The Artificer. "I’m sorry, your Majesty. There must be some mistake. I got it in my ’ead that your Majesty ordered a lounge throne."
Are you a victim to the Tarzan habit? Perhaps your eye may have been caught by the word on bookstalls as the generic title of an increasing pile of volumes; but knowing, like myself, that all things explain themselves in time, you may have been content to leave it at that. Meanwhile, however, the thing has continued to spread, till on the wrapper of Tarzan the Untamed (Methuen), which now at last finds me out, its publishers are able to number its devotees in millions. Well, of course the outstanding fact about such popularity is that in face of it any affectation of superiority becomes simply silly. One has got to accept this creation of Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs as among the definite literary phenomena of our time. In the immediate spasm before me Tarzan (who is, if you need telling, a kind of horribly exaggerated Mowgli after a diet of the Food of the Gods) is represented as placing himself at the disposal of the British forces in East Africa, and attacking the Germans with man-eating lions. The rather chastening feature of which was my own unexpected enjoyment of the idea. Even, for one disconcerting moment, like the persons in the admonitory anecdotes who taste opium "just for fun," I began to feel that perhaps.... However it passed, and the temptation has not returned. Meanwhile the real nature of Tarzanism, whether some sinister possession or simply the age-long appetite for the monstrous, just now a little out of hand, remains as far from solution as ever.
Mr. Horace Bleackley, whose last excursion into political fiction was a description of an opéra-bouffe Labour Government in action, addresses himself, in The Monster (Heinemann), to a more serious theme. His monster is the factory system, and if I say that this witty novel will provide the ignorant and comfortable with instruction as well as entertainment I hope I shan’t have done him any harm. The author, while making his points against the system, notes truly enough that the risen ranker, the one who had been through the dreadful mill, with its ninety-hour working week for children, became the hardest master during that wonderful period of the Manchesterising of England which laid the train for the explosions of our present discontents. He reminds us also of that admirable speech, made about every ten years for the last hundred or so in the House with the same fervour and conviction, to the effect that any change in conditions or wages would surely mean the complete ruin of the country. A comforting speech, that! Perhaps Mr. Bleackley, presenting three generations from Peterloo to the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, covers too much ground for full effect, but he has pleasantly gilded a wholesome pill for pleasant people. Good luck to him.
I did not take the publishers’ statement that Pengard Awake (Methuen) was "entirely unlike Mr. Straus’s previous stories" as a recommendation, however alluring it was intended to be, for he has good and enjoyable work to his credit. I doubt, indeed, if he has yet written a book more acceptable to the novel-reading public than this tale of "action, mystery and wonderful adventures" (again I quote from the paper wrapper). Possibly in a so-called mystery book the author ought to have his readers guessing all the time, but if I was not perpetually engaged in this rather exhausting pursuit I was, at any rate, intrigued. Pengard, who is also Sylvester, and yet is neither the one nor the other, may be too much for your saner moments of credulity. But Mr. Straus tells his queer story so plausibly and with so light a touch that even though you may affect to scoff at his dashing improbabilities you cannot escape their attraction. Indeed Mr. Straus’s adventure into fields hitherto strange to him has been so successful that I am inclined to ask him to continue cultivating them.
Life’s Little Contradictions.
"Now mind, you know, if I kill you it’s nothing, but if you kill me, by Jingo, it’s murder." This remark was put by John Leech into the lips of a small Special Constable, represented as menacing a gigantic ruffian, and was not, as you might think, addressed by a Sinn Feiner to a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary.