Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3814/Our Booking-Office
(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. At this time of day to attempt criticism upon a new novel by Miss Rhoda Broughton seems almost impertinent. The tens of thousands to whom she has given such pleasure before now would probably be willing to read anything that was put before them with the guarantee of her name. Fortunately in the case of Concerning a Vow (Stanley Paul) this confidence would be by no means misplaced. I can say at once, with my hand upon my reviewer's heart, that in freshness and vivacity and power of sprightly character-drawing here is a story that need fear comparison with none of its most popular predecessors. The vow of the title was that exacted by Meg Champneys on her death-bed from her sister Sally, binding the latter not to marry Edward Branley. Edward, in some fashion that was never made quite clear to me, had previously jilted both the sisters. But this all happened before the beginning of the book. In it poor Edward is made so pitiable and heart-broken a figure that I found it hard to credit his previous infidelities. However, most of the other characters detested him, and said that nothing was too bad for him; and as they themselves were delightful and quite human people I am ready to suppose that they had their reasons. Of course Edward and Sally were really in love all the time, and of course too they find resistance to this impossible; though I must own that their method of circumventing the vow reminded me dangerously of the young man who used a cigarette-holder because he had been told to keep away from tobacco. I speak flippantly; but as a matter of fact the story of Edward and Sally is not free from tragedy, very simply and movingly told. If Concerning a Vow does not add to Miss Broughton's popularity it will only be because this is impossible; it certainly will do nothing to lessen it.
I think that Mr. W. R. Titterton is a little late in the day; his book, Me as a Model (Palmer), recalls happy memories of that past and already romantic period when Trilby was the talk of the hour and Paris the centre of all Bohemian licence. Mr. Titterton has the Du Maurier manner, but his jocular skittishness, aided by asterisks, exclamation marks and suspensive dots, has curiously little behind it. It is not enough to-day to paint the gay impropriety of models and the devil-may-care penury of lighthearted artists. Trilby began the movement, Louise ended it, and Mr. Titterton is behind his day. I am glad, however, to learn that he was so splendid a model. The students at Julien's fall back aghast before his magnificent figure, and now, in every gallery in Europe, sculptures and paintings of Mr. Titterton are to be seen by vulgar crowd, often for no charge at all; and that, of course, is delightful for Europe. And, according to his title, that is doubtless the final impression that the author wishes to convey. I intend on my trip abroad to search for Mr. Titterton in all the galleries. My only means of discovery are the pictures of the author with which his book is filled, and here, if the illustrator (a very clever fellow) is to be trusted, I am frankly puzzled by the attitude at Julien's towards their model. There is very little in these illustrations to justify it.
If I am not mistaken, The Jam Queen (Methuen) marks the first incursion of Miss Netta Syrett into humorous fiction. In that, or any, case, she has written a story which deserves a considerable success. The Jam Queen is to a large extent what would be called in drama a one-part affair. There are plenty of other characters, many of them drawn with much unforced skill, but the personality of the protagonist, the Jam Queen herself, overshadows the rest. Mrs. Quilter is an abiding joy. There have been plutocratic elderly women, uneducated but agreeable, in a hundred novels before this; but I recall few that have been treated so honestly or with so much genuine sympathy. Mine you, Miss Syrett is no sentimentalist. Ill-directed philanthropy, Girtonian super-culture, the simple life with its complexities of square-cut gowns and bare feet—all these come beneath the lash of a satire that is delicate but unsparing. Yet with it all she has, as every good satirist should have, a quick appreciation of the good qualities of her victims. Even Frederick, the pious, as contrasted with the flippant, nephew of aunt Quilter—Frederick, with his futile institute for people who want none of it, his blind pedantry, and his actual dishonesty in what he considers a worthy cause—even he is punished no further than his actual deserving. Perhaps in telling you that Mrs. Quilter has two nephews, an idle and an industrious one, I have told you enough of the scheme. It is, after all, no great matter. Mrs. Quilter must be the reason for your reading the book, and your reward. She is real jam.
The tales Miss Ethel Dell includes
Within The Swindler (Unwin) pleased me,
Not by their thrills or interludes
Of tenderness—these hardly seized me;
Not by their people, though the pack
Were amiable and pleasant creatures,
Barring the villains who were black
And villainous in all their features.
By none of these my pulse was jerked
Out of its normal calm condition,
But by the plots, with which I worked
A quite exciting competition;
A point was mine if, at the start,
I guessed the way a yarn was tending;
Miss Dell's if by consummate art
She failed to use the obvious ending.
The first two tales she won on; three
And four were mine; five hers; six, seven
And eight I got hands down; and she
Got square with nine and ten. Eleven
Is still unwritten, and I bide
Impatiently its birth, for that'll
Finally, so I trust, decide
The issue of our hard-fought battle.