(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I never open a book by Mr. ROBERT HALIFAX without a feeling of pleasant
anticipation, nor close one without a sense of quickened sympathy for my
fellow-mortals, especially those of them who dwell in Camden Town. His
latest story, _The Right to Love_ (METHUEN), finds him again on familiar
ground; but the inhabitants of Widdiford Street have all the freshness
of real human beings. Perhaps more than its predecessors _The Right to
Love_ is a story with a purpose and a moral; in it Mr. HALIFAX has
illustrated by two groups of characters the vexed question of marriage
failures and the hard lot of the unwanted woman. But do not suppose that
these characters are merely "cases." On the contrary, it is because they
are realized as understandable creations of flesh and blood that the
disasters of _Norah_ and _Tom Spain_ and the tragedy of _Letty
Summerbee's_ enforced spinsterhood move one to so personal a concern.
From the moment when _Norah_ and _Tom_ enter their little house after
the short honeymoon to that in which the tormented young wife finally
leaves her worthless husband for the protection (word rightly used) of
his long-suffering friend one is made to feel that exactly thus and thus
the affair happened, and is happening to like persons every day. As for
_Letty_, with her restraint, her practical helpfulness and her
occasional outbursts of emotion thwarted and suppressed, she is a type
only too convincing. Perhaps one might object that Mr. HALIFAX brings an
indictment against society without suggesting any practical remedy. Also
that--as I have noticed before--his humorous characters have a tendency
to edge away from the rest into the regions of farce. But for all that
_The Right to Love_ remains a simple, sincere and very moving study.
* * * * *
I like the remark that General JOFFRE made, not to the horse-marines,
but to the remnants of the six thousand _Fusiliers Marins_ who made up
the Naval Brigade at Dixmude in November, 1914. "You are my best
infantrymen," he told them; and, if you want to know why, all you have
to do is read _Dixmude_ (HEINEMANN), by CHARLES LE GOFFIC. For four
weeks, shrapnel to right of them, "saucepans" to left of them, volleyed
and thundered, and for four weeks the six thousand stood in the valley
of death at Dixmude and held up six times as many Boches, who came on,
as one of them said, like bugs. Forty thousand was the estimate of the
number of these marines formed by a German major who was one of their
prisoners; when he learnt that they were only six he wept with rage and
muttered, "Ah, if we had only known!" Dixmude was not quite such a big
affair as Verdun, but the men who held the town, "the young ladies with
the red pompoms" on their caps, were first cousins to our own Jack Tars.
Bretons or Britons, there is nothing to choose between them. Sailors
all, they are the salt of the sea; and this fascinating and
circumstantial epic of the French marines is not at all an exaggerated
picture of the cheery courage and endurance of the Breton fisherman.
* * * * *
_Sussex Gorse_ (NISBET) is a story about the fight between man and
nature. It is told by Miss SHEILA KAYE-SMITH with considerable power and
a quickening touch of symbolism that lifts it into romance. The ambition
of _Reuben Backfield_ was to enlarge the Sussex farm that he had
inherited from his easy-going father till its bounds should include a
certain coveted moor. The book shows how his entire life was spent in
the achievement of this end; how for it he sacrificed his own ease, and
the happiness of his brother, his two wives and his many children, and
how finally he triumphed, and in his lonely old age, seeing the desired
acres all his own, was content. It is a grim book, with only now and
then a touch of suggested poetry to save it from being uniformly sordid
and depressing. As it is, the long unsparing struggle takes somehow the
dignity of an epic. Only one of _Reuben's_ many sons makes any success
out of life--_Richard_, who becomes a barrister, and treats his father
to occasional visits of curiosity and amused patronage. There is a
chapter of cynical humour in which the intolerant contemptuous old
rustic is confronted by the art-loving triflers who gather in his son's
drawing-room. Otherwise he is alone. "There's no one gone from here as
has ever come back!" But I was glad that Miss KAYE-SMITH had the courage
to play fair by her hero, and to give him at last his share of the hard
bargain. This is only one of many qualities that make _Sussex Gorse_ a
novel to be remembered.
