BOOKS OF THE DAY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3806, 22 February 1927, Page 74

BOOKS OF THE DAY.

A PLAY OF OLD ENGLAND. “Robin Hood: A Play in Five Acts.” By Alfred Noyes. (Cloth, 5s net.) London: William Blackwood and Sons, Limited.

Good plays are all too scarce nowadays. The output of novels and short stories is perhaps more prolific than ever before, but the percentage of plays which adapt themselves to acting purposes while being at the same time something better than mere melodrama, is comparatively small. “Robin Hood,” Alfred Noyes’s latest dramatic composition, is one of the treasured few, and, properly produced, should be a memorable thing, for, to read, it is indeed lovely. It goes back to the days of King Richard the Lion-hearted, who, away at the Crusades, leaves England to mourn and suffer under the tyrannical rule r.f his brother, Prince John. To protect the serfs and defy the unjust laws laid upon them, the Earl of Huntingdon allows himself to be outlawed, and thereafter lives in the forest as the beloved Robin Hood, who, with his merry men—Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, and Much the Miller’s son—vows to be chivalrous, good, and just to all. His sweetheart, the Lady Marian Fitzwalter, owing to circumstances, follows him, with her maid Jenny and Widow Scarlet, lives in the forest as Maid Marian until the temporary reappearance of King Richard allows her to be publicly wedded to Robin and recognised again as a lady of the land. But the security of the lovers is short-lived, for, when Richard, back at the Crusades, is reported as dead, John and his sister the Princess Elinor contrive" that- both Robin Hood and Maid Marian s till be killed, and the play ends tragically. The story is not a new one, but the fresh characters and extra themes introduced turn it from history into a fantasy of sheer beauty, and make it stand apart among all that has been written of the denizens of Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood is a hero to delight all; Maid Marian the perfect lady of romance; Richard and John both aet as one would expect them to,.and the merry' men afford the humour and excitement proper to the tale. Princess Elinor is an impressive character, a jealous woman who' for the sake of the evil passion she feels for Robin Hood, resorts to lying, trickery, cruelty, and finally murder. The “black nun”*of the play, she is certainly an outstanding figure.

But is is with the elemental people that the real charm of the piece lies. Alfred Noyes, lover of the supernatural, makes Sherwood Forest the home of the fairies, so that there are two distinct sets of persons in the cast, the humans and the “little folk,” joined by the link of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, a half-wit fool who frequents both court and wood. Shadow-of-a-Lea? is a wonderful character, a seer and a poet whose wisdom is iineomprehended by his mortal masters. Thorn-Whisper, king of the forest sprites, and Fern-Whisper, his queen, know that if a mortal hurts himself to help another, then he thrusts open-the ivory gate which separates their world from'the outside one; while one of the fairy folk, by deliberately breaking his vows of silence and telling mortals of fairy secrets, may, by his own death, shut himself off from fairyland, but allow his mortal friends to enter in his stead. This sacrifice does Shadow-of-a-Leaf perform at the last so that Robin Hood and Marian, instead of lying dead, may become part of the forest, and wander, immortal, through its glades. What is the impression which the play leaves on one? 'There is an impression, and a marked one, too. One cannot lay the book down without being deeply moved. It is one of beauty occasioned chiefly by Shadow-of-a-Leaf’s act of selfsacrifice, and the dramatically perfect re-introduction of the minstrel Blondel, who appears in the play as a personification of aspiration and fiery hope. One feels uplifted, thrilled, though there has been much bloodshed before, the country is, still in - the hands of a tyrant, and Richard the King is dead. Shadow-of-a-Leaf has given up his fairy power, and may no more be. with Robin Hood, the master he loved so. And yet—the final note is one of joy and faith. One feels, strangely, that the end is, after all, not the end but only the beginning, and that from the time the curtain descends things will be better and brighter for England. Shadow-of-a-Leaf is kneeling outside the ivory gates which have shut against him when Blondel enters, leading a great white steed. He stops and looks at the kneeling figure.

Blondel: “Shadow-of-a-Leaf!” Shadow-of-a-Leaf (rising to his feet) • “Blondel!” Blondel: “I go to seek my King!” Shadow-of-a-Leaf (in passionate o-rief) : “The King is dead!” Blondel (in yet more passionate joy and tiiumph) : ‘ The great King lives!” (Then more tenderly) : “Will °vou not come and look for Him with me?” They go slowly together through the forest and are lost to sight. Blondel’s voice is heard singing in the distance, farther and farther a wav: “Now till the end,” he saith All fear is gone. Love, in the mash of Death, Leadeth me on.” For passages such as these, poignantly athrill with poetry, romance, and inspiration, Alfred Noyes is indeed to be thanked. They transform what is already a charming play into rarely exquisite. °

