OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
This paragraph will, I hope, catch your eye in time to be of use as a guide in the holiday fairy-tale traffic. But at worst there are always birthdays or, for nursery gifts, those even more apt occasions known as Nothing-in-particular Days. (Humpty-Dumpty, you remember, a recognised authority, used to call them un-birthdays.) Anyhow, if you should be looking about for something applicable to Kit or Ursula, you may take my word that you will find nothing better than The Dream Pedlar (Simpkin, Marshall). The letterpress—I beg your pardon, I should have said the "reading"—is by Lady Margaret Sackville, who has clearly a pretty taste in fairy matters, and the pictures are by Florence Anderson in colour, and Clara Shirley Hayward in black-and-white. I don't say that all these are of equal merit, but the best of them are delightful. Moreover, although in the modern sumptuous fashion the colour plates are introduced on brown-paper mounts, still they have the practical merit of being fixed, and not merely gummed at one corner, a fashion that simply results in litter for the nursery floor. The tales themselves are wholly charming, and about quite the right people, kings and woodcutters and dream-princesses and goblins. Perhaps now and again Lady Margaret falls to the temptation of being a thought too clever with an aside, so to speak, whispered in the ear of the reader-aloud. But the wise child will forgive her this for the compelling charm of her simplicities. For me, if I had a favourite in the tales, it was perhaps Martin's godmother, "an attractive old lady, short, with large fan-like ears, which she would wave to and fro when amused." There is an enchanting picture of her doing it. I have not yet known the nursery where that picture would not soon bear the thumb-marks of popularity.
Not a single word could be conveniently omitted from Friends and Memories (Arnold), but I could easily spare a great many of its notes of exclamation—nearly all superfluous—for Miss Maude Valérie White's style of writing needs no such advertisement. And having got rid of that grumble I feel at liberty to express, without restraint, my profound admiration of the book and its author. Never, then, has it been my good fortune to read so many pages that are filled with what I can only call the fragrance of life. Sorrows and troubles Miss White has known in abundance—one often sees her smiling through a veil of tears—but she steadfastly refuses to dwell upon anything but the joy of living, and the kindness of her many friends. This splendid way of regarding the world is one of the qualities that has made her welcome and more than welcome wherever she goes; it is also the quality that gives an almost unique distinction to her volume of reminiscences. One can scarcely think of her as an eminent composer whose songs have been heard throughout the world when the gift, which she obviously values most and would herself call "priceless," is that of being able to keep up a cheerful end whatever happens. Her book, therefore, is really both a tonic and a lesson, but it is a tonic that is as delightful as good champagne, and it is a lesson that is full of humour and of what is rarer than humour—good fun. Even in her reticences Miss White cannot save herself from being amusing, for on her first page she refuses to tell us her age, though afterwards she gives it away time and again to anyone inquisitive enough to use a little arithmetic. But she need have no fears, for she has the spirit of youth which can laugh at figures and defy the passing years.
Must I believe that the life of anybody, even the hardest worked and least attractive village girl, is as devoid of exhilaration and good cheer as was that of Chrismas Hamlyn? Maybe dismal events happen now and then to individuals which make them wish, with reason, that they were dead and had never been alive, and I will admit that it was so with Chrismas at the moment when her second lover proved to be entirely spurious and to have pretended passion in order to steal a purse. But I am asked to assume that, apart from and before this little tragedy, she was necessarily in a state of gloom by reason of the mere dulness and hardship of the existence of her sort. This is a proposition which, notwithstanding Mrs. Henry Dudeney's skilful pleading, I am reluctant to accept. I prefer to think that the girl found recreation in everyday events, or at least in every other day events, of her neighbourhood which would make no appeal to Mrs. Dudeney or myself; or, indeed, that the brooding over her unhappy lot in general, and her first love failure in particular, afforded some satisfaction for which credit has not been allowed. Undoubtedly the environment of the Hamlyns is studied rather from our view than from their own, and by that method of analysis a vast amount of human misery may be discovered which does not always in fact exist. Apart from that, What a Woman Wants (Heinemann) is a convincing study of the sordid side of things; but I would like to see the admirable gifts of the authoress directed to the emphasizing of the merrier side of the same sort of life, so that we might compare the two and form a more balanced opinion.
