NEW NOVELS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 187, 9 August 1930, Page 2 (Supplement)

NEW NOVELS.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL.

A VIGOROUS DEFENCE.

No English institution has been criticised more widely and more generally of late years than the English public school. Its morals have been impugned; its intellectual standards derided; "its social bias deplored. We have even been told that because of its snobbishness wo may lose India.. Novelists, as well as publicists, have girded at public schools and their products! It is very refreshing, therefore, to read a novel by a new, and presumably young, author in which a particular school, and by implication, we take it, the public school system, are depicted in glowing colours as a nursery of virtues. "Lyndesay," by John Connell (Jonathan Cape) may be presumed to be, in great part at least, autobiographical. It is written from the heart of a man who owes to his school more than he can tell, but is not ashamed to try to tell it in this fictional form. At a time when so many young men are wrapt darkly in cynicism and disillusion, it is a pleasure to read Mr. Connell's forthright praise of oldfashioned virtues. Here is a school where most of the boys are decent —and what is equally interesting, most of the masters. Here are regard for intellectual pursuits, and atmosphere and tradition that mould character and send boys out into the world with ideals none the less potent because they are not always clearly expressed. "Lyndesay" has no plot. It is simply the progress of a sensitive English boy from the hell of a sinking private school (where the bullying takes loathsome forms) through a great public school, until with a coveted scholarship he goes to Oxford. It describes his friendships with boys and masters, the development o£ his sense of beauty, the growth of his love for the school, and the battle he has to fight against depravity in others. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing a school story is to avoid sentimentalism, and readers may think that Mr. Connell does not entirely succeed. The criticism is bound to be made that the author picks out the high-lights of school life and does not give a completely true picture of the institution. Lyndesay may be considered to be near to being a prig; indeed one of the masters —the only foolish one in the story —thinks he is one. Lyndesay, however, is an ardent, cleanminded boy, and it is good to be assured that the system turns out this type. It is good also to meet masters who arc wise gentlemen. In a very interesting preface Mr. Compton Mackenzie says the book has given him "faith and pride in the generation which is about to make itself heard," and that such a book "puts fresh heart into those who have begun to dread lest the reaction against Victorianism may not soon make England as hysterical as the United States. It would seem, glory he to God, that the stoic ideal is not as near* to death as most of the war novels of the moment suggest?' Mr. G. A. Chamberlain, the American novelist, who has fifteen novels already to his credit, in "When Beggars Ride" (Putnam) has written an amusing little story of Americans in Paris. There is much "smart" conversation, more rude perhaps than witty, attributed to the "Bright Young People" of to-day, whose social behaviour shocks all the elder generation. There is a suggestion that American politicians had much to do with the settlement of the "Young Plan and extorted more from Germany than unaided France and England could have done, but the U.S.A. always has treated politics as a dollar game. The story shows how recently acquired wealth buys less respect in the country of dollar millionaires than in countries impoverished by the war, and how America has gained by holding aloof from the quarrel which made her the shopping centre of the warring nations. However, the included love episode is new (although probably peculiar to America in France) and two equally peculiar young people treat love as a battledore and shuttlecock game, in which nobody wins. Mr. Chamberlain's philosophy of life is directly opposed to the catechism. You are not to be content with that state of life to which you are called, but to fight and struggle for what you want and "de'il take the hindmost."