(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
_Rescue_ (DENT) is a story in the authentic manner of Mr. JOSEPH CONRAD at
his unapproachable best. If it is true, as one has heard, that the book was
begun twenty-five years ago and resumed lately, this explains but does
nothing to minimize a fact upon which we can all congratulate ourselves.
The setting is the shallow seas of the Malay coast, where _Lingard_, an
adventurer (most typically CONRAD) whose passion in life is love for his
brig, has pledged himself to aid an exiled young Rajah in the recovery of
his rights. At the last moment however, when his plans are at point of
action, the whole scheme is thwarted by the stranding of a private yacht
containing certain persons whose rescue (complicated by his sudden
subjection to the woman of the party) eventually involves _Lingard_ in the
loss of fortune and credit. Perhaps you can suppose what Mr. CONRAD makes
of a theme so congenial; how the tale moves under his hand in what was once
well called that "smoky magnificence" of atmosphere, just permitting the
reader to observe at any moment so much and no more of its direction. Of
the style it would now be superfluous to speak. It has been given to Mr.
CONRAD, working in what is originally a foreign medium, to use it with a
dignity unsurpassed by any of our native craftsmen. Such phrases as (of the
prudent mate remonstrating with _Lingard_): "What he really wanted was to
have his existence left intact, for his own cherishing and pride;" or
again, "The situation was too complicated to be entrusted to a cynical or
shameless hope," give one the quick pleasure of words so delicately and
deftly used as to seem newly coined. _Rescue_, in short, is probably the
greatest novel of the year, one by which its author has again enriched our
literature with work of profound and moving quality.
* * * * *
I was inclined to flatter myself that nothing in the plot of _The Silver
Tea-shop_ (STANLEY PAUL) could possibly take me by surprise, but I found
towards the end that Miss E. EVERETT GREEN had contrived to slip in the
real villain all unsuspected while I, as she meant me to, was staring hard
at the supposed one, so that there I must acknowledge myself defeated. With
a stolen invention, an old gentleman found shot in his room, and a son
under a vow to avenge his father, the story provides plenty of thrills, and
the "Silver Tea-shop" itself has the fascination that business ventures in
books often exercise. It seems to be run on such lavish lines for the
prices charged that I found myself looking hungrily for its address. I wish
the author had not referred to her hero as having "mobile digits" and
burdened her ingenuous story with anything so important as a prologue. By
making the villain's deserted offspring not one baby girl only, or even
twins, but triplets, Miss EVERETT GREEN provides waitresses all of one
family for the "Silver Tea-shop," and that, though a happy arrangement, is
a little too uncommon to add to the likelihood of an unconvincing tale.
* * * * *
When a book is succinctly labelled _Love Stories_ (DORAN), at least no one
has any right to complain that he wasn't warned beforehand of the character
of its contents. As a matter of fact, human nature being what it is, I have
little doubt that Mrs. MARY ROBERTS RINEHART has hit upon a distinctly
profitable title. Indeed I believe that this has already been proved in the
Land of Freedom, from which the work comes to us, where (I am given to
understand) the vogue of sentimental fiction is even greater than with
ourselves. What the name does nothing to indicate is that the stories are
almost all of them laid in or about hospital wards. For some, perhaps most,
of the author's admirers this may serve only to increase the charm; for
others, who prefer their romance unflavoured with iodoform, not. Undeniable
that she has a smiling way with her, and a gift of sympathetic enjoyment
that carries off the old, old dialogues, even imparting freshness to the
tale of the patient _in extremis_ who persuades his attractive nurse into a
death-bed marriage, treatment that the slightest experience of fiction
should have warned her to be invariably curative. Perhaps the best of the
tales is "Jane," which tells very amusingly the results of a hospital
strike that in actual life would, I imagine, have provided little humorous
relief. By this time you may have gathered that what matters about Mrs.
RINEHART is not what she says but the way that she says it; upon which hint
you can act as fancy dictates.
* * * * *
I very distinctly feel that "KATHARINE TYNAN" could have made a first-rate
novel of _Denys the Dreamer_ (COLLINS) and have had plenty over for a good
second if she had taken the trouble. But her fluent pen runs away with her
down paths that lead nowhere in particular, instead of developing her main
characters and situations to an intelligible and satisfactory point.
