OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
That audacious paraphrase of the Book of Job, The Undying Fire (CASSELL), seems to me to be marred by a fundamentally false note. I am sure that Mr. WELLS is as serious about his new God in the Heart of Man as he was about the Invisible King—I've no sort of intention of sneering—but I cannot credit him with belief in the Adversary, who by arrangement with the Almighty (as set forth in a discreetly flippant prologue with something of the flavour of those irreverent yarns invented and retailed by Italian ecclesiastics about Dominiddio) visits Job Huss, the headmaster of Woldingstanton, with the plagues of his desperate trial. However I take it that the author was anxious that his parody should be as complete in form as possible, and, being rather impressed by the insouciance, not to say insolence, of the Satan of the original, seized his chance of bizarre characterisation and "celestial badinage" and let consistency go hang for the time. Certainly the theological disquisitions of Mr. WELLS are remarkable not for their formal logic, but for their provocative quality and the very real eloquence of detached passages of the rambling argument. In particular, taking up again the thread of Joan and Peter, he gives such a survey of the scope and glories of a new education that is to salve the world's wounds as would move the heart of a jelly-fish. Mr. WELLS has his own methods of justifying the ways of God to man. He may be discursive, impatient, rash, perhaps a little shallow; but he has an undying fire of his own. He is certainly not dull. And therefore orthodox divines and pedagogues may perhaps have a real grievance against him. But I can't imagine any serious-minded man in a serious time reading this book and not getting hope and courage from it.
Victory Over Blindness (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is a book whose title gives you at once the key to its contents and to the spirit that animates them. It is the record by Sir ARTHUR PEARSON of one of the most finely successful enterprises that the War has called forth. Everyone to-day has at least a vague idea of the work carried on at St. Dunstan's, "the biggest individual business," Sir ARTHUR terms it, "that I have ever conducted." A study of these pages will transform that vague idea into wonder and admiration. Big the business might well be called, since it is nothing less than the bringing back, almost to normal life, of men apparently condemned to an existence of helpless inactivity and dependence. Few things will strike you more forcibly in this book than its practical common sense. That and an unsentimental optimism seem to be the dominant notes of all Sir ARTHUR'S effort. Without doubt the success of this has been beyond measure helped by the fact that the originator was himself a sharer in the adversity that it was designed to lessen. Two chapters especially in the book, called "Learning to be Blind," a brief manual of practical suggestions by one whom experience has rendered expert, supply a clue to the difference between the work at St. Dunstan's and the best-intentioned efforts of outside sympathy, Victory Over Blindness is a proud and rewarding motto; this little volume will show how thoroughly it has been earned.
I fancy that Miss JOAN THOMPSON had some design of symbolism in the choice of a name for her heroine, Mary England (METHUEN). The publishers indeed consider that she might be called "Every Woman," so typical is she of her sex, and "so like to the emotional careers of so many English girls is her own." Perhaps, on the other hand (without disparagement to the skill of Miss THOMPSON'S portraiture), I should have expected the typical maiden of Mary's class to show greater initiative. Many things nearly happened to Mary; practically nothing in her life was fashioned by her own intent. Of the two men who might have made her happy, one didn't propose at all, and one did it in the wrong fashion. Other two, who seemed possibly menacing, both drifted away with their evil purpose (if any) unfulfilled. I am wrong, though, in recalling Mary as invariably passive. She was once roused to the action of destroying the manuscript of a novel, in which the writer, the man who didn't propose, had too faithfully revealed his perception of herself. But though, as a reviewer, I may applaud this achievement on general grounds, it provided no kind of solution for the problem of her existence. This was left to be settled, very much offhand, by a detached iceberg, which sank the ship in which Mary was emigrating. I thought that iceberg rather an evasion on the part of Miss THOMPSON. Perhaps however all this effect of drift is part of a subtle intention. I can certainly call the book admirably written, with restraint and an emotional sympathy that impressed me as the outcome probably of an intimate knowledge of the scenes and persons described. Whether her lethargy is "typical" or not, as a study Mary England will hold you at least sufficiently curious to deplore its arbitrary end.
