OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
There has recently been a notable output of books of "personalities" and critical appreciations, contemporary, historical and (for the most part) iconoclastic. One may therefore say that Mr. Horace G. Hutchinson is distinctly of the movement in compiling his Portraits of the 'Eighties (Unwin). This is certainly a volume that anyone can dip into with instruction and entertainment, even if (to be quite honest) the former is likely to predominate. The fact is that one has become so used to the satirical method in portraiture, in which the attack is all and the subject emerges only as a beriddled target, that an ordinary pen-picture, however faithful, is apt to seem heavy by contrast. Mr. Hutchinson certainly is not of the slingers; he will just "tell you about" the notable persons of his period, setting down nothing in malice, omitting little however banal, and rejecting no aphorism or anecdote as outworn. Perhaps his nearest approach to the popular method is a very occasional touch of gentle irony, as when he permits himself to say of G. W. E. Russell (to whose Portraits of the Seventies the present volume is intended as a sequel) that he "used to drive about London in a carriage picked out in colours that did not suggest that he sought seclusion." I have no space for the barest list of the sitters in Mr. Hutchinson's crowded picture of a time rich in character, his treatment of which aims rather at covering a wide ground than at intimacy of detail. To mention but one, it is interesting to compare his General Gordon with the recent presentment of him by another hand. If the result is more creditable to Mr. Hutchinson's kindliness than to his wit, it may serve as an apt comment on the whole book.
Beauty and Bands (Constable) is not, as you might excusably suppose, a treatise on syncopation or the decline of Jazz, but takes its title from a verse in the Book of Proverbs. Really what the story most illustrates is the extent to which a clever and experienced writer can clothe a wildly impossible plot with some aspect of reality. Miss Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler assuredly does not lack courage; having thought out a "good situation" (which it certainly is) she was not going to be put off by any considerations of probability. I can't resist some sketch of it, even at the risk of spoiling your pleasure. Suppose a lovely but selfish wife, bored to the point of flight from a well-intentioned husband, then involved in a railway smash which disfigures her beauty, destroys her memory and incidentally reforms her character; let her by plausible circumstance be mistaken for another traveller in the wrecked train and under a new name and personality meet her husband, fall in love with him, but be compelled to reject his suit by the presumption that his vanished wife may still be living—as I hinted, the result in situations is enough to satisfy the most exacting, the only real drawback being that not all Miss Fowler's pleasantly persuasive efforts can make me believe a word of it. If she had dared a little more, and inflicted the husband with blindness, impaired hearing and slight mental decay, I would have stretched a point and supposed that, during a protracted courtship, he might never have recognised his own wife. Lacking these concessions I can only report an entertaining but preposterous absurdity.
Those of us who read With the Persian Expedition know something about the Hush-Hush Army; enough, at any rate, to whet our appetites for more. Let me then recommend The Adventures of Dunsterforce (Arnold) to your notice, and assure you that it is a most lively account of as strange an enterprise as any that the War brought forth. Briefly, the object of General Dunsterville's mission was to prevent German and Turkish penetration in the area of the Caucasus, Baku and the Caspian Sea. In January, 1918, he set out from Baghdad with what he calls "the leading party." Continually hampered by lack of men, the mission failed to achieve its original object; but what it accomplished in most difficult circumstances was of great value to the Allies. The conditions at the time when the author sailed from Enzeli with his "Dunsterforce" to raise the siege of Baku were delightfully cosmopolitan. He describes himself as "a British General on the Caspian, the only sea unploughed before by British keels, on board a ship named after a South African Dutch President and whilom enemy, sailing from a Persian port under the Serbian flag to relieve from the Turks a body of Armenians in a revolutionary Russian town." "Let the reader," he adds, "pick his way through that delirious tangle, and envy us our task who may." After pursuing the tricky course of this astounding adventure I confess myself lost, not in its mazes, thanks to an excellent map, but in profound admiration for "Dunsterforce" and its leader.
When people do posters—
I wish they wouldn't—
make the wording—
go all round like this.
In A Merchant Fleet at War (Cassell) it takes nearly a hundred pictures to illustrate the fighting effort and experiences of the Cunard Steamship Company. Quite a lot of them are from snap-shot photographs actually taken while in action with submarines, and where through an unfortunate oversight these have not been available someone with vivid brush and imagination has done wonders to fill the gap. Certainly such a subject as the passing of the Lusitania, her decks still packed though her great bulk is three-quarters gone, the sea crowded with boats and, presumably, drowning Englishmen, is perhaps a little poignant to be handled in this fashion; but no one can object to seeing a U-boat nose-diving at the instance of S.S. Phrygia, or another being messed up by a shell from the Valeria; while the historic fight between Carmania, in Prussian blue, and Cap Trafalgar, mostly crimson, competes for lurid splendour with the Mauretania in "dazzle" costume, staged with a sky to match. Incidentally Mr. Archibald Hurd has acted as showman for the collection. One might have found his exposition rather more substantial but for Sir Julian Corbett's first volume of Naval Operations, which has set an uncomfortably high standard in sea history. Frankly, the deeds of the men of our merchant fleets, of the Cunarders no less than others, were so magnificent that a book to be worthy of them must be in itself as modest and unpretentious as they were. This book is not.
The Tall Villa (Collins), by "Lucas Malet," has a strange theme—no less than the deliberate wooing, by a sensitive unhappy woman, of a more unhappy ghost. Lord Oxley had lived in this odd villa on Primrose Hill a hundred years ago with a noted stage beauty who had finally jilted him. One of his descendants, Frances Copley, banished from Grosvenor Square by her husband's financial failure and conscious of the growing rift between them, detaches herself more and more from the world of sense till she is—well, till she is in just the right mood for seeing ghosts. First it is a mere shadow that stands by her piano; next a faceless figure, exquisitely dressed, sits brooding in her chair; then she hears a pistol shot; later—but this will spoil your entertainment. I cannot say I was quite convinced, but I certainly was held to the end by a tale very skilfully, almost too carefully, told, and by the cleverness of the four portraits—Frances herself, the adorable Lady Lucia her cousin, Charlie Montagu the passionate bounder, and, a little less definite, Morris Copley the stockbroking husband.
Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton have beaten up various American magazines and shepherded a few Waifs and Strays of short stories by the late "O. Henry" (William Sydney Porter) into a final volume of their excellent edition of his works. They have also included appreciations by various American and British critics of the author's achievement, together with some sparse biographical details. The stories are of varying value, exercises on a sentimental motive cloaked by humorous or bizarre exaggeration of language, with those unexpected but ingeniously plausible endings which are of the essence of "O. Henry's" method. Of the criticisms, English readers will be most affected by Mr. Stephen Leacock's "The Amazing Genius of O. Henry," an analytical appreciation in the most handsome terms, deploring English neglect of this master of one of the most difficult of art-forms—a neglect which we have done something of late to remedy.