(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
If _The Prussian Officer_, a study of morbidly vicious cruelty practised
by a captain of Cavalry on his helpless orderly (and the first of a
sheaf of collected stories, short or shortish, by Mr. D. H. LAWRENCE,
issued by Messrs. DUCKWORTH), had been written since the declaration of
war it would certainly be discounted as a product of the prevailing
_odium bellicosum_. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace,
and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a
freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the
common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a
distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. LAWRENCE'S method.
It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or
exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of those
stories is a story in the accepted mode. They are studies in (dare one
use the overworked word?) psychological portraiture. I don't know any
other writer who realises passion and suffering with such objective
_force_. The word "suffering" drops from his pen in curiously unexpected
contexts. The fact of it seems to obsess him. Yet it is no morbid
obsession. He seems to be dominated by sympathy in its literal meaning,
and it gives his work a surprising richness of texture.... I dare press
this book upon all such as need something more than mere yarns, who have
an eye for admirably sincere workmanship and are interested in their
fellows--fellows of all sorts, soldiers, keepers, travellers, clergymen,
colliers, with womenfolk to match.
* * *
On a map of the North you may be able to find an island named after one
_Margaret_. It should lie, though I have sought it in vain, just about
where the florid details of the Norwegian coast-line run up to those
blank spaces that are dotted over, it would seem, only by the occasional
footprints of polar bears. Anyhow it was so christened by two bold
mariners who lived in the _Spacious Days_ (MURRAY) of QUEEN ELIZABETH.
That they both loved the lady (ELIZABETH, of course, too--but I mean
_Margaret_) may be assumed; but that they should eventually, with one
accord, desire to resign their claims upon her affection must be read to
be understood. I for one did not quarrel with them on this score. For
had not their mistress in the meantime found companionship more suitable
than theirs? Besides, if even the author is so little courteous to his
heroine as to invite her to appear only in two chapters between the
third and the twenty-seventh, why should two rough sea-dogs--or you and
I--be more attentive? And indeed it is a correct picture of his period
that Mr. RALPH DURAND is concerned to present rather than a love story.
In the writing of the love scenes considered necessary to the mechanism
of the plot he seems very little at his ease; and so marked at times is
his discomfort that I must confess to having felt some irritation when
my willingness to be convinced was not met halfway. In the handling of
his sheets and oars I like the author better, though even here I miss
what might have brought me into a companionship with his people as close
as I could wish on a most adventurous journey of nearly four hundred
pages. But perhaps that is my fault; and, at the least, here is a
straightforward sea story--as honest as the sea and as clean.
* * *
_Llanyglo_ was a child with fair hair and blue eyes, and how she grew
and what she learnt, and all the changes of her dresses and her soul,
are set forth by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in _Mushroom Town_ (HODDER AND
STOUGHTON). She differed from the children of other novelists who grow
up to be men and women, because she was made of bricks and mortar and
iron girders and romantic scenery and ozone (especially ozone), and the
people who lived with her or took trips to see her are treated as a mere
emblematical garnish of her character and growth. _Llanyglo_ is a
daughter of Wales, but she is not any town that you may happen to have
seen, although possibly Blackpool and Douglas and Llandudno have met
her, and turned up their noses at her, as she turned up her nose at
them. Lancashire built and conquered her, to be conquered and annually
recuperated in turn. _Cymria capta ferum_ ... might have been the motto
of her municipal arms. Exactly how Mr. ONIONS exhibits the romantic
spectacle of her development, with the strange knowledge she picked up,
as from virgin wildness she became first select and then popular, I
cannot hope to explain. Suffice it to say that the process is epitomised
in sketches of the various people who helped in the moulding of her--the
drunken _Kerr_ brothers, who built a house in a single night; _Howell
Gruffydd_, the wily grocer; _Dafydd Dafis_, the harper; and _John Willie
Garden_, son of the shrewd cotton-spinner who first saw the
possibilities of the place, and won the heart of the untamed gipsy girl,
_Ynys_. This is surely Mr. ONIONS' best novel since _Good Boy Seldom_;
and as _Llanyglo_ is safely ensconced on the West coast you should go
there at once for the winter season.
