(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
_Marmaduke_ (HEINEMANN) has this peculiarity, that the title rôle is by
no means its most important or interesting character. Indeed it might
with more propriety have been called _Marrion_, since hers is not only
the central figure in the plot, but emphatically the one over which Mrs.
F. A. Steel has expended most care and affection. Moreover the untimely
death of _Marmaduke_ leaves _Marrion_ to carry on the story for several
chapters practically single-handed. I am bound to say, however, that at
no stage did she get much help from her colleagues, all of whom--the
gouty old father and his intriguing wife, the faithful servant, even
debonair _Marmaduke_ himself--bear a certain air of familiarity. But if
frequent usage has something lessened their vitality, _Marrion_ is a
living and credible human being, whether as daughter of a supposed
valet, adoring from afar the gay young ensign, or as the unacknowledged
wife of _Marmaduke_ and mother of his child, or later as an army nurse
amid the horrors of Crimean mismanagement. Later still, when the long
arm of coincidence (making a greater stretch than I should have expected
under Mrs. Steel's direction) brought _Marrion_ to the bedside of her
parent in a hospital tent, and converted her into a Polish princess, I
lost a little of my whole-hearted belief in her actuality. There are
really two parts to the tale--the Scotch courtship, with its intrigues,
frustrated elopements, _et hoc genus omne_; and the scenes, very
graphically written, of active service at Varna and Inkerman. I will not
pretend that the two parts are specially coherent; but at least Mrs.
Steel has given us some exceedingly interesting pictures of a period
that our novelists have, on the whole, unaccountably neglected.
* * * * *
_The Experiments of Ganymede Bunn_ (HUTCHINSON) is like to command a
wide audience. Its appeal will equally be to the lovers of Irish scenes,
to those who affect stories about horses and hunting, and to the
countless myriads who are fond of imagining what they would do with an
unexpected legacy. It was this last that happened to _Ganymede_, who was
left seventeen thousand pounds by an aunt called _Juno_ (the names of
this family are not the least demand that Miss Dorothea Conyers makes
upon your credulity). My mention of horses and Ireland shows you what he
does with his money, and where. It does not, however, indicate the
result, which is a happy variant upon what is usual in such cases. You
know already, I imagine, the special qualities to be looked for in a
tale by Miss Conyers--chief among them a rather baffling inability to
lie a straight course. If I may borrow a metaphor from her own favourite
theme, she is for ever dashing off on some alluring cross-scent. More
important, fortunately, than this is the enjoyment which she clearly has
in writing her stories and passes briskly on to the reader. There's a
fine tang of the open-air about them, and a smell of saddle-leather,
that many persons will consider well worth all the intricacies of your
problem-novelists. I had the idea that her honest vulgar little legatee
and his speculations as a horse-breeder might make a good subject for a
character-comedian; but I suppose the late LORD GEORGE SANGER is the
only man who could have produced the right equine cast.
* * * * *
The component elements of _The White Rook_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) may be
summarised in the picturesque argot of Army Ordnance somewhat as
follows: Chinamen, inscrutable, complete with mysterious drugs, one;
wives, misunderstood, Mark I, one; husbands, unsympathetic (for purposes
of assassination only), one; _ingénues_, Mark II, one; heroes, one;
squires, brutal, one; murders of sorts, three; ditto, attempted,
several. The inscrutable one is responsible for all the murders. Only
the merest accident, it seems, prevents him from disposing of the few
fortunate characters who survive to the concluding chapters of the
story. He narrowly misses the misunderstood wife (now a widow, thanks to
his kind offices), and his failure to bag the hero and _ingénue_
(together with a handful of subsidiary characters) is only a matter of
minutes. There is almost a false note about the last chapter, in which
the Oriental commits suicide before he has completed his grisly task;
but it was obviously impossible for anyone in the book to live happily
ever after so long as he remained alive. Just how Mr. HARRIS BURLAND and
the villainous figment of his lively imagination perform these deeds of
dastard-do is not for me to reveal. The publishers modestly claim that
in the school of WILKIE COLLINS this author has few rivals. As regards
complexity of plot the claim is scarcely substantiated by the volume
before me; but if bloodshed be the food of fiction Mr. BURLAND may slay
on, secure in his pre-eminence.
