(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.)
A book of little novels, or long-shorts, from the pen of Mr. ROBERT
HICHENS, will be welcomed with pleasure by a very large public.
_Snake-Bite_ (CASSELL) contains a half-dozen various tales, all but one
of which are eminently characteristic of their author. It sounds unkind
to add that this one is for artistry the best of the bunch; but I mean
no more than that Mr. HICHENS has here done very well a slight and
delicate sketch of a style not generally associated with his work.
In the name-piece his admirers will find themselves on more familiar
ground--none other indeed than that well-known desert in which they have
enjoyed such delicious thrills in the same company already. When Mr.
HICHENS' characters get the sand in their eyes almost anything may be
expected of them. Here he has given us a new version of the ancient
scheme of two men and a woman, complicated in this instance by a cobra;
the problem being, whether a doctor should cure his wife's lover of a
snake-bite. More original is the longest story in the collection, one
called "The Lost Faith," an affair of mental healing and love and crime
too complex for compression. It is admirably told. It leads up to a
situation as novel as it is dramatic--the confession of a young fanatic,
who believes in a lady-healer so implicitly that he puts typhoid germs
into the drink of a celebrated general in order to provide her with an
impressive subject. As a sensation this wants some beating; though it
failed to shake my own preference for the other story, which you will
observe I have purposely left unnamed. You will, I hope, enjoy finding
it for yourself.
* * * * *
_Heritage_ (COLLINS) gives me much the same impression that one obtains
from the spectacle of a man wire-walking in a sack or painting pictures
with his toes--attempting, in short, any task under conditions of
the greatest possible handicap. That certainly is what Miss V.
SACKVILLE-WEST has been at pains to impose upon herself. With a
straightforward, simple and interesting tale and some considerable
gifts for reproducing character, she has deliberately sacrificed these
advantages by telling her story in the most roundabout and awkward
manner imaginable. The theme is the influence of heredity, as shown in
the working out of a strain of Spanish blood in a Sussex peasant stock,
the victims of this inconvenient blend being _Ruth_ and the young cousin
whom half-unwillingly she marries; with devastating results. _Ruth_, as
I say, was attracted to _Westmacott_ with only part of her being; the
better (or at least less Spanish) elements in her were employed in
making soft eyes at two other men, one of whom, _Malory_, is supposed to
relate portions of the affair to the quite superfluous outsider who
puts them down. This _vivâ-voci_ recital is subsequently rounded off
by _Malory_, in what is surely the least credible of all the unlikely
letters in fiction, nearly a hundred printed pages of it. So you see
the obstacles that Miss SACKSVILLE-WEST has placed in her own and her
reader's path. That, despite them all, the interest, and passion of this
first novel do get home is an encouraging omen for her success when she
has learnt a greater simplicity of attack.
* * * * *
_Wings of the Morning_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) might have been a most
recommendable book, for it is in essentials a pleasant story of a great
artist who for the crime of his hot-headed youth suffered imprisonment
in the United States, and, having "covered his tracks," came home, fell
in love with his delightful sister's delightful step-daughter and, after
much suffering for them both, told his history and won his lady. But
unfortunately the inessentials--and among these I have the temerity to
include the great European War, or, at any rate, very much that is here
told of it--are so harrowing that they do not accord with the pleasant
story to which they are tacked on. I would not ask to be spared the
knowledge of anything faced by other people while I sat immune at home,
but there are many incidents which cannot with decency or dignity be
served up in fiction to add a thrill to the enjoyment of an hour's light
reading. Miss JOAN SUTHERLAND would have done well to have left detail
to more serious exponents, and to have discarded entirely one scene
of bestial cruelty which has no real bearing on her tale. Never in a
novel--and seldom in historical accounts of fighting--have I been asked
to wallow in so much gore. It is all the more regrettable because when
Miss SUTHERLAND uses her imagination on less horrible subjects she is
much more successful.