* * *
_Spragge's Canyon_ (SMITH, ELDER), takes its title, as you might guess,
from the canyon where the _Spragges_ lived. It was a delightful spot, a
kind of earthly paradise (snakes included), and the _Spragge_ family had
made it all themselves out of unclaimed land on the Californian coast.
Wherefore the _Spragges_ loved it with a love only equalled perhaps by
the same emotion in the breast of Mr. H. A. VACHELL, who has written a
book about it. The _Spragges_ of the tale are _Mrs. Spragge_, widow of
the pioneer, and her son _George_. With them on the ranch lived also a
cousin, _Samantha_, a big-built capable young woman, destined by
Providence and _Mrs. Spragge_ to be the helpmate of _George_. But
_George_, though he was strong and handsome and a perfect marvel with
rattlesnakes (which he collected as a subsidiary source of income), was
also a bit of a fool; and when, on one of his rare townward excursions,
he got talking to _Hazel Goodrich_ in a street car, her pale
attractiveness and general lure proved too much for him. Accordingly
_Hazel_ was asked down to the ranch on a visit (I am taking it on trust
that Mr. VACHELL knows the Californian etiquette in these matters) and
has the time of her life, flirting with the love-lorn _George_,
impressing his mother, and generally scoring off poor _Samantha_. At
least so she thought. Really, however, _Mrs. Spragge_ had taken
_Hazel's_ measure in one, and was all the time quietly fighting her
visitor for her son's future. This fight, and the character of the
mother who makes it, are the best things in the book. I shall not tell
you who wins. Personally I had expected a comedy climax, and was
unprepared for creeps. But _George_, I may remind you, collected snakes.
A good and virile tale.
* * *
Sir MELVILLE MACNAGHTEN hopes, in his Introduction to _Days of my Years_
(Arnold), that his reminiscences "may be found of some interest to a
patient reader"; and, when one considers that _Sir Melville_ spent
twenty-four years at Scotland Yard, many of them as chief of the
Criminal Investigation Department, he can hardly be accused of undue
optimism. Speaking as one of his readers, I found no difficulty at all
in being patient. I have always had a weakness for official detectives,
and have resented the term "Scotland Yard bungler" almost as if it were
a personal affront; and now I feel that my resentment is justified.
Scotland Yard does not bungle; and the advice I shall give for the
future to any eager-eyed, enthusiastic young murderer burning to embark
on his professional career is, don't practise in London. I would not
lightly steal a penny toy in the Metropolitan area. There are two
hundred and seventy-nine pages in this story of crime, as seen by the
man at the very centre of things, and nearly every one of them is packed
with matter of absorbing interest. Consider the titles of the chapters:
"Bombs and their Makers"; "Motiveless Murders"; "Half-a-day with the
Blood-hounds." This, I submit, is the stuff; this, I contend, is the
sort of thing you were looking for. There is something so human and
simple in Sir MELVILLE'S method of narration that it is with an effort
that one realises what an important person he really was, and what
extraordinary ability he must have had to win and hold his high
position. Even when he disparages blood-hounds I reluctantly submit to
his superior knowledge and abandon one of my most cherished illusions. I
hate to do it, but if he says that a blood-hound is no more use in
tracking criminals than a Shetland pony would be, I must try to believe
him.
* * * * *
Illustration: THE COMPLETE SALESMAN.
_Lady_ (_rather difficult to please_). "I LIKE THIS ONE, BUT--I SEE IT'S
PRINTED IN GERMANY."
_Salesman._ "WELL, IF YOU LIKE IT, MADAM, I WOULDN'T TAKE TOO MUCH
NOTICE OF THAT STATEMENT. IT'S PROBABLY ONLY ANOTHER GERMAN LIE!"
* * * * *
Revenge.
"After Herr Von Holman Bethwig's wild speech in the German Reichstag
the Government might change their minds."
_Cork Constitution._
It isn't much one can do to the GERMAN CHANCELLOR just now, but these
misprints of his name always annoy him, and every little helps.
* * * * *