OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In fiction it is certainly true that nothing succeeds like success. There is a sure and very understandable charm in a story of climbing fortunes. Therefore it may be that part of my pleasure in Tasker Jevons (Hutchinson) was due to sympathy with the upward progress of its hero. But much more was certainly due to the art with which Miss May Sinclair has written about it. Tasker Jevons is a book, and a character, that will linger pleasantly in my memory. He was a little man with a great personality, or rather I will say a great purpose, and that was to approve himself in the eyes of the wife whom he worshipped, and her perplexed, slightly contemptuous family. The trouble was that Tasker was in the beginning a hack journalist, socially and personally impossible; and that Viola Thesiger, whom he married, belonged by birth to the rigidest circle of Cathedral society (Miss Sinclair, scorning subterfuge, calls it quite openly Canterbury). So you see the difficulties that beset the Jevons pair. Their story is told here, very effectively, through the mouth of a third person, a fellow-journalist and admirer of Jevons—but quite respectable—the rejected suitor of Viola, and eventually the husband of her sister. Through his clever and observant eyes we watch the progress of Jevons, see him prospering materially, becoming famous and rich and vulgarized. It is an unusually close and rather subtle study of the development of such a man. Eventually there happens that for which the date, Midsummer 1914, will have prepared you, even if you had forgotten that Miss Sinclair had herself served in Belgium with a field ambulance. So the end of the book gives us some vivid War pictures. Taking it all round, I am inclined to consider Tasker Jevons the best of the 1916 novels that has yet come my way.
When, in the first chapter of Moll Davis (Allen and Unwin), you find the heroine having a very pretty dispute with the landlord of the Mischief Inn, and a gallant blade of a fellow coming to her rescue, you will guess what fare is to follow. And, provided that your taste is for diet of the lightest, you will not be disappointed, for no one is more capable than Mr. Bernard Capes of making it palatable. Here we are then back in the year 1661, and in a maze of intrigue. Wit, if we are to believe the novelist, was as plentiful in those days as morals were scarce, and Mr. Capes is not the man to spoil tradition for lack of colour. He calls his book a comedy, but he should have called it a comedy with an interlude; and the part I like best is the interlude. Possibly because he was weary of plots and counterplots he suddenly breaks loose, and with a warning to those who have "an unconquerable repugnance to sentiment" tells a moving tale that has nothing to do with the main narrative. I can thank him unreservedly for this, and for the crop of words which he has added to my vocabulary. "Bingawast," "gingumbobs," and "fubbs" have the right ring, and after a little training I hope to use them with telling effect on my platoon.
Edith Ottley cherished a passion for Aylmer Ross; to such an extent indeed that she came within an ace of eloping with him. However, the ace wasn't played; and in due course Aylmer went to the War and became a captain. Unfortunately he also became much more interesting by reason of a wound; and, when this brought him back to England, the passion also returned, stronger than ever. This, of course, is why their story is called Love at Second Sight (Grant Richards). I have now a small surprise for you, namely that Edith was already married, and owned a charming house, a valetudinarian husband and two pleasant children. So I quite expected that Aylmer, in the fulness of time, would either (1) be removed by the enemy, or (2) marry a delightful little Red-Cross nurse who adored him. But the author, Mrs. Leverson, had other views. Instead therefore of ending her heroine in the expected mood of conventional reconciliation she sends the objectionable husband off with somebody else, and leaves us to a prospect of wedding-bells with the divorce court as a preliminary. Which is at least original. But throughout I had the feeling that a great deal of bright and clever writing was being wasted on a poor theme. The characters are brilliantly suggested, but—with perhaps one exception, forgetful Lady Conroy, who is an entire delight—they seem altogether unworthy of it. In fact I came away from the book with the impression of having attended a gathering of somewhat shoddily smart people, and sat next to a clever woman who had been witty about them. The worst of the matter is that they are all so real. This is a tribute to the author, but a most unpleasant reflection for everyone else.
The Rector. "Well, William, you ought to be proud and happy to know you have four sons serving their country with His Majesty's Forces."
William. "I am proud and happy, Sir, but the old woman she do fret somethin' terrible because none of 'em ain't got no Victoria Cross yet."
My attention was first attracted to The New Dawn (Long) by the fact that the plot starts at Euston Station. That interesting, not to say romantic, line, the L. & N. W. R., is usually shunned by our novelists. But although "George Wovil" takes his characters to the furthest North, even beyond Glasgow, their sympathies, like, I think, those of their creator, remain behind in fair and false and fickle Wimbledon. This at least was where Halvey Brown wished himself as the train glided over the best laid track in Europe towards dour Bartocher. And Brown, though he knew the natural drabness of his destination already, had at that time no information as to all the unpleasing events that were to happen there; that, for example, the minister's new wife would turn out to be a lady with a past that he himself had shared, or that the fair-haired young man in the same compartment was the assistant minister, who would fall in love with the said wife and eventually slay her, the minister, and himself. I find I have been led into betraying for you the outline of the story. Perhaps, however, this does not greatly matter. The value of the book lies in its very natural and human characters. All four of them—there are only four who really matter—are admirably drawn, so that the tragedy of their lives holds and convinces you. My complaints against the author are, first, the excess of emphasis that he gives to the physical unpleasantness of his background; secondly, the loose construction that allows the tale to be continually turning back to look behind it. He would keep a lover in the act of embracing the lady of his heart while he explains what the parents of each died of, and all that has happened since. Still, The New Dawn remains an unconventional and strongly written story, which will certainly interest though perhaps hardly enliven you.
There is something very soothing in the peeps into dusty family papers and the faint echoes of departed gossip which Mrs. Stirling provides in A Painter of Dreams (Lane). These pleasantly amateurish historical studies go back a century and a half. A commonplace book from which are quoted many diverting and incredible things; a chapter in which those queer Radicals, Horne Tooke, Cobbett, Sir Francis Burdett and bluff Squire Bosville, are chiefly concerned; a sketch of the fourth Earl of Albemarle, keen farmer and friend of Coke of Norfolk, Master of the Horse to William IV. and Queen Victoria (it is to Albemarle in this capacity that the Iron Duke said: "The Queen can make you go inside the coach, or outside the coach, or run behind it like a d——d tinker's dog"), winner of the Ascot Gold Cup three years running and stiff-backed autocrat; an account of the beautiful Misses Caton of Baltimore and their matrimonial adventures—the American invasion of brides bringing money and beauty in exchange for titles thus dating back to 1816; some details of the lives of two artists, John Herring, animal painter, and Roddam Spencer Stanhope, one of the lesser pre-Raphaelites and the painter of dreams referred to in the title—these all make up an agreeable pot-pourri with an old-world fragrance which ought to be able to charm you out of the preposterous nightmare of the present. But it makes one feel old to see that the conscientious author thinks that Dicky Doyle now needs a footnote to let the present generation know who he was.