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Wanted, a New World

The Mills of the Gods — By Elizabeth Robins
My Profitable Friends — By Arnold Palmer
The Golden Bird — By Dorothy Easton

Suppose we put it in the form of a riddle: ‘I am neither a short story, nor a sketch, nor an impression, nor a tale. I am written in prose. I am a great deal shorter than a novel; I may be only one page long, but, on the other hand, there is no reason why I should not be thirty. I have a special quality—a something, a something which is immediately, perfectly recognizable. It belongs to me; it is of my essence. In fact I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer. Those who know me feel: “Yes, that is it.” And they are from that moment prepared for what is to follow. Here are, for instance, some examples of me: “A Trifle from Life,” “About Love,” “The Lady with the Dog.” What am I?’

It does not appear from ‘The Mills of the Gods,’ however, that the question has ever troubled Miss Elizabeth Robins. The seven tales in this new volume are of a kind that might have appeared in any successful high-class magazine. They are wholesome, sentimental, and not so inconveniently thrilling that the train carries you past your station. Experience, confidence, and a workmanlike style—the author has all three, and they go far to disguise the hollowness beneath the surface, but the hollowness is there. There is not one of the seven which will stand examination. How is it that the author can bear to waste her time over these false situations which are not even novel? How can she bear to put her pen to describing the great-hearted, fearless, rude, swearing, murdering toughs who frequent the Golden Sand Gambling Hell at Nome? those types whom we know as if they had been our brothers, whose hats are off at the page 212 word ‘Mother,’ and who shoot the cook who denies them a can of peaches. And then to add to them a little golden-haired innocent child whose father dies, and whom they adopt and send to Europe to finish her studies, and write to in their huge childish fists, telling her she is never to go out without her chaperone and they all send their love! Oh, Miss Robins! We are very, very weary of this kind of tale, and if we cannot refrain from smiling at the love story of the passionate Italian whom ‘his intimates in Italy and elsewhere’ called Satanucchio, it is not because we are amused.

‘My Profitable Friends’ contains a number of very clever sketches which ought to be more successful than they are. There is over them a strange breath of self-consciousness which blurs the effect of their sensitiveness and interrupts our attention, so that we have the uncomfortable and very cooling sensation that the author may at any moment be at hand to point out the subtleties. The book is not large, but it contains seventeen examples of his work; some of them are very slight, almost negligible, and perhaps it would have been better to cut down their number by half. On the other hand, it is interesting, when an author can write as well as Mr. Palmer at his best, to attempt to discover from the evidence what is his aim. We feel he has not yet made up his mind. In each story he makes it up again. His cleverness is indisputable; but when that matters to him a great deal less he will write a great deal better. At present he leans upon it—as in ‘Eve Follyhampton’—and it carries him to just before the end; but then, when he has to throw it away and jump, it is kinder not to look.

It is Miss Dorothy Easton's happy fortune to be introduced to the public by Mr. Galsworthy in the kindest possible little speech. He describes the sketches in ‘The Golden Bird’ as ‘little pictures, extraordinarily sensitive and faithful, and never dull.’ That is very just criticism, but it does not prepare the reader for the quality of the ‘little pictures.’ The writer gives us the impression of page 213 being extremely young—not in the sense of a child taking notes, but in the sense that she seems to be seeing, smelling, drinking, picking hops and blackberries for the first time. She has a passion—there is no other word for it—for the English countryside. The people she meets she, in the frankest possible way, devours. There are still times when she mistakes sentimentality for feeling, and the little paragraphs at the end under the title ‘Moments’ are rather a painful instance of this. But at her best her feeling for nature is exquisite. And for such sketches as ‘An Old Indian’ and ‘From an Old Malt-House’ we have nothing but praise. But while we welcome her warmly, we would beg her, in these uncritical days, to treat herself with the utmost severity.