OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned, Clerks.)
The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (MACMILLAN) is a book that may be regarded as filling, at least partially, what has long been an aching void in our biographical shelves. I say partially, because the time has not perhaps fully come for an unreserved appreciation of a character whose handling must present exceptional difficulties. One cannot but notice how many obstacles Mr. EDMUND GOSSE has had to overcome, or avoid, in the present volume. The result inevitably is a certain sense of over-discretion that makes the whole study so detached as to be at times lacking in vitality. Even, however, with these reservations the figure of the poet stands out, bewildering as it must have been in life, with its strange blend of frailty and genius. Stories abound also (sometimes one suspects Mr. GOSSE of having fallen back upon anecdote with an air of relief); they range from the early days of brilliant "failures" at Eton and Balliol to those when in the watchful security of Putney the lamp was guarded by hands so zealous that its flame was ultimately extinguished. Two of the tales remain pleasantly in my memory, one of them describing how young ALGERNON, lately sent down from Oxford and a pupil at the rectory of the future Bishop STUBBS, scared away his host's rustic congregation by leaning upon the garden-gate one Sunday morning, looking, with his red-gold hair and scarlet dressing-gown, like some "flaming apparition." The other, less picturesque but more credible, has also a bishop in it, and concerns an untimely recitation of Les Noyades. I will leave you to find this for yourself in a book that forms at least an interesting, if not altogether final, study of a fascinating subject.
For an old hand BENJAMIN SWIFT shows a poor discretion in crowding too many characters into his pages to allow of anything like adequate characterisation, and indeed, in What Lies Beneath (CHAPMAN AND HALL), he is too much concerned with his main purpose of tract-making to be sufficiently interested in the subsidiary business of good story-telling. A Mr. Ravendale, an unpleasant, hoary-bearded patriarch and opulent seller of Bibles, who has buried three wives and lives in a fat Bloomsbury house with the collected offspring of his three marriages, and one or two step-children thrown in, is haunted by a doubt as to whether the beautiful Ruby Delmore, daughter of the widow Delmore, his second wife, is also the daughter of the late Mr. Delmore or of himself, whose attitude towards Mrs. Delmore had not been as correct as that of a seller of Bibles is reasonably expected to be, especially by people like the author who don't believe in Bibles. At any rate Sebastian, son by the first marriage, is desperately in love with Ruby—so, you see, the old man had something to worry about. However, it all turns out to be, in fact, mere illusion, developing into a fatal monomania, and the family business is left to be carried on by such of the next generation as have not been convinced by the formidable array of evidence, anti-Theistic and anti-Christian, of two of the characters (who, it is clear, have sedulously read the same books). Sebastian loses his faith apparently because he has been distressed by the sight of a wounded horse in the great War, as if it were necessary to wait for the great War for this kind of a difficulty! A certain rough earnestness lies beneath this rather crude presentment of a world-old problem. But I wonder how much of the honest patriotism which fills the book would survive a rationalism as perverse and shallow as Mr. SWIFT applies to traditional faiths. Does he imagine they have no better defences than those which he puts into the weak mouth of silly Mr. Teanby, the parson?
The arrangement of Lady POORE'S new volume of recollections, An Admiral's Wife in the Making (SMITH, ELDER), reminded me quaintly of certain romances familiar to my boyhood, in which the fortunes of the hero were traced from cadetship in aspiring sequence. Because, of course, this is exactly what happens to the hero of the present book; the chief difference being that he himself makes only a brief personal appearance therein (though the chapters in question, formed from letters and diaries of Commander POORE during the Nile Expedition of '85, are by no means the least interesting part of the volume). For the rest, one might perhaps call it a draught of Naval small beer, but a very sparkling beverage and served with a highly attractive head upon it. To drop metaphor, Lady POORE has brought together a most entertaining collection of breezy reminiscences of life ashore and on the ocean wave. There is matter to suit all tastes, from her recollections of economies in a furnished villa at Paramé, where chickens were to be bought for thirty-two sous, to more exalted anecdotes connected with the time when her hero had been advanced as far as the post of Commander of the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert. It is all kindly gossip, not ill suited to the best-tempered service in the world. Especially did I like Lady POORE'S gently maternal attitude towards the many junior officers who figure very attractively in her pages (e.g. the jovial pic-nic party in the Blue Mountains, who slaked their thirst from the Government rain-gauge, and thereby disorganised the meteorological records of Jamaica). Certainly the book could not have appeared in times more apt to give it a hearty welcome.
