A new aquatic sport has been invented. It is known as "planking," and consists in standing upon a board towed by a fast motor-boat. Some who have tried it consider the pleasure over-rated.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Reality (Cassell) deserves to rank high amongst the novels of the present season; it has, indeed, qualities that will cause it, if I am not mistaken, to outlive most of them. The chief of these I can best express by the word colour; by which I mean not only a picturesque setting, but temperament and a fine sense of the romantic in life. Perhaps I ought to have known the name of Miss Olive Wadsley already. As I did not, I can only be glad that Reality has rectified the fault; I shall certainly not again forget a writer who has given me so much pleasure. The scene of the story is laid in Vienna, chiefly in musical Vienna, and the protagonists are the young widow, Irene von Cleve, and the violinist, Jean Victoire, whom she marries despite the well-founded objections of her noble family. Some of the family, too, are quite excellently drawn, notably a Cardinal, who, though he has little to do in the tale, manages to appear much more human and less of a draped waxwork than most Eminences of fiction. I have said that the objections of Irene's relations were justified, the fact being that Jean was not only a genius, but the most scatterbrained egoist and vulgarian. Naturally, therefore, the alliance turned out a failure; and the process is quite admirably portrayed. I liked least in the book the end, with its sudden revelation of a superfluous secret. Had the secret not been so superfluous it might have vexed me to have been so long kept in ignorance of it. But this is a small matter. The chief point is that Reality has the pulse of life in it—in a word that it confirms its title; which, indeed, is about the highest praise that a critic can bestow.
I am not at all sure how Mr. Frank Norris, were he still living, would have regarded the resurrection of this early attempt at realism, as taught us by M. Zola—Vandover and the Brute (Heinemann). He would, I fancy, have softened some of the crudities and allowed a touch of humour to lighten the more solemn passages. There are pages here that remind one that Vandover's creator was also the author of those magnificent novels The Octopus and The Pit; but I cannot, in spite of them, place much confidence in the truth of Vandover's life history. We are told that he enjoyed his bath, and usually spent two or three hours over it. When the water was very warm he got into it with his novel on a rack in front of him and a box of chocolates conveniently near. Here he stayed for over an hour, eating and reading and occasionally smoking a cigarette. Can you wonder after this that poor Vandover went utterly to the bad, and is to be found on the last page doing some horrible work with a muck-rake whilst an innocent child points an obvious moral? So certain was Vandover's doom, once that box of chocolates had been mentioned, that I grew impatient and a little weary. If this is an age of realism in fiction I think that Vandover and the Brute should make plain to any reader why, very shortly, we are going to have an age of something else.
Do not allow yourself to be put off by the title of Captivating Mary Carstairs (Constable)—now published for the first time in England. It is not, as you might assume, a costume novel of eighteenth-century tushery. This is what I expected; but as a matter of fact Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison has written a tale about as unlike this as anything well could be. It is a capital tale, too; American to the last epithet, and crammed so full of the unexpected and adventurous that never (except once) can you anticipate for a moment what is going to happen. The chief adventure is abduction, the subject of it being Mary Carstairs, whose father was separated from her