* * * * *
I can't quite make out what made Mr. WILLIAM HEWLETT persist in
_Introducing William Allison_ (SECKER). Probably a nice general
conviction (rather infectious; I caught it) of his own cleverness. If
his work wants a good deal of pulling together separate bits of it are
confoundedly well done. The schoolboy conversations (_William_ is a
Winchester man, thrown into a lawyer's clerkship straight from the
sixth) and the picture of the superbly groomed associates of his
friend's brother, _Marmaduke Fenton_, are cases in point, though I don't
think Winchester would have been so absurdly abashed by the glories of
bachelordom in Half-Moon Street. So too is the lecture of _Parbury_, the
neo-decadent, on the cultivation of "that sacred and imperishable
flower, the white unsullied bloom of an Intensely Useless Life," even if
it be only a belated cutting from _The Green Carnation_. _William's_
first boyish passion for a quite cold shop-minx, with its agonies of
self-abasement and rarefied desire, is uncannily clever; and the
thoroughly unpleasant episode of our _William_, minx-free, only to be
caught in the toils of that insatiable sensualist, Mrs. _Daintree_, is
presented with discreet vigour. There is possibly a moral in the
fascinating _Marmaduke's_ desperate half-hour in Dr. _Ferox's_
consulting-room. But Mr. HEWLETT never wrote this flippant tale to point
a moral. Rather, as I suggest, he seems to have said, "These are samples
of several _genres_ in which I can succeed on my head. Some day I will
really finish something. Meanwhile pray be amused."
* * * * *
Of Miss ETHEL DELL'S popularity there seems to be no possible doubt, and
her publishers, Messrs. HUTCHINSON, assure me that her latest, _The Bars
of Iron_, is the best novel she has written. While accepting their
unprejudiced judgment I retain the liberty of remaining unimpressed.
Miss DELL has an eye for a plot and she can make things move; but her
methods are too feverish for my taste. A man-fight in the prologue is
followed by a dog-fight in the first chapter, and through the early part
of the book the _Rev. S. Lorimer_ beats his numerous family again and
again. It is true that, between her explosions, she introduces certain
lovable characters, but they fail to correct the general atmosphere of
violence. Neither the beauty of _Piers Evesham_ (his naked shoulders
looked "like a piece of faultless statuary, god-like, superbly strong"),
nor his sympathy with children, offers adequate compensation for his
volcanic temperament. If Miss DELL, who seems to have a penchant for
tempestuous heroes, would devote some of her superfluous energy to a
study of men, so as to get to understand them as well as she understands
her own sex, it would be a good thing for the quality both of her work
and of her public.
* * * * *
In her latest little volume of verse, modestly entitled _Simple Rhymes
for Stirring Times_ (PEARSON), Miss JESSIE POPE shows that she has not
only the right spirit, but a sense of form beyond the common. She does
not pretend to heroics and she seldom allows herself to touch a note of
pathos; her mission is just to inspire other hearts with the infectious
gay courage of her own. It finds a natural expression in the easy lilt
of her measures. She is fluent rather than polished and never overlays
her designs with excess of embroidery. Long practice has made her
familiar with a craft which is not so easy as it looks; and in
particular she has learnt the art of the final line. Miss POPE may
possibly run the risk of over-writing herself; but so long as she brings
a discriminating eye to the choice of what is worth preserving--and she
has been _quite_ reasonably self-critical in her present selection--the
matter that she jettisons is no affair of mine. Judging only by what I
see here, I recognise that, in whatever other way she may be helping the
cause, through her gift of light-heart verse she is doing--and none more
bravely--her share of woman's work.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Touring Stage Manager (rehearsing super)._ "And when you
hear the cue, 'Ah, here comes the Kaiser!' you stride slowly on to the
stage looking like the guilty Monarch."]
* * * * *
Journalistic Colour.
"On all hands their preparations for their ultimate victory are
being pressed forward with unflagging zest, and nowhere has the
white heat of their resolve grown pale"--_Daily Graphic._
* * * * *