NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19772, 9 November 1929, Page 17

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

SHAKESPEARE COME TO LIFE. Tt« Krturn of William Shakespeare. Hugh KingsmlU. Dnclrwvrttt. Mr Kingsuiill throws us headlong into a farcical ph.t, about some queer I p'e who have discovered how to reintegrate the dead, and have reintegrated Shakespeare. They are walking out their schemes to commercialise him, in particular how one of thorn may "deputise*' f,, r him without detection, while he :s picking tip his strength at Marley Farn,." All this is described with boisterous humour and satire. Suddenly, however, we find ourselves at Marley Faim. alone, but for the farmer and his wife, with Shakespeare and Cecil Wilkinson: and Cecil, ar.d Cecil only, bears from Shakespeare's own lips the truth about the "-mind and art" that Dowdeu only guessed at and groped after. The imposture in London is detected; and before -the real Shakespeare can be "proved" he dies again. There is an exctllent touch of satire in the isolation of Shakespeare with one listener, while the others are scheming out the publicity and the protits in London; but it is difficult to see why Mr Kinfjsmill makes Shakespeare talk about, himself all the time, with a few unconscious slips, in tho third person, as if about another man. Perhaps to get. rather unsatisfactorily round the difficulty that Mr Kingsmill has really written a long and very fascinating essay, in his own modern idiom, about Shakespeare the man and artist. The occasional interruptions by Wilkinson and the purely conversational leafage could be cut away in five minutes, and the rest be printed as an unusually good essay. Has Mr Kingsmill only written the rest as a kind of comic and satirical framework, to tempt people to read his essay in interpretation? At all events, it is good reading.

ESCAPE FROM SAFETY. Hans Frost. By Hugh Walpole. M*cmlll*n. Hans Frost is a great man; his novels nnd poetry lie behind him, and sit seventy lie has nothing to do but be a figure, under his wife's competent management, and let himself settle gradually deeper into complacency. On his seventieth birthday the congratulations and the homage jar the delicate mechanism of this decline to an anxious stop; the presentation, a Manet, excites and exalts and hurts and unsettles him with its beauty. At this dangerous moment, when he must either relapse into the process of wearing out his life with becoming dignity and acquiescence, turning his back on what he cannot have or mend, or else escape from aafety to the risks of exploring life at seventy, his wife's niece. Nathalie Swan, comes to visit them; and her youth and happiness and eager, spontaneous affection carry him away from false security, from his wife's well-calculated scheme of things, from the sight of her mother's claw-hold on life, from Bigges the butler, from "submitting to other people out of laziness, just passing into corruption in an arm-chair." His spirit runs with hers and is happy with it, most of alt in her love-affair; and when his wife, seeing in this only dangerous interruption and disorder, sends Nathalie away, he follows. On the journey to find her, he talks to Klimov at ""The Three Feathers":

Now, here I am. I've been a selfish man nil my life. I regard myself as someone I've got to look after, because if I doit certainly no one else is going to. And here I am, too, at a very advanced age, suddenly discovering that I've been living all the'wrong kind of life—submitting to other people out of laziness, just passing into corruption In an armchair. And I've been jerked out of that like a jack-in-the-box. I'm going to lead my own life from now on. I shan't care a damn for anybody, and I'll die in a ditch with a bottle of whisky in my hand and nettles in my hair, and the worms will eat mc, and no one will know I've even gone—only a star or two or a sleepy duck in a green pond, or a waterhen, or possibly the village constable. Do you know what would have happened otherwise? I'd have died in my bed, and there'd have hcen three doctors, oxygen in a bag, and rows of medicine bottles. Mr Wife would have closed my eyes, my mother-in-law would have danced the saraband, there (would have been articles in' the newspaper.', and the Authors' Society would have sent a wreath to the funeral. A memorial service in a chorch, and no one caring a damn. A word or two at some dinner-parties, and then — silence. And my poor ghost tearing its windy hair, because for all those years I was in prison and didn't know it. I might have been free, and wasn't. 1 might have kicked my heels and oaten my eggs and bacon in a tuppeny inn, and bought liquorice at the village shop, and ridden on a charabanc to Margate, lived in a world with decent noises and long silences, thought one or two things through to the beginning, slept till midday or got up at five, nnd nobody caring—and I sacrificed it all, for what? Kor a ceremony that has always bored me to death, for people who are less than shadows to tne. for a convention that is a gilded sham. I don't want to make the world better. 1 never did. God knows. I don't want to have any truck with the world at all. What's the world to me or I to the world? I'm but an old man with two eyes and a nose. MY eyes and MY nose. I've been letting them out on hire. I'm never going to give anyone the use of them again I've been playing "Blindman's buff'' for seventy years. . . . T)o you know Ihe said, looking up at the waiter] whet votir cheese is like? It's like soap. And then soap.. And then more soap. I>o you know- what vour apple fart's like? It's like plaster and'a cold in the nose. Do you know what your coffee's like? It's like ink and sawdust.

