Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3830/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Stevenson, in one of his Fables, imagines a court presided over by the Great White Magistrate. It was a very brief session, and the novelist did not again use the idea. Mr. Hugh Carton, whose name, we are informed by the wrapper of the book, that new and most trustworthy medium of communication between the candid publisher (unwilling that merit should shine unobserved) and the hesitating purchaser (who needs only the truth to send his hand to his purse) is a pseudonym covering the identity of "one of the leading clerics of our day," has however made a whole book of it. In The Grand Assize (Heinemann) Mr. Carton imagines a Day of Judgment, on which the careers and influences of a number of social types are weighed and punishment inflicted—for all are guilty. The Plutocrat, the Daughter of Joy, the Bookmaker, the Party Politician, the Musical Comedy entrepreneur, the Agitator, even the Cleric (although not, I am sure, he of the wrapper) are called to justice. Everything for and against them is then said, either by themselves or the advocate, and sentence is passed. The result is a book curiously rich in sympathy, fearless and fine, and provocative of much thought. That it is in essence a tract is nothing against it; for many of the best novels belong to that genus, and Hogarth, of whom now and then the reader is forced to think, was a tractarian to the core. I take off my hat to "Hugh Carton" and wish that more parsons were as humane and understanding as he.
Mr. Algernon Blackwood seems as a writer to possess two quite distinct literary methods. There is his style high-fantastical, which at its best touches a kind of fairylike inspiration, unique and charming—the style, for example, of Jimbo. Then, on a lower plane, there is the frankly bogie creepiness of John Silence. Between the two he has created a position for himself, half trickster, half wizard, that none else in modern literature could fill. His new book, Incredible Adventures (Macmillan), is a combination of both methods. Four of the five adventures are of the mystically gruesome kind, removed however from being commonplace ghost-stories by a certain dignity of conception. It is to be admitted that but for this dignity two at least would fall into some peril of bathos. Take the first, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, in which a young tutor, bear-leading a spiritless scion of nobility through Europe, brings his bored charge to a strange mountain village where the inhabitants worship the forces of fire and wind. If you know Mr. Blackwood's work, as you surely do, I need not detail to you what happens. Told as he tells it, at considerable, even undue, length, but with a wonderful sense of the mysterious, of the feeling of the wind-swept mountain and its roaring fires, the thing is undeniably impressive. But in other less expert hands it would become ludicrous. There is one tale of finer texture than the others. It is called Wayfarers, and is a quite beautiful little fantasy on the old theme that love is longer than life. This is what Mr. Blackwood can do to perfection. It redeems a volume that, for all its originality, does not otherwise display his art quite at its best.
Antarctic Adventure (Fisher Unwin), by Raymond E. Priestley, tells the story of Scott's Northern party. That party, as you probably remember, spent an unexpected Winter underground, owing to the failure of the ship to relieve it. Its story was shortly told by its leader, Lieutenant Campbell, in Scott's Last Expedition—the official report of a sailor to his commanding officer. Mr. Priestley is more communicative. As one of the famous six who went through it, he gives us, from his comfortable rooms in Cambridge, the full tale of that extraordinary adventure. He had a good angle of observation in the igloo, for it was he who doled out the eight birthday lumps of sugar and the other few ridiculous luxuries which relieved the monotony of seal. He was, in fact, the commissariat officer. How he must have been loved—and hated! To what a large extent also (one begins to realise) the ultimate safety of the party must have been due to his management. I recommend to boys and grown-ups a story as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe, and as heartening to the pride of Englishmen as the other stories which we are hearing now from places less remote. For boys in particular The Voyages of Captain Scott (Smith Elder) has been written by Charles Turley, a compilation excellently made from the original diaries; to which Sir J. M. Barrie has written a true Barrie preface describing the boyhood of Scott. I can think of no better present for a nephew.
