OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Murders, divorces, by-elections and new insurance schemes from time to time occupy the most conspicuous columns of the daily Press and receive our deep attention, but these things occur suddenly and are soon forgotten. Civil war in Mexico preceded and outlives them all as a matter of sensation, and the psychological moment in the career of that other "distressful country" is interminable. How the revolutions began, in what manner they continue and when they are likely to end, are questions which agitate the minds of men when they read their morning papers at breakfast, their evening papers after dinner and their reviews over the week-end. It was obvious that some qualified student of affairs should forget the events of the moment, visit Mexico at whatever risk to himself, personally witness the internecine squabbles in progress, and, if he was lucky enough to survive the experience, write up the matter in a compact and entertaining volume for our better understanding of the whole. Having regard to the present condition of the country as I now understand it, I should say there was no rush of applications for the job; certainly if my Editor should ask me to go out there and test the accuracy of Mr. H. Hamilton Fyfe's observations, as expressed in The Real Mexico: a Study on the Spot (Heinemann), I should at once discover an important engagement to prevent my accepting his kind invitation. Mr. Fyfe's narrative is, however, too graphic and his description too real to admit of doubt; I am glad that there was no competition and his subject has been left to be dealt with by the best man for the purpose. Given the title of the book and the name of the author, there is no more need of recommendation to the English public; but I beg Messrs. Wilson and Bryan (of the U.S.A.) to read, mark, learn and, if their physique is capable of the feat, inwardly digest it. They should know, in glaring detail, the ills general and individual resulting from what the American resident in Mexico calls their "grape-juice" policy.
Four imprisonments of varying lengths, one of them including forcible feeding, presumably give Lady Constance Lytton a right to record her experiences, and the chronicle she presents in Prisons and Prisoners (Heinemann) is telling through its very simplicity and directness. Such a tale would be hardly likely to prove other than "an indictment of our existing prison system" (as orators have it); but Lady Constance Lytton is careful to punctiliousness in her recognition of the kindness and natural sympathy of many of the officials, even while she condemns the rules and regulations which tend to cramp and stifle the gentler side of human nature. Still, our prison system has had to stand a good deal of attack before this. We should most of us be thankful to change it if we knew how, and I need never despise hints in this direction. The interest of the book, however, is by far the greatest when it is regarded as a running commentary on the modern feminist movement. It is impossible to read such a book seriously without feeling a strong admiration for the courage, self-sacrifice and resolution it reflects, and at the same time a quite appalling sense of waste. When a way has been found to apply to the needs of our bewildered country the powers of such women as form the heroines of Lady Constance Lytton's book, I for one shall not be surprised if things begin to happen. But at present the results that they have achieved, even upon their own showing and apart from all criticism of methods, seem quite incommensurate with the amount of trouble and pain.
In The Custody of the Child (Hutchinson) Mr. Philip Gibbs has chosen a difficult theme—the story of a broken home, told from the child's point of view, and he has handled it like an artist. Of the three books into which this biography of Nicholas Barton is divided, the first is so much the best that the second seems a little tame. This was, of course, inevitable, for the first book is the thunderstorm, the second the gentle rain which follows it. I have another reason for deriving particular pleasure from the opening book, and that is that the scene is laid in a Battersea Park flat. I have long since marked down Battersea as one of London's most romantic neighbourhoods. To a child, the curiously mingled intimacy and exclusiveness of life among the cliff-dwellers of that long road facing the Park, where you drop your toys out of your front garden (which house-agents call a balcony) and see them impounded as legitimate gifts that have dropped from Heaven by a perfect stranger in the front garden of the ground-floor flat, must be a perpetual wonder. Mr. Gibbs has brought this out so persuasively that I have shaken hands with him after each sentence. There is not an incident in Book I. that is not exactly right. The rest of the story, with its courageous avoidance of unmitigated happiness in the ending, never fails to arrest, unless for a moment or so in the middle; but for me at least the real charm of the volume lies in Book I.
"Let us try to avoid the detestable trick of sentimentality when dealing with this beloved, presuming, gallant, unhappy man." So Mrs. Evan Nepean adjures us and herself; and it must be confessed that the warning was needed. For the man was James, Duke of Monmouth, a study of whom she has written under the title of On the Left of a Throne (Lane); and of all the Stuarts he is the one about whom it is most difficult to avoid being sentimental. Mrs. Nepean has perhaps just succeeded, but only just; and we will agree, therefore, to call her style vividly enthusiastic. She is quite frankly in love with Monmouth throughout. That wonderful, dangerous beauty fascinates her; and who, looking at the delightful portraits with which the book abounds, is going to blame her or anyone else for yielding to its charm? One fortunate result of this attitude is that the Fairy Prince of the seventeenth century lives again in the page of this fervent admirer as he would never have lived in those of a colder historian. Dancing, riding, hunting, raking and fighting, we are bound to feel about him much as old Pepys did, who called him, in a memorable and picturesque phrase, "skittish and leaping," and, for all his righteous disapproval, admired with the best. "How he would have loved flying!" is Mrs. Nepean's very characteristic comment upon a record of her hero's graceful activities. For one thing especially does the writer of this study deserve gratitude. She dwells purposely as little as possible upon the details of the rebellion; but she has made it her duty to win back for Monmouth some of the credit for personal courage of which popular history has been too ready to deprive him. Here you may read how, after the short agony of nerves was over, he faced death with a placid and untheatrical bravery, than which the long records of the scaffold show nothing finer. It is a profoundly moving end to a fascinating story.
After reading Two Women (Methuen) I hope to avoid "girl bachelors" for a very long time. They are, Mr. Max Pemberton says, curious products of the century, and I am not disposed to contradict him. In Gertrude Wynne's flat, "Debussy's music was open upon a miniature grand, and a volume of Anatola France stood upon the marquetry table near the fireplace;" but in Doris Holt's room "an open piano had a song from a revue upon it, while a translation of one of Paul de Koch's novels lay upon the window-seat." That ought to give the key to their characters, but if it does not, let me boldly add that Gertrude was clever and sedate, while Doris was a queen of minxes. Doris, indeed, got herself into a pretty mess with a vulgar philanderer called Lord Raymore, and was justly punished by marrying him. This Raymore man despised politics, but all the same he had made up his mind to "win a place in the Tory Cabinet, and to pose there as the new Disraeli," which makes me think that Mr. Pemberton is occasionally funnier than he means to be. Not until we get away from the girl bachelors and are off on a spying expedition to Germany with Captain Ainsworth does the story grip. Then, however, things begin to happen, and the flight from the German fortress, in which Ainsworth had been imprisoned, is really thrilling. In his next book I hope Mr. Pemberton will leave "curious products" alone and let us have an extra dose of adventure to make up for the meagre allowance contained in Two Women.
"It is far more important to have the right style in the country than in town. Men don't want their women to wear something that will frighten the birds away. Nothing cheap or badly cut ought ever to be worn in the country."
Vanity Fair and Hearth & Home.
The birds: "We really cannot stay to be shot to-day, the women are wearing such cheap clothes."
Close of an essay by a small girl on Charles I.:—"Had Charles the First been more strong minded and sincere, he would have been a better king; as it was, he was more suited for a clergyman."