OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Not for a great while have I met a story at once so moving and so simply made as Summer (MACMILLAN). Of course at this time the art of EDITH WHARTON is no new discovery; but to my thinking she has never done better work than this tale of a New England village, and the wakening to love of the girl who was drowsing away her youth there. It is all, as I say, so simple, and written with such apparent economy of effort, that only afterwards does the amazing cleverness of Mrs. WHARTON'S method impress itself upon the reader. Charity Royall was a waif, of worse than ambiguous parentage, brought up in a community where her passionate and violently sensitive nature was stifled. Two men loved her—dour middle-aged Lawyer Royall, whose house she kept, and Lucius Harney, the young visitor from the city, the fairy-prince of poor Charity's one great romance, through whom came tragedy. You see already the whole stark simplicity of the theme. What I cannot convey to you is that secret of Mrs. WHARTON'S that enables her by some exquisitely right word or phrase so to illuminate a scene that you see it as though by an inspiration of your own, and feel that thus and thus did the thing in fact happen. There are episodes in Summer—for example the Fourth of July firework evening, or the wildly macabre scene of the night funeral on the mountain—that seem to me to come as near perfection in their telling as anything I am ever likely to read, and when you have enjoyed them for yourself I fancy you will be inclined to join me in very sincere gratitude for work of such rare quality.
Those who admired (which is the same as saying those who read) that excellent book, The Retreat from Mons, will be glad to hear that its author, Major A. CORBETT-SMITH, has now continued his record in a further volume, called The Marne and After (CASSELL). In it you will find all those qualities, a sane and soldier-like common-sense, an entire absence of gush, and a saving humour in the midst of horrors, which made the earlier installment memorable. Above all else I have been impressed by the first of these characteristics. Major CORBETT-SMITH writes from the viewpoint of one to whom even this ghastliest of wars is part of the day's work. That he sees its human and hideous sides by no means impairs this quiet professional outlook. I recall one phrase in his chapter on the secret agents of the enemy: "At the Aisne German spies were a regular plague"—just as one might speak of wasps or weather—which somehow conveyed to me very vividly the secret of our original little army's disproportionate influence in the early weeks of the War. The operations which we call the actual Battle of the Marne (surely fated to be the most fought-again engagement in history) are here very clearly described, with illustrative plans; while one other chapter, called suggestively "Kultur," may be commended to those super-philosophers amongst us who are already beginning an attempt to belittle the foul record of calculated crime that must for at least a generation place Germany outside the pale of civilization. For this grim chapter alone I should like to see Major CORBETT-SMITH'S otherwise cheery volume scattered broadcast over the country.
June (METHUEN) is saturated with the simple sentimentality in which American authors excel. I do not know whether British novelists could write this sort of book successfully if they would, but I do know that they don't. Miss EDITH BARNARD DELANO, however, succeeds in getting considerable charm into her story, and if it leaves rather a sweeter taste in the mouth than some of us relish there are others who like their fiction to be strongly sugared. June, an orphan child, was looked after by nigger servants, and by one, Mammy, in particular. She possessed a house and a valley; and a young man prospecting in the latter met with an accident and was discovered by the child. Hence complications, and the removal of June from her home to be educated with some cousins. Then poverty, hard times and plenty of pluck. But the clouds began to lift when June discovered that an emerald cross of hers was worth four thousand dollars; and finally the sun burst forth when, through the agency of the accidental young man, her property was found to be very valuable, and she more valuable still—to the young man. It sounds ingenuous, doesn't it? But not nearly so easy to write as it seems, for to produce anything as artless as June is an art in itself.
In The Book of the Happy Warrior (LONGMANS) a chivalrous modern knight holds up to our youngsters the patterns of an older chivalry to teach them courage, clean fighting and devoted service. Sir HENEY NEWBOLT claims that the tradition of the public schools is the direct survival of the mediæval training for knighthood, and incidentally defends flannelled and muddied youth from hasty aspersions. ROLAND and his OLIVER, RICHARD LION-HEART, EDWARD the Black Prince and CHANDOS, DU GUESCLIN and BAYARD, if they revisited this tortured earth, would be dismayed by the procedure and the chilling impersonality of modern war. Perhaps in the glorious single combats of the Flying Corps they might recognise some faint semblance of their ancient method. Sir HENRY, rightly from his point of view, chooses to ignore the wholesale horrors of to-day's warfare and to emphasize the ideal of fighting service as a fine discipline and proof of manly worth. He shows an obvious, honest, aristocratic bias, but he does not forget another side of the matter, as a fragment of an imaginary conversation between a young lord and a squire present at the great tourney at St. Inglebert's between the Gentlemen of England and of France pleasantly shows. The Englishmen were worsted and took their defeat in a fine sporting spirit. "How is it we're beaten? We always win the battles, don't we?" asks the boy. "The archers win them for us," says the Squire. Quite a characteristic little touch of subaltern modesty! One thought occurs to me especially. It is unthinkable that a book like this should appear in the Germany of to-day. It will be worth your while giving it to your boy to find out why.
Since the practice of writing first novels is becoming increasingly popular with young authors it was inevitable that a "First Novel Library" should find its way on to the market. Whether the classification is to be construed as an appeal for forbearance for the shortcomings of the neophyte, or as a warning which a considerate publisher feels is due to the public, is not for me to say. But the policy of charging six shillings for these maiden efforts—all that is required of us for the mature masterpieces of our MAURICE HEWLETTS and ARNOLD BENNETTS—is open to question. The Puppet, by JANE HARDING (UNWIN), is not without merit, but the faults of the beginner are present in manifold. The heroine tells her story in the first person—a difficult method of handling fiction at the best—and in the result we find a young lady of no particular education or apparent attainments holding forth in the stilted diction of a rather prosy early-Victorian Archbishop. The effect of unreality produced goes far to spoil a plot which is wound and unwound with considerable skill. Miss HARDING will write a good novel yet, but she must learn to make her characters act the parts she assigns to them.
We all must be writing books about the War. It is natural enough to suppose one's own share of war-work is worthy of record, and indeed, when we come to think of it, the historian of the future will get his complete picture of the time only when he realises how every scrap of the national energy was absorbed in the one master purpose. That being so it is arguable that Mr. WARD MUIR was thinking far ahead in compiling his hospital reminiscences, Observations of an Orderly (SIMPKIN). One hastens to make it clear that the last thing intended or desired is to disparage the usefulness or the stark self-sacrifice of the men who are serving in menial capacities in our war hospitals, but to tell the truth this account of sculleries and laundry-baskets, polishing paste and nigger minstrels, bathrooms and pillow-slips, has not much intrinsic interest about it, nor are the author's general reflections very different from what one could supply oneself without much effort. His notes on war slang are about the best thing in the volume, and I liked the story of the blinded soldiers—feeling anything in the world but mournful or pathetic—who played pranks on the Tube escalator; but on the whole this is a book which will be of considerable interest only to the writer's fellow-labourers. They, beyond any doubt, will be glad to read this history of their familiar rounds and common tasks.
Wanted, a Tortoise-Shell (LANE) would have made an excellent short story, but to pursue its farcical developments through three hundred pages requires a considerable amount of perseverance. The scene of Mr. PETER BLUNDER'S book is laid in tropical Jallagar, where the British Resident was keener on cats than on his duties. A male tortoise-shell was what he fanatically and almost ferociously desired, and to obtain it he was ready to barter his daughter to one Kamp, who is tersely described as "a fat Swede." I conceived a strong distaste for this large and perspiring man, and can congratulate Mr. BLUNDELL on having created a character odious enough to linger in the memory. For the rest there are some gleams of real fun where a beach-comber tries to palm off a dyed cat as the long-deferred tortoise-shell, and the exit of this animal from a world too covetous to hold it is thoroughly sound farce. But on the whole I failed to get many of those quiet gurgles of delight which are the best tribute one can pay to a funny man's work.
