A SONG FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
"Where my caravan has rested."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
As in the enervating luxury of peace, so in the stern stringency of war we have always a use, and a good use too, for the humourist. But he must be a jester of the right sort; not bitter nor flippant, not over boisterous nor too "intellectual." Humour for humour's sake is what we want, and in these anxious hours something to make us laugh quietly and unhysterically, if only by way of temporary relief. Mr. Ian Hay hits the mark about eight times in every ten in A Knight on Wheels (Hodder and Stoughton), which is not at all a bad proportion for three hundred and nineteen pages. He has some delightful ideas, which, happily, he does not overwork: a case in point is the brief but rapid career of Uncle Joseph, who employs the most criminal methods in order to attain the most charitable ends. The story is a simple one—youth, laughter and love; and the motor car plays an important but not a tiresome part in it. The author's attitude towards women is slightly cynical but very light-hearted, and clearly he loves them all the time: indeed, I think Mr. Hay, while alive to existing faults, loves everything and everybody. In return most people will be prepared to love him. And he deserves to be loved for the sake of a book which has a happy beginning, a happy middle and a happy end, together with lots of incidental laughter.
"There is a teacup storm in the Close, I hear. The Dean altered the time of closing the Minster for summer cleaning or some such trifle, and did not consult the Chapter, which had already made its holiday arrangements." This sentence, chosen at random from Quisquiliae, the diary of Henry Savile, will do well enough to support my contention that Dr. Ashford and His Neighbours (Murray) is going to be a great boon to the cathedral cities of our Midland shires. Under the form of a narrative of social life in Sunningwell, Dr. Warre Cornish has elected to arrange his views on religion, art, literature, politics and the questions of the day, sometimes putting them into the mouths of his characters and sometimes into the note-book of the afore-mentioned Henry Savile, a leisured cripple whose disquisitions on letters and on people are, if a trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. Mr. Henry Savile quotes from the Classics perhaps a little too freely for the taste of a decadent age, and his friends, Dr. Ashford, Lady Grace, the bishop's wife, Olive, her niece, and Philip Daly, nephew of an archdeacon and parliamentary candidate for Sunningwell, would be a little more amusing if they were treated in a more Trollopian manner, and did not so faithfully discuss the burning controversies of the time. But, after all, the great excitement in Dr. Ashford and His Neighbours (and I really cannot advise any resident in—shall we say Mercia?—to be without it) is the chance it affords for such questions as: Who is the Dean? Does the author really mean Canon X? Are we living in Sunningwell, or it is L———? Even I myself, in this metropolitan backwater, have made one or two ingenious guesses, but wild taxicabs would not drag them from me.
