The long-promised Herbert Beerbohm Tree (Hutchinson), than which I have expected no book with more impatience, turns out to be a volume full of lively interest, though rather an experiment in snap-shot portraiture from various angles than a full-dress biography. Mr. Max Beerbohm has arranged the book, himself contributing a short memoir of his brother, which, together with what Lady Tree aptly calls her Reverie, fills some two-thirds of it with the more intimate view of the subject, the rest being supplied by the outside appreciations of friends and colleagues. If I were to sum up my impression of the resulting picture it would be in the word "happiness." Not without reason did the Trees name a daughter Felicity. Here was a life spent in precisely the kind of success that held most delight for the victor—honour, love, obedience, troops of friends; all that Macbeth missed his exponent enjoyed in flowing measure. Perhaps Tree was never a great actor, because he found existence too "full of a number of things"; if so he was something considerably jollier, the enthusiastic, often inspired amateur, approaching each new part with the zest of a brief but brilliant enthusiasm. I suppose no popular favourite ever had his name associated with more good stories and wit, original and vicarious. Despite some entertaining extracts from his commonplace book I doubt if this side of him is quite worthily represented; at least nothing here quoted beats Lady Tree's own mot for a mendacious newspaper poster—Canard à la Press. Possibly we are still to look for a more official volume of reference; meantime the present memoir gives a vastly readable sketch of one whose passing left a void perhaps unexpectedly hard to fill.
In the prefatory chapter of Our Women (Cassell) Mr. Arnold Bennett coyly disclaims any intention of tackling his theme on strictly scientific principles. The warning is perhaps hardly necessary, since, apart from the duty which the author owes to his public as a novelist rather than a philosopher, the title alone should be a sufficient guide. One would hardly expect a serious zoologist, for instance, in attempting to deal with the domesticated fauna, to entitle his work Our Dumb Friends. The book is divided in the main between adjuration and prophecy. As a result of their emancipation from economic slavery, Mr. Bennett expects women—women, that is to say, of the "top class," as he calls it—to adopt more and more the rôle of professional wage-earners; but at the same time he insists that they do not as yet take themselves seriously enough as professional housekeepers. How the two functions are to be combined it is a little difficult to see, but apparently women are to retain a profession as a stand-by in case they fail to marry or to remain married. At the same time Mr. Bennett takes it for granted that woman will never relinquish her position as a charmer of man, or even the use of cosmetics and expensive lingerie. Speaking neither as a novelist nor as a philosopher, I cannot help feeling that Mr. Bennett is too apt to consider the things he particularly likes about women to be eternal, and those that he does not like so much to be susceptible of alteration and improvement. Anyhow, it looks as if Our Men were going to have rather a thin time.
Miss Beatrice Harraden calls her latest story Spring Shall Plant (Hodder and Stoughton). She might equally well have called it The Successes of a Naughty Child. Certainly it is chiefly concerned with the many triumphant insubordinations of Patuffa (whom I suspect of having been encouraged by her too challenging name) both at home and at the various schools from which she either ran away or was returned with thanks. This is all mildly attractive if only from the vivacity of its telling; but I confess to having felt a mild wonder whether a child's book had not got on to my table by error—when the grown-ups suddenly began to carry on in a way that placed all such doubts at rest. There was, for example, a Russian lady, godmother of Patuffa, who escaped from somewhere and established herself, with others of her kind, in an attic in Coptic Street. My welcome for this interesting fugitive was to some extent shaken by a realisation that she was (so to speak) a refugee from the other side and, in a sense, a spiritual ancestress of Bolshevism. Miss Harraden would however object, and justly, that the clean-purposed conspirators of the earlier revolution had little in common with the unsavoury individuals who at present obscure the Russian dawn. Soon after this, Patuffa's papa begins to go quite dreadfully off the rails, even to the extent of wishing to elope with her governess and eventually losing all his money and shooting himself. There was also a famous violinist—well, you can see already that Patuffa's vernal experiences were on generous lines. It is to the credit of all concerned that she and her story retain an appreciable charm under adverse conditions.
Nothing, one would imagine, could promise much more restful reading than a book that concerns itself with such things as christening robes for caterpillars, the dyeing blue of white chickens and searches among Californian lilies and pine-trees for the soul of a hog unseasonably defunct. But, since this most uncharitable age refuses to believe anything just because it is told it should, the peaceful pages of The Diary of Opal Whiteley (Putnam) are unfortunately fussed over with a controversy that no one who reads them can quite escape. Miss Whiteley's diary is presented with every circumstance of solemn asseveration as the unaided work of a child of seven, only now pieced together by the writer after quite a number of years. If you care to throw yourself into the argument you will certainly find heaps of reasons for thinking unkind thinks, as the writer would say, of the truth of this claim, particularly in the completeness with which every incident is carried through various stages to its literary finish; but, if you will be ruled by me, you will try to forget anything but the book itself, with its quite charming pictures of many animals and one little girl, their understanding friend. The quaint idiom in which the diary is supposed to have been written (or, of course, was written) adds to the delight of a rather uncommon feeling for nature at its simplest, while the scrapes for which the small heroine receives (or, you may say, is alleged to receive) well-deserved punishment preserve the book from ever dropping into mere mawkishness. A great pity, I think, that it was not published rather as based on childish memories than as the actual printed script of a prodigy.
Moon Mountains (Hurst and Blackett) is a story which with the best will in the world I found it impossible to regard wholly seriously. The greater part of the scene is laid in Darkest Africa, where the father of the hero, Peter (my hope that the Peter habit had blown over appears to have been premature), disappears at an early stage. The subsequent course of events reminds me of the words of the musical-comedy poet, popular in my youth, who wrote, "It were better for you rather not to try and find your father, than to find him"—well, certainly better than to find him as Peter found his. Perhaps it would not be unfair to suppose that Miss Margaret Peterson had at this point her eye already firmly fixed upon her big situation. Certainly the course of Peter is rather impatiently and spasmodically sketched till the moment when matters are sufficiently advanced to ship him also to Africa, in company with an elderly hunter of butterflies named Mellis. Their adventures form the bulk of the tale (filled out with some chat about elephants, and a sufficiency of love-making on the part of Peter), and I suppose I need hardly tell you how one of them, poor Mellis, is immediately captured and brought before the terrible white king of the hidden lands, nor how this same monarch, a really dreadfully unpleasant person, turns out to be—Precisely. So there the tale is; little more incredible than, I dare say, most of its kind; and if you have no rooted objection to characters all of whom behave like persons who know they are in a book there is no reason why you should not find it at least passably entertaining.