Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3834/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Sir John Lubbock, whose Life, by Mr. Horace Hutchinson, Macmillan publishes in two volumes, was one of the most honourable men who figures in public life during the last half-century. He was also one of the most widely honoured. Under his name on the title-page of the book appears a prodigious paragraph in small type enumerating the high distinctions bestowed upon him by British and foreign literary and scientific bodies. Forestalling the leisure of a bank-holiday I have counted the list and find it contains no fewer than fifty-two high distinctions, one for every week of the year. These were won not by striking genius or brilliant talent. Sir John Lubbock, to preserve a name which the crowning honour of the peerage did not displace in the public mind, was by nature and daily habit constitutionally industrious. After Eton he joined his father's naking business. In his diary under date Christmas Day, 1852, being the nineteenth year of his age, he gives an account of how he spends his day. It is too long to quote, but, beginningby "getting up at half-past six," it includes steady reading in natural history, poetry, political economy, science, mathematics and German. Breakfast, luncheon and tea are mentioned in due course; but there is no reference to dinner or supper. These functions were doubtless regarded by the young student as frivolous waste of time.
I knew Lubbock personally during his long membership of the House of Commons. He had neither grace of diction nor charm or oratory. But he had a way of getting Bills through all their stages which exceeded the average attained by more attractive speakers. In his references to Parliamentary life he mentions that Gladstone, when he proposed to abolish the Income Tax, told him that he intended to meet the deficiency partly by increase of the death duties. That was a fundamental principle of the Budget Lord Randolph Churchill prepared during his brief Chancellorship of the Exchequer. It was left to Sir William Harcourt to realise the fascinating scheme, later to be extended by Mr. Lloyd George. Another of Lord Randolph's personally unfulfilled schemes was the introduction of one-pound notes. In a letter dated 16th December 1886, he confidentially communicated his project to Lubbock. When his book reaches its second edition Mr. Hutchinson will have an opportunity of correcting a misapprehension set forth on page 48. He writes that, on June 21st, 1895, "all were startled by an announcement that Mr. Galdstone had resigned and that Parliament was to be dissolved." The surprise was not unnatural since Lord Roseberry was Prime Minister at this memorable crisis.
I can see some good in most people, but none whatever in those chairmen of meetings who, being put up to introduce distinguished speakers, thoroughly well worth listening to, feel called upon to delay matters by making lengthy speeches themselves. I propose to be quite brief in announcing Professor Stephen Leacock on Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (Lane). Conceive this arch-humourist let loose, if so rough a term may be applied to so delicate a wit, among the sordid and fleshly plutocracy of a progressive American city; imagine his polished satire expending itself on such playful themes as the running of fashionable churches on strictly commercial line, dogma and ritualism being so directed and adapted as to leave the largest possible dividends on the Special Offertory Cumulative Stock, and your appetite will be whetted for an intellectual feast of the most delicious flavour. For myself, I found a certain quiet but intense delight in the first five stories, episodes in the lives of individual billionaires; but when I came to the last three, which dealt with the class as a collective whole, then I became frankly and noisily hilarious. I am not given to being tiresome in the reading-room; it is another of the unforgivable offences; but I defy any man of intelligence to read those chapters and retain even a fair remnart of self-control.
The Lighter Side of School Life (Foulis) is one of the merriest and shrewdest books that I have met for a long time. Mr. Ian Hay pleasantly dedicates his work "to the members of the most responsible, the least advertised, the worst paid, and the most richly rewarded profession in the world"; and you will not have turned two pages before discovering that the writer of them knows pretty thoroughly what he is writing about. For my own part I claim to have some experience both of schoolmasters and boys, and I can say at once that the former at least have seldom been dealt with more faithfully than by Mr. Hay. His chapter on "Some Form Masters" is a thing of the purest joy; bitingly true, yet withal of a kindly sympathy with his victims. One would say that he knows boys as well, were it not for the conviction that to imagine any kind of understanding of Boydom is (if my contemporaries will forgive me) the last enchantment of the middle-aged, and the most fallacious. As for the Educational experts, he has all the cold and calculated hate for them that is the mark of experience. I admired especially his treatment of the "craze for practical teaching," the theory which holds, for example, that, instead of postulating a fixed relation between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, a teacher should supply his boys with several ordinary tin canisters, a piece of string and a ruler, and leave the form to work out their own result. Decidedly, Mr. Hay has seen The Lighter Side of School Life with the eye of knowledge; and when I mention that your own eyes will here encounter a dozen pictures by Mr. Lewis Baumer at his delightful best—well, I suppose, enough said.
At one time, I hope for ever gone, Mr. Percy White's sense of irony ran away with him. He seemed to have said to himself, "I can write witty dialogue and I have a shrewd eye for foibles, and if you are not satisfied with that you can take it or leave it." I for one took it, but always with a feeling that he was offering me a sparkling wine of a quality not first-rate, whereas with a little more trouble and expense he could have offered me an unimpeachable brand. Now that Cairo (Constable) has provided me with what I have been waiting for, I am more than delighted to present my acknowledgments. Mr. White's subject is pat to the moment; moreover it is handled with such unobtrusive skill that one absorbs a serious problem without being anxiously conscious that all the play of intrigue and adventure is covering a much deeper motive. When Mr. White sent Daniel Addington to Egypt to meet Abdul Sayed, who had been at Oxford and was a leader of the Young Egyptian party, he gave himself a chance of which he has taken full advantage. It is true that Addington cried a pest on all politics as soon as he fell a victim to the charms of Ann Donne, a widow of excessive sprightliness; but by that time he was too deeply enmeshed in the nets of intrigue to escape the just reward of those amateurs who dabble with critical situations. Abdul regarded him as a "milksop," and so he was from Abdul's full-blooded point of view; but I can also see in him a fresh testimony to the courage of our race. For he married the widow Ann, and that was a very plucky thing to do.
The only thing I didn't like about Molly, My Heart's Delight (Smith, Elder) was the title. But to allow yourself to be put off by this will be to miss one of the pleasantest books of the season. What I might call true fiction has always held a peculiar charm for me. In the present work that clever writer, Katharine Tynan, has been lucky and astute enough to find an ideal heroine, ready made to her hand, in the person of the charming woman who married Dean Delany. Upon the basis of her diaries and letters the romance has been built up, with the excellent result of a blend of art and actuality that is most engaging. Molly is the gayest of creatures in her girlhood. We see her character develop gradually, tamed and half broken by her unhappy first marriage (an episode exquisitely treated, so that even the ugly side of it bears yet some precious jewels of charity and long-suffering), tried in the fire of romantic adoration, and finally reaching its appointed destiny in the comradeship with "kind, tender, faithful D.D." Lovers of diaries and memoirs, equally with those who like a graceful tale well told, will find what they want here, from the moment when its heroine goes, a girl-bridge, to the romantically gloomy house of Rhoscrow, to that other moment when the placid mistress of the Deanery hears of the death of Bellamy, the man whom all her life she really loved. This book of Molly should be a "heart's delight" to many.