LOVE ON ITS TRIAL. ‘•The Veil of Glamour.” By Clive Arden. (Cloth, Gs net.) London: Leonard Parsons (per Robertson and Mullens, Melbourne). This is the story of a romantic girl who shrinks from the realities of life, and wants the flowers of love without its thorns, but who comes to realise that true love, the love which makes happy marriage, means the desire to give and to serve. From early childhood Margaret (Meg) Mellor is given to spinning romances in which she is a fairy princess wooed by a fairy prince, and marriage is vaguely visioned as a “happy-e.ver-after” sequel. As she grows up what she learns unwillingly of the realities of life, and the death of her elder sister a year after her marriage, make her shrink'from the idea of marriage for herself.’ At all events, she decides, one must be very sure that love is the real thing on both sides before committing oneself to the uncertainties of married life. She has literary aspirations, has some success in getting short sketches and stories published, and decides that literature is her vocation. Then she meets Frank Henden, a literary man aged 34, who, like herself, is alone in the world. He has travelled and done war service in Africa, and is embodying the results of his observations and researches in writing. He has an ideal of womanhood as one-sided as Meg's ideal of man, and is averse to the modern woman's claim to self-expres-sion and economic indepeudence. A strong, mutual attraction soon makes itself felt between the two, but I'irgaret cannot bring herself to accept Frank’s proposal of marriage. Marriage is too big a thing to commit oneself to without making sure that love is not merely glamour. Finally, the two decide on a year of probation ; not the “marriage on trial” of which so much has been heard the last decade or two, but life together on the status of an engaged couple. Walter has a cottage in Surrey, and there the two establish themselves with, as housekeeper, Meg’s old nurse Bicky, who. though scandalised at the experiment, will not desert her charge. Constant companionship and work together for a year will, they think, make it plain whether or not they can spend their lives happily together, and if the experience is unfavourable they will go their several ways without being any the worse. The curiosity and gossip of the people of the neighbourhood is described with liveliness, but the vicar and his sister take the' young couple up, and check scandal. As a result of the experiment Meg and Frank certainly come to know each other’s faults and weaknesses thoroughly. Frank's health is uncertain: he is “nervy.” He finds Meg too much absorbed in her own work and in outside interests. The two wrangle much more than the average newly-married couple do. Frank reproaches Meg with selfishness, and she denounces his “colossal egotism.” It is all very naturally told, though the repeated recital of their tiffs and squabbles becomes rather wearisome. At the end of the year Mcg's first book has met with success, and Frank has shown himself wholly unsympathetic about it. They part; aud the reader will probably see no reason why the separation should not be final. The author, however, decides otherwise. The scene shifts to Algeria, whither Frank’s work cqlls him, and where Meg goes for holiday travel with Deryck Keith, the vicar whom the reader may have been regarding as the destined partner for Meg—and his sister. This affords variety and some exciting passages, though the narrative of Frank’s capture in the desert and his rescue by Meg gives the impression of improbability. As a love history the book fails to be wholly convincing; but it is a well-written and agreeable story. ROMANCE OF AN ISLAND. “Nadine: a Romantic Comedy.” By G. P. Robinson. (Cloth: 6/-.) London: Duckworth. (Per Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne.) The hero of this amusing comedy' of adventure appeals to chance to decide where he shall spend the three months’ holiday he has been granted on medical advice. Adventure, he says, is the best tonic, and chance allots him a reg-ion where he finds adventure galore and high romance to boot. This is Maranos, a small island near Cyprus, which the reader is not likely to find on the map; However he learns from an encyclopaedic friend in the Foreign Office that in the nineties its Prince tried to turn the place into a Levantine Monte Carlo; that his seriousminded son closed the Casino, thereby nearly exciting a revolution, but that the new prince, brother of the preceding one,

ip, rev , lvln S V le orme r glories of the island, the hero Weymouth encounters adventure on the little vessel, manned by a cutthroat crew, on which he voyages to the isle from Athens, not waiting for the up-to-date steamer MhichTs bringing visitors for the coronation ceremony His fellow passenger, Daireau, an adventurous much-travelled 9 asc o n > posts him in the politics of the island. As an adherent of the prince, U /%i a for - the knives a nd bullets of the rival factions headed by one Sculend!, who ha s bribed the skipped to do away with Davreau on the voyage. Arrived at Perinth, the island capFtel M eymouth meets at the State ball P with the young Princess Nadine, a beautiful girl of nineteen, and their love story is folhws 0 ’ An Th nt ° tl?e ® drama which signal for ? Pr Tf S ccr °nation i s the signal for a revolutionary coup by the XX . 'S' 0 ?- “ d U In fit friend to the hero. In the end honesty and chivalry meet ,hJ a " S i The b “ k '«•»“ adventm-« • i m i ke a popular story of

