(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
All the world recognises Sir Martin Conway as a paramount peak-compeller and explorer of resource, while superior persons, like this learned clerk, know him as an effective dilettante in the realms of art. In The Sport of Collecting (Fisher Unwin), with a general candour, but a specific, canny (and of course rather tiresome and disappointing) reticence as to prices, he gives us, in effect, a treatise on the craft of curio-hunting, gaily illustrated by anecdotes of the bagging of bronze cats in Egypt, Foppas and Giorgiones in Italian byways, Inca jewellery in Peru, and heaven knows what and where beside. The authentic method, apparently, is to mark down your quarry as you enter the dealer's stockade, to pay no visible attention to it but bargain furiously over some pretentious treasure which you don't in the least want; later, admitting with regret your inability to afford the price, to suggest that as a memento of your pleasant visit you might be disposed to carry off that odd trifle in the corner over there; then, bursting with hardly controlled excitement to see your priceless primitive wrapped in brown paper and thrown into your cab, to drive to your quarters, hug yourself ecstatically and boast to your friends and fellow-conspirators about it. Shooting the driven tiger from the howdah is quite evidently nothing to this royal sport of dealer-spoofing, especially when the dealer knows a thing or two, as Sir Martin bravely confesses he sometimes does. I wonder if this arch-collector, when he discovered his best piece, Allington Castle (of which he discourses with such pleasant and knowledgable enthusiasm), turned a contemptuous back on the battlements and made a casual offer for the moat. A most diverting book.
The name of Madame Yoi Pawlowska is new to me; but if her previous books were anything like so good as A Child Went Forth (Duckworth) I am heartily sorry to have missed them. There have been many books written about childhood, and the end of them is not yet in sight; but I have known none that so successfully attains the simplicity that should belong to the subject. You probably identify the title as a quotation from Walt Whitman, about the child that went forth every day, "and the first object that he looked upon, that object he became." The child in the present instance was one Anna, who went forth in the Hungarian village where she was born, and saw and became a number of picturesque and amusing things, all of which her narrator has quite obviously herself recalled, and sat down in excellent fashion. I don't want you to run away with the idea that Anna was a good or even a pleasant child. Anything but that. The things she did and said furnished a more than sufficient reason for her father to threaten again and again to send her to school in England. The book ends with the realisation of this, which had always been to Anna as a kind of shadowy horror in the background of life. We are not told which particular English school was favoured with her patronage, nor how she got on there. I was too interested in her career not to be sorry for this omission; and that shall be my personal tribute to her attractions.
There are few persons who can write love stories with a surer and more tender touch than Katharine Tynan. So I expect that many gentle souls will share my pleasure in the fact that she has just put together a volume of studies in this kind under the amiable title of Lovers' Meetings (Werner Laurie). Personally my only complaint about them is that in a short story lovers' meetings mean the journey's end, and I wished to spend a longer time in the society of many of the agreeable characters of Mrs. Hinkson's studies. Take for example the first—and my own favourite—of the series. There really isn't anything special in it—and yet there is everything. What happened was that Challoner, a confirmed bachelor, went to the Dublin quay to see off a friend on the boat to Holyhead. The friend didn't turn up; but a young governess, with whom Challoner had only the slightest previous acquaintance, was going by the boat—so Challoner went with her, and they were married, and lived happy ever after. You may think that this doesn't sound very probable, and perhaps it doesn't; but it is so charmingly told—Challoner's growing delight in the initial mistake that confuses the pair as man and wife is so alluringly developed, and the whole little episode of twenty pages has such a way with it as to take your credulity a willing captive. This was my individual choice; but there are fifteen others of various styles; some mild detective studies, and a pathetic little ghost story that recalls to me one of Kipling's best. Altogether an attractive collection, very far above many such that have appeared lately.
Mr. Wilkinson Sherren, in his new novel, The Marriage Tie (Grant Richards), is very serious about the hypocrisies of the virtuous and the injustice of our moral conventions. Other writers before him have been serious about these things, and I do not know that Mr. Sherren has anything very new to say. I must also confess to thinking that a sense of humour would have assisted him greatly in his task. Nevertheless his readers are certain to sympathise with his beautiful heroine in her dismay at her unfortunate illegitimacy, and she is a good girl with a great regard for the feelings of all her friends, even though she expresses this regard a little stiffly. Mr. Sherren uses his background well, and many of his scenes would be effective if only his characters were debarred from dialogue. It would be, I am sure, beyond Johanna's powers, were she limited to the deaf and dumb alphabet, to convey such a speech as this: "I wish you to consent to your father's suggestions, dear. By doing so you do not injure me, and you cheer his declining days. I am sure your dear mother wishes it." Her methods would become something much brusquer and more direct. I doubt if Mr. Sherren is at his best in a novel. An essay on the confused issues of illegitimacy and the punishment of the children for the sins of their fathers would show him, I am convinced, at his ease; but dialogue and a beautiful heroine are an embarrassment to him.
In a volume of tales and sketches entitled The Mercy of the Lord (Heinemann) Mrs. Flora Annie Steel revives pleasant memories of her Indian romances once beloved by me. In these new stories everybody dies—if Europeans, with the latest slang upon their lips; if natives, with a lusty invocation to Allah. Mrs. Steel does not believe in letting the reader know what she is about, and there is generally something up her sleeve. Each story has its own little puzzle, and, if the puzzles are not always solved by the end of the tale, one can make all kinds of pleasant conjectures as to what really did happen, and Mrs. Steel's mysterious hints and shrugs and fingers on the lip do beyond question assist her atmosphere. I like best of the stories "Salt of the Earth," a most moving tale, beautifully told. Always Mrs. Steel is interesting, and I hope these sketches are only little preludes to another of her thrilling romances.