(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._}
Mr. Beresford is most warmly to be congratulated upon his new book, _The
House in Demetrius Road_ (Heinemann). Mr. Beresford's work has had from
the first remarkable qualities that place him beyond question amongst
the first half-dozen of the younger English novelists; but never before,
I think, have his talents had a subject so exactly suited to their best
display. It would be difficult to praise too highly the grim and
relentless effect of the author's treatment of his subject. _Robin
Gregg_ is a drunkard, and everyone about him--his secretary, his
sister-in-law, his little girl--is caught into the dingy cloud of his
vice. The house also is caught; and very fine indeed is the way in which
Mr. Beresford has presented his atmosphere--the rooms, the dirty strip
of garden, the shabby suburb, the London rain--but beyond all these
things is the central figure of _Gregg_ himself. Here is a character
entirely new to English fiction--a man who in spite of his degradation
has his brilliance, his humour and, above all, his mystery. It is in
this implication that, at the very heart of the man, there are fine
things too degraded and degraded things too fine for any human record of
them to be possible that the exceptional merit of Mr. Beresford's work
lies. In his desire to avoid any possible cheapness or weak indulgence
he misses, perhaps, some effects of colour and pathos that might, a
little, have heightened the contrasts of his study; and I do not feel
that the woman is as vivid as she should be. These things, however,
affect very slightly a story that its author may indeed be proud to have
written.
_Penelope_ was the heroine. She was in what are called reduced
circumstances, and was moreover encumbered by sisters who were not quite
all that could have been wished in the way of niceness. One day
_Penelope_, looking through an iron gate, saw a beautiful garden, full
of flowers; and the master of the garden, himself unseen, saw
_Penelope_, and loved her. So she accepted the invitation of his voice
and went into the garden and found that the master was a young man so
disfigured by a recent accident that he had to wear blue spectacles and
a shade. However, he loved her and she didn't mind him, so that after a
time they became engaged, which was pleasant enough for _Penelope_, who
had henceforth the run of the garden and leave to take home roses and
things to the not-nice sisters. Do you want to be told how presently
these began to tempt _Penelope_, urging her to insist that her lover
should unmask, and what happened when she yielded? Or have you seen
already that the story here called _A Garden of the Gods_ (Alston
Rivers) is just a modern version of one that we all used to be told in
the nursery? Moreover, Beauty and the Beast had been used once at least
in this fashion before Miss Edith M. Keate happened on the idea. But
that does not make the present any the less an amiable, quietly
entertaining story, if a little obvious. The characters have never
anything but a very distant resemblance to life; and their speech is for
the most part that of a lady novelist's creations rather than of human
beings. But those who demand "a good tale," with beauty properly
distressed till the last page, and there beatified with the knowledge
that "the darkness that surrounded her was scattered for ever," will
find some highly agreeable pasturage in _A Garden of the Gods_.
_The Modern Chesterfield_ (Hurst and Blackett) is a book that I enjoyed
only after overcoming a considerable and partially-justified prejudice.
In the first place, I generally dislike stories told in epistolary form;
in the second, I almost always detest books that their publishers
advertise by selected "smart sayings." But I must honestly admit that
_The Modern Chesterfield_ conquered me--chiefly, I think, by its
good-nature. The writer of these very up-to-date paternal admonitions is
supposed to be one _Sir Benjamin Budgen, Bart_, "of Budgen House, Fleet
Street, E.C. and Cedar Court, Twickenham, Middlesex." The addresses tell
you what to expect--a satire on the methods of popular journalism. This
in fact is what you get, but the satire is so neat (and withal so
genial) and Mr. Max Rittenberg has so happy a knack of conveying
character in a few lines that you are simply bound to enjoy reading him.