* * * * *
Mr. ARTHUR TURBERVILLE has taken almost over-elaborate pains with
his sketch of a type which must have been common enough in the new
armies--the young officer of pacifist leanings, who, intellectually
convinced of the futility of war and by no means out of sympathy with
the ultralogical or illogical (and anyway impossible) position of the
Conscientious Objector, yet joins up and makes the very best of a bad
job. _Kenneth, Dugdale_ (METHUEN), the prize prig (according to the
verdict of his Mess), became a brave and efficient subaltern; and the
author's idea of bringing him by means of the discipline of war-training
and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous
fighting types, and of bringing these by the same discipline to a
readier appreciation of the intellectual and idealist position, is well
enough worked out. The character-drawing impressed me less favourably.
The author, I should say, finds it rather difficult to understand
the ordinary good or indifferent fellow with his qualities and their
defects. I doubt the possibility of such a snake in the grass as
_Lieutenant Seymour_ carrying on without getting kicked. Nor do I think
that that simple soldier man, _Fortescue, V.C._, would have so tamely
accepted _Dugdale's_ betrayal to the woman they both loved of the fact
that he had just seen his rival putting a dubious young lady into a cab
in Regent Street at midnight. There is a good deal of thoughtful work
in this novel which should be interesting to amateur students of the
psychology of war and men of war.
* * * * *
The latest of Mrs. J. B. BUCKROSE'S genial little comedies about a
comfortable world is concerned with war-weddings, their cause, and some
hints for their successful conduct. She calls it _Marriage While You
Wait_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), and illustrates her theme with the case of
a young man and maiden, who dashed, like so many others, into matrimony
in the breathless haste of short leave, and came dangerously near
repenting at leisure. Only near, of course; Mrs. BUCKROSE is too
confirmed an optimist not to make it clear that the blackest boredom
has a silver lining; and I had never any real fear that her nice young
couple were becoming more than quite temporarily estranged. Still,
things went so far that _Sophia_ left the cottage where she and
_Arthur_ and a cooing dove had proposed to live the idyllic life of
happiness-ever-after, and betook herself to the mansion of the local
villain; while _Arthur_ cut the throat of the dove (there my sympathies
were with him entirely) and relapsed into nervous breakdown. But
_Denyer_, being only a BUCKROSE villain, which is a very mild variety,
packed _Sophia_ home again; _Arthur_, after the usual crisis, recovered;
and the symbolic dove was the only inmate of the cottage for whom the
little rift remained unhappily permanent. So there you are; with the
gentlest short sermon to wind up, and a blessing to all concerned.
Perhaps I have read stories more briskly entertaining from Mrs.
BUCKROSE'S flowing pen; one feels that her intent here was not solely
laughter. But as a smiling homily, preaching much the same moral that
Sir ARTHUR PINERO once treated more caustically in perhaps his best
play, her story, _Marriage While You Wait_, should have at least two
sympathetic readers in many scores of homes.
* * * * *
Whenever I finish a book by Mr. S.P.B. MAIS I am left with the feeling
that he has only to enlarge his horizon to write something worth reading
and remembering. If _The Education of a Philanderer_ (GRANT RICHARDS)
had been written, by an unknown man I should have welcomed it as work of
great promise. But the trouble with Mr. MAIS is that he seems to find it
perilously easy to write about young school-masters who fall in and
out of love with facility and who are financially at their wits' end.
_Rupert Blundell_, the philanderer, described here, is a clear and
clever picture of a young man who loved where he listed and listed quite
a lot. As far as he goes he can be visualized perfectly both at Oxford
and as a schoolmaster. But he does not go far enough and he belongs to a
type of which one can easily tire. Mr. MAIS is not so callow as he once
was in his judgement of people mentally distasteful to him, but he still
needs a wider outlook on life and a wider knowledge, and I sincerely
hope that he will take steps to remove the limitations which at present
prevent him from giving entire satisfaction to his admirers.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Critic (writing a review during a hot spell)._ "TO SPEAK
CANDIDLY, THIS BOOK LEAVES US COLD."]
* * * * *
"THE LOST LEADER."
[In this new play, at the Court Theatre, PARNELL is represented as
having survived his own death.]
_Parnell_ at the Court sings the very same tune
As the sluggard of old--"You have waked me too soon."
* * * * *
"If, out of hand, one were asked who, now living, knows most about
the Brontës in a personal way, the answer would probably be, Lord
Crewe."--_The Book Monthly_.
We understand that on the question being put to the Editor of _The
Sphere_ his answer was Shorter still.