SHADY LOVE AFFAIRS. “Fruits of Desire.” Bv E W ; attractive by ' choosing °a so-SKI ing . plot. This, Savi, -author of a number of weakly sensational novels, las done in the story before us. Its two ending feminine characters are mother ffive d intSue’ of P J Ot on butterfly „? „ w.m.n\X B X:od W S now about 40-with a young mln who is -Rooing her daughter, a girl of IS „ i apart from her mother. There is notln'nm the author’s treatment of the theme a one for its unsavouriness, though presumably she thinks she has saHsfied lues by making the mother die miserably as the result of her folly. A younger woman, her confidante, is more cynicallv Dhere S of H n the Who,c at mos" pliere of the story is unpleasant. S > ne “ risk y” situation were not the author devises another in -irl I* C ?*? uettcs ” grandmother and the girl herselt are concerned. The o-rand-mother, when an aging widow had” married (as was believed) a man fully young enough to be her son, and as “Coquette” grows up she is tormented by the fact that he will fall in love with the girl as he actually does. And as it turns out there was no actual marriage after all, the author finds it quite satisfactory that the girl should marry the man who was ostensibly her step-father for so many years. To say nothing of morals the story fails signally in delicacy of feeling and good taste.

MORE “FLAMING YOUTH.’’ “Summer Bachelors.” By Warner Fabian. (Cloth. > London : Stanley Paul and Company, Limited. The author of those widely-discussed novds of 1925 and 192G—“Flaming Louth and “Sailors’ Wives”—has scored another success in this, his lates*Ule of New York life, “Summer Bachelors. It is the story of Desideria Thomas, a beautiful young girl of 23 m no, on account of her employer’s going away, is made manager of his business for three years, and incidentally becomes a person of means and position. Her friends, but for Willowdean French, an appealing and lovely actress whose tragic love story is one of the most moving and human things in the story, are mostly married men whose luxury-loving wives spend the summer season out of town, and “Derry,” as she is called, lives a life of wild pleasure, pursued by many, running all sorts of risks to her reputation, and yet remaining strictly virtuous ami respected. She is specially friendly with Beverly Greenway, a young married man of splendid character, with Richard Otle£, who is her partner in more than one daring escapade, .and with Anthony Landor, an eligible bachelor against whose influence and offers of marriage Derry puts up a determined fight, feeling from experience in her past family life that marriage is fatal to any real happiness. Preston Smith, husband of a selfish and pampered woman, is the figure who, remaining in the background more or less, conceals his love for Derry by looking to her welfare and steering her by his advice into proper channels of conduct. Willowdean is in love with Walter Blakely, a studious and eccentric professor who holds high ideas about hypnotism and auto-suggestion. An hypnotic globe which had been in his possession is the point on which the crisis of the tale hinges, and brings events to a startling aud unforeseen conclusion in the last chapter. “Summer Bachelors” is an interesting book for those who like novels dealing with the idea that preseut-day youth feeds on excitement, docs away with barriers of convention, and makes its own standards. Some of its character-drawing is finely done, and the plot has enough movement in it to keep the reader’s attention held until the very last page. “YO HO HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped.” By Robert Louis Stevenson. (Each cloth, 2s net.) London: Hodder and Stoughton, Limited. These two classics of adventure and peril, with their themes of piracy, buried treasure, shipwreck, and intrigue, have been favourites ever since they were first

published, and will continue to be 4>o as long as boys are boys and romance is romance. They are now published in Hodder and Stoughton’s popular two shilling library among the “Man and Boy Books,” which include stories of adventure, travel, mystery, and sport, where clean;—stirring, and straightforward they will appeal to the call of goodness, honesty, and manliness which are in every man from 15 to 50. Both books have interesting prefaces—“ Treasure Island,” a description of how this, the first of Stevenson’s novels, came to be written, and what, difficulties attended it; and “Kidnapped,” a letter to Charles Baxter written in the author's best style. Most boys have read these books, and thrilled to the call of youth which they express. But there is a coming generation, too young for them yet, but ever growing older, and it is with regard to them that the appearance of the two classics in their present easily-purchasable editions is specially pleasing. Feed the growing youth on literature such as Stevenson has made for him, and he will not readily forsake the lure of such for any reading less worthy of his time.

