OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Marmaduke (HEINEMANN) has this peculiarity, that the title rôle is by no means its most important or interesting character. Indeed it might with more propriety have been called Marrion, since hers is not only the central figure in the plot, but emphatically the one over which Mrs. F. A. Steel has expended most care and affection. Moreover the untimely death of Marmaduke leaves Marrion to carry on the story for several chapters practically single-handed. I am bound to say, however, that at no stage did she get much help from her colleagues, all of whom—the gouty old father and his intriguing wife, the faithful servant, even debonair Marmaduke himself—bear a certain air of familiarity. But if frequent usage has something lessened their vitality, Marrion is a living and credible human being, whether as daughter of a supposed valet, adoring from afar the gay young ensign, or as the unacknowledged wife of Marmaduke and mother of his child, or later as an army nurse amid the horrors of Crimean mismanagement. Later still, when the long arm of coincidence (making a greater stretch than I should have expected under Mrs. Steel's direction) brought Marrion to the bedside of her parent in a hospital tent, and converted her into a Polish princess, I lost a little of my whole-hearted belief in her actuality. There are really two parts to the tale—the Scotch courtship, with its intrigues, frustrated elopements, et hoc genus omne; and the scenes, very graphically written, of active service at Varna and Inkerman. I will not pretend that the two parts are specially coherent; but at least Mrs. Steel has given us some exceedingly interesting pictures of a period that our novelists have, on the whole, unaccountably neglected.
The Experiments of Ganymede Bunn (HUTCHINSON) is like to command a wide audience. Its appeal will equally be to the lovers of Irish scenes, to those who affect stories about horses and hunting, and to the countless myriads who are fond of imagining what they would do with an unexpected legacy. It was this last that happened to Ganymede, who was left seventeen thousand pounds by an aunt called Juno (the names of this family are not the least demand that Miss Dorothea Conyers makes upon your credulity). My mention of horses and Ireland shows you what he does with his money, and where. It does not, however, indicate the result, which is a happy variant upon what is usual in such cases. You know already, I imagine, the special qualities to be looked for in a tale by Miss Conyers—chief among them a rather baffling inability to lie a straight course. If I may borrow a metaphor from her own favourite theme, she is for ever dashing off on some alluring cross-scent. More important, fortunately, than this is the enjoyment which she clearly has in writing her stories and passes briskly on to the reader. There's a fine tang of the open-air about them, and a smell of saddle-leather, that many persons will consider well worth all the intricacies of your problem-novelists. I had the idea that her honest vulgar little legatee and his speculations as a horse-breeder might make a good subject for a character-comedian; but I suppose the late LORD GEORGE SANGER is the only man who could have produced the right equine cast.
The component elements of The White Rook (CHAPMAN AND HALL) may be summarised in the picturesque argot of Army Ordnance somewhat as follows: Chinamen, inscrutable, complete with mysterious drugs, one; wives, misunderstood, Mark I, one; husbands, unsympathetic (for purposes of assassination only), one; ingénues, Mark II, one; heroes, one; squires, brutal, one; murders of sorts, three; ditto, attempted, several. The inscrutable one is responsible for all the murders. Only the merest accident, it seems, prevents him from disposing of the few fortunate characters who survive to the concluding chapters of the story. He narrowly misses the misunderstood wife (now a widow, thanks to his kind offices), and his failure to bag the hero and ingénue (together with a handful of subsidiary characters) is only a matter of minutes. There is almost a false note about the last chapter, in which the Oriental commits suicide before he has completed his grisly task; but it was obviously impossible for anyone in the book to live happily ever after so long as he remained alive. Just how Mr. HARRIS BURLAND and the villainous figment of his lively imagination perform these deeds of dastard-do is not for me to reveal. The publishers modestly claim that in the school of WILKIE COLLINS this author has few rivals. As regards complexity of plot the claim is scarcely substantiated by the volume before me; but if bloodshed be the food of fiction Mr. BURLAND may slay on, secure in his pre-eminence.
