R.F.
Harold (after a violent display of affection). "'TISN'T 'COS I LOVE YOU—IT'S 'COS YOU SMELL SO NICE."
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The Great Man is, I suppose, among the most difficult themes to treat convincingly in fiction. To name but one handicap, the author has in such cases to postulate at least some degree of acquaintance on the part of the reader with his celebrated subject. "Everyone is now familiar," he will observe, "with the sensational triumph achieved by the work of X——;" whereat the reader, uneasily conscious of never having heard of him, inclines to condemn the whole business beforehand as an impossible fable. I fancy Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM felt something of this difficulty with regard to the protagonist of his quaintly-called The Moon and Sixpence (HEINEMANN), since, for all his sly pretence of quoting imaginary authorities, we have really only his unsupported word for the superlative genius of Charles Strickland, the stockbroker who abandoned respectable London to become a Post-impressionist master, a vagabond and ultimately a Pacific Islander. The more credit then to Mr. MAUGHAM that he does quite definitely make us accept the fellow at his valuation. He owes this, perhaps, to the unsparing realism of the portrait. Heartless, utterly egotistical, without conscience or scruple or a single redeeming feature beyond the one consuming purpose of his art, Strickland is alive as few figures in recent fiction have been; a genuinely great though repellent personality—a man whom it would have been at once an event to have met and a pleasure to have kicked. Mr. MAUGHAM has certainly done nothing better than this book about him; the drily sardonic humour of his method makes the picture not only credible but compelling. I liked especially the characteristic touch that shows Strickland escaping, not so much from the dull routine of stockbroking (genius has done that often enough in stories before now) as from the pseudo-artistic atmosphere of a flat in Westminster and a wife who collected blue china and mild celebrities. Mrs. Strickland indeed is among the best of the slighter characters in a tale with a singularly small cast; though it is, of course, by the central figure that it stands or falls. My own verdict is an unhesitating stet.