OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The Great Man is, I suppose, among the most difficult themes to treat convincingly in fiction. To name but one handicap, the author has in such cases to postulate at least some degree of acquaintance on the part of the reader with his celebrated subject. "Everyone is now familiar," he will observe, "with the sensational triumph achieved by the work of X——;" whereat the reader, uneasily conscious of never having heard of him, inclines to condemn the whole business beforehand as an impossible fable. I fancy Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM felt something of this difficulty with regard to the protagonist of his quaintly-called The Moon and Sixpence (HEINEMANN), since, for all his sly pretence of quoting imaginary authorities, we have really only his unsupported word for the superlative genius of Charles Strickland, the stockbroker who abandoned respectable London to become a Post-impressionist master, a vagabond and ultimately a Pacific Islander. The more credit then to Mr. MAUGHAM that he does quite definitely make us accept the fellow at his valuation. He owes this, perhaps, to the unsparing realism of the portrait. Heartless, utterly egotistical, without conscience or scruple or a single redeeming feature beyond the one consuming purpose of his art, Strickland is alive as few figures in recent fiction have been; a genuinely great though repellent personality—a man whom it would have been at once an event to have met and a pleasure to have kicked. Mr. MAUGHAM has certainly done nothing better than this book about him; the drily sardonic humour of his method makes the picture not only credible but compelling. I liked especially the characteristic touch that shows Strickland escaping, not so much from the dull routine of stockbroking (genius has done that often enough in stories before now) as from the pseudo-artistic atmosphere of a flat in Westminster and a wife who collected blue china and mild celebrities. Mrs. Strickland indeed is among the best of the slighter characters in a tale with a singularly small cast; though it is, of course, by the central figure that it stands or falls. My own verdict is an unhesitating stet.
If there be any who still cherish a pleasant memory of the Bonnie Prince CHARLIE of the Jacobite legend, Miss MARJORIE BOWEN'S Mr. Misfortunate (COLLINS) will dispose of it. She gives us a study of the YOUNG PRETENDER in the decade following Culloden. Figures such as LOCHIEL, KEITH, GORING, the dour KELLY, HENRY STUART, LOUIS XV., with sundry courtiers and mistresses, move across the film. I should say the author's sympathy is with her main subject, but her conscience is too much for her. I find myself increasingly exercised over this conscience of Miss BOWEN'S. She seems to me to be deliberately committing herself to what I can only describe as a staccato method. This was notably the case with The Burning Glass, her last novel. Her narratives no longer seem to flow. She will give you catalogues of furniture and raiment, with short scenes interspersed, for all the world as if she were transcribing from carefully taken notes. Quite probably she is, and I am being authentically instructed and should be duly grateful, but I find myself longing for the exuberance of her earlier method. I feel quite sure this competent author can find a way of respecting historical truth without killing the full-blooded flavour of romance.
There is a smack of the Early Besantine about the earnest scion of a noble house who decides to share the lives and lot of common and unwashed men with an eye to the imminent appearance of the True Spirit of Democracy in our midst. Such a one is the hero of Miss MAUD DIVER'S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (né Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, and then we find, him, not in the slums of some industrial quarter, but in Western Canada, where class distinctions are founded less on soap than on simoleons. At the end of the volume the War has "bruk out," and our hero, apart from having led a healthy outdoor life and chivalrously married and been left a widower by a pathetic child with consumption and no morals, is just about where he started. I say "at the end of the volume," for there I find a publisher's note to the effect that in consequence of the paper shortage the further adventures of our hero have been postponed to a subsequent volume. It is to be entitled The Strong Hours, and will doubtless provide a satisfactory raison d'être for all the other people who did nothing in particular in Vol. I.
If you had numbered Elizabeth, the heroine of A Maiden in Malaya (MELROSE), among your friends, I can fancy your calling upon her to "hear about her adventures in the East." I can see her delightedly telling you of the voyage, of the people she met on board (including the charming young man upon whom you would already have congratulated her), of how he and she bought curios at Port Said, of her arrival, of her sister's children and their quaint sayings, of Singapore and its sights, of Malaya and how she was taken to see the tapping on a rubber plantation—here I picture a gleam of revived interest, possibly financial in origin, appearing in your face—of the club, of dinner parties and a thousand other details, all highly entertaining to herself and involving a sufficiency of native words to impress the stay-at-home. And perhaps, just as you were considering your chance of an escape before tea, she would continue "and now I must tell you all about the dreadful time I had in the rising!" which she would then vivaciously proceed to do; and not only that, but all about the dreadful time (the same dreadful time) that all her friends had in the same rising, chapters of it, so that in the end it might be six o'clock or later before you got away. I hope this is not an unfair résumé of the impression produced upon me by Miss ISOBEL MOUNTAIN'S prattling pages. To sum up, if you have an insatiable curiosity for the small talk of other people's travel, A Maiden in Malaya may not prove too much for it. If otherwise, otherwise.
I wish Col. JOHN BUCHAN could have been jogging Mrs. A.C. INCHBOLD'S elbow while she was writing Love and the Crescent (HUTCHINSON), All the essential people in his Greenmantle, which deals, towards the end at any rate, with just about the same scenes and circumstances as her story, are so confoundedly efficient, have so undeniably learnt the trick of making the most of their dashing opportunities. In Mrs. INCHBOLD's book the trouble is that with much greater advantages in the way of local knowledge and with all manner of excitement, founded on fact, going a-begging, nothing really thrilling or convincing ever quite materialises. The heroine, Armenian and beautiful, is as ineffective as the hero, who is French and heroic, both of them displaying the same unfortunate tendency to be carried off captive by the other side and to indulge in small talk when they should be most splendid. And the majority of the other figures follow suit. On the face of it the volume is stuffed with all the material of melodrama; but somehow the authoress seems to strive after effects that don't come naturally to her. What does come naturally to her is seen in a background sketch of the unhappy countries of Asia Minor in the hands of the Turk and the Hun, which is so much the abler part of the book that one would almost rather the too intrusive narrative were brushed aside entirely. Personally, at any rate, I think I should prefer Mrs. INCHBOLD in essay or historical form.
Madame ALBANESI, in Tony's Wife (HOLDEN AND HARDINGHAM), has provided her admirers with a goodly collection of sound Albanesians, but she has also given them a villain in whom, I cannot help thinking, they will find themselves hard-pressed to believe. Richard Savile was deprived of a great inheritance by Tony's birth, and as his guardian spent long years in nourishing revenge. He was not, we know, the first guardian to play this game, but that he could completely deceive so many people for such a long time seems to prove him far cleverer than appears from any actual evidence furnished. If, however, this portrait is not in the artist's best manner, I can praise without reserve the picture of Lady Féo, a little Society butterfly, very frivolous on the surface, but concealing a lot of nice intuition and sympathy, and I welcome her as a set-off to the silly caricatures we commonly get of the class to which she belonged. Let me add that in the telling of this tale Madame ALBANESI retains her quiet and individual charm.
A Curious Romanian Custom.
"The two white doves which were perched in the wedding carriage excited much interest. They were given, following the pretty Roumanian cuckoo, to the bride and bridegroom by the people of Roumania to symbolise the happiness and peace which are hoped to the newly-married couple."—North Mail.
"A ROMANTIC COURTSHIP IN TURKEY.
Miss —— visited Colonel —— when boat, money, a hiding-place in Constantinople last summer suffering from smallpox."—Provincial Paper.
There seem here to be all the elements of romance, but the story suffers from overmuch compression. We shall wait to see it on the film.