OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
If for nothing else, Mr. JACK LONDON'S latest story would deserve a welcome for its topicality. In these days of strikes and industrial conflict every one might be glad to know what a writer of his individuality has to say about unions and blacklegs and picketing. True, this is hardly the kind of thing that one has learnt to associate with his name; and for that reason perhaps I best liked The Valley of the Moon (MILLS AND BOON) after its hero and heroine had shaken the unsavoury dust of the town from their feet and set them towards the open country. But much had to happen first. The hero was big Billy Roberts, a teamster with the heart of a child and the strength of a prize-fighter—which was in fact his alternative profession. He married Saxon Brown ("a scream of a name" her friend called it when introducing them to each other), and for a time their life together was as nearly idyllic as newly-wedded housekeeping in a mean street could permit it to be. Then came the lean years: strikes and strike-breaking, sabotage and rioting, prison for Billy, and all but starvation for Saxon. Perhaps you know already that peculiar gift of Mr. JACK LONDON'S that makes you not only see physical hardship but suffer it? I believe that after these chapters the reader of them will never again be able to regard a newspaper report of street-fighting with the same detachment as before, so vivid are they, so haunting. In the end, however, as I say, we find a happier atmosphere. The adventures of Billy and Saxon, tramping it in search of a home, soon make their urban terrors seem to them and the reader a kind of nightmare. Here Mr. LONDON is at his delightful best, and his word-pictures of country scenes are as fresh and fine as anything he has yet done. The Valley of the Moon, in short, is really two stories—one grim, one pleasant, and both brilliantly successful.
It is perhaps a mistake to read a novel at a sitting, since the reaction is too sudden and the reader is apt to find the real life and the real people surrounding him highly unsatisfactory by contrast. Mr. JAMES PROSPER has reduced me to this state by The Mountain Apart (HEINEMANN), but it is my duty as critic to disregard my personal feelings and judge impartially between the fictitious and the actual. Duty, then, compels me to say that the Mr. Henry Harding who at the last solved all the difficulties of Rose Hilton by the simple expedient of a romantic proposal is a hollow fraud. The position was this: Rose was a woman of flesh and blood and all the human limitations, blessed and cursed with all the intricacies allotted by Providence to the sex. Her trouble was that she had to face life as it is, and this she found very trying. She suffered from her marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and from her abortive grapplings both with the abstract problems of her soul and the concrete mischiefs of her female friends. The influence of IBSEN and a militant Suffragette didn't help her meditations, and when her husband died she had the mortification to find that the first man of her own age who professed love to her was no man but a series of artistic poses. Of her difficulties, real enough up to this point, the solution was the fraudulent Henry, fraudulent because he was just a stage hero whose actions and conversation resembled nothing on earth. Henry, in fact, is the sort of person that doesn't exist, and, if he did, would be intolerable to everybody except a novel reader worked up to a climax. I doubt if even such a reader could stand the fellow on a longer acquaintance. To this conclusion all must come in their saner moments, and yet most will, I think, finish the book in one spell and be under the delusion at the end of it that all their troubles would be solved at once if only their friends would talk and conduct themselves more like Henry.
In Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography (MACMILLAN) the ex-President shows us how it was done: how he started life as a weakly lad and by perseverance made himself what he is to-day. But what is he? That is the insoluble problem. No two people, least of all Americans, seem to agree on the point. I have heard Mr. ROOSEVELT called everything from a charlatan to the Saviour of his Country. For myself, if I may intrude my own view, I have always admired the "Bull Moose." But, since nobody on this earth, in America or out of it, can really understand American politics, my respect has been for Mr. ROOSEVELT'S private rather than his public performances. And in the view that he is, take him all round, a pretty good sort of man, this book has confirmed me. He has told his story well. Nor is the Power of the Human "I" too much in evidence. It is just a simple, straightforward tale of a particularly interesting life. Whatever your views on Mr. ROOSEVELT may be, the fact remains that he has been a cowboy, a police commissioner of New York, a soldier on active service, and the President of God's Country, suh; and a man must have an unusually negative personality if he cannot make entertainment for us out of that. Now nobody has ever suspected Mr. ROOSEVELT of a negative personality; and it is certain that he has told a very entertaining story. There are in this volume battle, murder, sudden death, outlaws, cowboys, bears, American politics, and the author's views on the English blackbird, all handsomely illustrated, and the price is only what you would (or would not) pay for a stall to see a musical comedy. It's a bargain.
Between the rising of the partisans of the Duchesse DE BERRI and the dawn of the Tractarian movement there would not seem, at first blush, to be any very close association apart from the coincidence of their dates; yet in The Vision Splendid (MURRAY), by D.K. BROSTER and G.W. TAYLOR, a link is furnished in the person of an English clergyman's daughter, who marries a Frenchman of the "Legitimist" aristocracy, and is loved, before and afterwards, by an enthusiastic disciple of the Oriel Common Room. But the link is too slight to give a proper unity to the tale; and we have to fall back upon contrasts. Even so, the two modes of life which made up, between them, the experience of the Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon (née Horatia Grenville) are too cleanly severed by the estranging Channel to be brought into sharp antithesis, except in the heart of the one woman. And, since it is difficult to understand why anyone so British in her independence and aloofness should have surrendered her heart to the first good-looking Frenchman who came her way, we never get to be on very intimate terms with that organ. The construction of the story tends to break up the action and make its interest desultory. While we are spending a hundred odd pages at one time and fifty odd at another in Paris and Brittany we forget, very contentedly, about Oriel; and while we are in residence at Oxford we are practically cut off—no doubt, to our spiritual gain—from the things of France. The authors seem to belong to the solid old-fashioned school that had the patience to spread itself and leave as little as might be to the imagination. I suspect one of them of supplying the foreign information and the other of being the correspondent on home and clerical affairs. I don't know how many of them—if any—are women, but I seem to trace a female hand in some of the domestic details. But the book contains strong matter, too—both of narrative and characterization; as in the dying of Armand de la Roche-Guyon, and the picture of his lover, Madame de Vigerie. And there is something of the inspiration of the Holy Grail in that "Vision Splendid" which heartens Tristram Hungerford to make sacrifice of his passion that he may give his soul unshared to the service of the Church.
Until I had read Mr. A. RADCLYFFE DUGMORE'S book and revelled in his most wonderful photographs I had never wished to be a caribou; but now that I have fully digested The Romance of the Newfoundland Caribou (HEINEMANN) there is only one animal whose lot in life I really envy. This is due not to a natural sympathy with caribous (for, as the author says, "In England it is quite the exception to find anyone who knows what the caribou is, unless he happens to have been to Newfoundland or certain parts of Canada," and I was never one of the exceptions), but to the extraordinary manner in which Mr. DUGMORE has imparted the affection that be himself entertains for his chosen beast. Although he shoots with no more formidable a weapon than a camera, the dangers and risks that he has run would appal many of the sportsmen whose aim is to destroy and not to study the lives of animals. He has, however, no contempt for hunters, provided that they will play the game and give a fair chance to their quarry. Another point in his favour, which appeals mightily to me, is that after nine consecutive seasons in Newfoundland he confesses that his knowledge of the caribou is still incomplete. This means that, when he does make an absolute statement, you may be pretty certain that it is true. If I ever have to argue about the habits of caribous, there is one shot that will remain in my locker until the very end of the argument, and it will be, "Well, DUGMORE says so."
IMPRESSION OF A FOOTBALL MATCH GATHERED FROM OUR ILLUSTRATED DAILY PAPERS.