OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The title of a book should be a guide to its contents, a simple enough rule which some authors overlook in their anxiety to start being clever and eccentric on the very outside cover. The book-buying public will appreciate Miss M. Betham-Edwards' title, From an Islington Window, Pages of Reminiscent Romance (Smith, Elder), and will gather from it that this is a book for those who prefer a long life and a quiet one to the short and thrilling. Incidentally I am relieved from divulging any of the plots in order to demonstrate the nature of the twelve short pieces embodied; enough to quote two typical sub-titles, "Mr. Lovejoy's Love-story" and "Miss Prime," and to put upon the whole the label of the author's own choice, "Early Victorian." Everybody knows where and what Islington is and the sort of minor tragedy and comedy that would be likely to occur in the lives of its inhabitants in the last reign but one. No one would look there for epoch-making crises, but many will find a longed-for relief from the speeding-up tendencies of modern romance. Lastly, but for a tendency at times to affectation, the style of the writer is as graceful and elegant as her themes are homely and serene, and that, I think, is all about it.
Mr. W. E. Norris is subtle; at least if my idea of the genesis of Barbara and Company (Constable) is the right one. I believe, then, that Mr. Norris found himself possessed of plots sufficient for a number of agreeable short stories, but that, knowing short stories to be more or less a drug in the market, he very skilfully united them into one by the simple process of making all their characters friends of Barbara. Nothing could be more effective. For example, Mr. Norris thinks what fun it would be to describe a race ridden by two unwilling suitors, the prize to be the lady's heart, which neither in the least wishes to win. Promptly Miss Ormesby, the heroine, is asked down on a visit to Barbara, and the story is told, most amusingly and well, in a couple of chapters. Again, the pathetic and moving tale of Miss Nellie Mercer, the nameless companion, who blossomed into fierce renown as Senorita Mercedes, the dancer, and died of it. Why should not this same Barbara have adopted the parentless girl in childhood? It is all simplicity itself. Perhaps you may object that the useful Barbara shows some signs of being a little overworked, and that few women are likely to have had quite so adventurous a company of friends. In this case I shall have nothing to urge, except that, so far as I am personally concerned, Mr. Norris has such a way with him that if he chose to people Barbara's drawing-room with the persons of the Arabian Nights he could probably convince me that there was nothing very much out of the ordinary in that assembly. And, after all, pianists and writers and actors, all the kind of folk with whom Barbara surrounded herself, are precisely those to whom short stories should, and do, happen. Next time, however, I hope Mr. Norris's inspiration will be less fragmentary but equally happy.
Johnnie Maddison (Smith, Elder) was nice. And here and now I wish to propose a vote of thanks to Mr. John Haslette for having the uncommon pluck to create a hero neither handsome nor strong. Brave of course he had to be, or how should that which is written in the proverbs have been fulfilled, but "he was slight," "he stooped a little," "he had an ordinary face." (What hopes that brings to the hearts of some of us!) For the rest, he lived in Sta. Malua, to which tropical port came Molly Hatherall, intending to be married to a handsome scamp who spent all his salary as a mining engineer and all the money he could borrow from friends in losing games of poker to a man who made a profession of winning them. Why he should have wanted to do this (for it seemed to be his solitary serious vice) in a place like Sta. Malua I cannot imagine. But there it is. For one reason or another the marriage was delayed, and after a long mental struggle Jno. Maddison, who had fallen in love with Molly, decided to tell her what kind of man her idol of romantic chivalry really was. It raises, you see, a nice point of ethics, since Edmund Serge was popular at the club and, except for the brand of the poker on his forehead, a pretty good fellow. Unfortunately Mr. Haslette rudely slices the knot of his difficulty by making Edmund embezzle money and abscond at the critical point of the story. The telling of the yarn is a little humdrum, but gains from a comparative leniency in the matter of local colour—for I feel that Sta. Malua is the sort of place which might have been rather ruthless about this—and the suspended banns keep the interest fairly warm. But I am not sure that Johnnie Maddison might not have been nicer if he had escaped a suspicion of priggishness and lost a trifle now and then at progressive whist.
In Miss Eleanor Mordaunt's new volume called The Island (Heinemann) all the tales have a common interest through their association with a corner of Empire easily recognisable by those who have ever seen it. I remember how greatly I have already admired Miss Mordaunt's power of vivid and picturesque scene-painting; there are several stories in this book that show it at its best. I wish I could avoid adding that there are others that seem to me entirely unworthy of their author, at least for any other purpose than that of boiling the pot. One of the best of the tales, "A Reversion," is both dramatic and realistic; it bears a strong resemblance to a sketch that recently made a successful appearance at the Hippodrome; indeed the good qualities of Miss Mordaunt's stories are precisely those that would help their development into excellent little plays. One thing that I cannot help wishing is that the writer had trusted a little more to my imaginative intelligence. There is a certain kind of detail that is best confided to this sanctuary, and Miss Mordaunt's difficulty seems to have been in realising when all the sayable things had been said. At least one of the stories plunges considerably beyond the limit of discretion and even good taste. But the heat and the colour, the thrills and the devastating ennui of life for the English in the island, are as well rendered as anything I remember in the fiction of Empire. For this alone there should be a warm welcome for the collection, with all its faults, both from those who know the original and those who need help in imagining it.
The Purple Frogs (Heath, Cranton and Ouseley) I can only describe as the most exasperating, not to say maddening, product of modern fiction. What on earth Messrs. H. W. Westbrook and Lawrence Grossmith, the joint authors, mean by it I have not the ghost of an idea. Occasionally signs are detectable that the whole thing is a practical joke; still more occasionally it even promises to become mildly amusing; and then again one is confronted with an incident (such as the visit of the armed maniac to the house of Isambard Flanders) serious to the point of melodrama. Not for pages and chapters did I discover any excuse for the title; and even then not much. But it appeared eventually that Isambard Flanders was jealous of the friendship between his wife, Cicely, and Stephen, a young man who produced film-dramas; and that in order to score off them he wrote a novel called The Purple Frogs, in which he embodied his suspicions. The last half of the volume is occupied with this tale within a tale. Here possibly we have a key to the purpose of the collaboration. Anyhow, I permitted myself to form a theory that Mr. Westbrook (or Mr. Grossmith) had written a novel too exiguous for separate publication, and in this dilemma had appealed to Mr. Grossmith (or Mr. Westbrook) to provide a setting. But which wrote which, and why—these are problems that remain inscrutable. Yet another is furnished by the fact that Miss Ella King Hall has composed for the main story six "illustrations in music," duly reproduced. You may with luck be able to smile a little at the quaintness of these. But on the title-page they are said to be "arranged from the MS. notes of Botolf Glenfield." And Glenfield, being only a character in the novel written by Flanders, couldn't possibly ... Help!
THE CUBIST PHOTOGRAPHER.