Seeing how enjoyable and fresh are the greater number of these new short stories [in The Trip to London] by Mr. Rhys Davies, it is perhaps ungracious to begin by saying that too many short stories are being written now. But then, too much of everything is being written; there are too many novelists, the poets are too many and portentous, and wherever a cat jumps there are only too many observers-on-the-spot ready to whip out their notebooks. Inspiration seems to lie very thick on the ground in these days of despair. One wonders why. But as to the short story, it is possible that the form suggests itself to the unsuspecting as easy to manage, easy to trick.

Mr. Rhys Davies is anything but unsuspecting; on the contrary, he is a most accomplished, skilful writer, who in his best work shows himself again and again as complete master of what he chooses to do. It is odd, therefore, to find him in one or two of these new stories, notably Orestes and Spectre de la Rose, letting them write themselves, with passages of dialogue that are slipshod and sometimes even untrue, and with a kind of slackness towards the whole theme which is disappointing, and leads him in Orestes at least to an improbable and cheap conclusion. Spectre de la Rose, which is about a night of the Blitz in London, is not very well written, and leads one to wonder why so far so little that is really good has been done on a theme which must have burnt itself into the imaginations of most writers. But some of the opening pieces in this new book are in Mr. Davies's best manner—and that is as good as need be. When this author writes of Wales he takes wing; his pages vibrate with poetic truth. An ease invests him then which reminds me of Frank O'Connor when he writes of Cork. It is an especial, luminous certainty which we take from such stories as The Benefit Concert and A Dangerous Remedy; it makes them a delight to read. Accuracy, light-fingered and gentle, and drawing form and feeling together into a single, unaffected statement, is Mr. Rhys Davies's great gift, and he gets beautiful results from it here in six or seven of these eleven new stories.