OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Miss Viola Meynell brings to her analysis of character an astonishingly acute observation and insight, an intimate sympathy, a quiet, leavening, sometimes faintly malicious, humour; and to her synthesis a conscientious and dexterous artistry in selection and arrangement which gives a vividly objective reality to her creations. So that you may put down her Columbine (Secker) with something like the guilty feeling of an eavesdropper. Love in its effect upon three girls is her main theme, and it is difficult to overpraise her skill and restraint in the handling of it. Lily Peak, the actress, beautiful, passionless, incompetent, with her irrelevant banality, and her second-hand philosophy of living, is a veritable tour de force of characterisation which cleverly avoids the easy pit of caricature. And between this pretty nonentity and Jennifer, the competent, the loyal and the deep, with her occasional flashes of beauty and her innocent provocativeness, Dixon Parrish, one of those self-analytic, essentially cool-blooded modern young men, wavers to the tragic hurt of all the three. Alison, his sister, full of moodiness and passionate preoccupations, moves unquiet on the well-planned background which holds that genially absurd pseudo-intellectual, her father; the kindly negative Mrs. Parrish; Gilbert, Alison's lover (the least satisfactory of the portraits); the pleasantly pretentious Madame Barrett of the elocution classes; and "that Mrs. Smith," who is only (but adroitly) shown through Lily's artless chatter. Miss Meynell chooses to write chiefly of little moments in little lives. But she has adequate reserves of power for bigger work, as passages of warm colour placed with a fine judgment on her low-toned canvas abundantly prove, and meanwhile she has shown herself mistress of a method singularly skilful and restrained. She does not describe or explain or soliloquise. All her points are made through the speech, the actions or the expressed thought of her characters—the manifestly excellent way which so few have the wit or the courage to follow.
Mr. Leo Brandish, so Miss Peggy Webling assures me, intends to write the professional biography of their mutual hero, that notable actor and admirable gentleman, Edgar Chirrup (Methuen). In the meantime she has told us all about the man himself, at least as far as the last page that he has turned, the one where the dogs and the rocking-horse are included in the family portrait, with his children and the wife whom you and I, and everyone else for that matter, realised was the one for him long before he did. Some of the other pages in his life were less satisfactory, more particularly those on which Fate had inscribed, not in the most convincing fashion (but perhaps the authoress jogged Fate's elbow), the history of his sudden unworthy infatuation. If I could not forget or ever quite understand this episode, neither could "Chirps" himself in the years that followed, when the lovableness and loyalty that had already won my affections were pleading for his release, with the ladies (Fate and Miss Webling, I mean) collaborating over his destiny. It would indeed be pitiful if any but the happiest of endings had been in store for the hero and his Ruth, for sweeter and simpler folk have seldom been persuaded by any writer to smile a genial public into arm-chair content. And the secret of their charm would seem to be just that they have been able to catch the qualities of sympathy and sincerity that belonged in the first case to the manner of the telling of their story; so perhaps, after all, nothing but good was meant them from the start. At any rate from first to last there is not a page in this book that is not sweet, wholesome and entirely readable. Here is tenderness without mawkishness, humour without noise, a sufficiency of action without harshness of outline; most surprising, here is a story, in which many of the characters are of the Stage, presented with an entire absence of limelight or any other vulgarity. All this, indeed, one expects from the title-page; but none the less it is no mean achievement. And so—my congratulations.
Through the Ages Beloved (Hutchinson) might be fairly described as an unusual story. I am bound to say that I both admired and enjoyed it; but at the same time a more tangled tale it was never my task to unravel. For the benefit of future explorers I will say that the motive of the plot—whose scene is laid in Japan—is reincarnation. Consequently, though the hero, Kanaya, begins as a modern student who has fought through the Russo-Japanese war, you must be prepared to find him and yourself switched suddenly without any warning into the remote past. I am not quite sure that Mr. H. Grahame Richards has been playing the game here. So unheralded is the transference that even the close and careful reader will experience some bewilderment; as, for example, when the heroine, whose own name remains the same in both ages, re-enters with different parents. As for the skipper, his doom will be confusion unmitigated. However, once you have found your bearings again, there is much to admire in the treatment of a time and a place so eminently picturesque. Mr. Richards' pen-pictures of Japanese scenery have all the delicate beauty of paintings upon ivory. The clear, clean air, the colour of sunrise flushing some exquisite landscape, a flight of birds crossing a garden of azaleas—all these are realized with obvious knowledge and enthusiasm, and more than compensate for the intricacy of the plot. But this is certainly there. Once only was I myself near vanquished. This was when the Kanaya of the past, himself the result of the modern Kanaya hitting his head on a stone, began to hint of uneasy visions pointing to a remote Port-Arthurian future. Here I confess that (like Alice and The Red King) I longed for some authoritative pronouncement as to who was the genuine dreamer, and who would "go out." Still, an original story, and one to be read, even if with knitting of brows.
The Passport with accompanying photograph sometimes arouses suspicion. One seldom looks like oneself immediately after a rough Channel crossing.
There seems some lack of proper respect in describing as a pot-boiler a story that, when no longer in its first youth, can enjoy a second blooming at ten shillings and sixpence net, in its own cardboard box, and embellished with any quantity of the liveliest coloured pictures. Yet I fear that this is my impression about The Money Moon (Sampson Low). I have liked Mr. Jeffrey Farnol's other work too well to be able to accept this at its present sumptuous face-value. You remember no doubt how George Bellew, having been jilted by the girl of his original choice, set out upon a walking tour; how on the first day of this expedition he fought a bloody battle with a carter, about nothing in particular, and arrived at a village with the significant name of Dapplemere. You will not have forgotten that at Dapplemere there lived a small boy, who talked as boys do in books but nowhere else; a lavendery old lady-housekeeper whose name (need I remind you?) was Miss Priscilla; and a maiden as fair as she was impoverished. You recall too how all these charming people took George to their expansive hearts, and welcomed him as the ideal hero, without apparently once noticing that he must at the moment (on the author's own showing) have had a swollen nose and probably two black eyes. No, I repeat my verdict. The whole thing is too easy. I understand, however, that in America, where The Money Moon is at present shining more brightly than with us, there exists a steady demand for this rather saccharine fiction. So let us leave it at that.
There must be many persons (I am one of them myself) who, when confronted with a topical burlesque of Alice in Wonderland, would confess to a little regret. The book is such a treasured joy that one hates to have any hands, even the cleverest, laid upon it. Yet the deed is so often done that there is clearly a large public that does not share this view. Therefore a welcome seems assured for what is certainly, so far, the wittiest of the attempts, Malice in Kulturland (The Car Illustrated), written by Horace Wyatt, with pictures by Tell. The ingenuity with which the parodists have handled their task makes me wish that my personal prejudice had allowed me to appreciate it more whole-heartedly. Especially neat is the transformation of the Cheshire Cat into a Russian Bear, seen everywhere in the wood (there is a clever drawing of this). You remember how, at Alice's request, the Cat kindly obliged with a gradual disappearance from tail to grin? The Bear does the same, "beginning with an official statement, and ending with a rumour, which was still very persistent for some time afterwards." Mr. Wyatt has certainly a pretty turn of wit, which I shall look to see him developing in other and more virgin fields.
"CAN WINKLES BE ELIMINATED?"
Bristol Observer.
They can be withdrawn with a pin.
"An ewe, owned by Mr. Sydney Crowther, of Oak View Farm, Plompton, near Harrogate, has given birth to a lamb."
Yorkshire Evening Post.
One would have expected a lion in these martial days.