Chapter 4

Robert Tressall was a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled _The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ (Grant Richards), and fell into the hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how long it will be before another job comes along. Nobody who hadn't lived exclusively in this hard environment could have written with such candour and intensity. Mr. Tressall has avoided altogether the pretentiousness and literary affectation that betrayed, for example, Mr. H. G. Wells' bathchairman, Meeks. The earlier part of the book is better than the later, where the propagandist ousts the chronicler. The exposition of Socialist doctrine is made with a considerable if a crude skill. It is disfigured with certain familiar limitations; the author can recognise no work except that done with the hands; and, whether by unhappy accident of actual circumstance or through defect of temperament, he sees his employers with a disproportionate bitterness that somewhat discounts his indictment, while he views his fellow-workmen from rather a disdainful height. But _The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life at its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties.

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Mr. Grant-Watson is one of the most resolute and intrepid novelists I have met, and his directness of speech may give offence, I fear, to the more reticent of his readers. His story of two white men and _Alice Desmond_, freed from the social conventions and let loose among the natives on a remote island in the Pacific, proceeds apace and with little regard for the susceptibilities of civilisation and refinement. Familiar but rarely printed language is used when occasion demands; primitive passions stalk naked and unashamed; and when murder is to be done it is done brutally, forthwith and notwithstanding the respective merits, from an heroic point of view, of active and passive agents. Being myself so situated in life that I am never likely to take part in any affair more passionate and drastic than a football match or a law-suit, I found the savage reality, the candour and the unbridled wrath of _Where Bonds are Loosed_ (Duckworth) most welcome by contrast. It gave me pleasure to see a man's annoyance being worked off by the use of fists, knives and bullets, a woman's impatience spending itself in immediate violence, and love and hatred being expressed in sharp and decisive action rather than in deliberate subtleties of conversation. In short, Mr. Watson left me wondering, somewhat fondly, to what lengths I myself might go in my more heated moments if I too were isolated on Kanna Island and beyond the supervision of police-constables and next-door neighbours.

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Once upon a time it was my lot to read a slender volume of Prose Poems, all about stars and rivers and moons and such other things of which prose poetry is made, and written by the most intense and soulful young woman who ever put pen to paper. Which, being perused, I handed to another and elder woman, noted for a great reader of books. And after many days, and after (I suppose) much fruitless toil on the part of my friend, the volume was returned to me with this single comment, "It seems very racily written." I tell you the story, which being true is without point, because I have been wondering what the same critic would have found to say about another slender booklet called _The Word of Teregor_ (Nisbet). My idea of it is that Mr. Guy Ridley, the author, knows and admires his Kipling and delights in his Maeterlinck to such extent that (possibly after a visit to _The Blue Bird_) he felt himself inspired to sit down and write these Forest-Jungle-Book tales of an earlier world, wherein Man and Beast and all created things were subject to the benevolent rule of _Teregor_, the Oak-tree; when everything living had a voice and used it, pleasantly enough, in rather mannered prose of the "Yea, Nay and Behold" type; and when all the old legends had yet to be started in ways of which Mr. Ridley gives his own most original explanations. So if you care about this kind of thing (and I had quite a pleasant half-hour from it myself) get it. You will at least find here a book entirely different from anything else in the library-box; printed in type that is a pleasure to the eye, and having, moreover, the classic excuse of being a very little one.

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I have for some time watched a steady improvement in the work of Mr. Ralph Straus. It is therefore a pleasure to greet _The Orley Tradition_ (Methuen) as his best yet. The _Orley_ tradition was to do nothing whatever, and, like the House of Lords in _Iolanthe_, to do it very well. They were, as a family, noble, of ancient lineage, and fine stupidity. _John Orley_, the hero of the tale, starts out to follow worthily in the footsteps of his race, as a brainless but agreeable country magnate. Then comes an accident, which thwarts his physical ambitions and awakens his mental. Thereafter he essays the life of affairs--and fails all round; is defeated for Parliament, and equally worsted in the lists of Art. So, being now recovered of his hurt, he says a graceful farewell to the career intellectual and resumes the traditional _Orley_ existence. This, in brief, is his story; but I give it without the pleasant style of Mr. Straus's telling. There are many very happily touched scenes; more especially had I a guilty sympathy roused by one in which poor _John_ endeavours to concentrate his very slipshod brains upon an afternoon of hard reading. And almost all the characters are alive, from the entertaining old lady who keeps the village post-office to _Mrs. Adderson_, the naughty novelist in whose hands _John Orley_ completed his sentimental education. As for the setting, I fancy that those who have spent their summers round about St. Margaret's Bay will have little difficulty in identifying _Handsfield_. Altogether a happy book (more so than you would expect from its theme) and one that marks, as I said, the further advance of a ready and agreeable writer.

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AT THE GLADIATORIAL AGENCY.

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"By road it is vastly different: there is an 80 mile sand desert to negotiate, and hundreds of miles of rutty roads and rocky bush tracks to drive over; yet Mr. Murray Aunger, of Adelaide, averaged 38 hours per mile from capital to capital."--_Advt._

If it wasn't for the chance of being photographed we should always prefer to walk this bit.

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"'I am,' he answered in rather indifferent English."

_"Derby Advertiser" feuilleton_.

Very indifferent, we call it. How much better if he could have answered, "Your statement of the position is not wholly unwarranted by the facts," or something snappy like that.