OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The Romance of Madame Tussaud's (Odhams) strikes one, in these days of universal reminiscence, almost as a libre à faire, certainly as a volume that finds its welcome waiting for it. I suppose there are few unhappy beings for whom the very name of that gifted lady does not revive something of the nursery magic that is never quite forgotten. All of which means that Mr. John T. Tussaud, who has written, vivaciously and with obvious pleasure, this history of the famous show, is (I hope) assured beforehand of his sales. It is a fat record, taking the story from the earliest wax profiles made by Dr. Curtius for the Parisian aristocracy in the days before the Revolution; through the Terror, when his niece (afterwards Madame Tussaud) was employed to model notable heads from the basket of the guillotine, which was itself subsequently to figure amongst the attractions of her collection, and finally bringing the enterprising artist and her models to England and Baker Street, whence a comparatively recent move established them (the foundress in effigy only) in their present palace. I was especially interested to trace the evidence of close attention paid to the show by Mr. Punch, and in particular to learn that the title Chamber of Horrors was first invented by that observer; though the author falls into an obvious chronological inexactitude in ascribing to these pages a cartoon by Cruikshank published "in November of Waterloo year." I have no space for the many queer stories, chiefly of encounters between the quick and the wax, with which the book abounds, nor for more than mention of its admirable photographs, of which I should have liked many more. Altogether it gives an unusual sidelight on the history of two Capitals; and incidentally, if the reading of it puts others in the same resolve as myself, an extra turn-stile will be needed in the Marylebone Road.
Mr. Harry Tighe is something of a problem to me. With the best will in the world to appreciate what looked like unusual promise I can only regard him at present as one who is neglecting the good gifts of heaven in the pursuit apparently of some Jack-o'-lanthorn idea of popularity. No doubt you recall his first novel, The Sheep Path, a sincere and well-observed study of feminine temperament. This was followed by one that (though it had its friends) marked, to my thinking, a lamentable fall from grace. He has now published a third, Day Dawn (Westall). Here, though popularity of a kind may be its reward, the work is still woefully beneath what should be Mr. Tighe's level. Certainly not one of the demands of the circulating libraries is unfulfilled. We have a fair-haired heroine (victim to cocaine), a dark and villainous foreigner, a dashing hero, a middle-aged woman who adores him despite the presence of her husband, himself called throughout Baron Brinthall, a style surely more common in pantomimic circles than in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and the incidents embrace both murder and suicide. Moreover there is "plenty of conversation," and the intrigue moves sufficiently quickly (if jerkily) to keep one curious about the next page. But having very willingly admitted so much I return to my contention, that for Mr. Tighe to neglect his sensitive and delicate art for the antics of these tawdry dolls is to betray both himself and the craft of which he may still become a distinguished exponent.
From the official who is interested in officialdom to the Infantry officer who is interested in tactics, from the mechanical expert who can appreciate the technical details of diagrams to the child who revels in faultless photographs of hair-raising monsters ("I may read it, mother, mayn't I, when I've unstickied my fingers?" was the way I heard it put), everybody, I think, will find plenty to attract him in Sir Albert Stern's finely illustrated Tanks 1914-1918 (Hodder and Stoughton). Tanks were born at Lincoln, and rightly so, for did not Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides mostly come from this region?—and the main theme of this book is to show how much more formidable an obstacle they found in the files and registries of Whitehall than in the trenches and wire-entanglements of Flanders and France. Parents they had and sponsors innumerable. Practical soldiers and engineers were enthusiastic about them, and the Bosch quaked in his trenches or ran; but even so late as the autumn of 1917, after General Foch (as he was then) had said, "You must make quantities and quantities; we must fight mechanically," one stout little company of obscurantists bravely defied the creed of Juggernaut until the irresistible logic of its successes in the field crushed them remorselessly under the "creeping grip." And that company, of course, according to Sir Albert Stern, was the British War Office.
Let me commend to you The Mask (Methuen) as a craftsmanlike essay in imaginative realism; ruthlessly candid and self-revealing, but free from that tiresome obsession of the ultra-realists that everything that has ever happened is equally important in retrospect. The narrator, Vanya Gombarov, a Russian Jew, discourses reflectively and detachedly, as it were from behind a mask, to an English artist friend about his early childhood in his own land and the dismal adventures of the Gombarov family in that underworld of exploited and miserable aliens which is one of the root social problems of America. Very poignantly Mr. John Cournos makes you understand the import of the phrase so constantly on the lips of such victims of their own credulous hopes of El Dorado—"Woe to Columbus!" The portrait of Vanya's stepfather, brilliant, magnanimous, pursued by an Æschylean malignity of destiny, fills much of the foreground and is a quite masterly piece of work. One cannot be wrong in assuming this to be essential autobiography; there is a passionate conviction as of things intimately seen and dreadfully suffered. Such material might well have tempted to a mere piling of squalor upon squalor. A fine discretion has given a noble dignity to a record through which shines the unquenchable human spirit. One passage, full of affectionate discernment about London, will cause a flicker of just pride in everyone who is authentic Cockney, whether by birth or adoption. A big book of its kind, I dare assert.
Star of India (Cassell) is what Mrs. Alice Perrin calls her latest novel, a title so good that I can only wonder why (or perhaps whether) it has not been used before. Inside also I found excellent entertainment. One supposes the author to have been confronted with two main problems with regard to her plot—how to make sufficiently plausible the marriage between a flapper (if you will forgive the odious word) of seventeen and a middle-ageing Anglo-Indian; and, secondly, how to impart any touch of novelty to the inevitable catastrophe that must attend this union. The first she has managed by a very cunning suggestion of the mingled jealousy, curiosity and boredom that drove Stella into the arms of her elderly suitor; the second by a variety of devices, to indicate which would be to give away the whole intrigue—one, I may say, whose climax is not nearly so visible from afar as that of most triangle tales. One point only I will reveal: Mrs. Perrin has had the courage, while vindicating her own common-sense judgment upon such folk, to introduce a second girl, daughter and pupil of one of the spoon-fed idealists who would govern India with the platitudes of ignorance, and not only to make her sympathetic, but to convince me of her attractions, which (especially just now) was not easy work. Decidedly a first-rate yarn.
We may, I think, take it that the love-story in The Gunroom (Black) is fiction pure and naively simple, but that the experiences of John Lynwood, the hero, in the Navy are given as the actual experiences of Mr. C.L. Morgan, the author. Let me then at once say that his revelations of the bullying of junior by senior midshipmen go back to a period before the War. These "shakings," we are asked to believe, were due partly to custom and partly to boredom caused by lack of leave. If Mr. Morgan is correct both in his facts and surmises it is satisfactory to think that the War must have obliterated the boredom which provoked such excesses, and one need not be a fanatical opponent of physical punishment to hope that such forms of tyranny will never again be tolerated as a matter of custom. I am obliged to conclude that these incidents in Lynwood's career are absolutely true, for certainly nothing less than absolute truth could excuse their appearance in print; but at the same time I must confess that any attack upon our Navy is apt with me to act as an irritant. The more reason that I should honestly admit Mr. Morgan's merits and say that he writes with a nice sense of style, and that his book does not derive its only interest from its revelations.
Hunting Extraordinary.
"Good Sport with the Holderness.
"A stout ox led the field into Bilton village."—Provincial Paper.
Réchauffés for Cannibals.
"A company, numbering over 80, sat down to dinner, the host and hostess (Mr. and Mrs. ——) proving, as usual, a first-class menu."—Local Paper.