OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I do not think that even the most phlegmatic of Englishmen could read Francis and Riversdale Grenfell: a Memoir (Nelson) without a quickening of the pulses. This is not to suggest that Mr. John Buchan has sought to make an emotional appeal—indeed he has told the tale of these devoted brothers with a simplicity beyond praise—but it is a tale so fine that it must fill the heart, even of those who were strangers to them, with joy and pride. I beg you to read the memoir for yourselves, and see how and why it was that these twin brothers, from Eton onwards, radiated cheerfulness and a happy keenness wherever they went. "Neither," Mr. Buchan writes, "could be angry for long, and neither was capable of harshness or rancour. Their endearing grace of manner made a pleasant warmth in any society which they entered; and since this gentleness was joined to a perpetual glow of enthusiasm the effect was triumphant. One's recollection was of something lithe, alert, eager, like a finely-bred greyhound." Those of us who were not personally acquainted with Francis and Riversdale Grenfell will, after reading this Memoir and the Preface by their uncle, Field-Marshal Lord Grenfell, seem to know them intimately. Francis won the first V.C. gained in the War, but when he read the announcement of it in The Gazette his brother was already killed and his joy of life was quenched. "I feel," he wrote to his uncle, "that I know so many who have done and are doing so much more than I have been able to do for England. I also feel very strongly that any honour belongs to my regiment and not to me." In that spirit he met his death a few months later. In work and sport, in war or peace, the twins were ardent, generous and brave, and their deaths were as glorious as their lives were gracious and radiant. The profits of Mr. Buchan's book are to be devoted to the funds of the Invalid Children's Aid Association, in which the brothers were deeply interested.
There are certain tasks which, like virtue, carry their reward with them. No doubt Miss Eleanour Sinclair Rohde would be gratified if her book, A Garden of Herbs (Lee Warner), were to pass into several editions—as I trust it will—and receive commendation on every hand—as it surely must—but such results would be irrelevancies. She has already, I am convinced, tasted so much delight in the making of this, the most fragrant book that I ever read, in her delving and selecting, that nothing else matters. Not only is the book fragrant from cover to cover, but it is practical too. It tells us how our ancestors of not so many generations ago—in Stuart times chiefly—went to the herb garden as we go to the chemist's and the perfumer's and the spice-box, and gave that part of the demesne much of the honour which we reserve for the rock-garden, the herbaceous borders and the pergola. And no wonder, when from the herbs that grow there you can make so many of the lenitives of life—from elecampane a sovran tonic, and from purslane an assured appetiser, and from marjoram a pungent tea, and from wood-sorrel a wholesome water-gruel, and from gillyflowers "a comfortable cordial to cheer the heart," and from thyme an eye-lotion that will "enable one to see the fairies." Miss Rohde tells us all, intermingling her information with mottoes from old writers and new. Sometimes she even tells too much, for, though she says nothing as to how lovage got its pretty name, we are told that "lovage should be sown in March in any good garden soil." Did we need to be told that? Is it not a rule of life? "In the Spring a young man's fancy...."
To my mind, amongst the least forgettable books of the present year will be that to which Mr. Seton Gordon, F.Z.S., has given the title of The Land of the Hills and the Glens (Cassell). Mr. Gordon has already a considerable reputation as a chronicler of the birds and beasts (especially the less approachable birds) of his native Highlands. The present volume is chiefly the result of spare-moment activities during his service as coast-watcher among the Hebrides. Despite its unpropitious title, I must describe it without hyperbole as a production of wonder and delight. Of its forty-eight photographic illustrations not one is short of amazing. We are become used to fine achievement in this kind, but I am inclined to think Mr. Gordon goes one better, both in the "atmosphere" of his mountain pictures and in his studies of birds at home upon their nests. To judge, indeed, by the unruffled domesticity of these latter, one would suppose Mr. Gordon to have been regarded less as the prying ornithologist than as the trusted family photographer. I except the golden eagle, last of European autocrats, whose greeting appears always as a super-imperial scowl. Chiefly these happy results seem to have been due to a triumph of patient camouflage, concerning which the author suggests the interesting theory that birds do not count beyond unity, i.e., if two stalkers enter an ambush and one subsequently emerges, the vigilance of the feathered watchers is immediately relaxed. Should this be true, I can only hope that Mr. Gordon will get in another book before the spread of higher education increases his difficulties.
