Perspiring Sportsman (who has been riding in fourteen-stone point-to-point race). "Well, thank goodness that's the last of the season!"
Friend. "Thought you liked it."
Perspiring Sportsman. "Yes, if it weren't for the wasting you've got to do to ride the weight?"
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Doubtless you will think, as I did at first, that the title of The Priceless Thing (Stanley Paul) has reference to love or something intense like that. Far from it. Not in fifty guesses would you be likely to discover that its real meaning is an autograph of the late William Shakspeare. One knew already that Mrs. Maud Stepney Rawson could write a vigorous and bustling tale. If I have a complaint to make against The Priceless Thing it is indeed that it suffers from some superfluity of plot, and what approaches a plethora of villains, real or supposed. For this reason it is a story more than usually hard to condense fairly into a paragraph. Briefly, however, the P. T., which was the peculiar treasure of the noble line of Annerslie, lived in a case in the library of their ancestral home. The heroine, Anstice, a relation of the Family, was employed by My Lord as librarian. When I tell you, moreover, that Anstice had run away from her own father on finding that he was an expert manufacturer of literary forgeries, and that her circle of friends included an American blackmailer, a curiosity dealer and a mad Italian who was even better at the forgery business than her own father, you will perceive that the poor girl was likely to find her situation "some job." I could not begin to tell you what really happened. Towards the end there had been so much mystery, and the story had become such a palimpsest of forged signatures, that I myself knew no more than Lord Annerslie in which to believe. But I think we both had the upholding conviction that an affair of this kind was bound to come out all right in the end. Which indeed it did; leaving all the virtuous characters abundantly satisfied, a feeling that will, I am sure, be shared by Mrs. Rawson's maze-loving public.
Robert Tressall was a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Grant Richards), and fell into the hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how long it will be before another job comes along. Nobody who hadn't lived exclusively in this hard environment could have written with such candour and intensity. Mr. Tressall has avoided altogether the pretentiousness and literary affectation that betrayed, for example, Mr. H. G. Wells' bathchairman, Meeks. The earlier part of the book is better than the later, where the propagandist ousts the chronicler. The exposition of Socialist doctrine is made with a considerable if a crude skill. It is disfigured with certain familiar limitations; the author can recognise no work except that done with the hands; and, whether by unhappy accident of actual circumstance or through defect of temperament, he sees his employers with a disproportionate bitterness that somewhat discounts his indictment, while he views his fellow-workmen from rather a disdainful height. But The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life at its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties.