TEA-CUP ADVENTURES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22422, 17 November 1934, Page 4

TEA-CUP ADVENTURES

CECIL ROBERTS GOES RUSTIC " Gone Rustic.” By Cecil Roberts. Illustrated. London: Hodder and Stoughton. (75.) This is the true story of the cottage made known to Mr Roberts’s public in “Pilgrim Cottage.” The book will appeal to that public as all Mr Roberts’s books appeal to his public. He is the fortunate possessor of a style that, though of the lightest and most unsubstantial, is popular, probably from those very qualities. Always easy to read, hia books seldom strain either the reader’s intellect or .his emotions. “ Gone Rustic" certainly does neither. This essay in sectional autobiography tells of the author’s awakening to the beauty of England and of English gardens, his search for a cottage and his tea : cup adventures as a property owner. A great many authors have rather self-consciously discovered their private Englands of late. But it seems a pity that Mr Roberts should have followed so closely in the steps of his more brilliant, if even more precious, contemporary, Mr Beverley Nichols. This is ■“ A Thatched Roof ” with a slight difference, and a very slight one. Mr Roberts is also evidently an admirer of Mr de la Mare. The poem. " The Old Cottage,” awakes echoes, ringing echoes in fact, of Mr de la Mare’s poem, “The Listeners.” Each chapter of the book is preceded by a poem, or rather a set of verses. Mr Roberts elsewhere relates that he has given up all thoughts of being a poet and records the many rebuffs ter ceived in his youth in seeking publication as such. His method of obtaining a public for his verses by sandwiching them between hia very readable chapters is ingenious, but unfortunately his verse is much inferior to his prose, both in technique anM in content.. It is, in fact, the more prosy of the two. The impression gained from all Mr Roberts’s books, and continually strengthening, is that there is something definitely missing from his personality. In “ Gone Rustic,” he dilates on the gynecology of plants and the sexual relations of worms with an almost prurient delight. Is it possible that the virile Cecil Roberts is. dcv'eloping into that sad fellow, the masculine old njaid. This is but a pale pink book. One cannot help feeling .that a strong tonic, compounded of three drachms of Hugh Walpole and the same quantity of G. B. Stern, with just a dash of Kipling, would do the author’s constitution a world of good. P. H. W. N.