Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/105

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N.C.O. (passing squadron that has been halted, men resting).

Voice from darkness.



to remember that, in the old days of peace, when a friend was run down or in want of thorough rest, it was a commonplace of advice to suggest a long voyage in a sailing ship. Somehow I do not think that, even when mines and traffic raiders are no more, I shall be quite so ready with this counsel after reading The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Of course I know that a voyage in nautical fiction can never be wholly uneventful, also that one is justified in looking to Mr. Author:Jack London for something rather strenuous. But really the Elsinore appears to touch the limit in this kind. I wish I could tell you properly about her crew. (Mr. takes chapters and chapters in which to do it). I suppose that every possible variety of undesirable was represented among them, from dangerous maniacs downwards. And their behaviour was what you might expect. The disquieting thing about the book is that the author gives to its most horrific episodes a cold and calculated air of truth. "Experto crede," he seems to say; "thus and thus is the real life of ships." So I had to believe him. There was only one passenger on board the Elsinore, and he finished the voyage in command of her. This was after the Captain had gone wrong in the head, and the First Officer had discovered the Second to be the murderer of one whom he had sworn to avenge. By this time also the voyage (which might be called one of attrition) had considerably reduced the Elsinore's company; while the survivors were mostly engaged in hurling bombs and vitriol at each other. What one might call an active, open-air book. But, though I am far from denying its grim strength, it will not be my favourite among its author's always interesting romances.

Mr. Author:Gilbert Cannan offers us in Young Earnest an extremely conscientious and plausible study of a talented, sensitive and, I am afraid, rather "superior" youth whose love affairs preoccupy him too exclusively and whose demands on life are so exacting that nothing can ever bring him content. I feel so sure from the good deal which I now know of young Fourmy and his behaviour to his wife, Linda, that brilliant suburban, and to Ann, the factory girl, that he never found with Cathleen the perfect peace which his creator alleges; or perhaps, more justly, that he never could have found it without a struggle and self-discipline, of which there are few signs. It is surely one of the fallacies of a common philosophy of romance—a fallacy much too crude for Mr. unusually careful method—that while this, that and the other relation, opening delightfully, becomes sordid or impossible some final selection is to prove automatically and permanently blissful, even if there be no legal ties to chafe against on principle. The fact is your Fourmys are in this difficult matter of the affections doomed to trouble as the sparks fly upward, and of course the perceptive author knows this perfectly well and his happy ending is only a "let's pretend." I have been fascinated by the skill of a series of uncannily clear-cut portraits; I know no other writer who has the power in so singular a degree of getting right down below surface traits to depths of mood and character. Analyse it and you will find that Mr. gives you no descriptions but merely lets his characters unfold themselves in their talk. There's much in that "merely." 