OUR VILLAGE FIRE BRIGADE.
Amateur Engineer (who has burst the boiler and shouted to the driver to stop). "Get out the hose quick! The engine's afire."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
From what is known of the tastes of Sir Ian Hamilton it might have been supposed that he wrote his Gallipoli Diary (Arnold) lest his pen-hand should lose its cunning while wielding the sword. Indeed he tells us of a rumour among his officers "that I spend my time composing poetry, especially during our battles." But that he did not write for the sake of writing must be clear to anyone who reads the book, even if the author had not declared his motive in the preface. Here he admits that, though "soldiers think of nothing so little as failure," it was in fact the thought of possible failure that determined him, at the very start, to prepare from day to day his defence. Perhaps this is not quite the attitude of one who stakes all upon the great chance. In another significant passage of self-revelation he tells us how, on a tour of inspection in Egypt, he met Rupert Brooke, "the most distinguished of the Georgians." "He looked extraordinarily handsome ... stretched out there on the sand, with the only world that counts at his feet." Whether in ordinary times the world of art is or is not the "only world that counts," I cannot say, but I am certain that to a soldier entrusted with an enterprise of so great moment the only world that should have "counted" at that hour was the world of war. If the chapter which describes the failure that followed the landing in Suvla Bay exposes the incapacity of some of his officers to inspire their men with that little more energy which would have ensured a great victory, it seems also to expose a certain want of compelling personality in the High Command. But of the military questions here raised I make no pretence to judge, and in any case judgment has been passed on them already. The interest of the diary lies in its appeal as a human document. It is the apologia of a man who, for all his criticism, often apparently justified, of the authorities at home (there are passages which he must surely have suppressed if Lord Kitchner had still been living), sets down scarce a word in malice and but few in bitterness of spirit; who appreciates at its high worth the devotion and gallantry of his officers and men; who, whatever qualities he may have lacked for his difficult task, reveals himself as loyal at heart and generous by nature.
Miss Ruth Holt Boucicault (a name with a double theatrical association) has written, in The Rose of Jericho (Putnam), a novel of American stage life which I should suppose comes as near to being a true picture as such stories can. She derives her title from the convenient habit of the desert rose of detaching itself from uncongenial or exhausted soil, subsiding into a compact mass and travelling before the wind to more profitable surroundings. It will be admitted that the author has at least hit upon a picturesque metaphor for a touring company, which on this analogy becomes a very garden of (Jericho) roses. Actually, however, she no doubt intended it to apply more to the disposition of her heroine, and in particular to her power of transferring her young affections, flower, leaf and root, from one object to another, with undiminished enthusiasm. Sheelah's capacity for being off with the old and on with the new is almost preternatural; her progress from stage-child to leading lady is accompanied by such various essays in unconventional domesticity that the reader may well experience a sense of confusion, or at least feel some difficulty in sustaining the first freshness of his sympathy. The story is at times almost startlingly American, as when the original betrayer of the heroine is excused on the ground that, being English, his morality would naturally not rise to native level (I swear I'm not laughing—see page 168); and so full of the idiom of the Transatlantic stage as to be a perfect vade mecum for visiting mimes from this side. For the rest, vivacious, wildly sentimental and obviously written from first-hand experience.
By calling her Potterism (Collins) "a tragi-farcical tract" Miss Rose Macaulay disarms our criticism that she conducts too heavy a discussion from too light a platform. I don't think the author of What Not is likely to write anything dull, anything I shan't be pleased to read. She has a keen eye, a candid soul, a sharp-pointed pen. She is deliciously modern. And she dislikes Potterism, which is sentimental lack of precision in thought. It is much more (or much less) than this, but I get the definition by inverting a phrase of her dedication. Potter, by the way, or Lord Pinkerton, as he is now, owns a series of newspapers "not so good as The Times nor so bad as The Weekly Dispatch" (guileless piece of camouflage this!), and Mrs. Potter ("Leila Yorke") is a novelist who might have written The Rosary. Two of the young Potters, Jane and Johnny, though they both when up at Oxford joined the Anti-Potter League, do not thereby escape being Potterites. They cling to materialistic Potter values. Whereas an aristocratic clergyman, a woman scientist, a Jew journalist (this last an admirable study) do in varying degrees contrive to avoid the deadly infection. This tract needed writing. I have a feeling that it could be better done and by Rose Macaulay. But it makes excellent reading as it is.... The pachyderm will wince, shake himself and be left grinning.