Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3818/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Some people have all the luck! Fancy preparing for publication this summer a novel whose scene is laid in Belgium. The picture of Bruges Tower on the cover of The Belfry (Hodder and Stoughton) should alone be enough to sell it like the hottest of hot cakes. Of course it would be rather too much to expect the story to treat of the Belgium we all love and admire to-day. Indeed, Margaret Baillie Saunders, writing in the old times of six weeks ago, permits herself some good-natured humour at the expense of the little red-trousered army. To-day it sounds oddly archaic. But, this apart, there is enough topical and local colour in the setting to secure success, even without an interesting story such as is told here. One may perhaps fairly easily detect its inspiration in certain actual happenings. It is the story of a woman, Lucy Briarwell, clever and gifted with personality, the grass-widow of an apparently incurable lunatic who, living in Bruges, falls under the influence of a Belgian poet-dramatist. Together—for Lucy is shown as his collaborator and source of inspiration—they evolve a wonderful new form of miracle play in which she presently captivated London and Paris as the reincarnate Notre Dame de Bruges. So much of the tale I indicate: the rest is your affair. It is told in a pleasant haphazard fashion, enriched with flashes of caustic wit and disfigured with a good deal of ungrammatical and slovenly writing. I think I never met a novelist who did more execution among the infinitives. Also I suspect that Mrs. Saunders' zeal for theatrical setting outran her knowledge of it, otherwise she would hardly have permitted a dramatist to speak of his "caste," or the leading lady to leave the theatre (even under circumstances of faintness) in her stage costume. But for all that my congratulations to her on a good story.
My impression of Behind the Picture (Ward, Lock) is that it would be better worth reading if it contained less of the tale—which, to speak quite candidly, is parlous nonsense—and more of the trimmings. The trimming are mostly concerned with art bargain-hunting, and are excellent fun. Most of us have the treasure-trove instinct sufficiently developed to like reading about a young man who picks up Gainsboroughs for a tenner, or unearths lost masterpieces of Turner on a clue supplied by an old letter. The young man in question was Hugh Limner, and in his off moments he fulfilled perfunctorily the duties of hero of the story. But I can't help thinking that Mr. M. McD. Bodkin, his creator, liked him best as an expert. Certainly I myself did. Hugh, as I say, found his buried Turner on the authority of an autograph letter from the artist, which in its turn he had found in a volume entitled "Turner's Poems," that proved to have belonged to Ruskin, the whole purchased off a stall for ten shillings. That was the kind of expert Hugh was. When he had dug up the picture he exhibited it in a private gallery, where "each day an eager crowd freely paid an entrance-fee of half-a-guinea." How, when he could achieve that kind of luck, could he be expected to take more than a languid interest in a tale where the most impossible people behave more impossibly; where, for example, a missing peer posts a letter to his wife at the back of a picture-frame for no earthly reason; where the villain, younger brother of the long-lost, comes into the heroine's drawing-room and says, "You must allow me to introduce myself. I am Frederick Ackland, Earl of Sternholt"? We were only beginning the second chapter, but my wonder is that a fellow like Hugh, who was within hearing, didn't throw up his part at once. He would have had my sympathy.
The public is quite content to have any amount of trite philosophy passed off upon it as new goods by the author who has a gift for dialect and uses an American negro as mouthpiece. Miss Dorothy Dix employs a black laundress in the name of Mirandy (Sampson Low) for philosopher; and cheerfully persisting with the "yessum's," the "wid's," the "dat's" and the "becaze's," tells us with incessant humour many things we all knew before about husbands, their little idiosyncrasies and weaknesses and the methods by which they may be best caught and trained for their purpose in life. Now and then Mirandy gets away from matters matrimonial, and it is upon these too rare occasions that she is at her best. I was particularly moved by her views on the just rights of the invalid, summed up in the urgent demand that those on the sick-bed should (omitting the lingo) "be allowed to enjoy being ill in their own way, without being persecuted by their friends and their friends' doctors, pet remedies and religions." On the whole, I may quite safely recommend these two hundred and fifty pleasantly written and delightfully printed pages to readers who like to muse quietly on the elementary principles of love and life without risking the surprise of startling of revolutionary lines of thought. There is nothing peculiarly good or bad in the many comic illustrations by Mr. E. W. Kemble.
Mr. Punch regrets that in his last week's notice of Marie Van Vorst's delightful romance, His Love Story, he spoiled her good Dutch name by calling her Marie Von Vorst. He offers his best apologies.