If Winter Dont

people that, intellectually, Miss Ethel M. Dell takes the hindmost. Personally, I found If Winter Comes a most sympathetic and interesting book. I think there are only two points on which I should be disposed to quarrel with it. Firstly, though Nona is a real creation, Effie is an incredible piece of novelists machinery. Secondly, I detest the utilization of the Great War at the present day for the purposes of fiction. It is altogether too easy. It buys the emotional situation readymade. It asks the readers memory to supplement the writers imagination. And this is not my sole objection to its use. I wonder if I might, without being thought blasphemous, say a word or two about the Great Novelists of to-day. They have certain points of resemblance. I do not think that over-states it They have the same little ways. They divide their chapters into sections, and number the sections in plain figures. This is quite pontifical, and lends your story the majesty of an Act of Parliament. The first man who did it was a genius. And the other seven hundred and eighteen showed judgment. I propose to use it myself when I remember it. Then there is the three-dot trick. At one time those dots indicated an omission. To-day, some of our best use them as an equivalent of the cinema fade-out. Those dots prolong the effect of a word or sentence they lend it an afterglow. You see what I mean Afterglow . . . One must mention, too, the staccato style--the style that makes the printer send the boy out for another hundred gross of full-stops. All the Great Novelists of to-day use it, more or less. Let us see what can be done with it. Here, for instance, is a sentence which was taught me in the nursery, for its alleged tongue-twisting quality She stood at the door of Burgesss fish-sauce shop, Strand, welcoming him in. In that form it is not impressive, but now note what one of these staccato merchants might make of it. Across the roaring Strand red and green lights spelling on the gloom. BURGESSS FISH-SAU. A moments darkness and again BURGESSS FISH SAU. Like, that. Truncated. The final - CE not functioning. He had to look though it hurt him. Hurt horrible. Damnably. And his eyes traveled downward. Suddenly and beyond hope she I sobel-at-the-last. Standing in the doorway. White on black. Slim. Willowy. Incomparable. Incommensurable. She saw him and her lips rounded to a call. He sensed it through the traffic. Come in. Calling and calling. Come in. Come in. . . . Out of the rain. It is like a plaintive hymn sung to a banjo accompaniment. Incidentally it illustrates another favorite trick of these gentlemen-the introduction of a commonplace or even jarring detail into a romantic scene in order to increase its appearance of reality. It is quite a good trick. And sometimes, not every day but sometimes, one gets a little weary even of the be tricks. Need the author depend quite so much on the printer for his effects Scenes and passages in a book seem to be standing very near the edge, and the wanton thought occurs to one that a little shove would send them over. In fact, one gets irritable. And then anything bad may happen... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.