OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
To read An Englishman Looks at the World (Cassell), a collection of "unrestrained remarks on contemporary matters"—aeroplanes, Chesterton and Belloc, libraries, labour unrest, the Great State, and the like—by Mr. H. G. Wells, is to be delighted or infuriated according to your natural habit of mind. If established in tolerable comfort in a world which you judge, for all its blemishes, to be on the whole rather well run, you will resent exceedingly this pert young man (for Mr. Wells is still astonishingly young) with his preposterous eagerness, his insane passion for questioning and tinkering and most unfairly putting you and your kind in the wrong. You will no doubt find excellent grounds for doubting his ability to reconstruct; for suspecting what you will feel to be his pretentious breadth of view, his assumed omniscience. But if, on the other hand, thinking life in your sombre moments a nightmare of imbecility and in your more expansive moments a high adventure of immeasurable possibilities, you are straitened between cold despairs and immense hopes, you will readily forgive this irreverent, self-confident critic-journalist any crude things he may have said in his haste for sake of his flashes of perception, his happily descriptive phrases, his inspiring anticipations, his uncalculating candour, and above all his generous preoccupation with things that matter enormously. "What we prosperous people who have nearly all the good things of life and most of the opportunities have to do now is to justify ourselves." That is a sentiment and a challenge repeated or implied throughout the book. This Englishman looking at his world looks with quick eyes. He is himself so intensely interested that he can only fail to interest such as find his whole attitude an outrage upon their finally adopted convictions and conventions.
Have you noticed the way in which certain stories bear the mark of a particular place or period? If ever there was a novel that vociferated "Cambridge" in every line, The Making of a Bigot (Hodder and Stoughton) is that one. Well indeed may its paper wrapper display a drawing of King's Chapel, though as a matter of fact only the action of the first chapter passes in the University town. Miss Rose Macaulay has based her story upon a quaintly attractive theme. Her hero, Eddy Oliver, is a type new to fiction. Eddy saw good in everything to such an extent that he allowed himself to be persuaded into active sympathy with the aims of practically everyone who was aiming at anything, however mutually irreconcilable the aims might be. "He went along with all points of view so long as they were positive; as soon as condemnation or rejection came in, he broke off." Consequently, as you may imagine, his career was pleasantly involved. It embraced the Church, various forms of Socialism, and at one time and another some devotion to the ideals of Nationalism, Disarmament, Imperial Service and the Primrose League. But please don't imagine that all this is told in a spirit of comedy. Miss Macaulay is, if anything, almost too dry and serious; this, and her disproportionate affection for the word "rather," a little impaired my own enjoyment of the book. It contains some happily sketched types of modernity—all of them Cambridge to the back-bone; and Eddy's final discovery (which makes the bigot), that one can't achieve anything in life without some wholesale hatreds, is genuine enough—more so than the system of card-cutting by which he settles his convictions. Miss Macaulay has already, I am told, won a thousand pounds with a previous book; this one proves her the possessor of a gift of originality that is both rare and refreshing.
I could imagine a novel with which I could sympathise deeply, based upon the theme of England's regeneration by means of the right type of Tory squire, but it would be a novel with a more credible hero and conceived in a less petty spirit of party bias than Mr. H. N. Dickinson has given us in The Business of a Gentleman (Heinemann). For, in the first place, Sir Robert Wilton, who figured of course in Keddy and Sir Guy and Lady Rannard—he has, in fact, by this time married Marion, late Sir Guy's widow—is far too jumpy and nervy a person to fit my ideal of a paternal landlord, and what is, after all, more important, I feel convinced that his tenants and stable-lads would have thought the same. Secondly, I refuse to believe that a spinster, however soured, however much devoted to the cause of Labour and misguided crusades for social purity, would have behaved as Miss Baker does in this book; and deliberately attempted to father a false scandal on Sir Robert merely because she hated his type. And if the author replies that he knows of such an instance I maintain that it was just one of those things which the art of selection should have prompted him to leave out. I have, of course, no fault to find with Mr. Dickinson's style, which as usual is curiously simple yet at the same time attractive, nor with his powers of character-sketching. His schoolboy of seventeen, Eddie Durwold, is in this book particularly good. It is the things that these people do that bothers me. And if I might venture to rename The Business of a Gentleman the title I should choose is "The Escapade of an Egoist."
Mr. Sidney Low has paid some visits to Egypt and the Sudan, has kept his eyes very wide open and has written Egypt in Transition (Smith, Elder) in consequence. The Earl of Cromer, who has also been there or thereabouts, introduces the book to the notice of the public with an appreciative preface. Am I then in a position to pass judgment? Yes, I am; for I can claim to be literally more informed on the subject than most people, having above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the clearest possible picture of the country—a stretch of sand, some pyramids in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling enigmatically—not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave Mr. Low five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his illustrations reproduced himself on either on or off a camel. On less personal grounds, I have no scruple in giving him the remaining five for the vastly interesting facts, political, international, social and racial, with which he entertained me. It requires no small skill in a dispenser of such facts to make them entertaining. Twice only was I minded to quarrel with him; once when he expressed a general contempt, based upon one egregious example, for the foreign exports of Oxford and Cambridge, and again when he got on to the subject of tourists, who include my nearest and dearest, and abused them from the standpoint of a "visitor." In the first case he was absurd, in the second, common-place; but he made ample compensation for both by his memorable chapter of "Conclusions," in which he gave me clearly to understand why East, being East, will never be joined to West, always West, but yet how the twain have got within measurable distance of one another.
There must have been moments when Napoleon found St. Helena a little quiet for a man of his temperament; when the monotony of his life there pressed somewhat hardly upon him. On these occasions I like to think of him saying philosophically to himself, as he remembered what Mr. Rudolf Pickthall calls "the last phase but two," "Well, after all, this isn't Elba. I've got that much to be thankful for." In The Comic Kingdom (Lane) Mr. Pickthall shows how everybody on the island struggles to make a bit out of their visitors. Little children rallied round with posies of wild flowers, demanding large sums in payment. Bogus monks waved crosses at him, and, if he pretended not to notice them, rolled in the dust under his carriage wheels. There was never a moment when somebody was not calling with a bust of the Emperor or Empress, price three hundred francs. And itinerant bands played under his windows into the small hours of the morning. I can imagine him saying, in the words of Orestes, "Dis is a dam country." Orestes was the guide who conducted Mr. Pickthall through the island. It revolted him, but he did it. "I tink we better leave to-morrow," was a sort of refrain with Orestes. He had a poor opinion of Elba, which I for one do not share. After reading The Comic Kingdom I feel that one of my coming holidays must be spent climbing its hills and supplying its thirsty inhabitants with wine. The scenery is apparently worth while, and the natives appear a friendly lot. I like their enthusiasm for literature. They turned out in their hundreds and insisted on Mr. Pickthall's standing treat, just because they mistook him for a great historian. When I tell them I write for Punch they will be all over me.
