OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Is not Come Out To Play (Constable) a delightful title for a story? And, believe me, not better than the story itself, which I should call, save for one defect, a perfect masterpiece in miniature. To have done with blame, I will say at once that the defect is the end, which, to my thinking at least, seems both inartistic and cowardly. I can hardly explain my meaning more clearly without spoiling your enjoyment. But I will hint that this tragedy of unfulfilled promise (for the book is a tragedy, though concealed beneath a surface merriment) seemed too delicate for so melodramatic a climax. Miss M. E. F. Irwin writes with an ease and finish that is amazing. She has form, too, and a quite unusual beauty of style that gives to her work something that is very difficult to analyse. The book is the story of a boy called Truffles (which of course was not his real name), a boy with a long white face and dark eyes under heavy lids that gave him the look of Pierrot. Nothing very special happens in his life. He has a genial spendthrift father, a prig of an elder brother, a rather jolly sister and a host of admiring friends. And the lot of them drift along in the artificial comedy of London existence in peacetime, flirting and idling, working and loving, all a little self-consciously; setting their emotions for the most part to an accompaniment of popular comic songs, those vacuous jingles whose light-heartedness Time so quickly turns to a wistful and poignant melancholy. You will gather that the actual story is no great matter. It is the faintly pathetic grace of the telling that makes this book one of the very few to which the misused adjective "beautiful" can honestly be applied. Perhaps in reading it you may be reminded, as I was, of another modern novel, one that was praised greatly in these pages and has leapt since to fame. I name no names, because I am far indeed from charging Miss Irwin with imitation. The more present-day writers who can display this same sensitive and compelling charm, the better I shall be pleased.
The perfect children's-book must be one of the most difficult things in the world to write. The qualities it would demand are so varied and the dangers so many. You must, for example, be just sentimental enough to obtain sympathy, yet never so much as to invite suspicion of being sloppy. There must be adventure for the adventurous, colour for the romantic and magic for everybody. Frankly I cannot say that Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole has achieved the ideal; but in Poppyland (Lane) he has certainly strung together a number of stories that most children are sure to like. I fancy their favourite will be "The Little Prince," a story in which all the right things happen—beggar girls turn out to be Countesses, and handsome Princes suffer a strictly temporary decline into beggary—and all in an agreeable Neapolitan setting, which, as the advertisements say, "will appeal to children of larger growth." With his fairies Mr. Stacpoole is, to my thinking, a degree less successful. The worst of tales about storks and magic gardens and cripple-boys and the like is that, however freshly you set forth, sooner or later you are sure to find yourself in the foot-prints of the old wizard of Denmark. If I had loved my Hans Christian less, I should have better appreciated certain tales in this collection that inevitably recalled him. Still, the whole is pleasant enough. I wish I could say also that I liked the illustrations, but, with exceptions, these seemed to me both ugly and pretentious. The best exception was one of the old stork, a delightful piece of colour for the sake of which I can almost forget some of the others.
Miss Macnaughtan always writes very charmingly and with plenty of humour, and in dedicating A Green Englishman (Smith, Elder) to "My Canadian friends" she must, I think, be too unconscious of her powers, for this collection of stories is far from being a valuable endorsement of the flowery praises of the emigration bureaux. Very little hope is held out to the young man of good family who is a gentleman and something of a sportsman, and proposes to pick up gold on the pavements or the prairies of the West. I do not mean that the writer is ungenerous either to the Dominion or to its people, but she takes no pains to conceal the terror that lives with the beauty of its vast spaces, and she does not represent the struggle to "make good" as altogether a lovely thing. Perhaps the most ambitious of these sketches, certainly the one which conforms most nearly to the "short story" model, describes the fate of a clergyman's daughter who pays a visit to Macredie, "somewhere on the C. P. R. line," and marries a farmer and land-speculator, chiefly because this is her last chance of marrying at all. The horror of the silence and the snow, when her husband leaves her to face a Canadian winter alone, because he has business in England, eventually drives her mad; and though most of the stories are in a lighter vein than this, and there is plenty of the humorous sentiment in which Miss Macnaughtan excels, the moral that I draw from the book as a whole is, "Visit Canada by all means, but, unless you are a Scotchman of the very doggedest type, don't stay there."
The hiding of lights under bushels may be all very well in private life, but is misplaced in the book-publishing business. I thoroughly disapprove of the title and the outside cover of the Hon. Mrs. Dowdell's latest collection of leisurely essays, Joking Apart (Duckworth). The one suggests a heart-to-heart talk on the things that matter or else an outburst of boisterous farce, while the other is merely dismal. The two together are enough to put the public off a really good thing. Mrs. Dowdell treats of the domestic and social side of feminine life in that peculiar vein of humour which is neither joking nor yet joking apart; her writing reminds me of those least-to-be-forgotten evenings of my life when I have been lucky enough to listen for hours to a real pucker conversationalist in the best of spirits and at the top of his form. The words that passed are forgotten; it is even difficult to remember what all the talk was about; but the recollection remains of having heard the truth of things for once, neither laughed at nor wept over, but very brightly revealed. Of twenty excellent chapters I much prefer the one about woman's sphere in electioneering; as to the thumb-nail illustrations in the margin, they show bad draughtsmanship, but some are delightfully apt.
Mr. Lincoln Colcord, writer of short stories of the sea, republished under title The Game of Life and Death (Macmillan), has taken no pains to conceal his admirable model. There surely never was, outside conscious parody, so conspicuously derivative a method of handling similar types and subjects. It was a bold thing to do. He has not Conrad's fastidious sense of words, nor his masterly suggestion of atmosphere, so much more felt than actually expressed, nor his patient sure unravelling of motives; and in "The Voice of the Dead" he commits a piece of shocking bad Wardour Street, of which by no conceivable lapse could his master have been guilty. But there is a whiff of the sea in his work; his types, if cruder, have life, and he often contrives some ingenious turn in the situation which gives the story interest. The Game of Life and Death—which ends in a hand of poker played between Chinese merchants and pirates, with two lives and much money and gear for stake—is a good yarn, though it leans on the inartistic unlikelihood of a royal capping a straight flush—which is piling it on too thick. The tale of "The Moths" that haunted a man who took them for the souls of wronged women provides a sufficient thrill. "De Long" is just the kind of story of the crooked cosmopolitan ship-chandler that Conrad would write, indeed has written. Nichols, the narrator of this and others, is made after the model of his reflective skippers. And here the challenge gets too near for Mr. Colcord's chances. Still the yarns go well with a seasoned pipe; and that is no mean recommendation.
The Honourable Percival (Hodder and Stoughton) may at least claim to have established a record in one respect. I think I never met a full-sized novel with a more slender plot. The Honourable Percival Hascombe, on a pleasure tour in the Pacific, met Miss Roberta Boynton, and fell in love with her. This, I give you my word, is all there is of it. But, if you think that so slight a thread will be insufficient to hold your interest, you reckon without the cunning of Alice Hegan Rice, who has spun it. There are those of us who worship Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. There are also those who don't. But while regretfully classing myself among the benighted to whom this Best Seller appealed in vain, I hasten to add that I have nothing but gratitude for The Honourable Percival. This record of a shipboard romance is done with the daintiest art, delicate, tender, humorous, and not (as is the fault with so many American romances) oversweetened. The development of Percival from a priggish misanthrope to a man and a lover is beautifully told. Also a great part of the charm of the tale lies in its setting, a series of cinemascopic views of the ports touched at by the S.S. Saluria, so vividly portrayed that you will close the book with quite the feeling of the returned traveller. One small but poignant surprise the ending has in store, which I will not spoil by anticipation.