The Bed-Book of Happiness is a "Colligation or Assemblage of Cheerful Writings," colligated by Mr. Harold Begbie, and published by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton. It is a second edition, entitled the Red-Cross Edition, and it offers itself as an anodyne for the pain and boredom of wounded heroes. Said heroes, of average British pattern, would, I think, receive a nasty shock on reading the title and might be tempted to thrust the volume privily away without more ado. But they need do no such thing; it is nothing like so bad as that. On the contrary it is stuffed with most excellent matter for the perceptive, in doses not long enough to tire and with sufficient variety to stimulate. Old favourites from Hood and Calverley; an odd Ingoldsby or two; whimsicality from Samuel Butler; absurdities from that other Samuel (Clemens); growls from that greatest of the tribe, Johnson; cheeriness from that best of poets and schoolmasters, T. E. Brown; a little Sterne, a little Dickens, a little Thackeray; Percy Anecdotes and snippets from Gronow; translated excerpts from those delightful allies, Daudet, Saint-Beuve, Anatole France; and so forth and on. Of course no two colligators of bed-books could agree upon their choice, but I do think Mr. Begbie might have bagged a little from R. L. S. That omission and the deplorable title are my chief grievances. It is a sound point that there is no unwholesome invalidy tone about this seasonable re-issue with additions.
Though I enjoyed Broken Shackles (Methuen) in a mild degree, I hardly think that Mr. John Oxenham has here given us of his best. So little do I think this that I am the prey of a suspicion—probably quite unfounded—that the tale is either early work, or has been hastily put together since the beginning of August. Anyhow, it's about a young man named de Valle, an officer in the Eastern Army of France, who is married but lives apart from his wife. The time is the winter of 1870, and when the great surrender comes, and the army is forced over into Switzerland, de Valle is so sick of military muddles that he determines to settle down as a Swiss civilian and never go back any more. This (fortune helping him) he is enabled to do. He changes his name to Duval, and starts the simpler life with some pleasant folk who run a saw-mill in the Brunnen Thal. He even goes so far as to marry the maid of the mill. Which was rash of him, since he was still legally tied to his French wife, and (in fiction at least) the course of bigamy never did run smooth. Inevitably, therefore, not only did he encounter his wife again, coming out of the casino at Interlaken (she too has not been idle, having meanwhile married a Russian Prince), but the villain of the story also saw them both, and looked to make a good thing by it. But you know how quick and deep the Aar runs at Interlaken? Duval accordingly pushed the inconvenient blackmailer into the water, and everyone, with this exception, lived happy. The real merit of the book lies not in this improbable plot, but in its moving chapters upon a little treated phase of the last Franco-German fighting. These are well done.
Many gentle readers will be well pleased to hear that Agnes and Egerton Castle are giving them more news of that engaging heroine, Lady Kilcroney. True, in the new book Kitty herself plays but a subordinate part, but as her dainty mantle of insolence and charm appeals to have fallen on the shoulders of a worthy successor no one need grumble upon that score. The new book is called The Ways of Miss Barbara (Smith Elder), and I daresay that having said so much I might spare myself the pains of telling precisely what those ways were. Do you need to hear how Mistress Barbara (who was a kind of eighteenth-century Becky Sharp without the sting) was befriended by Lady Kitty and her susceptible lord? How the noble carriage was waylaid on its journey from Paris to the coast? How the highwayman was eventually brought to hook by the wiles of Barbara, who in the long run marries a duke, and is left preparing for permanent prosperity? Whether this last expectation will be fulfilled without preliminary troubles I take leave to doubt. Indeed, the situation as regards Barbara and her ducal spouse is left so full of intriguing possibilities that I could not but suspect those clever campaigners, the Egerton Castles, of having artfully arranged it as a kind of concrete foundation from which to attack the public sympathy later on. This is as may be. Meanwhile here is a pleasantly sparkling comedy with which, I vow, you are like to find yourself vastly well pleased.
GERMAN SPY REPORTS TO HEADQUARTERS.
"Have visited Army and Navy Stores. Find British Forces being supplied with many useless articles calculated to embarrass their movements."
Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.