OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Narcissus (Secker), by Miss Viola Meynell, is one of those books for which I cannot help feeling that my appreciation would have been keener two years ago than is possible to-day. It is the story of the growth to manhood of two brothers, Victor and Jimmy, who live with their widowed mother in an outer suburb of London. That there is art, very subtle and delicate art, in the telling of it goes without saying. The characters of the brothers are realized with exquisite care. Victor, the elder, uncertain, violently sensitive and emotional, seeking always from life what he is never destined (at least so far as the present story carries him) to attain; Jimmy, placid, shallow, avoiding all emotion, attracting happiness like a magnet. Nothing, I repeat, could be better done in its kind than the pictures of these two, and of the not very interesting crowd of young persons among whom they move. But, for all its real beauty of style, I have to confess that the book left me cold, and even a little irritated. Perhaps we demand something more from our heroes these days than susceptibility, or indifference, to emotion. Was the purpose of life, one wonders, ever as delicately elusive as these bewildered young men seem to find it? I kept longing for Lord Derby. Perhaps, again, this is but part of the cleverness of the writer, and Miss Meynell, like the child in the poem, only does it to annoy. But I hardly think so. Her tenderness and sympathy for Victor especially are obvious. He, I take it, is Narcissus (though Narcissi would have been a truer title for the book, as each of the brothers is more in love with his own reflection than with anything else), and, since he is left unmarried at the close of the volume, I derived some quiet satisfaction from the thought that modified conscription might yet make a man of him.
Why will the heroes of historical fiction persist in that dangerous practice of leaving an angry and overmastered villain bound to a tree to await death or rescue? The result is rescue every time, and one way and another a mort of trouble for the good characters. Still it may be argued that if the protagonist of The Fortunes of Garin (Constable) had not followed this risky precedent those fortunes would not have led him where they eventually did, and we should have missed one of the best costume novels of the year. Miss Mary Johnston is among the very few waiters whom I can follow without weariness through the mazes of mediævalism. This tale of the adventures of a knight and a lady in the days when Henry II. sat on the throne of England, and his son Richard princed it in Angoulême, is told with an air that lifts it out of tushery into romance. She wields a picturesque and courtly style, sometimes indeed a trifle too charged with metaphor to be altogether manageable (as for example when she speaks of "pouring oil upon the red embers of a score unpaid"), but for the most part admirably pleasing to the ear. Her antique figures are alive; and the whole tale goes forward with a various and high-stepping movement and a glow of colour that reminded me of nothing more than that splendid pageant one follows round the walls of the Riccardi Palace in Florence. Of course the journey ends in lovers' meeting and the teaching of his place to the evil-minded. The fact that this latter was called Jaufre, a name that I would wish kindlier entreated, is almost my only complaint against a lively and entertaining story which more than once rises to real beauty.
Given a plot of the conventional order I dare say it is best to make very little fuss or mystery about it. So, at any rate, "Katharine Tynan" seems to think, for after about page 32 of her latest book, Since First I Saw Your Face (Hutchinson), there is really almost no guessing left to do, the authoress seeming principally concerned to ensure a smooth passage for one's prophecies. Thus, while the unknown son of a secret marriage, happening by good luck to thrash the ostensible claimant to the title and heroine, gets that successful start in the early pages that is so necessary to his happiness in the last, and the lady never really looks like straying far into disconcerting opinions of her own, even the rival himself obliges us by throwing up the sponge just when the game should really begin. All this is soothing enough, but it is also very thin stuff; and the addition of a ghostly ancestress, who lures her descendants to midnight assignations by smiling at them out of a Lely painting, does not stiffen things much. The fact is that away from such a purely Irish subject as, say, "Countrymen All," Mrs. Hinkson really has not much to tell. Sweeney's New York Stores do not harmonise at all well with her atmosphere of wistful tragedy. The effect suggests a soap-bubble trying to cake-walk.
When cattle-ships put forth to sea
From Montreal across the Atlantic,
The life on board would not suit me,
Nor you, I think. The cattle frantic,
The tough steel plates beneath the might
Of crashing waters well-nigh riven—
Ugh! Here it is in black and white,
Clearly described by Frederick Niven.
Published by Heinemann (six bob),
The book relates the ceaseless battle
Which they must wage whose steady job
Is valeting a mob of cattle;
And yet they pant to get a ship,
For jobs the owners they importune
At—mark you this!—one pound the trip!
I wouldn't do it for a fortune.
It's just a tale of common men,
Who never went to school or college,
Writ by a skilled and practised pen
Most certainly from first-hand knowledge;
It has no very obvious plan,
No movement, no connected story;
And yet I don't see how you can
Fail to enjoy The S.S. Glory.
You'll meet some men you're sure to like—
Men who would greet you as a brother;
One is that honest fellow, Mike,
And Cockney, possibly, another;
Unpolished, quick to wrath and slow,
When roused, to lay aside their cholor,
Yet are they types you ought to know
As well as did the hero, Scholar.
THE UNINTERNED PERIL IN OUR MIDST.
Portrait of Herr Pfunk ("Sister Susie"), who edits "Our Mites' Corner" in the well-known weekly, Mum's Pets, and also conducts a column of "Hints to Mothers," which is having an alarming effect on infant mortality.
In an eloquent foreword to The Queen's Gift Book, (Hodder and Stoughton), we are told by Mr. Galsworthy that it is "in the nature of a hat passed round, into which, God send, many hundred thousand coins may be poured." The coin that we are asked to put into what I hope will be a very widely circulating hat is half-a-crown, and whatever you may or may not think of Gift Books I can promise you that in this instance to pay your money is to get its worth. It is true that some of the contributors have given us work that we have already had an opportunity to know; but even here I am not grumbling, for among the stories that have already been published is Mr. Leonard Merrick's "The Fairy Poodle," a tale so full of sparkle that the oftener I see it the better I shall be pleased. All tastes, however, are catered for. You can read tales by Sir J. M. Barrie or Mr. Joseph Hocking, verses by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. John Oxenham or Mrs. Henry de la Pasture, sketches by Mr. Conrad or "Sapper." But I advise you to read the lot. An especial word of praise is, I feel, due to Mr. John Buchan for a tale humorous enough in its dry way to squeeze a smile from a mummy, and to the artists who have helped to make this Gift the success that it is. In short, the book is good, nearly as good as the object for which it has been published. "In aid," we read on the cover, "of Queen Mary's Convalescent Auxiliary Hospitals. For Soldiers and Sailors who have lost their limbs in the War." Here then, by helping to provide our maimed heroes with the best mechanical substitutes for the limbs which they have lost, is a chance for us to pay a little of the unpayable debt we owe to them. Mr. Galsworthy may rest assured that his appeal to "our honour in this matter" will not be made in vain.
An extract from the Master of the Temple's sermon on "Muddling Through":—
"When we rejoiced at the efficiency of our Navy we too seldom recollected that it was primarily due to a superbly effective system of education built up by the efforts of a few great men loyally supported by enthusiastic insubordinates."—Morning Paper.
Nelson's "blind eye" is not forgotten.