BOOKS.
THIS WEEK'S BOOKS.
LAST week the most notable books were in criticism ; this week they are in fiction. Mr. John Masefield has published his romantic novel, Sard Harker (Heinemann), which we review elsewhere. Mr. Arnold Bennett collects his recent stories into one volume, Elsie and the Child (Cassell). We must congratulate Messrs. Jarrold on the two novels they send this week : they are beautifully designed and printed, and they were well worth the trouble. One is Miss Susan Glaspell's Fidelity, the other Mr. Paul Selver's Schooling. Miss Glaspell is an interesting young American novelist—young in spirit and, I should guess, in person. She is very much in earnest over last year's problems, feminism and divorce and free love and such ; but she has as much power as naivete. Mr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust's A L'Ombre des Jeunes Filks en Fleets comes out under the title Within a Budding Grove (Chatto and Windus) ; and Mr. Gilbert Carman has translated A. 0. Barnabooth, his Diary, a novel by M. Valery Larbaud (Dent).
A book which can be recommended to the historian and to the general reader is Mr. Walter George Bell's The Great Plague of London in 1665 (Bodley Head). It is full of inter- esting details, and accomplishes that miracle of good selection, the making of fact after fact into a cumulative and exciting story. We begin with the terror of Europe at portentous comets and coffins in the skr ; we see the sporadic deaths from plague growing meal qnd more numerous. In the summer before the Plaggeirear, "flies pestered the houses in such multitudes that they lined the walls, and where any thread or string hung down, it was presently thick set with flies like a rope of onions. Ants covered the highways, swarming so thickly that a handful at a time might have been taken up." Even in the severe winter, with the Thames blocked by ice, the Plague showed its head. Then followed a spring and summer that Richard Baxter declared "the driest that ever man alive knew or our forefathers mention of late ages ; so that the grounds were burnt like the high- ways where the cattle should have fed." We see the spread of the Plague through the filthy streets of the lower quarters —"the Poore's Plague," it was called ; the terror and disor- ganization of London ; the nurses strangling their patients -to strip them of their clothes and conveying the infection to the healthy, so that they might have more patients ; "the Plague victims were more afraid of the nurse than of the Plague itself " ; quack doctors killing the people by selling 'noxious drugs as remedies at exorbitant prices ; robbery and pillaging and murder. We are told of the havoc wrought by the sudden, absurd, widespread belief that venereal infection was a preventive of the Plague. Mr. Bell examines Defoe's novel, The Journal of the Plague Year, and points out how far it is trustworthy. He proves the truth of the most gruesome of Defoe's tales—of the piper who fell dead drunk in the street and was hooked up into the dead-cart ; in the morning he sat up half-sober, dragged his bagpipes clear and began to play. A Bill of Mortality for the City of London is reproduced, and the causes of death are quaintly set down. In one week three died of Grief, seventy-nine of Griping in the Guts, one Frighted, one of Head-mould- shot, two of the Purples, one of the Meagrorne, eighteen of Rising of the Lights : in the same week 4,287 died of the Plague.
In the World's Classics Series the Oxford University Press publish The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, together with six hitherto unpublished speeches. Mr. J. A. Steuart has written a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, published in two volumes by Messrs. Sampson Low. There is a big and detailed History of Persian Literature in Modern Times, written by Professor Edward G. Browne and published by the Cambridge University Press.
Messrs. Constable publish The Granta and Its Contributors, 1889-1914, compiled by Mr. F. A. Rice. As J. K. Stephen, "F. Anstey," Sir Owen Seaman, Mr. A. A. Milne, "Ian Hay," Mr. Barry Pain, and a host of other deft and light-hearted humorists were undergraduates at Cambridge and contributed , te- the paper, an agreeable anthology 4s easily selected from- rom its
its pages. Mr. A. A. Milne introduces the volume with a fine fling at Oxford, and he was the writer of some of the most riotous poems, notably "The Tragedy of Biggs," who attempted to solve the problem of infinite space :—
" For the gas was escaping one night— With a candle ho looked for the place
• Well, he left for the sun At a quarter to one ; And he seemed to be in for a race By the pace That he soared up to infinite space: And he hopes to get into it soon (Forgive me for dropping a tear) On Friday at noon He had passed by the moon And was making for Sat urn, I hear,
Which is near—
So he ought to be there in a year."
We shall also find in this volume the origin of the famous epitaph
"Here lie I, Killed by a sky- Rocket in the eye-socket."
Messrs. Constable publish a "fine edition" of Mr. Shaw's
St. Joan, with stage settings by Mr. C. Ricketts.
TETE LITERARY EDITOR.
Previous page
