OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I should like to commend with extraordinarily little reserve Mr. FIELDING-HALL'S The Way of Peace (HURST AND BLACKETT) to the kind of reader that is drawing plans in his head for a New England. No wonder that in these great days the impatient idealist rushes forth with his bag of dreams. The author of The Soul of a People is extreme but sane—an extremist in common sense, say. He stakes on the fact of human solidarity as the cure for the bitternesses and crookednesses of politics; declares life and men to be good, not evil (how right he is!); wants an England rescued from the Puritans on the one hand and the mere musical comedians on the other; an England chaste because freer, less ignorant; good beer in easeful inns; the village or township as the unit of government and of fellowship; a return to music and the dance, not as a plasmon-fed high-brow proposition but as the natural expression of a joy of life returned; a clear fount of honour; a representative House of Commons; justice, respect, common sense and responsibility instead of charity; some place other than the streets for our young men and maidens to make love in; a recognition of crime as mainly a social, not an individual, disease; a law simplified and scales of justice not weighted against the poor; and a host of other good and wise and nearly possible things. Here is not the barren politics of manipulation but an ideal of living citizenship. I commend it to all believers in new days and all honourable disgruntlers; not perhaps as a programme but as a tonic.
Do not, please, run away with the idea that The Nursery (HEINEMANN) presents us with Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS' views on baby culture. The background of his story, the scenes of which are laid in and around Colchester a year or so ago, is composed of gardens and oyster-beds. On these he gives a lot of information, and, as he could not be pedantic even if he tried to be, I browsed pleasantly upon the store of knowledge set before me. Also I liked the restraint he shows in dealing with the War, and commend his exemplary method to some of our more blatant novelists. When, however, I came to the inhabitants of The Nursery I failed to find in them that rare and delightful quality with which Mr. PHILLPOTTS usually succeeds in endowing his characters. Readers of his novels must know by this time that he is not exactly in love with Mrs. Grundy, but here he seems to be insurgent against something, and for the life of me I don't know quite what it is. Perhaps it is insincerity, which is a very good thing to be in rebellion against. There is one very amusing and delightful character, a bibulous old sinner who defied law and order and almost at the last gasp ladled out what he considered justice in a most dramatic manner. His name is William Ambrose, and it is worth your while to make his disreputable acqaintance.
One fact at once awakened in me a fellow-feeling for Mr. BERTRAM SMITH—the discovery of his appreciation (shared by myself, the elder STEVENSON, and other persons of discernment) for the romantic possibilities of the map. There is an excellent map in the beginning of Days of Discovery (CONSTABLE), showing the peculiar domain of childhood, the garden, in terms that will hardly fail to win your sympathy. But not in this alone does Mr. SMITH show that he has the heart of the matter in him; every page of these reminiscences of nursery life proclaims a genuine memory, not a make-believe childhood faked up for literary ends. Who that has once been young can read unstirred by envy the chapter on "Devices and Contrivances," with its entrancing triumph of the chain of mirrors arranged (during the providential absence of those in authority) from the night nursery, down two flights of stairs, to the store-room in the basement? I know a reviewer whom nothing, but moral cowardice restrained from testing the possibility of this delightful plan by personal experiment. Fireworks too—Mr. SMITH has remembered them with a proper regard that is, of course, wholly different from that of those who understand them only in their pyrotechnic aspect, not as objects loved for themselves alone, for their shape and feel, and the glamour of weeks of hoarding and barter. In short, a real nursery book for the study; not one perhaps that actual children would care for (quite possibly they might resent it as betrayal), but one that for the less fortunate will reopen a door of which too many of us have long lost the key.
