(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
Doubtless you will think, as I did at first, that the title of _The
Priceless Thing_ (Stanley Paul) has reference to love or something
intense like that. Far from it. Not in fifty guesses would you be likely
to discover that its real meaning is an autograph of the late William
Shakspeare. One knew already that Mrs. Maud Stepney Rawson could write a
vigorous and bustling tale. If I have a complaint to make against _The
Priceless Thing_ it is indeed that it suffers from some superfluity of
plot, and what approaches a plethora of villains, real or supposed. For
this reason it is a story more than usually hard to condense fairly into
a paragraph. Briefly, however, the P. T., which was the peculiar
treasure of the noble line of _Annerslie_, lived in a case in the
library of their ancestral home. The heroine, _Anstice_, a relation of
the Family, was employed by My Lord as librarian. When I tell you,
moreover, that _Anstice_ had run away from her own father on finding
that he was an expert manufacturer of literary forgeries, and that her
circle of friends included an American blackmailer, a curiosity dealer
and a mad Italian who was even better at the forgery business than her
own father, you will perceive that the poor girl was likely to find her
situation "some job." I could not begin to tell you what really
happened. Towards the end there had been so much mystery, and the story
had become such a palimpsest of forged signatures, that I myself knew no
more than _Lord Annerslie_ in which to believe. But I think we both had
the upholding conviction that an affair of this kind was bound to come
out all right in the end. Which indeed it did; leaving all the virtuous
characters abundantly satisfied, a feeling that will, I am sure, be
shared by Mrs. Rawson's maze-loving public.
* * * * *
Robert Tressall was a house-painter, a Socialist, and very evidently a
sincere if somewhat raw thinker. He left to his heirs and assigns a
manuscript of many thousand words. It was a novel, oddly entitled _The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists_ (Grant Richards), and fell into the
hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too
strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to
the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious
lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates
working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and
despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how
long it will be before another job comes along. Nobody who hadn't lived
exclusively in this hard environment could have written with such
candour and intensity. Mr. Tressall has avoided altogether the
pretentiousness and literary affectation that betrayed, for example, Mr.
H. G. Wells' bathchairman, Meeks. The earlier part of the book is better
than the later, where the propagandist ousts the chronicler. The
exposition of Socialist doctrine is made with a considerable if a crude
skill. It is disfigured with certain familiar limitations; the author
can recognise no work except that done with the hands; and, whether by
unhappy accident of actual circumstance or through defect of
temperament, he sees his employers with a disproportionate bitterness
that somewhat discounts his indictment, while he views his
fellow-workmen from rather a disdainful height. But _The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists_ is a book to be read by any who want an
insight into the conditions of working-class life at its average, with
its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties.
* * * * *
Mr. Grant-Watson is one of the most resolute and intrepid novelists I
have met, and his directness of speech may give offence, I fear, to the
more reticent of his readers. His story of two white men and _Alice
Desmond_, freed from the social conventions and let loose among the
natives on a remote island in the Pacific, proceeds apace and with
little regard for the susceptibilities of civilisation and refinement.
Familiar but rarely printed language is used when occasion demands;
primitive passions stalk naked and unashamed; and when murder is to be
done it is done brutally, forthwith and notwithstanding the respective
merits, from an heroic point of view, of active and passive agents.
Being myself so situated in life that I am never likely to take part in
any affair more passionate and drastic than a football match or a
law-suit, I found the savage reality, the candour and the unbridled
wrath of _Where Bonds are Loosed_ (Duckworth) most welcome by contrast.
It gave me pleasure to see a man's annoyance being worked off by the use
of fists, knives and bullets, a woman's impatience spending itself in
immediate violence, and love and hatred being expressed in sharp and
decisive action rather than in deliberate subtleties of conversation. In
short, Mr. Watson left me wondering, somewhat fondly, to what lengths I
myself might go in my more heated moments if I too were isolated on
Kanna Island and beyond the supervision of police-constables and
next-door neighbours.
* * * * *
Once upon a time it was my lot to read a slender volume of Prose Poems,
all about stars and rivers and moons and such other things of which
prose poetry is made, and written by the most intense and soulful young
woman who ever put pen to paper. Which, being perused, I handed to
another and elder woman, noted for a great reader of books. And after
many days, and after (I suppose) much fruitless toil on the part of my
friend, the volume was returned to me with this single comment, "It
seems very racily written." I tell you the story, which being true is
without point, because I have been wondering what the same critic would
have found to say about another slender booklet called _The Word of
Teregor_ (Nisbet). My idea of it is that Mr. Guy Ridley, the author,
knows and admires his Kipling and delights in his Maeterlinck to such
extent that (possibly after a visit to _The Blue Bird_) he felt himself
inspired to sit down and write these Forest-Jungle-Book tales of an
earlier world, wherein Man and Beast and all created things were subject
to the benevolent rule of _Teregor_, the Oak-tree; when everything
living had a voice and used it, pleasantly enough, in rather mannered
prose of the "Yea, Nay and Behold" type; and when all the old legends
had yet to be started in ways of which Mr. Ridley gives his own most
original explanations. So if you care about this kind of thing (and I
had quite a pleasant half-hour from it myself) get it. You will at least
find here a book entirely different from anything else in the
library-box; printed in type that is a pleasure to the eye, and having,
moreover, the classic excuse of being a very little one.
* * * * *
I have for some time watched a steady improvement in the work of Mr.
Ralph Straus. It is therefore a pleasure to greet _The Orley Tradition_
(Methuen) as his best yet. The _Orley_ tradition was to do nothing
whatever, and, like the House of Lords in _Iolanthe_, to do it very
well. They were, as a family, noble, of ancient lineage, and fine
stupidity. _John Orley_, the hero of the tale, starts out to follow
worthily in the footsteps of his race, as a brainless but agreeable
country magnate. Then comes an accident, which thwarts his physical
ambitions and awakens his mental. Thereafter he essays the life of
affairs--and fails all round; is defeated for Parliament, and equally
worsted in the lists of Art. So, being now recovered of his hurt, he
says a graceful farewell to the career intellectual and resumes the
traditional _Orley_ existence. This, in brief, is his story; but I give
it without the pleasant style of Mr. Straus's telling. There are many
very happily touched scenes; more especially had I a guilty sympathy
roused by one in which poor _John_ endeavours to concentrate his very
slipshod brains upon an afternoon of hard reading. And almost all the
characters are alive, from the entertaining old lady who keeps the
village post-office to _Mrs. Adderson_, the naughty novelist in whose
hands _John Orley_ completed his sentimental education. As for the
setting, I fancy that those who have spent their summers round about St.
Margaret's Bay will have little difficulty in identifying _Handsfield_.
Altogether a happy book (more so than you would expect from its theme)
and one that marks, as I said, the further advance of a ready and
agreeable writer.
* * * * *