forms to such an end of beauty.  Read these books, and you will genuinely know something about Russia; you will be drenched in the vast melancholy, savage and wistful, of Russian life; and you will have seen beauty.  No tale in “The Kiss” is quite as marvellous as either the first or the last tale in “The Black Monk,” perhaps; but both volumes are indispensable to one’s full education.  I do not exaggerate.  I must add that on a reader whose taste is neither highly developed nor capable of high development, the effect of the stories will be similar to their effect on the magazine editor.

THE SURREY LABOURER

[1 Apr. ’09]

It is a great pleasure to see that Mr. George Bourne’s “Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer” (Duckworth) has, after two years, reached the distinction of a cheap edition at half a crown.  I shall be surprised if this book does not continue to sell for about a hundred years.  And yet, also, I am surprised that a cheap edition should have come so soon.  The “Memoirs” were very well received on their original publication in 1907; some of the reviews were indeed remarkable in the frankness with which they accepted the work as a masterpiece of portraiture and of sociological observation.  But the book had no boom such as Mr. John Lane recently contrived for another very good and not dissimilar book, Mr. Stephen Reynolds’s “A Poor Man’s House.”  Mr. Stephen Reynolds was more chattered about by literary London in two months than Mr. George Bourne has been in the eight years which have passed since he published his first book about Frederick Bettesworth, the Surrey labourer in question.  Mr. Bourne will owe his popularity in 2009 to the intrinsic excellence of his work, but he owes his popularity in 1909 to the dogged and talkative enthusiasm of a few experts in the press and in the world, and of his publishers.  There have been a handful of persons who were determined to make this exceedingly fine book sell, or perish themselves in the attempt; and it has sold.  But not with the help of mandarins.  It is not in the least the kind of book to catch the roving eye of a mandarin.  It is too proud, too austere, too true, and too tonically cruel to appeal to mandarins.  It abounds not at all in quotable passages.  Its subtitle is:  “A Record of the Last Year of Frederick Bettesworth.”  The mandarins who happened to see it no doubt turned to seek the death scene at the close, with thoughts of how quotably Ian Maclaren would have described the death of the old labourer, worn out by honest and ill-paid toil, surrounded by his beloved fields, and so forth and so forth.  And Mr. George Bourne’s description of his hero’s death would no doubt put them right off.  I give it in full:  “July 25 (Thursday).—­Bettesworth died this evening at six o’clock.”  Oh, Colonel Newcome, sugared tears, golden gates, glimmering panes, passings, pilots, harbour bars—­had Mr. George Bourne never heard of you?