bable literary effect of the catastrophe by
recounting the various ways in which French writers suffered from that
of 1870. An interesting prediction, too, as recalling what many of us
believed at the beginning of the war, is this about the future of
English letters: "What we must really face is the fact that this harvest
of volumes [the autumn publishings of 1914] will mark the end of what is
called 'current literature' for the remaining duration of the war. There
can be no aftermath, we can aspire to no revival. The book which does
not deal directly and crudely with the complexities of warfare and the
various branches of strategy will, from Christmas onwards, not be
published at all." As they stand, these words might well serve as a mild
tonic for "current pessimism"; not even the paper famine has brought
them to fulfilment. Elsewhere in the volume is an instructive paper on
"The Neutrality of Sweden" (valuable but vexatious, as are all the
indictments of our insular apathy in the matter of influencing foreign
opinion), and two or three interesting studies of French life and
letters under the conditions of war. In fine, a book full of scholarly
grace, such as may well achieve the writer's hope, expressed in his
preface, of renewing the friendship he has already made with those
readers "whose minds have become attuned to his," though they are now
"separated from him by leagues of sea and occupied in noble and
unprecedented service."

* * * * *

The author of _The Dop Doctor_, with her expansive style, always seems
cramped in any story of under a couple of hundred thousand words or so.
Perhaps the best things in her new book of short stories, _Earth to
Earth_ (HEINEMANN), concern _The Macwaugh_, a shocking bad artist with
an immense thirst and the heftiest of Scotch accents. I don't think that
there ever was or could be anybody like _Macwaugh_, or indeed that
people talk or act like the majority of the characters in this book; but
that's where, perhaps, "RICHARD DEHAN" scores a point or two off those
realists who mistake accuracy of detail for art. This amiable drunkard,
though absurd, lives and moves. The author is evidently attached to him,
and that helps. She has, indeed, something of the Dickensian exuberance
which carries off absurdities and crudities that would otherwise be
intolerably tiresome. She even seems to get some fun out of this kind of
thing:--"'Write,' commanded the Zanou