(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I never open a book by Mr. Robert Halifax without a feeling of pleasant anticipation, nor close one without a sense of quickened sympathy for my fellow-mortals, especially those of them who dwell in Camden Town. His latest story, The Right to Love (Methuen), finds him again on familiar ground; but the inhabitants of Widdiford Street have all the freshness of real human beings. Perhaps more than its predecessors The Right to Love is a story with a purpose and a moral; in it Mr. Halifax has illustrated by two groups of characters the vexed question of marriage failures and the hard lot of the unwanted woman. But do not suppose that these characters are merely "cases." On the contrary, it is because they are realized as understandable creations of flesh and blood that the disasters of Norah and Tom Spain and the tragedy of Letty Summerbee's enforced spinsterhood move one to so personal a concern. From the moment when Norah and Tom enter their little house after the short honeymoon to that in which the tormented young wife finally leaves her worthless husband for the protection (word rightly used) of his long-suffering friend one is made to feel that exactly thus and thus the affair happened, and is happening to like persons every day. As for Letty, with her restraint, her practical helpfulness and her occasional outbursts of emotion thwarted and suppressed, she is a type only too convincing. Perhaps one might object that Mr. Halifax brings an indictment against society without suggesting any practical remedy. Also that—as I have noticed before—his humorous characters have a tendency to edge away from the rest into the regions of farce. But for all that The Right to Love remains a simple, sincere and very moving study.
I like the remark that General Joffre made, not to the horse-marines, but to the remnants of the six thousand Fusiliers Marins who made up the Naval Brigade at Dixmude in November, 1914. "You are my best infantrymen," he told them; and, if you want to know why, all you have to do is read Dixmude (Heinemann), by Charles le Goffic. For four weeks, shrapnel to right of them, "saucepans" to left of them, volleyed and thundered, and for four weeks the six thousand stood in the valley of death at Dixmude and held up six times as many Boches, who came on, as one of them said, like bugs. Forty thousand was the estimate of the number of these marines formed by a German major who was one of their prisoners; when he learnt that they were only six he wept with rage and muttered, "Ah, if we had only known!" Dixmude was not quite such a big affair as Verdun, but the men who held the town, "the young ladies with the red pompoms" on their caps, were first cousins to our own Jack Tars. Bretons or Britons, there is nothing to choose between them. Sailors all, they are the salt of the sea; and this fascinating and circumstantial epic of the French marines is not at all an exaggerated picture of the cheery courage and endurance of the Breton fisherman.
Sussex Gorse (Nisbet) is a story about the fight between man and nature. It is told by Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith with considerable power and a quickening touch of symbolism that lifts it into romance. The ambition of Reuben Backfield was to enlarge the Sussex farm that he had inherited from his easy-going father till its bounds should include a certain coveted moor. The book shows how his entire life was spent in the achievement of this end; how for it he sacrificed his own ease, and the happiness of his brother, his two wives and his many children, and how finally he triumphed, and in his lonely old age, seeing the desired acres all his own, was content. It is a grim book, with only now and then a touch of suggested poetry to save it from being uniformly sordid and depressing. As it is, the long unsparing struggle takes somehow the dignity of an epic. Only one of Reuben's many sons makes any success out of life—Richard, who becomes a barrister, and treats his father to occasional visits of curiosity and amused patronage. There is a chapter of cynical humour in which the intolerant contemptuous old rustic is confronted by the art-loving triflers who gather in his son's drawing-room. Otherwise he is alone. "There's no one gone from here as has ever come back!" But I was glad that Miss Kaye-Smith had the courage to play fair by her hero, and to give him at last his share of the hard bargain. This is only one of many qualities that make Sussex Gorse a novel to be remembered.
I can't quite make out what made Mr. William Hewlett persist in Introducing William Allison (Secker). Probably a nice general conviction (rather infectious; I caught it) of his own cleverness. If his work wants a good deal of pulling together separate bits of it are confoundedly well done. The schoolboy conversations (William is a Winchester man, thrown into a lawyer's clerkship straight from the sixth) and the picture of the superbly groomed associates of his friend's brother, Marmaduke Fenton, are cases in point, though I don't think Winchester would have been so absurdly abashed by the glories of bachelordom in Half-Moon Street. So too is the lecture of Parbury, the neo-decadent, on the cultivation of "that sacred and imperishable flower, the white unsullied bloom of an Intensely Useless Life," even if it be only a belated cutting from The Green Carnation. William's first boyish passion for a quite cold shop-minx, with its agonies of self-abasement and rarefied desire, is uncannily clever; and the thoroughly unpleasant episode of our William, minx-free, only to be caught in the toils of that insatiable sensualist, Mrs. Daintree, is presented with discreet vigour. There is possibly a moral in the fascinating Marmaduke's desperate half-hour in Dr. Ferox's consulting-room. But Mr. Hewlett never wrote this flippant tale to point a moral. Rather, as I suggest, he seems to have said, "These are samples of several genres in which I can succeed on my head. Some day I will really finish something. Meanwhile pray be amused."
Of Miss Ethel Dell's popularity there seems to be no possible doubt, and her publishers, Messrs. Hutchinson, assure me that her latest, The Bars of Iron, is the best novel she has written. While accepting their unprejudiced judgment I retain the liberty of remaining unimpressed. Miss Dell has an eye for a plot and she can make things move; but her methods are too feverish for my taste. A man-fight in the prologue is followed by a dog-fight in the first chapter, and through the early part of the book the Rev. S. Lorimer beats his numerous family again and again. It is true that, between her explosions, she introduces certain lovable characters, but they fail to correct the general atmosphere of violence. Neither the beauty of Piers Evesham (his naked shoulders looked "like a piece of faultless statuary, god-like, superbly strong"), nor his sympathy with children, offers adequate compensation for his volcanic temperament. If Miss Dell, who seems to have a penchant for tempestuous heroes, would devote some of her superfluous energy to a study of men, so as to get to understand them as well as she understands her own sex, it would be a good thing for the quality both of her work and of her public.
In her latest little volume of verse, modestly entitled Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times (Pearson), Miss Jessie Pope shows that she has not only the right spirit, but a sense of form beyond the common. She does not pretend to heroics and she seldom allows herself to touch a note of pathos; her mission is just to inspire other hearts with the infectious gay courage of her own. It finds a natural expression in the easy lilt of her measures. She is fluent rather than polished and never overlays her designs with excess of embroidery. Long practice has made her familiar with a craft which is not so easy as it looks; and in particular she has learnt the art of the final line. Miss Pope may possibly run the risk of over-writing herself; but so long as she brings a discriminating eye to the choice of what is worth preserving—and she has been quite reasonably self-critical in her present selection—the matter that she jettisons is no affair of mine. Judging only by what I see here, I recognise that, in whatever other way she may be helping the cause, through her gift of light-heart verse she is doing—and none more bravely—her share of woman's work.
Touring Stage Manager (rehearsing super). "And when you hear the cue, 'Ah, here comes the Kaiser!' you stride slowly on to the stage looking like the guilty Monarch."