OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Jinny the Carrier (HEINEMANN) was, as Mr. ZANGWILL lets us know in a felicitous epistle-dedicatory to an evidently charming lady, designed as a "bland" and leisurely book, free from any trace of war's horrors or modern perplexities, the sort you could read comfortably with a sore throat on you. I think if I had not been in such rude health I might have managed the five hundred and eighty odd close-set pages without getting just a little tired of his worthy Essex peasants of the time of the great Hyde Park Exhibition. Jinny herself is a perfect darling, of real wit and character, and her business as the local carrier gives a plausible machinery for the introduction of an enormous number, a truly Dickensian profusion, of subsidiary characters. Jinny indeed is above criticism, but the trouble with many, indeed with most, of the others, seemed to me to be their exaggerated sprightliness of speech, just a little too clever to be credible and not quite amusing enough to be palatable in large doses. To me the real pleasure of the book comes from the author's craftsmanlike use of words and the humour and imagination of his descriptions and asides. But if I may be humbly candid beyond the custom of my trade I must confess to an uncomfortable impression that sounder qualities in the reviewer would have discovered greater qualities in the work.
I rather suspect Mrs. GERTRUDE ATHERTON of having written The Avalanche (MURRAY) either for the amusement of exercise in an unfamiliar medium, or, well, for any motive that might explain a production certainly not quite up to her own standard. Its publishers (who may be prejudiced) consider The Avalanche as "a brilliant and engaging study of mystery and romance;" me it impressed as a melodrama dependent on one long-heralded sensation, which proves on tardy arrival an affair of disappointment. I suppose I must be careful not to give away the mystery, such as it is. Price Rugler was anxious to discover why his attractive wife assumed a worried look when money was mentioned and fainted on being told that she was not to wear the family ruby at a particular masque. All this happened (you may not be astonished to hear) in San Francisco, amongst that luxurious, idle, over-moneyed society whose manners Mrs. ATHERTON knows and describes so well. Price had already found out, with the assistance of a not too brilliant detective, that his wife's mother derived her income from a gambling saloon; the remaining problem was how to link up this knowledge with the odd behaviour of Mrs. Price. Perhaps you see it already. She had been—No, I said I wouldn't, and I won't. Of course the discovery couldn't be called cheerful, though it was fortunately made in time to prevent any great harm. But it was nothing like an avalanche.
It is much harder, I am afraid, to be a good Bengali than a good Englishman. Nikhil, the Rajah of Sir RABINDRANATH TAGORE'S The Home and the World (MACMILLAN), persists in treating Sandip Babu (a convinced Nietzchean in philosophy and a Nationalist of the most inflammable type) as an honoured guest of his household, in spite of the fact that he differs from the fellow profoundly on every conceivable topic and is well aware, moreover, that Sandip is rapidly winning the heart of his Rani, Bimala. Nikhil, you see, considers that "all imposition of force is weakness," and that "only the weak dare not be just." Most Westerners, I think, would have kicked the rhapsodical and rather plausible agitator out-of-doors and felt all the better for it from the boot-toe upwards. The real truth is that the story, which is written in the form of a triple autobiography (Nikhil, Sandip and Bimala all taking a hand at telling it in turn) is an exposition of two views of Suadeshi, or what may be called the Sinn Fein movement in India. Nikhil is the apostle of "self-realisation" as a moral force; Sandip believes in grabbing whatever you can. The latter first deifies his country (Bande Mataram, or "Hail, Mother!" is the Nationalist motto) and then identifies Bimala with the object of his worship, which seems a very convenient theory. As for Bimala, she wavers between the two. The romantic interest of the book (which is, by the way, a translation) breaks down rather badly when it becomes clear that Sandip is not really a big enough man to make a complete conquest of the Rani; but from every other point of view it is supremely interesting. And if Nikhil might perhaps have been improved by a little less force of character and more of shoe-leather, Bimala, at any rate, is a delightful personage.
Even "KATHARINE TYNAN" must sometimes fall below her own standard, and The Man from Australia (COLLINS), though written with considerable grace and charm, is too thin in plot to be altogether satisfactory. John Darling, a youngish man of wealth and an extremely liberal disposition, came from Australia to visit his connexions in the West of Ireland and—if opportunities occurred—to help them. Opportunities did offer themselves in abundance. The Adairs in their various ways were ripe for a benefactor of the Darling type to appear, and John soon got busy. In the course of his activities—for it would have been unkind (and very dull) to bring him all the way from Australia to Ireland just to serve as a travelling relief-fund—he is made to fall in love with one of the Adair girls. And that's almost the whole story. One may always trust Mrs. HINKSON to get her atmosphere right; but she is not so happy in her attempt to contrast the preternaturally unselfish Darling who, like an earlier Mr. Darling, would have been content to live in a kennel) with the inordinately self-indulgent father of the Adairs.