The Stars in their Courses (UNWIN) is not, as you might possibly suppose, a work of theatrical history, but just the latest volume in that admirable series, the First Novel Library. While I am not claiming for it any startling pre-eminence, it is at least a story of more than ordinary promise, and one that easily contrived to hold my interest. This is, perhaps, the more odd, since Miss HILDA M. SHARP has apparently of deliberate intent called in every one of the three conventions that all good young novelists are bidden to avoid—the long-nourished revenge, the missing will, and the super-quixotic self-sacrifice. Naturally the last is the worst. Thus when old Mr. Yardley (who had, I fancy, more than a touch of the melodramatic habits of the late Mr. Dombey) planned to revenge himself upon a faithless wife by bringing up his and her son with extravagant tastes, and leaving him penniless, I winced but endured. When, repenting of such inhuman intentions, he revoked them by a will, carefully placed, for subsequent discovery, between the pages of a put-away book, I still held an undaunted course. But, when Patrick, the disinherited spendthrift, took upon himself, for the thinnest reason, all the blame of his supplanter's evil doing and kept up this idiotic fraud till the girl of his heart, and indeed everyone who cared for him, turned their backs in disdain, then I confess to having felt that Miss SHARP was trying my forbearance too high. But even so the fact that I could not throw the book down unfinished seems to show that whoever selects Mr. UNWIN'S débutantes has spotted another winner. If, in short, Miss SHARP will forget all the novels she may ever have read, and choose for her next story something a little nearer to life, I believe the result may be remarkable.
Nursing Adventures, with its sub-title, A F.A.N.Y. in France, is a notable addition to the series of War-literature which is bringing grist to Messrs. HEINEMANN'S windmill. F.A.N.Y., in case it has you puzzled, means First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Starting from one woman this corps now has over fifty members working in the zone of the armies, and I shall believe that no one can read of their efficiency and courage without genuine admiration. This is not an official account of the F.A.N.Y. Corps—that is to come when the Hun is beaten—but the author has told enough to convince us of the sound work that has been and is being done by these brave and gentle-hearted women. Fortunately she has the gift of selection, in spite of a rather breathless style, which however goes excellently well with a narrative full of excitement and danger. Here too once more a fine tribute is paid to the incorrigible courage of the Allies in face of an enemy that has forgotten the elementary rules of humanity.
Those who have sampled any reasonable selection of the eighty or so published works of "KATHARINE TYNAN" will know what pleasant fare to expect in Kit (SMITH, ELDER). Kit is a pretty, red-haired, peasant girl approved for her gentle ways and honest breeding by Madam of the big house, and sent, on the advice of one of Mrs. HINKSON'S nice, human, friendly priests, to a convent for the higher education. She stirs the sentimental soul of one of the English quality, Captain Guy Dering; is plunged into, and rather chilled by, high-life in the modern English manner, and eventually goes back to her own people and her girlhood's friend, Donal Sheehy, who returns from America a made man. 'Tis not a chronicle to set the Liffey afire, but it is wholesome, escapes being mawkish, and may be confidently recommended for an anxious old person to give to sensitive young persons—if there be still any such. Mrs. HINKSON, though she loves her own, is no blind partisan and does not spare her criticism. So that you get a plausible picture of a kindly decent native Irish folk of all sorts, not a little helpful in these days of stress and promise.
HENGIST AND HORSA KINDLY CONSENT TO TAKE PART IN A THREE-LEGGED RACE AT THE SPORTS IN AID OF THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS OF THE BRITONS.
"The bride was attended by her sister and Miss —— as bridesmaids, all being very strongly under the influence of drink.
Very choice—Brothers' Coffee."—Provincial Paper.
The last line is reassuring. We were afraid for the moment that it was something stronger.