(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
When I first read the title of Secret Bread (Heinemann) my idea was—well, what would anyone naturally think but that here was a romance of food-hoarding, a tale of running the potato blockade and the final discovery of a hidden cellar full of fresh rolls? But of course I was quite wrong. The name has nothing to do with food, other than mental; it stands for the sustaining idea (whatever it is) that each one of us keeps locked in his heart as the motive of his existence. With Ishmael Ruan, the hero of Miss F. Tennyson Jesse's novel, this hidden motive was love of the old farm-house hall of Cloom, and a wish to hand it on, richer, to his son. Ishmael inherited Cloom himself because, though the youngest of a large family, he was the only one born in wedlock. Hence the second theme of the story, the jealousy between Ishmael and Archelaus, the elder illegitimate brother. How, through the long lives of both, this enmity is kept up, and the frightful vengeance that ends it, make an absorbing and powerful story. The pictures of Cornish farm-life also are admirably done—though I feel bound to repeat my conviction that the time is at hand when, for their own interest, our novelists will have to proclaim what one might call a close time for pilchards. Still, Miss Jesse has written an unusually clever book, full of vigour and passion, of which the interest never flags throughout the five-hundred-odd closely-printed pages that carry its protagonists from the early sixties almost to the present day. No small achievement.
Mrs. Skrine has collected some charming fragrant papers from various distinguished sources concerning the ever-recurring phenomenon of The Devout Lady (Constable), in order to inspire one Joan, a V.A.D. heroine of the new order. I guess Joan, of whom only a faint glimpse is vouchsafed, must be a nice person—the author's affectionate interest in her is sufficient proof of that. I suppose we all know our Little Gidding out of Shorthouse's John Inglesant. Mrs. Skrine deprecates the Inglesantian view and offers us a stricter portrait of Mary Collet. "Madam" Thornton, Yorkshire Royalist dame in the stormy days of the Irish Rebellion and the Second James's flight to St. Germain, is another portrait in the gallery; then there's Patty More, Hannah's less famous practical sister, of Barleywood and the Cheddar Cliff collieries; and a modern great lady of a lowly cottage, in receipt of an old-age pension and still alive in some dear corner of England—the best sketch of the series, because drawn from life and not from documents. If the author has a fault it is her detached allusiveness, her flattering but mystifying assumption that one can follow all her references, and her rather mannered idiom: "He proved a kind husband, but sadly a tiresome." These, however, be trifles. Read this pleasant book, I beg you, and send it on to your own Joan.
I have read with deep interest and appreciation and with a mournful pleasure the Letters of Arthur George Heath (Blackwell, Oxford). It is the record, in a series of letters mostly written to his parents, of the short fighting life of a singularly brave and devoted man. There is in addition a beautiful memoir by Professor Gilbert Murray, whose privilege it was to be Arthur Heath's friend. Heath was not vowed to fighting from his boyhood onward. He was a brilliant scholar and afterwards a fellow of New College, Oxford. The photograph of him shows a very delicate and refined face, and his letters bear out the warrant of his face and prove that it was a true index to his character. Until the great summons came one might have set him down as destined to lead a quiet life amid the congenial surroundings of Oxford, but we know now that the real stuff of him was strong and stern. He joined the army a day or two after the outbreak of war, being assured that our cause was just and one that deserved to be fought for. He had no illusions as to the risk he ran, but that didn't weigh with him for a moment. On July 11th, 1915, he writes to his mother from the Western Front: "Will you at least try, if I am killed, not to let the things I have loved cause you pain, but rather to get increased enjoyment from the Sussex Downs or from Janie (his youngest sister) singing Folk Songs, because I have found such joy in them, and in that way the joy I have found can continue to live?" Beautiful words these, and typical of the man who gave utterance to them. The end came to him on October 8th, his twenty-eighth birthday. His battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment was engaged in making a series of bombing attacks. In one of these Arthur Heath was shot through the neck and fell. "He spoke once," Professor Murray tells us, "to say, 'Don't trouble about me,' and died almost immediately." His Platoon Sergeant wrote to his parents, "A braver man never existed," and with that epitaph we may leave him.
The scenes of A Sheaf of Bluebells (Hutchinson) are laid in Normandy, where they speak the French language. But the Baroness Orczy does not take advantage of this local habit, and is careful not to put too heavy a strain upon the intelligence of those who do not enjoy the gift of tongues. "Ma tante," "Mon cousin," "Enfin"—these are well within the range of all of us. Indeed, though I shrink from boasting, I could easily have borne it if she had tried me a little higher. "Ma tante," for instance, got rather upon my nerves before the heroine had finished with it. The plot (early nineteenth century) is concerned with one Ronnay de Maurel, a soldier and admirer of Napoleon, and in consequence anathema to most of his own family. The heroine was betrothed to Ronnay's half-brother, as elegant and royalist as Ronnay was uncouth and Napoleonic. It is a tale of love and intrigue for idle hours, the kind of thing that the Baroness does well; and, though she has done better before in this vein, you will not lack for excitement here; and possibly, as I did, you will sometimes smile when strictly speaking you ought to have been serious.
"Economy, I hate the word!" said a much-harassed housekeeper recently: echoing, I fear, the sentiments of the great majority of the British people. Nevertheless, let no one be deterred by a somewhat forbidding title from reading Mr. Henry Higgs's National Economy: An Outline of Public Administration (Macmillan). Although written by a Treasury official—a being who in popular conception is compounded of red-tape and sealing-wax and spends his life in spoiling the Ship of State by saving halfpennyworths of tar—it is not a dry-as-dust treatise on the art of scientific parsimony, but a lively plea for wise expenditure. Mr. Higgs is no believer in the dictum that the best thing to do with national resources is to leave them to fructify in the pockets of the taxpayers—"doubtful soil," in his opinion; nor is he afraid that heavy taxation will kill the goose with the golden eggs. It may be "one of those depraved birds which eat their own eggs, in which case, if its eggs cannot be trapped, killing is all it is fit for." The author is full of well-thought-out suggestions for saving waste and increasing efficiency in our national administration. The introduction of labour-saving machinery, the elimination of superfluous officials, the reduction of the necessary drudgery which too often blights the initiative and breaks the hearts of our young civil servants—all these and many other reforms are advocated in Mr. Higgs's most entertaining pages. I cordially commend them to the attention of everyone who takes an intelligent interest in public affairs, not excluding Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, and political journalists.