Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3813/Our Booking-Office
(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 mother, and, being a lonely old man with a longing for a daughter's affection, took this melodramatic course to secure it. In furtherance of his end he secured the services of Maginnis, genial swashbuckler, and Varney, young, susceptible and heroic, and despatched them on his yacht to apprehend one whom they vaguely supposed to be "a little girl about twelve." This was the only time in which I scored over Mr. Harrison. I was as certain, when I read thus far, that Mary Carstairs was no child, but a grown-up beauty, as I am now that I know the facts. Everywhere else the author had me beat. His capacity for complications seems inexhaustible. I knew that Varney was going to fall in love with Mary, but I did not know that he himself had a double who would cause endless and thrilling confusions; that Maginnis would become involved in local politics to the extent of endangering his life; and that even old Carstairs, Mary's father, would—but on second thoughts you had better share my unpreparedness about him. I should sum up the book as a tale with a "punch" in every chapter, some of them perhaps below the belt of probability, but all leaving one, as is the way with punches, breathlessly concerned.
Monsieur de Rochefort (Hutchinson) did not even take himself seriously; why then should I? To subject this airy romance, of Paris in 1770, to a minute criticism would be unnecessarily spoiling a good thing, and I shall not therefore ask myself whether prisons were so easily got out of or great statesmen so easily cajoled as Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole for present purposes assumes. I shall not examine the historical accuracy of the portraits of the Duc de Choiseul or of the Comtesse Dubarry, nor shall I question the human probability villains so inept as Camus or martinets so infallible and ruthless as de Sartines. The most exacting connoisseur of vintage ports will in his expansive moments admit the merits of a light wine from the wood, offered him as such in due season; even so the most fastidious novel-reader may in a holiday mood allow himself to be merely entertained and diverted by these lighthearted but breathless adventures in the Court of Louis XV. It is the greatest fun throughout; events are rapid and the dialogue is crisp; moreover there is from the beginning the comfortable certainty that, threaten what may, the unhappy end is impossible. If de Rochefort had failed to marry Javotte, I think that Mr. de Vere Stacpoole would have incurred the unanimous displeasure of all his readers, including those who at any other time would have strongly protested against the marriage of so great a gentleman with so humble a lady's-maid in any circumstances, let alone upon so very brief an acquaintance.
Bridget Considine (Bell) is a pleasant story with something very agreeable in its quality, which however I find hard to define. Miss Mary Crosbie has certainly a pretty gift for characterization, and this no doubt accounts for a good deal of the charm; the rest is largely a matter of atmosphere. The characters in the story whom you will most remember are Bridget herself and her father. The last especially is a continuous joy—a man who in his journey through life had taken instinctively the manner and aspect of a class to which he did not belong; a decayed gentleman without ever having been gentle except in mind; a needy adventurer without the spirit for adventure. Dragged up at the slip-shod heels of such a parent, supporting herself with romantic dreams when other nourishment failed, Bridget grew to young womanhood the very type, one would say, of the Cinderella to be rescued from poverty by a suitable Prince Charming. Thus when a combination of accidents thrusts her, as secretary-companion, into the society of Hugh Delmege, a budding politician, you will perhaps excusably plume yourself upon seeing the rest of the tale beforehand. If so, you will, as a matter of fact, be entirely wrong. Hugh and Bridget become engaged, certainly, but——— There is much virtue in that "but," the virtue of an unusual and convincing end to a story that has many charms, not the least of them being its humour. Yes, I certainly liked Bridget Considine well enough to wish for more from the same pen. Its motto, "Candidates for Humanity," is well chosen.
When Mr. William Satchell, in a preface to The Greenstone Door (Sidgwick and Jackson), remarks that some Maori words are used so frequently that he is "afraid the English reader will hardly be able to avoid acquiring a knowledge of their meaning," his alarm is quite unnecessary. Personally, at any rate, I am proud to know that papa-tea means an untattooed person, and waipiro an alcoholic beverage. But if Mr. Satchell had feared that the young man who tells the story might be found a little too self-complacent no protest would have sounded by me. For Cedric Tregarthen, then grandson of an earl, and also "The Little Finger" of a Maori chief, was beyond my swallowing, though I endured him obstinately until he reported verbatim the opinion of his beloved's governess. "'Good-bye, Mr. Tregarthen,' she responded. 'Or, if you will allow me to say, "Good-bye, Cedric," it will better express my feelings. I used to hate boys, my dear; but I shall love them all for the sake of your gentleness and kindness. I am sure you will grow into a very noble man.'" Now, I ask you, ought not dear Cedric to have kept this to himself? Give me for choice the Maori boy, Rangiora, and the half-Maori girl, Puhi-Huia, humans fit to be loved and admired. The pity of it is immense, because Mr. Satchell has a knowledge of his subject that is beyond all praise, and the Maori part of his book is worth reading again and again. But the trouble remains that Cedric lived to tell the tale, while Rangiora died and had to have his tale told for him.