(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
I should certainly call Mr. COMPTON MACKENZIE our first living
expositor of London in fiction. Indeed the precision with which, from
his Italian home, he can recapture the aspect and atmosphere of London
neighbourhoods is itself an astonishing feat. In _The Vanity Girl_
(CASSELL) he has happily abandoned the rather breathless manner
induced by the migratious _Sylvia Scarlett_, and returns to the
West Kensington of _Sinister Street_, blended subsequently with that
theatrical Bohemia in which _Jenny Pearl_ danced her little tragedy.
There is something (though by no means all) of the interest of
_Carnival_ in the new stage story; that the adventures of _Dorothy_
lack the compelling charm of her predecessor is inevitable from the
difference in temperament of the two heroines and the fact that
Mr. MACKENZIE with all his art has been unable to rouse more than
dispassionate interest in what is really a study of successful
egotism. From the moment when, in the first chapter, we encounter
_Dorothy_ (whose real name was _Norah_) washing her hair at a window
in Lonsdale Road, an eligible _cul-de-sac_ ending in a railway line,
beyond which a high rampart marked the reverse of the Earl's Court
Exhibition panorama, to that final page on which we take leave of
her as a widowed countess, sacrificing her future for the sake of
an Earl's Court of a different _genre_, her career, sentimental,
financial and matrimonial, is told with amazing vivacity but a rather
conspicuous lack of emotional appeal. It is perhaps an unequal
book; in parts as good as the author's best, in others hurried and
perfunctory. One of our more superior Reviews was lately debating Mr.
MACKENZIE'S command of the "memorable phrase." There are a score here
that I should delight to quote, even if the setting is not always
entirely worthy of them.
***
So long as "BERTA RUCK" will write for us such pretty books as
_Sweethearts Unmet_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), we need never feel
ourselves dependent on America for our supply of sugary novels. This
home-grown variety is just as sweet, and really, I think, may be
guaranteed not only harmless but positively beneficial. The authoress
has evidently a tender pity for the young men and women whom our
social conditions doom either to have no companions among their
contemporaries or only the wrong ones. Her heroine represents the
too-much-sheltered girl alone in an elderly circle, her hero the
lonely young man who has no means of getting to know people of his own
sort (I can't say class, because the authoress seems rather uncertain
about that herself). Her story is written in alternate instalments by
"the boy" and "the girl," a method which encourages intimacy in the
telling as well as a sort of gushing attention to the reader not so
pleasant. Miss NORA SCHLEGEL has drawn a pretty picture of _Julia_ and
_Jack_ to adorn the wrapper, and I can assure everyone who cares to
know it that they are just as nice as they look; _Jack's_ passion for
abbreviation ("rhodos" for rhododendrons) being the only ground of
quarrel I have with them or their creator.
***
In _Passion_ (DUCKWORTH) Mr. SHAW DESMOND desperately wants to
say something terrific about love, money and power. His violence makes
one feel that one is reading under a shower of brickbats, and it is
the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his
message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words
in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as
for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.;
nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the
author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all
about. You don't find out; but there, life's like that, isn't it? The
author's ideas of the operations of high finance are ingenuous. The
_Mandrill_ (do I rightly guess this to be a portrait distorted from
the life?), who is out to corner copper and "do down" the _Squid_
(head of the opposing copper group), is, if you are to judge by his
passionate exuberance at board meetings, about as likely to corner the
green cheese in the moon. I imagine the author saying, "_Mandrills_
mayn't be like that, but that's how I see 'em. It's my vision and mood
that matter. Take it or leave it." Well, on the whole I should advise
you to take it, first putting on a sort of mental tin hat. You'll at
least have gathered that Mr. DESMOND is a lively writer.
***
Of a war-story reviewed in these pages some months ago I remember
taking occasion to say that the author had damaged his effect by a too
obvious wish to injure the reputation of a certain cavalry brigade
(or words to that effect). Well, a book that I have just been
reading, _The Squadroon_ (LANE), might in some sense be regarded as
a counterblast to the former volume, since its writer, Major ARDERN
BEAMAN, D.S.O., has admittedly intended it as a vindication of the
work of the cavalry in the Great War. I can say at once that the
defence could scarcely have found a better advocate. Major BEAMAN
(who, I think superfluously, figures in his own pages in the fictional
character of Padre) has written one of the most interesting records
that I have read of personal experience on the Western Front. Partly
this is explained by his fortunate possession of a style at once
sincere, sanely balanced and always engaging. Also his story, apart
from the matter of it, reveals in the men of whom he writes (and
incidentally in the writer himself) a combination of just those
qualities that we like to call essentially British. Cavalrymen of
course will read it with a special fervour; but I am mistaken if
its genial temper does not disarm even so difficult a critic as the
ex-infantry Lieutenant--than which I could hardly say more. In short,
_The Squadroon_ is a belated war book in which the most weary of such
matters may well recapture their interest.
***
Written in the last great ebb and flow of the War, when the censorship
still prevented anything like carping criticism of matters near
the battle-front, _The Glory of the Coming_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON)
naturally resolves itself into a paean of praise of the French and
British armies in general and the American troops in particular, both
white and black. Mr. IRVIN S. COBB brings good credentials to his
task, for he saw the advance of the German army through Belgium in
1914, and in this book he describes the combined resistance to their
last great effort before defeat. The accident, if we may so call it,
to the Fifth Army has had nowhere a more eloquent apologist. "They
were like ants; they were like flies," he says of the Germans; "they
left their dead lying so thickly behind that finally the ground seemed
as though it were covered with a grey carpet." There are interesting
strictures in the later chapters on some of the quaint semi-official
delegations and personages who persuaded the United States Government
to let them come over and visit the War; and there are a number of
quite good yarns of the Yankee private, related in the Yankee style.
But better than all the American stories I think I like that of the
Bedfordshire soldier who, when asked by the writer to direct him to
Blerincourt during the chaos of the great retreat, replied, "I am
rather a stranger in these parts myself." Perhaps by the way I ought
to make it quite clear that the title refers to the coming of the
American troops, and that, although the line, "He is trampling out the
vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored," is also quoted in the
prefatory stanza, there is nothing in the book about Mr. "PUSSYFOOT"
JOHNSON.
***
I suppose the War did throw up a great number of worthy pomposities
genuinely eager to serve their country in some conspicuous and
applauded way, and old _Mr. Thompson_, the principal figure in _Young
Hearts_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), may be taken, on the authority of J.
E. BUCKROSE, as an East Riding variant of the type. He had always some
patent scheme for winning the War or improving the Peace, and no doubt
deserved all the ragging he got, though I lost my zest in the matter
before the author did. _Mr. Thompson_ had two daughters: a minx
(almost too minx-like for belief) and a never-told-her-love maiden of
sterling worth. The latter marries the good-young-man-under-a-cloud
(the cloud was, of course, a misapprehension or, alternatively, had a
silver lining), though the minx shamelessly tried to "bag him," as she
did every eligible male, the good sister tamely submitting under the
impression apparently that the other was a perfect darling. I indeed
seemed to be the only person who really understood what a little beast
she was--and possibly the author, who finally allotted to her the
beautiful unsatisfactory young man with the emotional tenor. Commended
for easy seaside reading.
* * * * *
TO RECALCITRANT HOUSE-OWNERS: Let and let live.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ["I hear of a seaside hotel whose proprietors have
instructed their staff never to correct the pronunciation or use of
a word by a guest. If it is necessary to use the same term in the
conversation the guest's form of it is the one to be used; it saves a
lot of irritation, if not actual humiliation."--_Daily News._]
_Waiter (with anticipative tact) to holiday customer._ "ANY HORSE
DOOVERS, SIR?"]
* * * * *