(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
Is not _Come Out To Play_ (CONSTABLE) a delightful title for a story?
And, believe me, not better than the story itself, which I should
call, save for one defect, a perfect masterpiece in miniature. To have
done with blame, I will say at once that the defect is the end, which,
to my thinking at least, seems both inartistic and cowardly. I can
hardly explain my meaning more clearly without spoiling your
enjoyment. But I will hint that this tragedy of unfulfilled promise
(for the book is a tragedy, though concealed beneath a surface
merriment) seemed too delicate for so melodramatic a climax. Miss M.
E. F. IRWIN writes with an ease and finish that is amazing. She has
form, too, and a quite unusual beauty of style that gives to her work
something that is very difficult to analyse. The book is the story of
a boy called _Truffles_ (which of course was not his real name), a boy
with a long white face and dark eyes under heavy lids that gave him
the look of Pierrot. Nothing very special happens in his life. He has
a genial spendthrift father, a prig of an elder brother, a rather
jolly sister and a host of admiring friends. And the lot of them drift
along in the artificial comedy of London existence in peacetime,
flirting and idling, working and loving, all a little
self-consciously; setting their emotions for the most part to an
accompaniment of popular comic songs, those vacuous jingles whose
light-heartedness Time so quickly turns to a wistful and poignant
melancholy. You will gather that the actual story is no great matter.
It is the faintly pathetic grace of the telling that makes this book
one of the very few to which the misused adjective "beautiful" can
honestly be applied. Perhaps in reading it you may be reminded, as I
was, of another modern novel, one that was praised greatly in these
pages and has leapt since to fame. I name no names, because I am far
indeed from charging Miss IRWIN with imitation. The more present-day
writers who can display this same sensitive and compelling charm, the
better I shall be pleased.
* * *
The perfect children's-book must be one of the most difficult things
in the world to write. The qualities it would demand are so varied and
the dangers so many. You must, for example, be just sentimental enough
to obtain sympathy, yet never so much as to invite suspicion of being
sloppy. There must be adventure for the adventurous, colour for the
romantic and magic for everybody. Frankly I cannot say that Mr. H. DE
VERE STACPOOLE has achieved the ideal; but in _Poppyland_ (LANE) he
has certainly strung together a number of stories that most children
are sure to like. I fancy their favourite will be "The Little Prince,"
a story in which all the right things happen--beggar girls turn out to
be Countesses, and handsome Princes suffer a strictly temporary
decline into beggary--and all in an agreeable Neapolitan setting,
which, as the advertisements say, "will appeal to children of larger
growth." With his fairies Mr. STACPOOLE is, to my thinking, a degree
less successful. The worst of tales about storks and magic gardens and
cripple-boys and the like is that, however freshly you set forth,
sooner or later you are sure to find yourself in the foot-prints of
the old wizard of Denmark. If I had loved my HANS CHRISTIAN less, I
should have better appreciated certain tales in this collection that
inevitably recalled him. Still, the whole is pleasant enough. I wish I
could say also that I liked the illustrations, but, with exceptions,
these seemed to me both ugly and pretentious. The best exception was
one of the old stork, a delightful piece of colour for the sake of
which I can almost forget some of the others.
* * *
Miss MACNAUGHTAN always writes very charmingly and with plenty of
humour, and in dedicating _A Green Englishman_ (SMITH, ELDER) to "My
Canadian friends" she must, I think, be too unconscious of her powers,
for this collection of stories is far from being a valuable
endorsement of the flowery praises of the emigration bureaux. Very
little hope is held out to the young man of good family who is a
gentleman and something of a sportsman, and proposes to pick up gold
on the pavements or the prairies of the West. I do not mean that the
writer is ungenerous either to the Dominion or to its people, but she
takes no pains to conceal the terror that lives with the beauty of its
vast spaces, and she does not represent the struggle to "make good" as
altogether a lovely thing. Perhaps the most ambitious of these
sketches, certainly the one which conforms most nearly to the "short
story" model, describes the fate of a clergyman's daughter who pays a
visit to Macredie, "somewhere on the C. P. R. line," and marries a
farmer and land-speculator, chiefly because this is her last chance of
marrying at all. The horror of the silence and the snow, when her
husband leaves her to face a Canadian winter alone, because he has
business in England, eventually drives her mad; and though most of the
stories are in a lighter vein than this, and there is plenty of the
humorous sentiment in which Miss MACNAUGHTAN excels, the moral that I
draw from the book as a whole is, "Visit Canada by all means, but,
unless you are a Scotchman of the very doggedest type, don't stay
there."
