OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I should like to commend with extraordinarily little reserve Mr. FIELDING-HALL'S The Way of Peace (HURST AND BLACKETT) to the kind of reader that is drawing plans in his head for a New England. No wonder that in these great days the impatient idealist rushes forth with his bag of dreams. The author of The Soul of a People is extreme but sane—an extremist in common sense, say. He stakes on the fact of human solidarity as the cure for the bitternesses and crookednesses of politics; declares life and men to be good, not evil (how right he is!); wants an England rescued from the Puritans on the one hand and the mere musical comedians on the other; an England chaste because freer, less ignorant; good beer in easeful inns; the village or township as the unit of government and of fellowship; a return to music and the dance, not as a plasmon-fed high-brow proposition but as the natural expression of a joy of life returned; a clear fount of honour; a representative House of Commons; justice, respect, common sense and responsibility instead of charity; some place other than the streets for our young men and maidens to make love in; a recognition of crime as mainly a social, not an individual, disease; a law simplified and scales of justice not weighted against the poor; and a host of other good and wise and nearly possible things. Here is not the barren politics of manipulation but an ideal of living citizenship. I commend it to all believers in new days and all honourable disgruntlers; not perhaps as a programme but as a tonic.
Do not, please, run away with the idea that The Nursery (HEINEMANN) presents us with Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS' views on baby culture. The background of his story, the scenes of which are laid in and around Colchester a year or so ago, is composed of gardens and oyster-beds. On these he gives a lot of information, and, as he could not be pedantic even if he tried to be, I browsed pleasantly upon the store of knowledge set before me. Also I liked the restraint he shows in dealing with the War, and commend his exemplary method to some of our more blatant novelists. When, however, I came to the inhabitants of The Nursery I failed to find in them that rare and delightful quality with which Mr. PHILLPOTTS usually succeeds in endowing his characters. Readers of his novels must know by this time that he is not exactly in love with Mrs. Grundy, but here he seems to be insurgent against something, and for the life of me I don't know quite what it is. Perhaps it is insincerity, which is a very good thing to be in rebellion against. There is one very amusing and delightful character, a bibulous old sinner who defied law and order and almost at the last gasp ladled out what he considered justice in a most dramatic manner. His name is William Ambrose, and it is worth your while to make his disreputable acqaintance.
One fact at once awakened in me a fellow-feeling for Mr. BERTRAM SMITH—the discovery of his appreciation (shared by myself, the elder STEVENSON, and other persons of discernment) for the romantic possibilities of the map. There is an excellent map in the beginning of Days of Discovery (CONSTABLE), showing the peculiar domain of childhood, the garden, in terms that will hardly fail to win your sympathy. But not in this alone does Mr. SMITH show that he has the heart of the matter in him; every page of these reminiscences of nursery life proclaims a genuine memory, not a make-believe childhood faked up for literary ends. Who that has once been young can read unstirred by envy the chapter on "Devices and Contrivances," with its entrancing triumph of the chain of mirrors arranged (during the providential absence of those in authority) from the night nursery, down two flights of stairs, to the store-room in the basement? I know a reviewer whom nothing, but moral cowardice restrained from testing the possibility of this delightful plan by personal experiment. Fireworks too—Mr. SMITH has remembered them with a proper regard that is, of course, wholly different from that of those who understand them only in their pyrotechnic aspect, not as objects loved for themselves alone, for their shape and feel, and the glamour of weeks of hoarding and barter. In short, a real nursery book for the study; not one perhaps that actual children would care for (quite possibly they might resent it as betrayal), but one that for the less fortunate will reopen a door of which too many of us have long lost the key.