The Woman in the Bazaar (Cassell), by Mrs. Perrin, is a story of the Anglo-Indian life in which she always moves at ease. It is Captain George Coventry's first wife, the golden-haired and "phenomenally" (as the newspaper-men will go on saying) innocent Rafella of the high-perched Cotswold vicarage, who eventually finds her deplorable way down to the Bazaar. If George (that beastly prig) at the psychological moment of their first serious quarrel, instead of threatening and laughing like a drunken man and reeling back into the room, had reeled forward and gone into the matter quietly, the entirely virtuous, if idiotic, Rafella would not have flown into the practised arms of that unscrupulous barrister, Kennard, who, as everybody knew, had left a mournful trail of dishonoured wives all over India, his legal knowledge presumably saving him at once from the inconvenience of marrying his victims and from the physical violence of outraged Anglo-Indian chivalry. And when George, now a colonel and on the verge of a quarrel with the second Mrs. Coventry about a young ass of a tertium quid, caught sight of poor Rafella at a window in the Bazaar, he was so genuinely upset that he rushed back to his wife, forgave her (nothing in particular) and lived happily ever after. Which, of course, is just one of those things that thrusts the avenging hatchet into the hand of the Militant.
I suppose that the "culture" (using this word in the strictly English sense) of Streatham Hill may perhaps be a trifle thinner than that of certain other suburbs, and, keeping this well in mind, I must try to believe that Candytuft—I mean Veronica (Hutchinson) is meant for romantic comedy and is not a one-Act farce hastily expanded by its author into three-hundred-page fiction form. The plot turns on a not very serious marital estrangement. C. I. M. V. (she had called herself Veronica suddenly one day after reading Ruskin) decided that she must have an intellectual companion and (rather daringly) that he must be of the male sex. So her husband's best friend dressed himself up as a fantastic and extremely repulsive-looking poet with a red wig and padded waistcoat and indulged in fantastic rhodomantades in order to disillusionise her. Well enough on the knock-about stage, of course. But, if I am to treat C. I. M. V. from the mildly satiric stand-point, which I fancy that Mabel Barnes-Grundy would prefer me to adopt, Mr. Shakespeare Waddilove is rather a big mouthful to swallow, even if I can accommodate my threat to the supposition that the lady would have allowed her husband to choose her Platonic friend for her and promise beforehand to give him a two months' trial. She did come from Streatham, I know, before she went to live in the country; but still the trams run all the way from Streatham to Charing Cross—and that padded waistcoat! However there are some amusing passages in Candytuft—I mean, Veronica, and so I shut both eves and gulped as hard as I could.
Do you know Mrs. Shovell? Violet Ashwin she was, and married young Charlie Shovell, some sort of a publisher and really rather a nice fool. She is an absolute dear. Gay and loyal and adorably kind. No, not a bit sentimental. Shy and yet has a way with her, and, thank Heaven, not the least bit of a scalp-hunter. We did think that Master Charles, who was distinctly by way of being a philanderer, mightn't perhaps run quite straight. But she's done wonders with him. Might I introduce you? Certainly ? Then get Duke Jones (Sidgwick and Jackson), by Ethel Sidgwick. She's entirely responsible for these nice people, and for Lady Ashwin, Violet's utter beast of a mother, and Sir Claude, that brick of a man and doctor, and insufferable Honoria and naughty bewitching Lisette, who came badly to grief and was pulled out of a really rotten hole by Jones. E. M. Jones (M for Marmaduke) was the fellow who worshipped Violet at sight and was ever after her faithful dog... I've put down this book with real regret. I can't help worrying as to whether there really is such a person as Violet because I might have the fortune to meet her. Really, Miss Sidgwick has an extraordinary power of making you feel friends (or bitter enemies) with her puppets, who aren't puppets at all. I've had the bad luck to miss A Lady of Leisure, to which Duke Jones is a sequel, but I'll readily take the responsibility of advising you to get it first.
Those who do not accept Archbishop Lang's view that the Kaiser is too sacred a subject for mirth should spend sixpence and a quarter of an hour on Keep Smiling (Nash). In dealing with the inexhaustible theme of William's Lie Factory, Messrs. Walter Emanuel and John Hassall are at their best.