(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
To read _An Englishman Looks at the World_ (CASSELL), a collection of
"unrestrained remarks on contemporary matters"--aeroplanes, CHESTERTON and
BELLOC, libraries, labour unrest, the Great State, and the like--by Mr. H.
G. WELLS, is to be delighted or infuriated according to your natural habit
of mind. If established in tolerable comfort in a world which you judge,
for all its blemishes, to be on the whole rather well run, you will resent
exceedingly this pert young man (for Mr. WELLS is still astonishingly
young) with his preposterous eagerness, his insane passion for questioning
and tinkering and most unfairly putting you and your kind in the wrong. You
will no doubt find excellent grounds for doubting his ability to
reconstruct; for suspecting what you will feel to be his pretentious
breadth of view, his assumed omniscience. But if, on the other hand,
thinking life in your sombre moments a nightmare of imbecility and in your
more expansive moments a high adventure of immeasurable possibilities, you
are straitened between cold despairs and immense hopes, you will readily
forgive this irreverent, self-confident critic-journalist any crude things
he may have said in his haste for sake of his flashes of perception, his
happily descriptive phrases, his inspiring anticipations, his uncalculating
candour, and above all his generous preoccupation with things that matter
enormously. "What we prosperous people who have nearly all the good things
of life and most of the opportunities have to do now is to justify
ourselves." That is a sentiment and a challenge repeated or implied
throughout the book. This Englishman looking at his world looks with quick
eyes. He is himself so intensely interested that he can only fail to
interest such as find his whole attitude an outrage upon their finally
adopted convictions and conventions.
* * * * *
Have you noticed the way in which certain stories bear the mark of a
particular place or period? If ever there was a novel that vociferated
"Cambridge" in every line, _The Making of a Bigot_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON)
is that one. Well indeed may its paper wrapper display a drawing of King's
Chapel, though as a matter of fact only the action of the first chapter
passes in the University town. Miss ROSE MACAULAY has based her story upon
a quaintly attractive theme. Her hero, _Eddy Oliver_, is a type new to
fiction. _Eddy_ saw good in everything to such an extent that he allowed
himself to be persuaded into active sympathy with the aims of practically
everyone who was aiming at anything, however mutually irreconcilable the
aims might be. "He went along with all points of view so long as they were
positive; as soon as condemnation or rejection came in, he broke off."
Consequently, as you may imagine, his career was pleasantly involved. It
embraced the Church, various forms of Socialism, and at one time and
another some devotion to the ideals of Nationalism, Disarmament, Imperial
Service and the Primrose League. But please don't imagine that all this is
told in a spirit of comedy. Miss MACAULAY is, if anything, almost too dry
and serious; this, and her disproportionate affection for the word
"rather," a little impaired my own enjoyment of the book. It contains some
happily sketched types of modernity--all of them Cambridge to the
back-bone; and _Eddy's_ final discovery (which makes the bigot), that one
can't achieve anything in life without some wholesale hatreds, is genuine
enough--more so than the system of card-cutting by which he settles his
convictions. Miss MACAULAY has already, I am told, won a thousand pounds
with a previous book; this one proves her the possessor of a gift of
originality that is both rare and refreshing.
