(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The German War Book (Murray) is a work in whose authenticity many of us would have refused to believe this time last year. It is a pity indeed that it was not then in the hands of all those who still clung to the theory that the Prussian was a civilised and humane being. However, now that everyone can read it, translated and with a wholly admirable preface by Professor J. H. Morgan, it is to be hoped that the detestable little volume will have a wide publicity. True, it can add little to our recent knowledge of the enemy of mankind; but it is something to have his guiding principles set down upon the authority of his own hand. Cynical is hardly an adequate epithet for them; indeed I do not know that the word exists that could do full justice to the compound of hypocrisy and calculated brutishness that makes up this manual. It may at first strike the reader as surprising to find himself confronted by sentiments almost, one might say, of moderation and benevolence. He will ask with astonishment if the writer has not, after all, been maligned. Before long, however, he will discover that all this morality is very carefully made conditional, and that the conditions are wide. In short, as the Preface puts it, the peculiar logic of the book consists in "ostentatiously laying down unimpeachable rules, and then quietly destroying them by debilitating exceptions." For example, on the question of exposing the inhabitants of occupied territory to the fire of their own troops—the now notorious Prussian method of "women and children first"—the War Book, while admitting pious distaste for such practice, blandly argues that its "main justification" lies in its success. Thus, with sobs and tears, like the walrus, the Great General Staff enumerates its suggested list of serviceable infamies. At the day of reckoning what a witness will this little book be! Out of their own mouths they stand here condemned through all the ages.
Mrs. Humphry Ward, chief of novelists-with-a-purpose, vehemently eschews the detachment of the Art-for-Art's-Saker, while a long and honourable practice has enabled her to make her stories bear the burden of her theses much more comfortably than would seem theoretically possible. Delia Blanchflower (Ward, Lock) is a suffrage novel, dedicated with wholesome intent to the younger generation, and if one compares the talented author's previous record of uncompromising, and indeed rather truculent, anti-suffrage utterances one may note (with approval or dismay) a considerable broadening of view on the vexed question. For her attack here is delivered exclusively on the militant position. Quite a number of decent folk in her pages are suffragistically inclined, and there is a general admission that the eager feet that throng the hill of the Vote are not by any means uniformly shod in elastic-sided boots, if one may speak a parable. It is a very notable admission and does the writer honour; for such revisions are rare with veteran and committed campaigners. The story is laid in the far-away era of the burnings of cricket pavilions and the lesser country houses. Delia is a beautiful goddess-heiress of twenty-two, with eyes of flame and a will of steel, a very agreeable and winning heroine. Her tutor, Gertrude Marvell, the desperate villain of the piece, a brilliant fanatic (crossed in love in early youth), wins the younger girl's affections and inspires and accepts her dedication of self and fortune to the grim purposes of the "Daughters of Revolt." Mark Winnington, her guardian, appointed by her father to counteract the tutor's baleful influence, finds both women a tough proposition. For Gertrude has brains to back her fanaticism, and Delia is a spirited handful of a ward. Loyalty to her consecration and to her friend outlast her belief in the methods of the revolting ones. Her defences are finally ruined by Cupid, for Mark is a handsome athletic man of forty or so, a paragon of knightly courtesy and persuasive speech and silences, and compares very favourably with the policemen in Parliament Square. Poor Gertrude makes a tragic end in a fire of her own kindling, so that the moral for the younger generation cannot be said to be set forth in ambiguous terms.
Arundel (Fisher Unwin) is one of those stories that begins with a Prologue; and as this was only mildly interesting I began to wonder whether I was going to be as richly entertained as one has by now a right to expect from Mr. E. F. Benson. But it appeared that, like a cunning dramatist, he was only waiting till the audience had settled into their seats; when this was done, up went the curtain upon the play proper, and we were introduced to Arundel itself, an abode of such unmixed and giddy joy that I have been chortling over the memory of it ever since. Arundel was the house at Heathmoor where lived Mrs. Hancock and her daughter Edith; and Mrs. Hancock herself, and her house and her neighbourhood and her car and her servants and her friends—all, in fact, that is hers, epitomize the Higher Suburbia with a delicate and merciless satire that is beyond praise. I shall hurry over the actual story, because that, though well and absorbingly told, is of less value than the setting. Next door to the Hancocks lived a blameless young man called Edward, whom for many reasons, not least because their croquet-lawns, so to speak, "marched," Mrs. Hancock had chosen as her daughter's husband. So blamelessly, almost without emotion, these were betrothed, walking among the asparagus beds on a suitable May afternoon "ventilated by a breath of south-west wind and warmed by a summer sun," and the course of their placid affection would have run smooth enough but for the sudden arrival, out of the Prologue, of Elizabeth, fiercely alive and compelling, the ideal of poor Edward's dreams. Naturally, therefore, there is the devil to pay. But, good as all this is, it is Mrs. Hancock who makes the book, first, last and all the time. She is a gem of purest ray serene, and my words that would praise her are impotent things. Only unlimited quotation could do justice to her sleek self-deception and little comfortable meannesses. In short, as a contemporary portrait, the mistress of Arundel seems to be the best thing that Mr. Benson has yet given us; worth—if he will allow me to say so—a whole race of Dodos. For comparison one turns instinctively to Jane Austen; and I can sound no higher praise.
Love never seems to run a smooth course for girls of the name of Joan; their affairs of heart, whatever the final issue may be, have complex beginnings and make difficult, at times dismal, progress. I attribute the rejection of the great novel of my youth to the fact that the heroine, a rosy-cheeked girl with no more serious problems in life than the organisation of mixed hockey matches, was ineptly given that unhappy name. Miss Mary Agnes Hamilton's Joan Traquair is true to the type. From the start she is handicapped by a bullying father, an invalid sister, a lack of means and an excess of artistic temperament, the last of these being not just a casual tendency to picture galleries and the opera, but the kind of restless passion which causes people to prefer sunsets to meals and to neglect their dress. In due course she falls in love with a man called Sebastian, another name which, if less familiar, is yet a sufficient warning to the world that its owner is bound to be a nuisance on the hearth. This Sebastian was an artist, ambitious and of course poor; worse, he had a touch of genius and—worst of all—he knew it. Nevertheless Joan became his wife, supposing that this was just the sort of man to make her happy. Instead, he made her thoroughly miserable, at any rate for a good long time; but I doubt if any reader, even with all the facts before him, will anticipate exactly how he did it. I certainly didn't myself, although I feel now that I ought to have done. The point of Yes (Heinemann) is both new and true; I recommend the book with confidence to all interested in the Joans and Sebastians of this world.
Not though the soldier knew Someone had blundered.