"On Friday and Saturday the shops will be open until the usual hours, although lights will not be visible outside. Customers are requested to open the doors to obtain admittance."
Rugby Advertiser.
And not to climb through the windows, or come down the chimney, please.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I forget just how long it is since Mr. Arnold Bennett united Edwin Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways in the bonds of matrimony. Time goes so fast these days that I met them again, and Auntie Hamps, and Maggie, and Clara, and the rest of the Three Towns company, as after an enormous interval. They themselves however have changed in nothing, except perhaps that the habit of introspection and their phenomenal capacity for self-astonishment have become more pronounced. "He thought, 'I am I; this wife is my wife; and if I put one foot before the other I shall go inevitably forward.' And it seemed to him stupendous." I do not say that this is a quotation, but it represents a habit of mind that is in danger of growing, upon Edwin especially. He seems never able to share my own entire confidence in Mr. Bennett's efficiency as creator. Of course nothing very much happens in the course of These Twain (Methuen). It is simply a study of conjugal existence in its effect upon character; briefly, how to be happy though married. In the end Edwin seems to hit upon a sort of solution with the discovery that injustice is a natural condition to be accepted rather than resented. So one leaves the two with some prospect, a little insecure, of happiness. Needless to say the study of both Edwin and Hilda is marvellously penetrating and minute, almost to the point of defeating its own end. I had, not for the first time with Mr. Bennett's characters, a feeling that I knew them too well to have complete belief in them. They become not portraits but anatomical diagrams. But for all that the accuracy of his observation is undeniable. One sees it in those minor personalities of the tale whom he is content to record from without. Auntie Hamps, for example, and Clara are two masterpieces of portraiture. You must read These Twain; but if possible take time over it.
American improvements are the wonder of the world. America seems to have the knack of taking hold of old stuff and turning it into something full of pep and punch. You remember a play called Hamlet? No? Well, there is a scene in it, rather an impressive scene, where a man chats with his father's ghost. Mr. Robert W. Chambers, America's brightest novelist, has taken much the same idea and put a bit of zip in it. In his latest work, Athalie (Appleton), the heroine, who is clairvoyant, sees the ghost of the hero's mother, who prevented the hero from marrying her, and cuts it. "A hot proud colour flared in her cheeks as she drew quietly aside and stood with averted head to let her pass." In all my researches in modern fiction I cannot recall a more dramatic and satisfying situation. It is, I believe, the first instance on record of a spectre being snubbed. Shakspeare never thought of anything like that. As regards the other aspects of Athalie, the book, I cannot see what else a reviewer can say but that it is written by Mr. Chambers. The world is divided into those who read every line Mr. Chambers writes, irrespective of its merits, and those who would require to be handsomely paid before reading a paragraph by him. A million eager shop-girls, school-girls, chorus-girls, factory-girls and stenographers throughout America are probably devouring Athalie at this moment. My personal opinion that the book is a potboiler, turned out on a definite formula, like all of Mr. Chambers' recent work, to meet a definite demand, cannot deter a single one of them from sobbing over it. As for that section of the public which remembers The King in Yellow and Cardigan, it has long ago become resigned to Mr. Chambers' decision to take the cash and let the credit go, and has ceased to hope for a return on his part to the artistic work of his earlier period, when he wrote novels as opposed to Best Sellers.