Grannie. "And wit's the matter wi' me right leg, Doctor?"
Doctor. "Oh, just old age, Mrs. MacDougall."
Grannie. "Hoots, man; ye're haverin'. The left leg's hale and soond, and they're baith the same age."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
To read An Englishman Looks at the World (Cassell), a collection of "unrestrained remarks on contemporary matters"—aeroplanes, Chesterton and Belloc, libraries, labour unrest, the Great State, and the like—by Mr. H. G. Wells, is to be delighted or infuriated according to your natural habit of mind. If established in tolerable comfort in a world which you judge, for all its blemishes, to be on the whole rather well run, you will resent exceedingly this pert young man (for Mr. Wells is still astonishingly young) with his preposterous eagerness, his insane passion for questioning and tinkering and most unfairly putting you and your kind in the wrong. You will no doubt find excellent grounds for doubting his ability to reconstruct; for suspecting what you will feel to be his pretentious breadth of view, his assumed omniscience. But if, on the other hand, thinking life in your sombre moments a nightmare of imbecility and in your more expansive moments a high adventure of immeasurable possibilities, you are straitened between cold despairs and immense hopes, you will readily forgive this irreverent, self-confident critic-journalist any crude things he may have said in his haste for sake of his flashes of perception, his happily descriptive phrases, his inspiring anticipations, his uncalculating candour, and above all his generous preoccupation with things that matter enormously. "What we prosperous people who have nearly all the good things of life and most of the opportunities have to do now is to justify ourselves." That is a sentiment and a challenge repeated or implied throughout the book. This Englishman looking at his world looks with quick eyes. He is himself so intensely interested that he can only fail to interest such as find his whole attitude an outrage upon their finally adopted convictions and conventions.
Have you noticed the way in which certain stories bear the mark of a particular place or period? If ever there was a novel that vociferated "Cambridge" in every line, The Making of a Bigot (Hodder and Stoughton) is that one. Well indeed may its paper wrapper display a drawing of King's Chapel, though as a matter of fact only the action of the first chapter passes in the University town. Miss Rose Macaulay has based her story upon a quaintly attractive theme. Her hero, Eddy Oliver, is a type new to fiction. Eddy saw good in everything to such an extent that he allowed himself to be persuaded into active sympathy with the aims of practically everyone who was aiming at anything, however mutually irreconcilable the aims might be. "He went along with all points of view so long as they were positive; as soon as condemnation or rejection came in, he broke off." Consequently, as you may imagine, his career was pleasantly involved. It embraced the Church, various forms of Socialism, and at one time and another some devotion to the ideals of Nationalism, Disarmament, Imperial Service and the Primrose League. But please don't imagine that all this is told in a spirit of comedy. Miss Macaulay is, if anything, almost too dry and serious; this, and her disproportionate affection for the word "rather," a little impaired my own enjoyment of the book. It contains some happily sketched types of modernity—all of them Cambridge to the back-bone; and Eddy's final discovery (which makes the bigot), that one can't achieve anything in life without some wholesale hatreds, is genuine enough—more so than the system of card-cutting by which he settles his convictions. Miss Macaulay has already, I am told, won a thousand pounds with a previous book; this one proves her the possessor of a gift of originality that is both rare and refreshing.