NEW BOOKS REVIEWED.

Waikato Times, Volume 96, Issue 15359, 6 October 1923, Page 11 (Supplement)

NEW BOOKS REVIEWED.

CURRENT LITERATURE. German Spies. In “All’s Fair” Mr J. F. C. Dolby has written a latecomer among war novels which is nevertheless welcome. Valentine, an English girl “finishing” in a Belgian convent when the war came, meets Sir Gerald Singleton, Bart., D. 5.0., behind the German lines. Seeking safety together, they are hunted as spies by the powerful German secret service organisation, but are usually saved in time by a Belgian organisation, in which figures prominently Micoche, a gallant boy.

Their escape in a boat packed with refugees, which rams the boom of the Meuse under heavy fire, reaching Holland with its last ounce of steam, is an excellent finish.

Striking But Painful. “Five Striking Stories" are translated by Mrs Alys Eyre Macklin from the French. They are certainly striking, but the people with whom they deal are, with one or two exceptions, exceedingly, unpleasant, and the result is generally depressing. They are strong meat, though they show the usual French skill in handling disagreeable situations and perfect mastery of the short story-teller’s art.

A NeW Life of Shakespeare. Dr. J. Quincy Adams, who has long specialised in the field of Shakespearian research, and been Professor of English at Cornell University since 1919, has written a new “Life of William Shakespeare,” which Messrs Constable have recently published, net. Full account is taken of the discoveries relating to the dramatist’s private and public career which have been made during the last two decades. The book will include a study of contemporary theatrical life as well as a new portrait of Shakespeare himself. American scholarship will also be represented by an essay extending to some five hundred • pages on “The Newspaper and the Historian,” by Lucy Maynard Salmon, who considers the Press only on its esoteric side and takes for her text the quotation from Thackeray.

“Is there anything in the paper, Sir?”

"Anything in the paper 1 All the world is in the paper. Why, Madam, if you will but read what is written in The Times of this very day, at is enough for a year’s history, and ten times as much meditation.” The book seeks to discover the extent of the newspaper’s usefulness to the historian in his efforts to reconstruct the past, and includes chapters on the editor and the editorial,, the special (correspondent, criticism and the critic, the interview, the advertisement, and the illustrated Press.

“Claud Lovat Fraser," by John Drinkwater and Albert Rutherston, with representative examples of his work ' reproduced in collotype and in line.

When an artist achieves sudden and general fame in hjs own lifetime, he must sooner or later ask himself how many of those who praise him have a personal pleasure in his art. Ordinarily, the answer is—very few; for Lovat Fraser, the answer was—very many. His wider public, distinct from those who were capable of forming an aesthetic judgment of his work, was no better unformed than the wide public of other artists who happen to have become .fashionable, hut it was remarkable in this —that its praise expressed genuine pleasure, and was not, as widespread adulation so often is, an uncourageous and cheerless echo of other men’s opinions. From this fact arises another question: What is the popular quality in Lovat Fraser’s work which, when the Philistines came in their 'chariots to Hammersmith and the Leicester Galleries, allowed them for once to enjoy honestly what they would in any case have praised? The answer is implied in the restrained essay on Lovat Fraser’s art which Mr Albert Rutherston contributes to tlie present volume. “It has always been my opinion,” he says, “that Lovat was m-oro at home with the eighteenth century than with any other period,” and, elsewhere: “The more clearly we look into the motive forces underlying the expression of Lovat’s work, the more certain docs it became that a love of the artificial, of the fantastic, of the romantic, of the bright colourings of prints were the things he loved and felt the most.” Lastly, in speaking a stage drawing of a witch for Macbeth, Mr Rutherston says truly that “it has an cpio quality, a sense of ti'agio sightlieanee which is almost invariably absent from his other work.” In these sentences there is not only a just summary of the qualities dominant in Lovat Fraser's art, but an outline of fashionable tendencies of our own decade. The eighteenth century is a vogue; not, indeed, the eighteenth century of history or of Hogarth’s drawings, but an eighteenth century bright-coloured, artificial, fantastic, romantic, and comfortably lacking in tragic significance—Newgate and the scaffold turned to a drawing-room rhyme. Fashion has made a decoration of a tragedy and an epic, has forgotten Swift and has remembered Gay. Lovat Fraser struck the mood of his hour. He did not pander to it; he was too good an artist for that. But chance decreed that .its limitations should accord with his own.

Mr Drinkwater’s essay records tlie principal, events of his short career, and, if it fails to give life to the personality it describes, it has the important merit of being a clear, straightforward narrative which is made the stronger by careful avoidance of biographical superlatives. Mr Rutlierstou, in his estimate of Lovat Fraser’s art, traces its earlier developments and its later connexion with the theatre. The illustrations are satisfactory reproductions of work not previously published in book form. They include title-pages and book-plates, stage settings, drawings for children, designs for toys, and examples of commercial work. With the outstanding exception of “The Witch," they add little to our knowledge of the artist, but many of. them are charming and will he welcomed as accessible examples of the varied application of his inventiveness.