(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
_Dodo the Second_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), by E. F. BENSON. Doesn't the very
title-page sound like a leaf from your dead past? I protest that for my own
part I was back on hearing it in the naughty nineties, the very beginning
of them indeed (the fact that I was also back in the school-room did little
to impair the thrill) and agog to read the clever, audacious book that all
the wonderful people who lived in those days were talking about. And
behold! here they all are again--not the people who talked, but the
audacious characters. Only the trouble is that we have all in the interval
become so much more audacious ourselves that their efforts in this kind
seem to fail to produce the old impression. This is by no means to say that
I didn't enjoy _Dodo the Second_. I enjoyed it very much indeed; and so
will you. For one thing, it was the jolliest experience to recognize so
many old friends--_Dodo_ herself (now of course the _Princess Waldenech_),
and the wicked _Prince_, and the rest of them. Of _Dodo_ at least it may be
said, moreover, that she has matured credibly; this middle-aging lady is
exactly what the siren of twenty years ago would have developed into, still
beautiful, still alluring, and still (I must add) capable of infecting
everyone else in a conversation with exactly her own trick of cheap and
rather fatiguing brilliance. Added to all this there is now a new
generation of characters, several of whom are quite pleasant company; for
them and for one very impressive piece of descriptive work in the account
of a gathering storm, this Twenty Years After may be heartily welcomed.
Indeed one leaves _Dodo_ of 1914 so vigorously alive that I am not without
hope of her turning up yet again as a grandmother in 1934.
* * * * *
I have discovered from _The Rebellion of Esther_ (ALSTON RIVERS) why it is
that my sympathies, usually at the disposal of insurgents, are withheld
from the Suffragette. Anyone who is genuinely out to assert a principle, at
the cost of quarrelling with established authority, has a certain merit of
altruism which even the most law-abiding may count as a mitigating
circumstance, however unworthy the end in view; but the egoism of a young
lady (like Miss MARGARET LEGGE'S heroine) who in whatever cause defies all
institutions with the latent motive of asserting herself will induce even
the most lawless to support warmly the powers of suppression. _Miss Esther
Ballinger_ had a number of real grievances, but her point of view was
typified in her attitude towards the illicit and incidental motherhood of
one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it to
be "a courageous stand against conventional morality," which it just
possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak
surrender to immediate desires, as much more probably it was in fact. From
my knowledge of _Esther_ she had but one reason for expressing this
opinion, and that was the personal pleasure of saying the unorthodox thing,
an element which accounts for much of the unconventionality of that
intellectual class of townsfolk figuring broadcast in the book, and largely
discounts the value of its criticisms. I suspected the same flaw in her
expressed convictions on religious, political and feminist matters, and I
shouldn't be surprised to learn, though there is no hint of it, that she
stopped short of complete revolt in her own big affair because she realized
instinctively that even a passionate pose may lose its attractions if it
has to be maintained for a lifetime. Miss MARGARET LEGGE, though alive to
the young person's faults, regards her as, on the whole, deep-thinking and
right-minded; and I would not for a moment have our personal difference of
opinion discourage anybody from reading a carefully studied and ably
written novel.