The Rev. Frank Farmer, hero of Mr. RICHARD MARSH'S The Deacon's Daughter (LONG), was the youthful, good-looking and eloquent Congregationalist minister of the very local town of Brasted, and the ladies of his flock adored him. So earnestly indeed did they adore him that, after he had preached a stirring series of sermons on the evils of gambling, they decided to subscribe and send him for a holiday to Monte Carlo. On his return he was to preach another course of sermons, which "would rouse the national conscience and, with God's blessing, the conscience of all Europe." Possibly you can guess what happened to him; I did, and I am not a good guesser. The Rev. Frank had never been out of England, and he found Monte Carlo inhabited by ladies who made him blush. He could not understand their bold ways, so different from the manner of the Brasted maidens. One of them laid especial siege to him and assured him that he had "la veine." At first I am inclined to believe that he thought she was talking of something varicose, but when he understood what she meant he was at her mercy. In short he tried his luck, to the dismay of his conscience but with prodigious benefit to his pocket. His return to Brasted is described with excellent irony.
Mr. WILL IRWIN'S war-book naturally divides itself into two parts, since he was lucky enough to get near the Front both about Verdun during the great attack, and with the Alpini fighting on "the roof of Armageddon." To these brave and picturesque friends of ours he dedicates his study, The Latin at War (CONSTABLE). You must not expect much of that inside information which the author, as an American journalist, must have been sorely tempted to produce. Indeed he has little to offer us that has not been common property of the Correspondents for long enough, and several of his descriptions (his picture of a glacier, for one), given with a rather irritatingly childlike air of new discovery, cannot escape the charge of commonplace. But his reflections, for once in a way the better half of experience, more than make good this defect. His essay on Paris, for instance—"the city of unshed tears"—is something more than interesting, and his analysis of the cause of the successes of the French army, in the face of initial defects of material, even better. The author of Westward Ho!, considering the Spanish and English navies of ELIZABETH'S time, found precisely the same contrasted elements of autocracy and brotherliness producing just those results that we find respectively in the German and French forces of to-day—on the one hand a mechanical perfection of command, on the other an informed equality which, somehow, does not make against efficiency whilst fostering individuality. Mr. IRWIN hardly refers to our own Army; but one is thankful to remember that discipline by consent, one of the virtues of true democracy, is not the exclusive tradition of our French allies.
A London Posy (MILLS AND BOON) is a story with at least an original setting. So far as I know, Miss SOPHIE COLE is the first novelist to group her characters about an actual London house preserved as a memorial to former inhabitants. The house in question is that in Gough Square, where Dr. JOHNSON lived, and two of the chief characters are George Constant, the curator, and his sister, to whom the shrine is the most precious object in life ("housemaid to a ghost," one of the other personages rather prettily calls her). It therefore may well be that to ardent devotees of the great lexicographer this story of what might have happened in his house to-day will make a stronger appeal than was the case with me, who (to speak frankly) found it a trifle dull. It might be said, though perhaps unkindly, that Miss COLE looks at life through such feminine eyes that all her characters, male and female, are types of perfect womanhood. In Denis Laurie, the gentle essayist and recluse, one might expect to find some feminine attributes; but even the bolder and badder lots, whose task it is to supply the melodramatic relief, struck me as oddly unvirile. But this is only a personal view. Others, as I say, may find this very gentle story of mild loves and two deserted wives a refreshing contrast to the truths, so much stranger and more lurid than any fiction, by which we are surrounded.
[Owing to a scarcity of literary matter at the Front, our soldiers are sometimes reduced to telling each other tales.]
Private Jones. "AND SHE SAYS, 'OH! WOT BLINKIN' GREAT EYES YOU 'AVE, GRANDMOTHER!' AND THE WOLF, 'E SAYS, 'ALL THE BETTER TER SEE YER WIV, MY DEAR.'"