* * * * *
I could imagine a novel with which I could sympathise deeply, based upon
the theme of England's regeneration by means of the right type of Tory
squire, but it would be a novel with a more credible hero and conceived in
a less petty spirit of party bias than Mr. H. N. DICKINSON has given us in
_The Business of a Gentleman_ (HEINEMANN). For, in the first place, _Sir
Robert Wilton_, who figured of course in _Keddy_ and _Sir Guy and Lady
Rannard_--he has, in fact, by this time married _Marion_, late _Sir Guy's_
widow--is far too jumpy and nervy a person to fit my ideal of a paternal
landlord, and what is, after all, more important, I feel convinced that his
tenants and stable-lads would have thought the same. Secondly, I refuse to
believe that a spinster, however soured, however much devoted to the cause
of Labour and misguided crusades for social purity, would have behaved as
_Miss Baker_ does in this book; and deliberately attempted to father a
false scandal on _Sir Robert_ merely because she hated his type. And if the
author replies that he knows of such an instance I maintain that it was
just one of those things which the art of selection should have prompted
him to leave out. I have, of course, no fault to find with Mr. DICKINSON'S
style, which as usual is curiously simple yet at the same time attractive,
nor with his powers of character-sketching. His schoolboy of seventeen,
_Eddie Durwold_, is in this book particularly good. It is the things that
these people do that bothers me. And if I might venture to rename _The
Business of a Gentleman_ the title I should choose is "The Escapade of an
Egoist."
* * * * *
Mr. SIDNEY LOW has paid some visits to Egypt and the Sudan, has kept his
eyes very wide open and has written _Egypt in Transition_ (SMITH, ELDER) in
consequence. The Earl of CROMER, who has also been there or thereabouts,
introduces the book to the notice of the public with an appreciative
preface. Am I then in a position to pass judgment? Yes, I am; for I can
claim to be literally more informed on the subject than most people, having
above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the
clearest possible picture of the country--a stretch of sand, some pyramids
in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling
enigmatically--not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave
Mr. LOW five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his
illustrations reproduced himself on either on or off a camel. On less
personal grounds, I have no scruple in giving him the remaining five for
the vastly interesting facts, political, international, social and racial,
with which he entertained me. It requires no small skill in a dispenser of
such facts to make them entertaining. Twice only was I minded to quarrel
with him; once when he expressed a general contempt, based upon one
egregious example, for the foreign exports of Oxford and Cambridge, and
again when he got on to the subject of tourists, who include my nearest and
dearest, and abused them from the standpoint of a "visitor." In the first
case he was absurd, in the second, common-place; but he made ample
compensation for both by his memorable chapter of "Conclusions," in which
he gave me clearly to understand why East, being East, will never be joined
to West, always West, but yet how the twain have got within measurable
distance of one another.
* * * * *
There must have been moments when NAPOLEON found St. Helena a little quiet
for a man of his temperament; when the monotony of his life there pressed
somewhat hardly upon him. On these occasions I like to think of him saying
philosophically to himself, as he remembered what Mr. RUDOLF PICKTHALL
calls "the last phase but two," "Well, after all, this isn't Elba. I've got
that much to be thankful for." In _The Comic Kingdom_ (LANE) Mr. PICKTHALL
shows how everybody on the island struggles to make a bit out of their
visitors. Little children rallied round with posies of wild flowers,
demanding large sums in payment. Bogus monks waved crosses at him, and, if
he pretended not to notice them, rolled in the dust under his carriage
wheels. There was never a moment when somebody was not calling with a bust
of the Emperor or Empress, price three hundred francs. And itinerant bands
played under his windows into the small hours of the morning. I can imagine
him saying, in the words of ORESTES, "Dis is a dam country." ORESTES was
the guide who conducted Mr. PICKTHALL through the island. It revolted him,
but he did it. "I tink we better leave to-morrow," was a sort of refrain
with ORESTES. He had a poor opinion of Elba, which I for one do not share.
After reading _The Comic Kingdom_ I feel that one of my coming holidays
must be spent climbing its hills and supplying its thirsty inhabitants with
wine. The scenery is apparently worth while, and the natives appear a
friendly lot. I like their enthusiasm for literature. They turned out in
their hundreds and insisted on Mr. PICKTHALL'S standing treat, just because
they mistook him for a great historian. When I tell them I write for
_Punch_ they will be all over me.
* * * * *
[Illustration: A WORLD'S WORKER.
LADY OF TITLE TAKING LESSONS IN BUILDING-CONSTRUCTION PRIOR TO PERFORMING
THE CEREMONY OF LAYING A FOUNDATION-STONE.]
* * * * *