* * * * *
The attitude of Militarist to Pacifist has the makings of a very pretty
comedy. When the Mystics (with the Friends and the Tolstoians) were
evangelical enough to preach their message of peace even to the point of
non-resistance, they were broadly scouted as sentimental and idealistic
idiots, and reminded of a nature red in tooth and claw rampant in this most
sordid of all possible worlds. Now that the Rationalists take up the case
against war from another end, they are denounced as squalid souls, with a
greengrocer's outlook, morbidly anxious about the price of peas and
potatoes, and urged to remember that not by bread alone doth man live. In
_The Foundations of International Polity_ (HEINEMANN), a series of lectures
developing phases of the argument of the Great Illusion, Mr. NORMAN ANGELL
incidentally deals with this greengrocery business. Nobody with knowledge
of his shrewd and vigorous method will be surprised that without bluster or
rhetoric he establishes a very clear verdict of acquittal. One has always
the impression that the rationalist in him is deliberately repressing the
mystic, lest his case be weakened by a suspicion of sentimentalism. For it
must be obvious that not a cold, still less a squalid, but a generous
purpose alone could inspire the fervour that flashes between the reasoned
lines. When Mr. ANGELL pleads that policy is directed towards
"self-interest," an easily misunderstandable pronouncement, it is no mean
self-interest he has in view but a quality of high civilising and social
value. He argues cogently that defence is not incompatible with, but rather
a part of, rational pacifism, which is the protest against coercion;
re-emphasises the difference between soldiering and policing; and
illustrates the essential shallowness of that venerable tag, "Human nature
doesn't change," by pointing to the decay of the duello, and the decline of
the grill as a means of reasoning with heretics and witches. Were this
learned Clerk a politician (which Heaven avert!), he would move for yet
another increment to the Supplementary Navy Estimates--to wit, the price of
a battleship to be expended in the distribution of this fighting pacifist's
books to all journalists, attaches, clergymen, bazaar-openers, club
oracles, professors, head-masters and other obvious people in both Germany
and Britain.
* * * * *
In his new satirical study of certain modern cranks and their
unpleasantness Mr. OLIVER ONIONS has, I think, allowed his bitterness to
outrun his sense of proportion. _A Crooked Mile_ (METHUEN) is a sequel to
his earlier book, _The Two Kisses_. We meet again those two young women,
_Dorothy_ and _Amory_, and the natural characteristics that they once
presented seem now to be tortured into caricature. _Amory_ has indeed all
my sympathy, so badgered is she by Mr. ONIONS, so relentlessly forced into
ignominious positions; and I cannot feel, as I should do, that she would
have achieved those ignominies without Mr. ONIONS' impelling hand behind
her. I have myself considerable sympathy for cranks, and perhaps that is
why I regard Mr. ONIONS' satire as a dry, gritty business. His humour is,
of course, always a delightful thing, but here I fancy that he has not
drawn the true line between comedy and farce, between satire that preserves
the probabilities and indiscriminate exaggeration. Of the three Mr.
ONIONSES who have at different times given me pleasure--the author of
_Widdershins_, the author of _In Accordance with the Evidence_, and the
author of _Little Devil Doubt_--I greatly prefer the first. In _A Crooked
Mile_ there is one chapter worthy of all three of them--that chapter where
_Amory_ discovers that her lover is going away with another woman. That is
fine work. For the rest I hope that he will grow tired of his social satire
and soon give us again some more of his delicate imagination and fancy.
* * * * *
What I felt about _The Girl on the Green_ (METHUEN) was that, however
charming and capable, she was not quite likely, after but a few short
months of golf, to have put up such a good fight in her great match with
the crack amateur, _Jim Beverley_, who was giving her a half. I couldn't
manage to believe it. However, that was not my business, but MARK
ALLERTON'S. According to him, _Frank_ took her match to the last green, in
spite of a number of cats, headed by the Vicar's wife, who did their best
to put her off her game. Yes, you are right to presume that what began as a
single developed into a flirtsome, and that the twain lived happily ever
after in a nice little dormy house, and that _Jim_ bested the HILTONS and
the OUIMETS, while _Frank_ put permanently out of joint all the noses of
all the Misses LEITCH. Those who not only play but talk, dream, read and
generally live for golf will, I can say with confidence, be grateful to Mr.
MARK ALLERTON for this easy, hopeful narrative.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Vendor of studs and buttons_ (_to vendor of inflating
baby_). "NOW THEN, _FATHER_, NOT SO MUCH OF IT. GIVE AN OLD BATCHILER A
CHARNST, CARN'T YER?"]
* * * * *
_The Morning Post_ on the Army and Navy Boxing Championships:--
"These men's middles were full of good things."
Why don't they train better?