I should be inclined to call Mr. Norman Douglas our only example of the romantic satirist, though, unless you have some previous knowledge of his work, I almost despair of condensing the significance of this into a paragraph. For one thing the mere exuberance of his imagination is a rare refreshment in this restricted age. His latest book, with the stimulating title of They Went (Chapman and Hall), is an admirable example of this. Certainly no one else could have created this exotic city with its painted palaces and copper-encrusted towers, a vision of sea-mists and rainbows; or peopled it with so iridescent a company—the strange princess; the queen, her mother; the senile king who should have been (but wasn't) her father; Theophilus, the Greek artist; the philosophic old Druidess, and the dwarfs who "chanted squeaky hymns amid sacrifices of mushrooms and gold-dust." Perhaps this random quotation may hint at the fantastic nature of the tale; it can give no idea of the intelligence that directs it, mocking, iconoclastic, almost violently individual. Plot, I fancy, seldom troubles Mr. Douglas greatly; it happens, or it does not. Meanwhile he is far more concerned in fitting a double meaning (at least) to the most simple-sounding phrase. To sum up, They Went is perhaps not for idle, certainly not for unintelligent, reading; for those who can appreciate quality in a strange guise it will provide a feast of unfamiliar flavours that may well create an appetite for more.
That clever writer, Mr. A. P. Herbert, would lightly describe his story, The House by the River (Methuen), as a "shocker." But there are ways and ways of shocking. He might wish to show us the embarrassments of a fairly respectable member of the intellectual classes, living in a highly respectable environment, when he finds that he has committed homicide; and he might make the details as gruesome as he liked. But there was no need to shock the sensitive when he made his choice of the circumstances in which the poet, Stephen Byrne, inadvertently throttles his housemaid. It is a fault, too, that his scheme only interests him so far as it concerns Stephen and his society, and that the horror of the tragedy from what one may loosely call the victim's point of view does not seem to affect him at all. Otherwise, even for the sake of brevity, he could not so flippantly refer to the body, sewn in a sack and thrown into the river, as just "Eliza." He may argue that he never thought of the corpse as a real one and that the whole thing was merely an experiment in imaginative art; but his details are too well realised for that, and so is his admirable picture of the society of Hammerton Chase, W., a thin disguise for a riverside neighbourhood easy to recognise. I could never get myself quite to believe that Stephen's friend, Egerton, accessory after the fact, would so long and so tamely have borne the suspicion of it; but for the rest Mr. Herbert's study of his milieu shows a very intimate observation. If his Stephen, in whom the highest poetic talents are found tainted with a touch of coarseness, may not always be credible, the passion for self-expression which leads him on to versify his own experience in the form of a mediæval idyll, and so give himself away, is true to life. But my final impression of Mr. Herbert's book—he will perhaps think I am taking him too seriously—is that his many gifts and notably his humour, whose gaiety I prefer to its grimness, are here exercised on a rather unworthy theme.
MARTYRS OF SCIENCE:—THE INVENTOR OF TOFFEE.
Fashions for Proxy-Fathers.
"The bride entered the church on the arm of Mr. T. ——, of Happy Valley (who acted in loco parentis and was charmingly attired in crepe-de-chine)."
—South African Paper.
"Is there anyone amongst the thousands of men who will benefit who will be some an (please let the word remain, Mr. Editor) as not to show his appreciation in the same way?"
—Educational Paper.
Personally we think the Editor was a little too complaisant.
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Transcriber's Note: Page 361: Changed "corresponent" to "correspondent" A corresponent writes to a contemporary Page 362: Removed extraneous single closing quote. "Sir Harry Johnston's 'The Gay Donkeys' has passed its fifth edition in London.'"—_Australian Magazine_. Page 368: Changed "Pulman" to "Pullman" a ticket for a seat in the Pulman car |