* * *
The hiding of lights under bushels may be all very wellin private
life, but is misplaced in the book-publishing business. I thoroughly
disapprove of the title and the outside cover of the Hon. Mrs.
DOWDELL'S latest collection of leisurely essays, _Joking Apart_
(DUCKWORTH). The one suggests a heart-to-heart talk on the things that
matter or else an outburst of boisterous farce, while the other is
merely dismal. The two together are enough to put the public off a
really good thing. Mrs. DOWDELL treats of the domestic and social side
of feminine life in that peculiar vein of humour which is neither
joking nor yet joking apart; her writing reminds me of those
least-to-be-forgotten evenings of my life when I have been lucky
enough to listen for hours to a real pucker conversationalist in the
best of spirits and at the top of his form. The words that passed are
forgotten; it is even difficult to remember what all the talk was
about; but the recollection remains of having heard the truth of
things for once, neither laughed at nor wept over, but very brightly
revealed. Of twenty excellent chapters I much prefer the one about
woman's sphere in electioneering; as to the thumb-nail illustrations
in the margin, they show bad draughtsmanship, but some are
delightfully apt.
* * *
Mr. LINCOLN COLCORD, writer of short stories of the sea, republished
under title _The Game of Life and Death_ (MACMILLAN), has taken no
pains to conceal his admirable model. There surely never was, outside
conscious parody, so conspicuously derivative a method of handling
similar types and subjects. It was a bold thing to do. He has not
CONRAD'S fastidious sense of words, nor his masterly suggestion of
atmosphere, so much more felt than actually expressed, nor his patient
sure unravelling of motives; and in "The Voice of the Dead" he commits
a piece of shocking bad Wardour Street, of which by no conceivable
lapse could his master have been guilty. But there is a whiff of the
sea in his work; his types, if cruder, have life, and he often
contrives some ingenious turn in the situation which gives the story
interest. _The Game of Life and Death_--which ends in a hand of poker
played between Chinese merchants and pirates, with two lives and much
money and gear for stake--is a good yarn, though it leans on the
inartistic unlikelihood of a royal capping a straight flush--which is
piling it on too thick. The tale of "The Moths" that haunted a man who
took them for the souls of wronged women provides a sufficient thrill.
"De Long" is just the kind of story of the crooked cosmopolitan
ship-chandler that CONRAD would write, indeed has written. _Nichols_,
the narrator of this and others, is made after the model of his
reflective skippers. And here the challenge gets too near for Mr.
COLCORD'S chances. Still the yarns go well with a seasoned pipe; and
that is no mean recommendation.
* * *
_The Honourable Percival_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) may at least claim to
have established a record in one respect. I think I never met a
full-sized novel with a more slender plot. The _Honourable Percival
Hascombe_, on a pleasure tour in the Pacific, met _Miss Roberta
Boynton_, and fell in love with her. This, I give you my word, is all
there is of it. But, if you think that so slight a thread will be
insufficient to hold your interest, you reckon without the cunning of
ALICE HEGAN RICE, who has spun it. There are those of us who worship
_Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_. There are also those who don't. But
while regretfully classing myself among the benighted to whom this
Best Seller appealed in vain, I hasten to add that I have nothing but
gratitude for _The Honourable Percival_. This record of a shipboard
romance is done with the daintiest art, delicate, tender, humorous,
and not (as is the fault with so many American romances)
oversweetened. The development of _Percival_ from a priggish
misanthrope to a man and a lover is beautifully told. Also a great
part of the charm of the tale lies in its setting, a series of
cinemascopic views of the ports touched at by the _S.S. Saluria_, so
vividly portrayed that you will close the book with quite the feeling
of the returned traveller. One small but poignant surprise the ending
has in store, which I will not spoil by anticipation.
* * * * *