OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Mr. H.G. WELLS also among the New Theologians is not an entirely unexpected event. We have all had intimation in his later writings of the coming of some such thesis as God, The Invisible King (CASSELL). I can see the deans making mincemeat of the rash author. All's well if they'll eat some of the meat. And they may. At least this is no super-subtle modernist divine dealing out old coins surreptitiously stamped with a new image and superscription, but a plain blunt heretic who knows his mind (or, rather, mood). But it is a reverent, indeed, I dare to say, a noble book. The sanely and securely orthodox may read it with profit if with shock. It should brace their faith, and will rob them of nothing but a too-ready doubt that so forthright a house-breaker may be a builder in his own way. There is indeed more faith in these honest denials than in half the assents of the conformists. Just because it is not a subtle book it should not be "dangerous." It is romantic, rather; inspired, you might loosely say. The Index Expurgatorius will of course list it when they learn of it; but foolishly, because while the philosophy, the cosmology, the metaphysics may be advanced (so advanced as to be called hasty and apt to run into the theological barrages), the religion, the mysticism, the "conviction of sin," the vision of the invisibles, the perception of the imponderables, are positive, vivid, sincere, passionate in phrasing and in intention. Sincere as Mr. WELLS is always sincere; sincere rather than stable, patient, learned and so forth. I rather wonder that he insists so much on his finite God. The postulate hardly touches his real thesis. And I find it easier to believe that there may be some things behind "this round world" that Mr. WELLS cannot fully understand because he (the author) is finite—and busy—than accept what seems a contradiction in terms to no particular end.
The author of Grand Chain (NISBET) is profoundly aware that man is not the master of his fate (though he may be the captain of his soul, which is quite a different matter), and that the claim so universally put forward, that the leopard can change his spots, is simply an excuse for criticising the superficial pigmentation of other leopards. Dermod Randall, Miss G.B. STERN'S hero, is certainly not the master of his fate, which is inexorably moulded by the belief of his relatives, ascendant and descendant, that he must inherit the vices of his father, a particularly pard-like specimen, and may be expected at any minute to come out in spots himself. As a matter of fact his only failings were a young heart and a sense of humour; but, as these qualities were as out of place in the Randall family as a hornpipe at a funeral, Dermod lives under a perpetual cloud of unmerited suspicion. How he is compressed into a life groove, of which an ineffably turgid respectability provides the chronic atmosphere, is the theme of Grand Chain. And because the author possesses a wonderfully delicate gift of satire and a power of character delineation that never gets out of hand, she has written a novel deserving of more praise than the usual reviewer, all too timid of superlatives, may venture to give. Comparisons in criticism are dangerous, but Miss STERN'S philosophy strongly calls to mind BUTLER'S The Way of All Flesh. At least there is the same mordant and rather hopeless analysis of the power for evil in a too complicated world of impeccable people with no sense of humour. And in Dermod's case the effect is heightened by the feeling that if he had really been the irresponsible creature he was suspected of being he would have come much nearer to controlling his own destinies. He sowed a decent regard for his obligations, and reaped a perfect whirlwind of well-to-do respectability. Grand Chain is a really remarkable novel, and no discriminating reader will overlook it.
Was it not Mr. ALBERT CHEVALIER who used to sing some hortatory lyrics upon the inadvisability of introducing your donah to a pal? Something of this sort, mutatis mutandis in the matter of sex, might stand as the moral of That Red-headed Girl(JENKINS). Because no sooner had Julia, the heroine, got herself engaged to Dick than the arrival of auburn-tressed Sheila so dazzled the youth that in less time than it takes to write he had called the engagement off and prepared to marry the new-comer. However, to square matters, Sheila now jilted him; whereupon he fled back to Julia (meanwhile, though he knew it not, legatee of twelve thousand a year) and promptly married her. Which was entirely satisfactory, save from the view-point of Miss LOUISE HEILGERS, who was left with her hero and heroine united and the whole affair at an end before she had passed Chapter XII. Here however intervened a very touching instance of filial piety. Springing to the rescue of her author, and with no other possible motive or excuse than that of helping Miss HEILGERS towards a publishable six-bobs-worth, the resourceful Julia determined to think that Dick had married her for the money of whose existence he was palpably unaware. He, on his part, not to be outdone, played up to the situation thus created with a lunatic behaviour that gave it the support it wanted. I need not, of course, insult your intelligence with any indication of the end. A happy, flagrantly artificial little comedy of manners, as exhibited by the characters in polite pre-war fiction, and nowhere else.
Resigned Patriot. "DO WE DRAW FOR THIS, MY DEAR?"