OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I doubt if Messrs. Asquith, Churchill, Edmond, Lloyd George, or even Colonel Seely have leisure these days for novel-reading, and, if they have, they might be reluctant to devote it to The Ulsterman (Hutchinson). It does not treat of their favourite subject and, so far from offering any solution of extant difficulties, adds yet another complication to the Home Rule question. Everything from revenue to religion having been discussed, no one but Mr. F. Frankfort Moore has thought to deal with the love interest. What is to be done, the tale suggests, for the young lovers in the North whose families are loyal to different sovereigns? Ned was the son of a stalwart, if somewhat snobbish, adherent of His Majesty King George the Fifth; Kate was the daughter of a would-be subject of the Divine Devlin, and things could never have gone well with them had it not been for the intervention of Ned's uncle, who had been so long out of Ireland that he had ceased to cherish any keen feelings in the dispute, and had been so used by his brother in the past that he was only too glad of the opportunity of spiting him by getting his son married to a Papist. But there are other cases, where no such facilities are at hand, and, if Mr. Moore's picture is a true one, it must go hard with such couples. What is to be done for them? Are they to be told to wait six years and see? I hope not, for whatever they might see in the period could have no interest for them? This matrimonial difficulty is one, at any rate, which, as all must agree, even that reputed panacea, the General Election, cannot be expected to cure.
I think I never met a book more "racily" written—in a special sense of the word—than The Progress of Prudence (Mills and Boon). Horses and hounds play so large a part therein as almost to be the protagonists; certainly they are the chief influencing forces in the development of the heroine, from the day when she attempts to purchase one of the pack, under the impression that they are being exhibited for sale, to that other day, some time later, when her own entry finishes second in the Grand National. You will notice that Prudence had progressed considerably during the interval. Her early ignorance was due to the fact that she had only just developed from a slum factory-girl into a landed proprietress. The father of Prudence had been a miser; and, when he died in the attic where he and the girl had miserably lived, he left her a fortune, and instructions to spend it on real estate. So Mr. W. F. Hewer starts us on a pretty problem—how, in these circumstances, will Prudence get on? Of course, she gets on excellently; and soon is as keen a rider to hounds and a judge of horseflesh as any in a neighbourhood where those accomplishments are held in high esteem. Equally of course there are men, nay lords, who fall under the spell of her attraction; but when I tell you that the groom-and-general-horse-master, whom Prudence engaged, and under whose tuition she so prospered, was a gentleman who had seen better days, you will probably have already guessed the end of the tale. This is reached after some scenes of pleasant humour and sentiment, and after I don't know how many runs with hounds, given with a minuteness of detail that shows Mr. Hewer to be a practised master of his subject. The same remark applies to the various meetings at which Prudence (surely a little oddly named?) sees her colours carried to victory. Altogether a stablesque romance that should appeal irresistibly to its own public.
The Mailing of Blaise is Mr. A. S. Turberville's first novel, and it is easy to understand why Messrs. Sidgwick and Jackson have drawn attention to this fact. For the work reveals a great ignorance of, or a supreme contempt for, the art of construction, and its theme is very hackneyed; but at the same time Mr. Turberville observes so keenly that I groan in the spirit when I think of so much labour misspent on a subject unworthy of his talent. Here we have a boy with the artistic temperament born into the house of one Brown, a Cheapside tailor with puritanical prejudices and the mind of a sparrow. He and his rather futile wife were enough to make anyone rebellious; but too much irony is spent upon them, and it would have been less difficult to sympathise with Philip if his parents' point of view had been more fairly stated. After many domestic frictions the son rushes away from London and lives a Bohemian life (extremely well described) on the Continent, until he marries a delightful and penniless wife. All the marks for charm go to Athénée, unless a few of them can be spared for their child, Blaise, who had, or so it seems to me, great trouble in thrusting his way upon the scenes. Philip and Athénée were going to do great things for their son, but unfortunately both of them were killed while he was still a little child, and he had to be retrieved to the bosom of the Brown family. The change from freedom to rigorous conventionality did not suit poor Blaise, and I could not be very sorry when he annoyed most of the Browns by catching measles and petrified all of them by not recovering. Still, he lived long enough to get his name into the title, though this, I feel, was a bit of favouritism.
The Way Home, by Basil King (Methuen), describes the spiritual wanderings of a New Yorker, Charlie Grace, destined for the ministry; rejecting it, because of his disillusionment through the practice of the professing Christians about him, in favour of a hunt for the money which alone he finds can earn respect; adopting in business the inverted Christian motto, "Down the other fellow before he downs you"; drifting in and out of loves clean and sordid; and finally, broken in health, discovering the way, through the bitterness of a deeper disillusionment, back to an estranged wife; and yet another way to somewhere near the faith of his childhood and the peace of resignation. Barely is so serious a theme treated by a novelist with such simplicity, sincerity and eloquent reticence. Nobody need fear the dulness known as "pi-jaw." The story is full of interest. The characterisation, extraordinarily careful and balanced, is conveyed not only in description but in the cleverly-constructed dialogue. It is part of the author's skill to represent Hilda, Charlie's wife, with her charming reserve and dignity, as not a little difficult and exacting, and so to divide our sympathies fairly between the two. There are many other living characters, of which old Remnant, the sexton, with his queerly American business notions of religion and dislike of the "riff-raff," is too nicely absurd and human not to have been drawn from life. There is very good stuff indeed in this book, which seems to me in every way an advance upon The Street Called Straight.