OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I think I prefer Mr. WELLS'S recent essay in the Newest Theology to this too concrete illustration of The Soul of a Bishop (CASSELL). It's not that I object to the irreverence of stripping a poor tired bishop of cassock and gaiters, pursuing him to a sleepless bed and cinematographing all his physical twistings and turnings, his moral misgivings, his torturing doubts. I owe too much to Mr. WELLS' irreverences to mind that sort of thing; and I must say that, for a man who can't have had very much to do with the episcopacy in his busy life, he does manage to give a confoundedly plausible atmosphere to the whole setting. There are two letters from an older bishop to Dr. Scrope, the one, yieldingly tolerant, to dissuade him from resignation, the other, written after the accomplished fact, with touches of exquisitely restrained yet palpable malice, which strike me as masterly projections. Mr. WELLS also contrives a wonderful impressiveness in certain passages of the bishop's three visions. But I can't, even after careful re-reading, see the point of making the bishop's enlightenment depend upon a mysterious drug. This has an effect of impishness. There is nothing in Dr. Scrope's development that might not have taken place without this fantastic assistance ... I suppose the general suggestion of this rather wayward and hasty but conspicuously sincere book is, that if only an occasional bishop would secede it would make it easier for the plain man to listen to the rest. And there may be something in this.
To those who are in love with Mr. W.J. LOCKE'S incurable romanticism or who have a taste for heroines that "stiffen in a sudden stroke of passion looking for the instant electrically beautiful," let me commend The Red Planet (LANE). As a matter of fact Betty, the heroine, is quite a dear, and the narrator, Major Meredyth, a maimed hero of the Boer War, who looks at this one from the tragic angle of an invalid chair, is, apart from a habit of petulant and not very profound grousing at Governments in The Daily Rail manner, a sport who thoroughly deserves the reward of poor widowed Betty's hand on the last page but one. Perhaps he does not show a very ready understanding of the phenomenon of physical cowardice in the case of a brother-officer, though later he makes amends. But I take it that it was Mr. LOCKE'S idea to present a very ordinary decent sort with the common man's prejudices and frank distrust of subtleties. A sinister mystery of love, death and blackmail runs, a turbid undercurrent, through the story. The publisher's pathetic apology for the drab grey paper on which, in the interests of War Economy, the book is printed, makes one wonder how the other publishers who still issue books in black and white manage to live.
Of the literary reputations that the War has, so to speak, dug in, I suppose none to be more firmly consolidated than that of Mr. PATRICK MACGILL. The newest of his several battle-books is The Brown Brethren (JENKINS), a title derived from the campaigning colour that has amended a popular quotation till it should now read "the thin brown line of heroes." I can hardly tell you anything about Mr. MACGILL'S new book that you have not probably read or said for yourself of the previous volumes. For my own part, if the War is to be written about at all (a question concerning which I preserve an open mind), I say let it be, as here, the real thing, and the hotter and stronger the better. There is rough humour in these sketches of soldier types, and just enough story to thread them together; but it is the fighting that counts. Certain chapters, for example that about Benner's struggle with the Hun sniper, seem to leave one bruised and breathless as from personal conflict. Mr. MACGILL writes about war as he knows it, horribly, in a way that carries conviction like a charge of bayonets, and with an entire disregard of the sensibilities of the stay-at-home reader. For all which reasons The Brown Brethren and their French friends are assured of the success that they certainly deserve. Here's wishing them the best of it!
In The Sentence of the Court (WARD, LOCK) Mr. FRED M. WHITE contrives effectively to entangle our interest in one of those webs of facile intrigue from which the reader escapes only at the last line of the last page, muttering at he lays the volume down and observes with concern that it is 2.30 A.M., "What rot!" The title of the story is misleading. There is no Court, and nobody is sentenced, though the eminent specialist of Harley Street who essays the rôle of villain richly deserves to be. However, as he is left a bankrupt, discredited in his practice and detached from the heroine whom he had sworn to appropriate, it would perhaps be straining a point to cavil at his remaining at large. The idea upon which the story is based, and which enables the author to clothe his characters and their actions with bewildering mystery, is essentially good and, I believe, new, though far be it from me to do either Mr. WHITE or the reader the disservice of saying what it is. Suffice that we are introduced to some quite charming people, as well as two extremely unpleasant ones, and if the web of mystery is held together in places by a somewhat generous share of obtuseness on the part of the persons concerned it is not for us to complain, since we become aware of the defect only after the affair is over.
Apart from the greater complaint that I do not like her subject, which probably is entirely my own fault, I have nothing but praise for Mrs. STANLEY WRENCH'S latest volume, Beat (DUCKWORTH), except as regards her amazing fondness for drooping the corners of her characters' mouths, generally either "wistfully" or "sullenly." It only made one annoyed when Beatrix's unpleasant sisters developed the trick, but when poor little Beat herself was affected that way, in spite of the magnificent courage with which she faced the burden of deputy-motherhood, it made one miserable as well. The task she had undertaken was a prodigious one, for the sisters she had to rear were, you must understand, vexed with sex instincts of the type of the modern novel, and so in a large measure she failed, even though she sacrificed strength, happiness and even her own love-story in the effort to keep them straight. The tale is set out with every circumstance of sordid misery, in which the spiritual beauty of the heroine is meant to shine, and undeniably does shine with real strength and purity. The successive deaths of the mother and step-mother, the shabby London lodgings, the fall of Veronica, the selfishness of Beat's boy-friend, and the loathsome trade of her lover—these, and more horrors and lapses beside, are all taxed for the general effect in so able and vivid a fashion that the authoress succeeds to admiration in making her readers nearly as uncomfortable as her characters, long before the climax is reached. The end comes rather less wretchedly than could have been expected, but even so surely this is genius partly run to seed. The greatest tragedies are not written in these minor keys. Beat, woman and heroine, is so admirable that one fain would know her apart from all this unredeemed welter of sex and selfishness.
I confess I should have thought that the fictional possibilities of being as like as two peas to Royalty were fairly exhausted. But apparently Mr. EDGAR JEPSON does not share this view; and it is only fair to admit that in The Professional Prince (HUTCHINSON) he has contrived to give a novel twist to the already well laboured theme. Prince Richard (precise nationality unstated) was so bored with the common round of his exalted duties that, hearing of a convenient double, he engages him, at four hundred a year and pickings, to represent him at dull functions, and incidentally to pay the requisite attentions to the young woman, reported by photograph as depressingly plain, whom political considerations have marked as the Prince's fiancée. When later one of the characters points out to His Highness that this conduct showed some lapse from the finer ideals of taste, I am bound to say that I could find no words of contradiction. However the originality arrives when John Stuart, the deputy, instead of falling in love with the bride-elect in Ruritanian fashion, develops a marked liking for the prosaic side of his job, and insists upon lecturing his supposed relations upon the political crisis of the moment. Capital fun this. When the fiancée in her turn proved wholly different from the photograph I permitted myself to hope that we were in for a double masquerade—but this was to expect too much. Still, Mr. JEPSON has handled his wildly-preposterous plot with great verve; and even if the central situation is one that has been often encountered before, this only proves again that HOPE springs eternal.... But I wish he had avoided the War.
Manager of Automatic Dreadnought Pianofortissimo Company (enthusiastically to Literary Gentleman who has written a moving appeal to the public in favour of the Company's goods). "MY DEAR SIR, THIS IS MAGNIFICENT. IT ALMOST MAKES ME DECIDE TO BUY ONE OF THE THINGS FOR MYSELF."