* * * * *
The _Rev. Frank Farmer_, hero of Mr. RICHARD MARSH'S _The Deacon's
Daughter_ (LONG), was the youthful, good-looking and eloquent
Congregationalist minister of the very local town of Brasted, and the
ladies of his flock adored him. So earnestly indeed did they adore him
that, after he had preached a stirring series of sermons on the evils of
gambling, they decided to subscribe and send him for a holiday to Monte
Carlo. On his return he was to preach another course of sermons, which
"would rouse the national conscience and, with God's blessing, the
conscience of all Europe." Possibly you can guess what happened to him;
I did, and I am not a good guesser. The _Rev. Frank_ had never been out
of England, and he found Monte Carlo inhabited by ladies who made him
blush. He could not understand their bold ways, so different from the
manner of the Brasted maidens. One of them laid especial siege to him
and assured him that he had "_la veine_." At first I am inclined to
believe that he thought she was talking of something varicose, but when
he understood what she meant he was at her mercy. In short he tried his
luck, to the dismay of his conscience but with prodigious benefit to his
pocket. His return to Brasted is described with excellent irony.
* * * * *
Mr. WILL IRWIN'S war-book naturally divides itself into two parts, since
he was lucky enough to get near the Front both about Verdun during the
great attack, and with the Alpini fighting on "the roof of Armageddon."
To these brave and picturesque friends of ours he dedicates his study,
_The Latin at War_ (CONSTABLE). You must not expect much of that inside
information which the author, as an American journalist, must have been
sorely tempted to produce. Indeed he has little to offer us that has not
been common property of the Correspondents for long enough, and several
of his descriptions (his picture of a glacier, for one), given with a
rather irritatingly childlike air of new discovery, cannot escape the
charge of commonplace. But his reflections, for once in a way the better
half of experience, more than make good this defect. His essay on Paris,
for instance--"the city of unshed tears"--is something more than
interesting, and his analysis of the cause of the successes of the
French army, in the face of initial defects of material, even better.
The author of _Westward Ho!_, considering the Spanish and English navies
of ELIZABETH'S time, found precisely the same contrasted elements of
autocracy and brotherliness producing just those results that we find
respectively in the German and French forces of to-day--on the one hand
a mechanical perfection of command, on the other an informed equality
which, somehow, does not make against efficiency whilst fostering
individuality. Mr. IRWIN hardly refers to our own Army; but one is
thankful to remember that discipline by consent, one of the virtues of
true democracy, is not the exclusive tradition of our French allies.
* * * * *
_A London Posy_ (MILLS AND BOON) is a story with at least an original
setting. So far as I know, Miss SOPHIE COLE is the first novelist to
group her characters about an actual London house preserved as a memorial
to former inhabitants. The house in question is that in Gough Square,
where Dr. JOHNSON lived, and two of the chief characters are _George
Constant_, the curator, and his sister, to whom the shrine is the most
precious object in life ("housemaid to a ghost," one of the other
personages rather prettily calls her). It therefore may well be that to
ardent devotees of the great lexicographer this story of what might have
happened in his house to-day will make a stronger appeal than was the
case with me, who (to speak frankly) found it a trifle dull. It might be
said, though perhaps unkindly, that Miss COLE looks at life through such
feminine eyes that all her characters, male and female, are types of
perfect womanhood. In _Denis Laurie_, the gentle essayist and recluse,
one might expect to find some feminine attributes; but even the bolder
and badder lots, whose task it is to supply the melodramatic relief,
struck me as oddly unvirile. But this is only a personal view. Others,
as I say, may find this very gentle story of mild loves and two deserted
wives a refreshing contrast to the truths, so much stranger and more
lurid than any fiction, by which we are surrounded.
* * * * *
[Illustration: [Owing to a scarcity of literary matter at the Front, our
soldiers are sometimes reduced to telling each other tales.]
Private Jones. "AND SHE _SAYS_, 'OH! WOT BLINKIN' GREAT EYES YOU 'AVE,
GRANDMOTHER!' AND THE WOLF, 'E SAYS, 'ALL THE BETTER TER SEE YER WIV, MY
DEAR.'"]