OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
A book of little novels, or long-shorts, from the pen of Mr. ROBERT HICHENS, will be welcomed with pleasure by a very large public. Snake-Bite (CASSELL) contains a half-dozen various tales, all but one of which are eminently characteristic of their author. It sounds unkind to add that this one is for artistry the best of the bunch; but I mean no more than that Mr. HICHENS has here done very well a slight and delicate sketch of a style not generally associated with his work. In the name-piece his admirers will find themselves on more familiar ground—none other indeed than that well-known desert in which they have enjoyed such delicious thrills in the same company already. When Mr. HICHENS' characters get the sand in their eyes almost anything may be expected of them. Here he has given us a new version of the ancient scheme of two men and a woman, complicated in this instance by a cobra; the problem being, whether a doctor should cure his wife's lover of a snake-bite. More original is the longest story in the collection, one called "The Lost Faith," an affair of mental healing and love and crime too complex for compression. It is admirably told. It leads up to a situation as novel as it is dramatic—the confession of a young fanatic, who believes in a lady-healer so implicitly that he puts typhoid germs into the drink of a celebrated general in order to provide her with an impressive subject. As a sensation this wants some beating; though it failed to shake my own preference for the other story, which you will observe I have purposely left unnamed. You will, I hope, enjoy finding it for yourself.
Heritage (COLLINS) gives me much the same impression that one obtains from the spectacle of a man wire-walking in a sack or painting pictures with his toes—attempting, in short, any task under conditions of the greatest possible handicap. That certainly is what Miss V. SACKVILLE-WEST has been at pains to impose upon herself. With a straightforward, simple and interesting tale and some considerable gifts for reproducing character, she has deliberately sacrificed these advantages by telling her story in the most roundabout and awkward manner imaginable. The theme is the influence of heredity, as shown in the working out of a strain of Spanish blood in a Sussex peasant stock, the victims of this inconvenient blend being Ruth and the young cousin whom half-unwillingly she marries; with devastating results. Ruth, as I say, was attracted to Westmacott with only part of her being; the better (or at least less Spanish) elements in her were employed in making soft eyes at two other men, one of whom, Malory, is supposed to relate portions of the affair to the quite superfluous outsider who puts them down. This vivâ-voci recital is subsequently rounded off by Malory, in what is surely the least credible of all the unlikely letters in fiction, nearly a hundred printed pages of it. So you see the obstacles that Miss SACKSVILLE-WEST has placed in her own and her reader's path. That, despite them all, the interest, and passion of this first novel do get home is an encouraging omen for her success when she has learnt a greater simplicity of attack.
Wings of the Morning (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) might have been a most recommendable book, for it is in essentials a pleasant story of a great artist who for the crime of his hot-headed youth suffered imprisonment in the United States, and, having "covered his tracks," came home, fell in love with his delightful sister's delightful step-daughter and, after much suffering for them both, told his history and won his lady. But unfortunately the inessentials—and among these I have the temerity to include the great European War, or, at any rate, very much that is here told of it—are so harrowing that they do not accord with the pleasant story to which they are tacked on. I would not ask to be spared the knowledge of anything faced by other people while I sat immune at home, but there are many incidents which cannot with decency or dignity be served up in fiction to add a thrill to the enjoyment of an hour's light reading. Miss JOAN SUTHERLAND would have done well to have left detail to more serious exponents, and to have discarded entirely one scene of bestial cruelty which has no real bearing on her tale. Never in a novel—and seldom in historical accounts of fighting—have I been asked to wallow in so much gore. It is all the more regrettable because when Miss SUTHERLAND uses her imagination on less horrible subjects she is much more successful.
Mr. ARTHUR TURBERVILLE has taken almost over-elaborate pains with his sketch of a type which must have been common enough in the new armies—the young officer of pacifist leanings, who, intellectually convinced of the futility of war and by no means out of sympathy with the ultralogical or illogical (and anyway impossible) position of the Conscientious Objector, yet joins up and makes the very best of a bad job. Kenneth, Dugdale (METHUEN), the prize prig (according to the verdict of his Mess), became a brave and efficient subaltern; and the author's idea of bringing him by means of the discipline of war-training and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous fighting types, and of bringing these by the same discipline to a readier appreciation of the intellectual and idealist position, is well enough worked out. The character-drawing impressed me less favourably. The author, I should say, finds it rather difficult to understand the ordinary good or indifferent fellow with his qualities and their defects. I doubt the possibility of such a snake in the grass as Lieutenant Seymour carrying on without getting kicked. Nor do I think that that simple soldier man, Fortescue, V.C., would have so tamely accepted Dugdale's betrayal to the woman they both loved of the fact that he had just seen his rival putting a dubious young lady into a cab in Regent Street at midnight. There is a good deal of thoughtful work in this novel which should be interesting to amateur students of the psychology of war and men of war.
The latest of Mrs. J. B. BUCKROSE'S genial little comedies about a comfortable world is concerned with war-weddings, their cause, and some hints for their successful conduct. She calls it Marriage While You Wait (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), and illustrates her theme with the case of a young man and maiden, who dashed, like so many others, into matrimony in the breathless haste of short leave, and came dangerously near repenting at leisure. Only near, of course; Mrs. BUCKROSE is too confirmed an optimist not to make it clear that the blackest boredom has a silver lining; and I had never any real fear that her nice young couple were becoming more than quite temporarily estranged. Still, things went so far that Sophia left the cottage where she and Arthur and a cooing dove had proposed to live the idyllic life of happiness-ever-after, and betook herself to the mansion of the local villain; while Arthur cut the throat of the dove (there my sympathies were with him entirely) and relapsed into nervous breakdown. But Denyer, being only a BUCKROSE villain, which is a very mild variety, packed Sophia home again; Arthur, after the usual crisis, recovered; and the symbolic dove was the only inmate of the cottage for whom the little rift remained unhappily permanent. So there you are; with the gentlest short sermon to wind up, and a blessing to all concerned. Perhaps I have read stories more briskly entertaining from Mrs. BUCKROSE'S flowing pen; one feels that her intent here was not solely laughter. But as a smiling homily, preaching much the same moral that Sir ARTHUR PINERO once treated more caustically in perhaps his best play, her story, Marriage While You Wait, should have at least two sympathetic readers in many scores of homes.
Whenever I finish a book by Mr. S.P.B. MAIS I am left with the feeling that he has only to enlarge his horizon to write something worth reading and remembering. If The Education of a Philanderer (GRANT RICHARDS) had been written, by an unknown man I should have welcomed it as work of great promise. But the trouble with Mr. MAIS is that he seems to find it perilously easy to write about young school-masters who fall in and out of love with facility and who are financially at their wits' end. Rupert Blundell, the philanderer, described here, is a clear and clever picture of a young man who loved where he listed and listed quite a lot. As far as he goes he can be visualized perfectly both at Oxford and as a schoolmaster. But he does not go far enough and he belongs to a type of which one can easily tire. Mr. MAIS is not so callow as he once was in his judgement of people mentally distasteful to him, but he still needs a wider outlook on life and a wider knowledge, and I sincerely hope that he will take steps to remove the limitations which at present prevent him from giving entire satisfaction to his admirers.
Critic (writing a review during a hot spell). "TO SPEAK CANDIDLY, THIS BOOK LEAVES US COLD."