_Denys_ is of a gentle Irish family that has come down to very small
farming. He dreams good, solid and rather Anglo-Saxon dreams of draining
bogs on the sea-coast estates of _Lord Leenane_, whose agent he becomes
(and whose daughter he loves from afar), and of a great port that is to
rival Belfast. Unexpected, not to say incredible, assistance comes from a
Jew money-lender and his wife. The portraits of _Mr._ and _Mrs. Aarons_ are
the best things in the book, and I hope Mrs. HINKSON will make a novel
about these two admirable people some day soon. _Denys_ makes his own and
his patron's fortune and I am sure lives happily ever after with _Dawn_,
who is the palest wraith of a girl, owing to the shameful neglect of her
author, who is too busy putting large sums of money into the pockets of the
principal puppets. Indeed, for a West Coast of Ireland story a demoralising
amount of money is going about.
* * * * *
The principal scenes of _The North Door_ (CONSTABLE) are laid in the
Cornwall of some hundred-and-thirty years ago, and I welcome Dr. GREVILLE
MACDONALD as an expert in the Cornish language and character. Cornwall, as
all readers of fiction know, has during the last few years been attacked
again and again by novelists, and most of them would do well to study Dr.
MACDONALD'S romance and most thoroughly to digest it. In form, however, he
will have little to teach them, for his book is very indifferently
constructed. It may seem ungrateful in these rather skimpy days to complain
of a surfeit of matter, but there is stuff in this book for two if not
three novels. One cannot blame Dr. MACDONALD for his indignation at the
miseries of child-labour, but here it is perhaps out of place. His _Mr.
Trevenna_, the mystical parson, friend of smugglers and of everyone who
suffered from laws (unrighteous or righteous), is a great figure; and I
shall not soon forget either his correspondence with _Lady Evangeline
Walrond_ or his superhuman kindliness of heart. If you want to get at the
true flavour of Cornwall you have only to open _The North Door_.
* * * * *
A young clerk in an insurance office, who wanted to go as a missionary to
India, is the hero, if there is one, of Mrs. ALICE PERRIN'S latest novel,
_The Vow of Silence_ (CASSELL). I have never read a book about India which
made such an ambition seem more courageous, for it gives such a hot and
thirsty picture of that country when _Harold Williams_ at last reaches it
that it is positively uncomfortable to read it in Summer weather. _Harold_
and his brother and sister missionaries live in a state of stuffy
discomfort which soon undermines his health and leaves him no defence
against the charms of _Elaine Taverner_, who has a large cool drawing-room
and dainty frocks, and a young soldier lover and an old scholar husband,
and all the other things we expect of pretty young women in Anglo-Indian
novels. Poor _Harold_, consumed at once by a zeal which makes him long to
save _Elaine's_ soul and a passion which makes him embrace a parcel of her
_lingerie_, very naturally loses the remains of his reason and paves the
way for her marriage with her lover by obligingly pushing the elderly
husband into the jaws of a crocodile. If it were more convincing it would
be a painful story--in some hands it might have been a great one; as it is,
Mrs. PERRIN seems for once to have missed her opportunity.
* * * * *
If the publisher of _About It And About_ had told me on the wrapper that
Mr. D. WILLOUGHBY has an excellent fund of literary reminiscence, on which
he draws for the modelling of a very pretty epigrammatical style, I should,
after reading the book, have agreed with him heartily. What Mr. T. FISHER
UNWIN does say about these short essays, which embrace most of the subjects
on which people have violent opinions, is that the author's "point of view
is that of the natural historian making an unprejudiced examination." An
unprejudiced man, I take it, is a man whose sentiments are the same as
mine, and I happen to disagree with Mr. WILLOUGHBY as profoundly as
possible on several of the themes he has chosen. On fox-hunting, for
instance, which he considers a more decadent sport than bull-fighting; and
on Ulster, which he attacks bitterly by comparison with the rest of
Ireland, for cherishing antiquated political animosities and talking about
the Battle of the Boyne. But will Mr. WILLOUGHBY not have been hearing of
"the curse of CROMWELL"? Let us rather agree to be impatient with Yorkshire
for her absurd tranquillity with regard to WILLIAM THE FIRST. I repeat that
Mr. WILLOUGHBY has a very clever style, but, bless his heart, he is as
bigoted as I am myself.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Occupant of Pew._ "ENTIRELY SELF-MADE. ORIGINALLY A WAITER,
AS YOU CAN SEE."]