OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
If you only like listening to a talker with whom you agree, who is of your type and school, then don't bother with What is Coming? (Cassell), which purports to be H. G. Wells's forecasts of things after the War. It's perhaps hardly so serious as that, but just good speculative talk, the kind that offers the first thing that is signalled to the lips from a quick reflective brain without pauses to consider objections by the way. Yet perhaps, after all, the author cannot be dismissed too lightly as a prophet. He did see further into the air than most, at the time when the experts were blandly proving all sorts of impossibilities; and, as he recalls, he made a lucky shot in foretelling the immobility of trench warfare. He still believes in the Bloch deadlock, and gives victory to the Allies merely for better staying power. For British training and method he naturally has nothing but scorn, which takes him further than most of us can follow him. At least when he says that the university-trained class has been found "under the fiery test of war an evasive, temporising class of people, individualistic, ungenerous and unable either to produce or obey vigorous leadership," he badly needs to justify the confining of that diagnosis to that particular class. And when he further says of British administration of subject territories that "the British are a race coldly aloof. They have nothing to give a black people and no disposition to give"—well, it isn't an obvious truth. These are blemishes of a kind to which a quick-thinking man, a little too anxious to set everybody right by wholesale methods, is naturally subject. But you will miss a good deal of fresh-air sanity, of illumination (for the man can see and find the vivid phrase to express his vision) on war and peace and education and feminism and internationalism and citizenship, if you let yourself be alienated by such lapses. So please don't.
"If only those old things could speak, what stories, etc., etc.!" Most of us, at one time or another, have endured or inflicted that well-intentioned banality. And here is Miss Marjorie Bowen, most skilful of historical romancers, setting out to tell us precisely what stories. She calls her volume Shadows of Yesterday (Smith, Elder), explaining in a preface that is by no means the least attractive chapter that they are supposed to be the histories attached to a collection of antique oddments in a little Italian museum. No one who remembers with what persuasive charm Miss Bowen has handled her long costume novels will be astonished at the atmosphere with which she manages to invest these little episodes; a ring, a jewel, a Charles II. jug—these are the materials out of which by aid of fancy she recreates the past. Of the lot, I myself should give the palm to the jug's story, a spirited little thing enough, in which a country maid, awaiting in a cottage the coming of a lover, whom she knows as "Lord Anthony," meets instead my Lady Castlemaine, who tells her that the defaulting swain is really His Majesty, and explains that there exist (to put it tactfully) certain prior engagements of the royal affection. The end is a brilliant comedy stroke, which I will not spoil by anticipation for you. It is this capacity for the unexpected that saves Miss Bowen from the danger, obviously inherent in her plan, of being too tightly bound down by the need of forcing her catalogue of relics into prominence. She has done larger work, but nothing more agreeable.
I could not, if I would, apply quite the customary severities of criticism to Twilight (Hutchinson). It is too personal, and the death of its author, the clever woman who elected to be known as Frank Danby, is too fresh in memory for me to regard it with detachment. It is one of the tragedies of literature that only in her last two books, this and the one that preceded it, did the author give the world a taste of her true quality. There is evidence in Twilight of gifts that might well have raised its writer to a place among the greatest. But frankly it is not possible to consider it apart from the circumstances of its origin. Two stories there are in it: one personal, autobiography at its most intimate; the other a work of imagination. It is supposed that the writer, a woman novelist, wrecked with disease and the drugs that bring endurance, goes down into the country and there becomes obsessed with the history of another woman, in circumstances much like to her own, who had once lived and loved in the same remote house. So, side by side, you have the two tragedies, one of the sick bed, one of the soul, both told with an incisive and compelling art, and with a realism often painful. But, as at once a document of fact and imagination, the book is perhaps unique. Certainly no one can read it without feeling that the death of its author has left literature poorer by the loss of a personality whose real power was yet to be shown.
The demand for an eleventh edition of Lord Ernest Hamilton's book, The First Seven Divisions (Hurst and Blackett) is no more than a deserved tribute to what has already taken rank as the best history, so far, of the most critical period of the World War. Lord Ernest Hamilton writes as one having authority. He tells the facts as he knows them—facts in many cases hitherto undisclosed, and given here with adequate detail and just; enough of explanation to make the account clear even to the most unmilitary reader. There has been no attempt by the writer to embellish his theme. It remains a simple story of sheer heroism, told in a straightforward soldierly manner—and the reading of it must make the most unemotional Briton feel the thrill of pride and pity and gratitude. "Nothing," says the writer, "can ever surpass, as a story of simple sublime pluck, the history of the first three months of England's participation in the Great War." This is what you can follow day by day in these pages. There are many new maps in the present edition, which greatly help to explain the situation, as it developed from Mons, through the battle of the Marne, to the trenches before Ypres. I can only say that I hope there will soon be few school libraries in which this most inspiring book has not an honourable place.