SHORT STORY GEMS. “ Roads of Destiny.” By O. Henry. (Cloth, 3s 6d net.) London: Hodder and Stoughton (Ltd.). It is impossible to say anything new about the genius of O. Henry. His humour, his originality, his versatility, his power of holding the attention, his eharm, and his marvellous flair for making unexpected endings have been described in these columns and elsewhere so often before that repetition is useless. Sufficient it is to say that his is a genius which stands apart, and that. there are no other writers of short stories who are in any way like him. His books are being issued now in cheap editions, fit to grace any library, but priced so moderately that anyone may buy them, “ Roads of Destiny,” one of his best collections, being the last presented to us for review. One can read him a hundred times and find him each time as fresh and unexpected as he was found at first. He puts his finger on the pulse-strings of the heart, and plays on them to one’s delight and surprise. Such is tlie mystery of O. Henry —his power is beyond description.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED. We are in receipt of Stone’s Otago and Southland ABC bi-monthly Guide aul Diary for February and March. The table of contents, containing such items of civic interest as almanacs, tides, calendars, mail notices, diaries, time tables, postal information, etc., proves the Guide to be invaluable to the business man. * * * One of the jokes of the latest issue of Humour: —William was looking very serious. “You be looking glum this morning,” remarked Daniel. “What’s wrong?” “Got a noo hat,” replied William, scarcely moving his head. “A noo hat! Well, isn’t that a matter for rejoicing?” demanded Daniel. “Aye,” admitted William, “but it falls off if Oi laughs.” * * * Aussie is, as usual, big, bright, and breezy, its every page a source of interest or fun, whether shown by article, story, poem, or drawing. A number of New Zealanders contribute, a poem by Mona Tracy being particularly good. The cover, showing a wife entering her husband’s office through his noiseless door and discovering him with his typists on his knee is appropriately named “The Doom of Silence,” and, as usual, is clever and attractive.

The January number of the P.L.A. Monthly, the official organ of the Port of London Authority, is' beautifully produced both as regards illustrations and reading matter. Many of its pictures are well worth framing, the cover showing a reproduction. of Samuel Scott’s “Old Westminster Bridge, 1751,” being particularly so. The reading matter deals with Old Westminster Bridge; Dockland, or London over the Border; Trade of the Port of London; Thames Divers and Their Work; The Riverside a Century Ago; Ship Types in the Port of London; London’s Dock Blondins; The Progress of Improvement Works; Monoliths; The Site of St. Katherine Dock; Upstream and Downstream; and Queer Christmases.

The February number of the Home, the Australian journal of quality, comes out as a Colonial Days number, in which form it is amusing, interesting, and decidedly novel. Its beautifully produced photographs are, for the most part, of prominent people of our forefathers’ days, and the array of strange clothes—bustles, top-hats, and fripperies —the up-piled hair of the women and the variety of beards adopted by the men, strike a strange note in a journal of which the .predominant note is modernity. The articles written around illustrations are equally colonial, and include “The' Rape of the Albums,” “Lifting News From the Last Century,” “Sydney to Melbourne in the ’Eighties,” and “Peeps at Our Pioneers,” the last beng an hilarious thing by the humorist Frank Middlemiss. Other articles are “Carinthia Cruisers,” “Broadway Lends Judith Anderson” (an interview with the fair lady of “The Cobra”), “A Few Words Over the Front Gate” (dealing with decorating), “Certain Things Considered,” “Sydney s’Amuse,” “Melbourne Musings” and others. The new serial by Bartlett

Adamson, “The People With No Clothes;” goes into further details of what happened on Don’s dramatic flight, and introduces the reader to some interesting characters among the naked ones. Poems, short stories, and special sections of feminine interest complete an elaborate table of contents. * * * The Triad is a pleasing production nowadays. One receives it with real satisfaction, and, having read it/ feels that the hours devoted to its perusal w’ere well spent. It is, in every way, the antithesis of what is dull and feeble. The February number concentrates its art reproductions on the work of Victoria Cowdroy, the 18-year-old artist whose painting, sculpture, and drawing mark her as a genius among moderns. The specimens of her art shown the startling things, and cannot fail to provoke admiration from critics. Special features are the conclusion of Aldous Huxley’s article on “Spiritualism,” a symposium “What is Art?” by Australian artists; “Radio Music,” a problem by Richard Stein; “The Steinach Film,” by Alice Jackson; “Castle Crag,” by Nora Cooper, and “Jean Patou Pleads for Modernism,” by Isabel Ramsay. Errol Tennant’s extraordinary play, “Deliverance,” is concluded, and “Mo’ Juste: A Movie Without Pictures,” an amusing trifle by Peter Simple, contributed. Criticism deals with the theatre in Australia, Gilbert and Sullivan, recent gramophone records, the the Archibald prize, music, plays, and books. Two fine pieces of verse by B. E. —“Conception,” and “Afterwards?’ help to complete the table of contents.