One other facility he has that deserves the highest praise: he tells his
story, in letters that emanate from one side only, without wearisome
repetition. There is, I mean, hardly any of that "You say in your last
that--and ask me whether--etc.," which in similar volumes always bores
me to ill-temper by its unlikeness to the letter-writing customs of real
life. An explanatory line or two at the head of each epistle puts you in
possession of the facts--that _Norman_, the son to whom they are
written, has left Cambridge, is proving unsatisfactory, has married an
Earl's daughter, and so on. That known, the letters tell their own tale.
They reveal the writer too (I refer to _Sir Benjamin_): shrewd,
clear-headed, vulgar and of bull-dog courage. The disasters that
overwhelm him in the end do not leave his readers unmoved; bankrupt and
beaten he goes down fighting with the final characteristic wire, in
response to a suggestion of compromise by his chief enemy, "Surrender be
damned." A little book to enjoy.
The village priest of Clogher, as depicted in two colours on the paper
wrapper of _Father O'Flynn_ (Hutchinson), is a man of plethoric habit
and sanguine countenance engaged in brandishing a large horsewhip. The
book is dedicated by Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole, to Sir E. Carson and Mr.
Redmond, and in a short preface he says: "The Irish Roman Catholic
priest is the main factor in present-day Irish affairs. I have attempted
to catch him at his best in the butterfly net of this trivial story...."
I am anxious not to do Mr. Stacpoole an injustice, but I do feel that
(as an entomologist) he gets easily tired. In the 250 pages of _Father
O'Flynn_ there is a good deal of very tolerable Irish "atmosphere"; a
very tepid love affair between _Miss Eileen Pope_ and a gentleman from
England "over for the hunting;" a lot about old _Mr. Pope_--a moody
maniac who owned an illicit still at Clon Beg House, incurred the enmity
of the United Patriots, was in the habit of keeping followers away from
his beautiful step-daughter with a duck-gun, and finally (after locking
up his brother who came to recover a debt) set fire to his own
mansion--but practically nothing at all about the reverend gentleman
outside. Beyond a few conversations with the "boys" and some rescue work
at the end, _Father O'Flynn_ scarcely comes into the plot. There is
humour in the book and some good description in patches, but towards
understanding the Irish priest it will probably assist Sir Edward Carson
and Mr. John Redmond very little more than it will assist a settlement
of the problems of Ulster. However, it may give them an agreeable hour
or so in a railway train, and the announcement (also made on the cover)
that it is "an entirely new novel, now published for the first time,"
may call their attention to the value, in art as well as politics, of
emphatic tautology.
I could wish that _The Escape of Mr. Trimm, His Plight and Other
Plights_ (Hodder and Stoughton) had been one continuous whole, instead
of a number of separate items, for though Mr. Irvin S. Cobb tells a tale
well he has not such a genius for the short story that he needs must
express himself through that medium. Moreover, the people of his
imagination are too interesting to be readily parted with; I should, for
instance, have liked to see how that gentleman convict, _Mr. Trimm_,
fared when, after his odd vicissitudes, he was restored to the clutches
of the Law and was set on to do his time with the worst of them. There
was plenty of criminal company available, for Mr. Cobb makes some
speciality of perpetrators of dark deeds, and I feel that all the
characters and events of the subsequent stories could, with a little
ingenuity, have been worked into the one plot with our fraudulent
financier as the centrepiece. That wrong-headed but chivalrous relic of
the Southern Confederacy, _Major Putnam Stone_, would fit in as the
virtuous or comic relief, his inborn lust for battle and his chance
employment as a newspaper reporter being just the things to combat these
felonious activities. There is certainly a lack of lovable women in the
book, yet I have always been led to suppose that the U.S.A., the _locus
in quo_, overflows with feminine charm, and our author is obviously man
enough to appreciate and reproduce it for us. However, even a critic
must take things as they are, and it is a collection of short stories
that I have to complain about. My complaint, then, reduces itself to
this, that in the case of each of them I regret their shortness.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Jovial Person (to sweep)._ "Hullo, Chawlie me boy. Glad
ter see yer lookin' so well."]
* * * * *
_Mr. Lloyd George (to shade of Pitt)._ "Peace hath her income-tax no
less renowned than War."