(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
"I remember, I remember...." Still on every side echoes the poet's
cry, while scarce a publisher but can prove that the thoughts of age
make long, long books. Certainly not the shortest of these, but among
the most readable, is _A Medley of Memories_ (ARNOLD), in which the
Right Rev. Sir DAVID HUNTER-BLAIR has embodied the recollections of
his very active career as Benedictine monk and a leading figure in the
world of British Catholicism. Eton, Oxford, Rome, and (of course) his
own famous monastery at Fort Augustus, are the chief scenes of it;
and about them all Sir DAVID talks vividly, even brilliantly. I am not
saying that all this pleasant garrulity would not have been the
better for the blue pencil, especially in those chapters in which the
writer's memory dwells almost to excess upon the births, marriages,
deaths and dinner-parties of the orthodox Peerage. Elsewhere, however,
Sir DAVID finds occasion in plenty for the exercise of a wit so
dextrously handled that often his thrust is delivered before you have
realized that the rapier has left its sheath. I had marked a score of
examples for quotation (and now have space for none) and twice as many
good stories. In the Oxford recollections it was pleasant to renew my
own lively memories of a certain notorious lecture by Mr. WALTER WALSH
on Ritualistic Societies, when violence was narrowly averted by the
tactful chairmanship of the present LORD CHANCELLOR--a lecture from
which (as Mr. BELLOC observed at the time) "each member of the large
audience departed confirmed and strengthened in whatever convictions
he might previously have entertained." I sincerely hope that Sir DAVID
has yet in store for us those latter-day gleanings which he has been
compelled to dismiss for the present as being too recent for print.
* * * * *
Mr. G. B. STERN has set himself to study with sympathy and a candour
which extenuates nothing the Jew in England in the circumstances of
war, and in particular the Jew of German origin completely loyal to
the country of his adoption, but suspected and persecuted by such
simple folk (and journals) as are content to put their faith in
equally simple proverbs about leopards and spots. I suppose if
_Children of No Man's Land_ (DUCKWORTH) has a hero and heroine you
will find them in _Richard Marcus_ and his sister _Deborah_. Young
_Richard_, passionately English, with all the simple unquestioning
loyalty of the public-school boy, counts the months to the day when
he can testify to this by bearing arms in his country's defence, but
finds nothing open but internment or (by much wangling) a possible
niche in a Labour battalion. _Deborah's_ adventures are chiefly of the
heart, or what passes for the heart with a common type of modern girl
anxious to wring every sensation out of life that playing with
fire can give. It does not do to betray one's age by expressing too
confidently the idea that much of all the goings-on of _Deborah_
and her friends _Gillian_ and _Antonia_ seems impossible. Mr. STERN
certainly writes as if he knew what he was writing about, and there
is so rich an exuberance in the way he crowds his canvas, and so much
humour expressed and repressed in his point of view, that I found this
a distinctly entertaining and instructive book.
* * * * *
_Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push_ (LANE) is a fourth of the
enthusiastic and fiery war-books of that eminently enthusiastic and
inextinguishably fiery warrior-author, Lieutenant CONINGSBY DAWSON, of
the Canadian Field Artillery. If he evinces, blatantly at times, the
motives and perspective of the propagandist, he is justified by the
fact that he most ardently practised the Hun hatred which he preaches.
He states that he enjoyed the dangers and discomforts of so doing, and
his assertion is proved to be a true one by his having returned again
and again to the fray, notwithstanding every excuse and temptation to
leave it. The book follows on after his _Khaki Courage_, and is
also in the form of letters to his people at home. It takes up the
narrative at April 14th, 1917, and carries it to the triumphant end.
When, by reason of his wounds, he had to leave the Front and work in
London and elsewhere, he naturally lost touch with the real business
of the battle; even after his return to the Front in April, 1918, his
letters lack their original sense of actuality, and I, reading them,
began to wonder if he was ever going to recover his former style.
Happily he does so, and with his letter of July 11th he gives a
striking picture of a terrible incident of war, of which I don't
remember to have read before, but, as I read it now, I seem to be
witnessing it myself. From this point on he steadily develops his
best, so that he ends on a fitting climax to all his writings of the
War in his long final letter of October 6th--propaganda unashamed.