Sir HARRY JOHNSTON has written a book which I find it difficult to define. His publishers and Mr. H.G. WELLS call it a novel, but bits of a biography and an autobiography and an African explorer's account of his travels have all somehow squeezed themselves into it, and for readers whose birthdays began before the last quarter of the nineteenth century The Gay-Dombeys (CHATTO AND WINDUS) will best justify itself as a chronique scandaleuse. To penetrate the thin disguises in which the author has dressed his notabilities and to sort the composite or hybrid personalities into their component parts should provide the initiated with congenial if not very edifying occupation. The reader who is also a DICKENS enthusiast will be, according to temperament, delighted or outraged to find that Sir HARRY JOHNSTON has made his book as it were a continuation of Dombey and Son. Many of his characters are either the creations of Boz or their children and he contrives to carry on the interweaving of their lives to an unbelievable extent—even when the fullest allowance has been made for the smallness of the world. Florence Dombey and Walter Gay, as Mr. and Mrs. Gay-Dombey, actually survive well into the present book, while Sir HARRY JOHNSTON'S Eustace Morven, who tells us that he has reverted to the ancient spelling of his name, is the son of Harriet Carker and that hazel-eyed bachelor, Mr. Morfin, who lived and loved in Dombey and Son. But save in the chapter describing Eustace Morven's appearance at the annual dinner-party given by Florence and Walter to celebrate the re-establishment of the firm, Sir HARRY JOHNSTON'S work has not a very pronounced flavour of DICKENS. It is to be hoped that this method of writing novels will not become popular. A series of sequels to everybody by somebody else opens up an intimidating prospect, at least for the reviewer.
Mr. PHILIP GIBBS has gathered together, under the title. Open Warfare, the Way to Victory (HEINEMANN), his despatches written from the Western front during the last year of the War. What strikes one most on seeing them again in book form is the obscurity in which they veil the events they record. They so shine, as it were, with a luminous mist that they seem to reveal everything, yet in sober truth very often it is only in the light of later knowledge that they reveal anything at all. Congratulations, therefore, to Mr. GIBBS, the perfect war correspondent! I defy anyone from these papers alone (apart from the plentiful and excellent maps) to form anything like an adequate conception of the disaster that swept down upon the British Armies in the Spring of 1918. And yet in a sense it is all there, gorgeously camouflaged under the control—I daresay the wise and necessary control—of the censorship. The author, watching the very moulding of history with every advantage of proximity, has written down, if not much bare statement, yet an amazing sequence of heroic detail, associated with such stirring names as Arras or Givenchy or Cambrai. Curiously enough, though each chapter is intensely vivid, they become, through much instancing of the same unconquerable spirit, something monotonous, though never wearisome, in bulk. One trusts that a future generation will realise that the value of a book of this order consists in its first-hand record of such incidents of valour; it would be pitiful to have it hastily assumed, because so much is slurred or omitted to deceive the enemy, that England was so feeble-hearted as to require her evil news predigested before consumption in this manner. It should be added that the writer gives us a good sound introduction that goes a long way to fill the yawning gaps.
Gatekeeper (at castle of unpopular baron—to new grocer's boy). "YOU SILLY IDIOT! WHY DON'T YOU GO ROUND TO THE TRADESMEN'S GATE? GOOD THING YOU DIDN'T PULL THE BELL, OR YOU'D 'AVE GOT A 'ALF TON OF BOILING LEAD ON TOP OF YOU. THIS IS THE VISITORS' DOOR!"
"GIRL WANTED.—A reliable girl for the summer months to go across the Arm."—Halifax Evening Mail.
To prevent misapprehension we ought to say that the western part of the bay at Halifax, Nova Scotia, is locally known as the "Arm."