PLEASURES OF THE POINT TO POINT.
Good and encouraging Samaritan (helping sportsman to remount after immersion in the brook). "Next old bruck be heaps bigger'n this un, and he do have a turrible lot o' water in he just now."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Dodo the Second (Hodder and Stoughton), by E. F. Benson. Doesn't the very title-page sound like a leaf from your dead past? I protest that for my own part I was back on hearing it in the naughty nineties, the very beginning of them indeed (the fact that I was also back in the school-room did little to impair the thrill) and agog to read the clever, audacious book that all the wonderful people who lived in those days were talking about. And behold! here they all are again—not the people who talked, but the audacious characters. Only the trouble is that we have all in the interval become so much more audacious ourselves that their efforts in this kind seem to fail to produce the old impression. This is by no means to say that I didn't enjoy Dodo the Second. I enjoyed it very much indeed; and so will you. For one thing, it was the jolliest experience to recognize so many old friends—Dodo herself (now of course the Princess Waldenech), and the wicked Prince, and the rest of them. Of Dodo at least it may be said, moreover, that she has matured credibly; this middle-aging lady is exactly what the siren of twenty years ago would have developed into, still beautiful, still alluring, and still (I must add) capable of infecting everyone else in a conversation with exactly her own trick of cheap and rather fatiguing brilliance. Added to all this there is now a new generation of characters, several of whom are quite pleasant company; for them and for one very impressive piece of descriptive work in the account of a gathering storm, this Twenty Years After may be heartily welcomed. Indeed one leaves Dodo of 1914 so vigorously alive that I am not without hope of her turning up yet again as a grandmother in 1934.
I have discovered from The Rebellion of Esther (Alston Rivers) why it is that my sympathies, usually at the disposal of insurgents, are withheld from the Suffragette. Anyone who is genuinely out to assert a principle, at the cost of quarrelling with established authority, has a certain merit of altruism which even the most law-abiding may count as a mitigating circumstance, however unworthy the end in view; but the egoism of a young lady (like Miss Margaret Legge's heroine) who in whatever cause defies all institutions with the latent motive of asserting herself will induce even the most lawless to support warmly the powers of suppression. Miss Esther Ballinger had a number of real grievances, but her point of view was typified in her attitude towards the illicit and incidental motherhood of one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it to be "a courageous stand against conventional morality," which it just possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak surrender to immediate desires, as much more probably it was in fact. From my knowledge of Esther she had but one reason for expressing this opinion, and that was the personal pleasure of saying the unorthodox thing, an element which accounts for much of the unconventionality of that intellectual class of townsfolk figuring broadcast in the book, and largely discounts the value of its criticisms. I suspected the same flaw in her expressed convictions on religious, political and feminist matters, and I shouldn't be surprised to learn, though there is no hint of it, that she stopped short of complete revolt in her own big affair because she realized instinctively that even a passionate pose may lose its attractions if it has to be maintained for a lifetime. Miss Margaret Legge, though alive to the young person's faults, regards her as, on the whole, deep-thinking and right-minded; and I would not for a moment have our personal difference of opinion discourage anybody from reading a carefully studied and ably written novel.
The attitude of Militarist to Pacifist has the makings of a very pretty comedy. When the Mystics (with the Friends and the Tolstoians) were evangelical enough to preach their message of peace even to the point of non-resistance, they were broadly scouted as sentimental and idealistic idiots, and reminded of a nature red in tooth and claw rampant in this most sordid of all possible worlds. Now that the Rationalists take up the case against war from another end, they are denounced as squalid souls, with a greengrocer's outlook, morbidly anxious about the price of peas and potatoes, and urged to remember that not by bread alone doth man live. In The Foundations of International Polity (Heinemann), a series of lectures developing phases of the argument of the Great Illusion, Mr. Norman Angell incidentally deals with this greengrocery business. Nobody with knowledge of his shrewd and vigorous method will be surprised that without bluster or rhetoric he establishes a very clear verdict of acquittal. One has always the impression that the rationalist in him is deliberately repressing the mystic, lest his case be weakened by a suspicion of sentimentalism. For it must be obvious that not a cold, still less a squalid, but a generous purpose alone could inspire the fervour that flashes between the reasoned lines. When Mr. Angell pleads that policy is directed towards "self-interest," an easily misunderstandable pronouncement, it is no mean self-interest he has in view but a quality of high civilising and social value. He argues cogently that defence is not incompatible with, but rather a part of, rational pacifism, which is the protest against coercion; re-emphasises the difference between soldiering and policing; and illustrates the essential shallowness of that venerable tag, "Human nature doesn't change," by pointing to the decay of the duello, and the decline of the grill as a means of reasoning with heretics and witches. Were this learned Clerk a politician (which Heaven avert!), he would move for yet another increment to the Supplementary Navy Estimates—to wit, the price of a battleship to be expended in the distribution of this fighting pacifist's books to all journalists, attachés, clergymen, bazaar-openers, club oracles, professors, head-masters and other obvious people in both Germany and Britain.