The book should be thrust under the noses of those pacifists who now
labour to minimise the past and to magnify the virtue and the value of
their personal loving-kindness.
* * * * *
It has ever been my misfortune that the presence in a story of two
characters confusably alike, or a setting within drowning distance
of a tide-race, will produce in me an almost insuperable sense of its
having been "made on purpose." I had therefore a double stroke of bad
luck in finding both these elements present in _The Splendid Fairing_
(MILLS AND BOON). But the more credit to Miss CONSTANCE HOLME that,
despite my increasing conviction that the wrong prodigal would return,
and that the powers of nature were throughout almost visibly preparing
to engulf him, the gentle and unforced power of her story did hold my
attention till the final wave. Distinction shown in apparent absence
of effort would, I think, be my verdict on her writing; she clearly
knows her Northern farmer-folk with the sympathy of intimate
experience. I hope I have not already suggested too much of the plot,
a little tragedy of the commonplace dealing with the relations between
two farming brothers, of whom the younger prospers while the elder
fails, and the life-long jealousies of their women. Miss HOLME works,
one may say, on a minute scale; the short but simple annals of the
poor interest her to the extent of providing an entire volume of three
hundred odd pages from the events of a single day. But though now and
then the old Northern counsel to "get eendways wi' it" does hover in
the background of one's mind I repeat that sincerity carries the thing
through. For all that, however, _The Splendid Fairing_ did but confirm
me in a previous impression that these Mary-call-the-cattle-home
localities must remain more convenient to the local colourist than
attractive to the inhabitants.
* * * * *
The publication, as a foreword, of a "Glossary of Native Words" used
in the text made me wonder whether I should be bored or instructed,
or both, by _The Death Drum_ (HURST AND BLACKETT). Most happily I was
neither. Miss MARGARET PETERSON has built her novel, perhaps a trifle
hastily, about a quite uncommon theme and given it, in Uganda, a quite
uncommon setting. It is the story of a half-caste who marries a white
girl in order to avenge, in her degradation, his sister whom the
English girl's brother had betrayed. I must not say that _Tom Davis_,
the half-caste, is too much a white man--for Miss PETERSON, to do her
justice, has distributed goodness and badness among her blacks and
whites with a quite impartial hand--but he is too fine a fellow to
carry out his own plan, and, before he has done any lasting harm to
the girl he has come to love, he takes himself, by way of a native
rising, to a lotus-covered lake, and so out of her life. It seems a
pity that the happiness of the story's end couldn't include _Tom_, but
his ancestry effectually barred the way, and Miss PETERSON has had to
rely upon a very strong and not quite silent Englishman of the best
type for her satisfactory finish.
* * * * *
Few authors have a shrewder idea than Mr. P. G. WODEHOUSE of what the
British and American public want in the way of humour, and I do not
know anyone more determined to supply their requirements. He would
be a dull fellow indeed who did not appreciate the high spirits and
humorous situations to be found in _A Damsel in Distress_ (JENKINS).
It is no small feat to maintain a riot of irresponsible fun for more
than three hundred pages, but Mr. WODEHOUSE gets going at once, and
keeps up the pace to the end without even a pause to get his
second wind. If some of the characters--a ridiculous peer, his more
ridiculous sister and his most ridiculous butler--are of the "stock"
variety, Mr. WODEHOUSE'S way of treating them is always fresh and
amusing. But in his next frolic I beseech him to give golf and its
tiresome lingo a complete rest.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Customer._ "MAY I LOOK AT THAT TWELVE-GUINEA SUIT IN
THE WINDOW? (_Catching sight of ticket_) GOOD GRACIOUS! IT'S TWELVE
POUNDS THIRTEEN NOW."
_Tailor._ "YESSIR--A BRIGHT LITTLE NOTION OF OURS, IF I MAY SAY SO. A
TICKER ATTACHED, LIKE THOSE THINGS IN THE TAXICABS, TO KEEP THE PRICE
UP-TO-DATE."]
* * * * *
"Straying.--Wm. ----, for allowing three houses to stray on
the highway, was fined 20s."--_Local Paper._
In these days landlords cannot be too careful.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Note:
Errata:
Page 6: 'particlarly' corrected to 'particularly'.
["... makes her verses particularly susceptible to quotation."]