What I found strangest in the Transactions of Lord Louis Lewis (MURRAY) is that it is a story, or rather series of stories, about rogues, in which trickery is invariably vanquished—a refreshing contrast to the methods of most of our romanticists, who are given to a certain courtier-like attitude towards the lawbreaker. Certainly that various artist, Mr. ROLAND PERTWEE, has contrived to put together a highly entertaining collection of diamond-cut-diamond yarns, adventure tales that have the great advantage (for these days) of being concerned, not with bloodshed and mysterious murders, but with the wiles of dealers in the spurious antique and the exploits of Lord Louis in defeating them. This Lord Louis is indeed a very pleasant as well as a very ingenious gentleman. From the rotundity of his conversational periods and a certain general suavity of demeanour I suspect him of having made a careful study of the methods of his distinguished predecessor in rogue-reducing, Prince Florizel of Bohemia. But he is, of course, none the worse company for that. Once, however, he shocked me badly, when, in perusing an eighteenth-century MS., he—I can hardly bring myself to quote the passage!—he "moistened his fingers and turned over three pages." And this of a nobleman and a connoisseur! Oh, Mr. PERTWEE! Having said so much, it is only fair that I should call your special attention to one of the stories, "The House in Bath," an exquisite little gem of considerably higher art than is usually associated with such "Exploits of the Event."
You might perhaps allow yourself to be put off by such a title as Home Truths about the War (ALLEN), because it, or something like it, has so often been used as the preliminary to alarming or disagreeable statements that we have grown excusably suspicious. But to avoid on this account the letters that the Rev. HUGH CHAPMAN has here brought together would be to miss a very original and inspiring little book. Let me say once that Mr. CHAPMAN (whom you may know is energetic and popular chaplain of the Savoy; also as already, under a pseudonym, an author) has deliberately essayed the impossible. Self-revelation, especially in letters, can hardly ever be made convincing. But putting this on one side, and accepting these, not as the letters that would be written from one man to another, but rather (to speak without irreverence) such as the human heart might address to its Creator, you will find them full of interest and encouragement. All sorts and conditions of men and women are here shown, in their varied reaction to the great acid that for these three years past has been biting into the life of the world. The priest, the actor, the profiteer, the society-woman, even the conscientious objector, are all touched lightly, tactfully, and with a kindly humour that saves the book from its very obvious danger of becoming pedantic. In his brief preface Mr. CHAPMAN has crystallised very happily into a couple of words his ideal for the British attitude towards the War—buoyant sternness. It is the reflection of that quality in its pages that gives this little book its tonic value.
Mr. ARNOLD WRIGHT'S main work in Early English Adventurers in the East (MELROSE) has been that of making good. Most of us know something, at any rate, of the men who brought our Eastern Empire into actual existence, but I tell myself hopefully that my ignorance of those daring pioneers, whom Mr. WRIGHT describes as humble adventurers of the seventeenth century, is not exceptional. It has now been satisfactorily removed, and, after reading this excellently written history of stirring deeds, I must believe that even men of learning will thank him for rescuing many good names from the oblivion which threatened them. And Mr. WRIGHT is not only to be congratulated on this act of salvage, but also on the admirable way in which he has performed it. A restrained style and a temperate judgment are equally at his command. I cannot better commend his book to Imperialists than by saying that all Little Englanders will detest it.
On internal evidence I had set down Root and Branch (ALLEN AND UNWIN), by R. ALLATINI, as the very clever first book of a very clever and observant writer of the (alleged) weaker sex. But I find the title-page gives two previous novels to her pen—I still guess a woman's hand. And I by no means withdraw the "clever." The characterisation of the various members of the Arenski family—the branches are better done than the root, old Paul Arenski, K.C., idealist and orator—is uncannily good. There's wit and humour and diversity of gifts. What suggested the "first book" idea was an uncertainty of method, a hesitation between the new realism and the older romanticism. In both moods the author is successful, but the joints show something clumsily. This, however, is technical merely. I commend the book to all who are interested, approvingly or critically, in the Jew. A dramatic theme runs through the book, the ethical question as to whether a man may be justified in killing, at her passionate request, a woman dearly loved who is slowly dying of a terrible disease.
