OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
A new novel by Anthony Hope certainly deserves in these days to be considered a literary event of some importance. His Lucinda (Hutchinson) seems to me both in plot and treatment equal to the best of his work; as dignified and yet as lightly handled as anything he has given us in the past. The plot (which I must not betray) is excellent. From the moment when Julius, the narrator, making his leisurely way to the wedding of Lucinda, is passed by her alone in a taxicab going in an opposite direction, the interest of the intrigue never slackens. Into an epoch of rather "over-ripe" and messy fiction this essentially clean and well-ordered tale comes with an effect very refreshing and tonic. Anthony Hope's characters as ever are vigorously alive; in Lucinda herself he has drawn a heroine as charming as any in that long gallery that now stretches between her and the immortal Dolly. In short, those novel-readers who are (shall I say?) beginning to demand the respect due to middle age will enjoy in these pages the threefold reward of present interest, retrospection and a comforting sense that the literary judgment of their generation is here triumphantly vindicated in the eyes of unbelieving youth. What could be more pleasant?
It is a delight to welcome the Life of Mrs. R. L. Stevenson (Chatto and Windus), not only for the exceptional attraction of the environment in which she lived for many years, but because under any circumstances she would have been a remarkable woman. Once, when asked to write her own life, she refused because it seemed to her like "a dazed rush on a railroad express;" she despaired of recovering "the incidental memories." So it fell to her sister, Mrs. Van De Grift Sanchez, to undertake the task. A difficult one, for there was always the fear that the personality of Mrs. Stevenson might seem to be overshadowed by that of her husband. But the author, in giving us many interesting details about Robert Louis Stevenson, has been careful to select for the most part only those in which his wife was closely concerned. "In my sister's character," she writes, "there were many strange contradictions, and I think sometimes this was a part of her attraction, for even after knowing her for years one could always count on some surprise, some unexpected contrast which went far in making up her fascinating personality." Contradictions undoubtedly were to be found in her; thus during her later years Mrs. Stevenson intensely desired quietness and peace, and yet her love for change of scene never seemed to abate; but she was constant in her devotion as a wife and in her staunchness as a friend. Some excellent illustrations are included in this volume, and the only fault I have to find with it is that it lacks an index.
In selecting his hero for No Defence (Hodder and Stoughton) from the mutineers at the Nore, it may be admitted that Sir Gilbert Parker displayed a certain originality. With regard, to the clou of his plot, however, I can hardly say so much. Melodramatic young lovers have (in fiction) gone to prison and worse rather than employ a defence involving distress to the ladies of their choice, from ages untold. Dyck Calhoon did it when he was wrongly indicted for the killing of Erris Boyne, who was a traitor in the pay of France and incidentally the father of the heroine Sheila; though she knew nothing of this and would have been badly worried if the hazards of a defended murder case had brought it to light. Do you call the motive sufficient? No more do I. However, Dyck goes to prison, emerging just in time to join the fleet and became a successful rebel under the Naval soviets established by Richard Parker. Subsequently he takes his ship into action on the legitimate side, earns the quasi-pardon of exile on parole in Jamaica, finds a fortune of Spanish treasure, quells a black rising, is cleared of the murder charge (by the wholly preposterous arrival in the island of the now aged lady who had really done the deed—exactly like the finale of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera) and marries the heroine. A breathless plot, by which, however, my own pulse remained unquickened. To be brutally frank, indeed, the telling seemed to me wholly lacking in precisely the qualities of dash and crescendo required to carry off such a tale. Costume romance that halts and looks backward soon loses my following.
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.
Airedales and collies, according to Lieut.-Colonel E. H. Richardson, are notable for a truly remarkable and admirable characteristic. They would honestly rather be at work than just playing round. All the same, no one guessed before the War what they, and many other kinds of dogs, were able and willing to do for their country in emergency on guard and sentry duty, and, most of all, as battle-field messengers. Moreover it took the genius of the man who of all the world knows most of their mind to discover it. His book, British War Dogs (Skeffington), is neither very brilliantly written nor particularly well arranged (it contains quite a lot of repetitions and a system of punctuation all its own), but it is of more than average interest. The author details the training of war-dogs—literally "all done by kindness"—and records many thrilling exploits and heroisms of his friends. Further, he states at some length some rather attractive views on dog metaphysics, of which one need say no more than that, if you wish to believe that your four-footed pal has a soul to be saved as well as a body to be patted, here is high authority to support you. I think what one misses all through these pages is the dog's own story. Without it one never seems to get quite to grips with the subject. What were Major's thoughts and feelings, for instance, when carrying a message twelve miles in an hour over all obstacles, dodging the shells as he ran? Not even Colonel Richardson can find a way to get a personal interview out of him.
All the Scandinavian countries have in the last twenty-five years produced novel-writers of power and distinction, but with the single exception of the Swedish authoress, Selma Lagerlöf, whose great novel, Gosta Berling, was awarded the Nobel Prize, and the Norwegian, Knut Hamsun, whose extremely unpleasant book, Hunger, was published in this country a score of years ago, few if any of them have been made accessible to the average English reader. Now the Gyldendal Publishing Company of Copenhagen has undertaken the neglected task of producing English translations of the best Scandinavian fiction, the latest of which is Guest the One-Eyed, by the Icelandic novelist, Gunnar Gunnarsson. It is not a particularly powerful narrative, and is marked by the characteristic inconsequence that tends to convert the Scandinavian novel into a mélange of family biographies; yet the author has been successful in weaving into his chapters some of the beauty and magic of his native land, lovely and forbidding by turns, and the charm and simplicity of its people. So when he makes Ormarr Orlygsson fling away the strenuous work of ten years and a promising career as a great violinist to return to a pastoral life on his father's Iceland estates, the step seems neither strange nor unnatural. So with the perfectly villainous Sera Ketill, who at the culmination of unparalleled infamies suddenly repents and becomes the far-wandering and well-beloved Guest, we do not feel anything strained in the author's assumption that in Iceland, at any rate, such things easily happen. Guest the One-Eyed is not a noteworthy novel in the sense that Gosta Berling was. Yet one would not have missed reading it.
It is interesting to watch heredity at play. Given the inclination to write, what kind of a first book should we get from the son of one of the most cultured and sensitive classical scholars and translators of this or any day and from the grandson of the painter of the Legend of the Briar Rose? The question is answered by Mr. Denis Mackail's What Next? (John Murray), which on examination turns out to be a farcical novel. The story has certain technical weaknesses, but these are forgotten in the excitements of the chase, for the main theme is the tracking down of a coarse capitalist who defrauded the hero of his fortune and did something very low against England. With the assistance of a new character in fiction, a super-valet, justice is done and we are all (except the coarse capitalist and his son) extremely happy. Mr. Mackail has invented some excellent scenes and he carries them off with gaiety and spirit. In his second book (and for the answer to What Next? we shall not, I imagine, have long to wait) he will amend certain little faults, not the least of which is a tendency to give us the most significant events in the form of retrospective narrative instead of letting us see them as they occur.
"Bedroom Suite and a reasonable Piano Wanted."—Provincial Paper.
It mustn't be "overstrung."