Mr Walpole has never really got bevond his "Fortitude" stage, only he expresses himself there now with a rather more sophisticated skill; and he has never yet succeeded in making any of his big character? big. They are but little children \veak, nor born to any high estate; and they always: betray their origin. Still, this is a novel that can lean heavily on its beat qualities. It. is probahly.'in humour, animation, tenderness, arid living proportions, the best he has done. THE NEW EUROPE. The Little Entente. By Robert Machraj. Allen and Unwin. Mr Machray's account of the origin, policy, and influence of the Littte Entente is full of interest to the student of the New Europe, the product of the Great War and the Peace Treaties. The alliance of Czc-eho-Slovakia, Jugo-Sla-via and Rumania has undoubtedly bad a good, because a stabilising, effect : and Mr Mnchrav assembles much indispensable but hitherto scattered information about this part of the history of the last ten years. He is perhaps a little over-anxious to make out a case for the statesmanship of the Little Entente, and to do so adopts its own and therefore not an impartial point of view. For this reason we do not find as full a discussion as is desirable of the extent to winch French statssniaiuJiiP make-, instrumental u>e of the LittitEntente; nor is the Little Ententes rigid insistence oa the letter of the Peace Treaties treated broadly enough. It is easv enough to understand this insistence, and, up to a point (a very advanced point,, to sympathise with it. But—to quote from a speech of Minorc-seu's, on p. .162 —"to attempt to touch them would incur the risk of provoking a fresh and terrible cataclysm, which would overwhelm the world—with the most frightful consequences to those who had provoked it": this expresses a policv not without dagger. The danger of the Little Entente's Peace Treaty policy is that it is undiscriroinating, and is as likely to resist necessary and just revisions as any by which the three countries would really be injured. This defect, however, impairs the value of the book very little; for its value lies chieflv in the material facts.

BYRNE'S LAST NOVEL. The Power of taa Dog. By Dor.n Byrne. | Baupsou. Low, Mutton »nd Co., I»td. j From KoVertson and Mullens. The last mntl of Donu B> tno is! easily his most ambitious. There can be no doubi that it will lie widely road [ iii-.it admired : and it iv indeed a good I b;Oi». 11l s.p;tC oi its defect*, which .110 ti,.i>e that totally alienate soiuc 1 cadets mini his work and capture more. His emotions wore te>o evu::Me. and ho was too indulgent with them an<! with himself. They wore 1 lie emotiors oi a man always "on the side of *lio angels," mid there are readers to whom this justifies all. >o that lie has hoen praised tor his po*try iitul his geneensiiy and his passion Ipr beauty and ins pathos, and >o on--pi'aise tint lie really does deseive on oieaMons when they wero betraying him ii'to all sorts of false excess. The greater the th-me. the mere ticacher--0119 tills indulgence ran be; and Byrne"s last theme was cpie- Napoleon and Europe. A tremoiutous erfort of sustained comprehension eould aluio carry it olf: his is weakened ami interrupted by major and minor lapses into emotion il temptation. Finn the heightened, artitiejal contrast between the ehivalry of Napoleon nnd the inveterate, cold malice of Ca.stleiv.igh m the over-strain ot single phrases, the observant reader will mark that falsity ot which Byrne never learned to cine himself ; and ho will perhaps be prepared fur it by the attitudinising introduction, in whieh the author wings himself for -'the highth of tHis« great argument.' 1 Hut he may not be prepared lor the strength and sweep of many of the historical episodes in the book. They are well done, and the breaili of times reanimated is in them. The personal story whieh twines through the history is slight and unreal, but this matters less than anything. The success of this hook is Byrne's success in f-ometiuioß breaking out of his own theatre into the world. The title is from the Office of Compline on Passion Sunday: "Deliver mv soul. O God, from the ppril of the sword, nnd my darling from the power of the dog.''

AUNT CATHERINE. Death of Mr Aunt. By 0. H. B. Kit chin. Tbe Hogarth Press. "Death of Aly Aunt" is a novel of murder and mystery, which is sharply unlike the mass of others so classified and unlike anything Mr Kitehln Ims so far done, except in the quality of the writing andof the characterisation. The hero is a young stockbroker, equally good at describing himself and at describing others; and the result is that, for onco, wo get the "feel" of the psychological situation developed by n crime. U'o can accommodate ourselves exactly to the observer's and narrator'! point of view, and have to accept 110 inferences or analyses, as commonly iu such stories, more because they are justified in the result than because they nro themselves convincing. The credibility of these pages lasts from the moment of Aunt Catherine's death to the end.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. Tne strange Case of Vtatrtjt roioaiton. Sy lan Marshall. Thomas Kelson and Sons, Ltd. Very extraordinary things happen in this mystery story, and it will depend on the reader's temperament whether he accepts them or rebels. The heroine, almost, by force, persuades the stupid hero that there must be a happy ending- _____ Beau Ideal. By P. C. Wren. John Murray. From Robertson and Mullens, Ltd. The first cheap edition —3s 6d not — of Captain Wren's popular novel, published in 1928. 1 _———- I Harvests of Deceit. By Ertol FitsgeraldMills and Boon. From Sands and Mc- ' Dongall. When the heroine decides that, though her fiance has "nice grey eyes," las nose is too short and his chin too square, thev separate; but the events of a startling plot revise Phyllis's taste in features and set George on his knees beside her. "The impossible had happened. '' A Woman Is Dead. By Knfos King. Chapman and Hall. This is a good successor to "Murder by the Clock," Lieutenant Valcour is ail intelligent detective, whose conversational method of exploring character and situation is Mr King's laudable contribution to the art of detective' fiction.