(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
Except by keen politicians the fourth volume of Mr BUCKLE'S _Life of
Benjamin Disraeli_ (MURRAY) may be found a little dull in comparison
with its predecessors. That is not the fault of the biographer, who
has done his best with a vast mass of somewhat dry material, but could
not make this portion of his record so enthralling as that which
preceded it or--we may confidently hope--that which will follow it. In
1855 DISRAELI had arrived at respectability, but had not yet attained
power. The Conservative Party recognised that he was indispensable,
but continued to withhold its full confidence, with the result that,
although his brain still teemed with the great schemes formed in his
hot youth, he had to defer their practical accomplishment and to devote
himself to educating his party and its titular leader, Lord DERBY, for
the day when the swing of the pendulum might give it a majority in the
House of Commons. Only one great triumph came to him during these years
in the wilderness. DISRAELI had never visited India, but, owing perhaps
to his Eastern ancestry, he had a truer intuition of Oriental needs
than most contemporary statesmen; and it was fortunate that it fell to
him in 1858, during one of the brief periods when the Conservatives
held office on sufferance, to carry the Bill which transferred the
government of India from "John Company" to the Crown. The principles
which he then laid down, and which eighteen years later he carried
a stage further in the Imperial Titles Act, justify Mr. BUCKLE in
claiming the Coronation Durbar of 1911 as "the logical conclusion of
Disraeli's policy." Apart from this one episode the volume is mainly
concerned with the reconstruction of the Conservative party--"at about
the pace of a Tertiary formation"--with which DISRAELI'S voluminous
correspondence with Lord DERBY was mainly concerned. Happily he had
other correspondents, and, though too self-conscious to be a perfect
letter-writer, he could be playful enough when writing to his wife or
to Mrs. BRYDGES-WILLIAMS. In this volume Mr. BUCKLE has given us a
careful portrait of the Politician DISRAELI; in his next we look to see
a little more of the Man.
* * * * *
It is probable, I think, that you will not have turned many pages
of _Brenda Walks On_ (HUTCHINSON) before being struck by a certain
pleasing incongruity between its matter and style. Sir FREDERICK
WEDMORE is such an artist in words, so punctilious in the niceties
of their employment, that to find him writing a story of modern
stage-life, and using for it--with, as it were, a certain delicate
deliberation--phrases peculiar to the jargon of the class of which it
treats, gives one a series of small shocks. It is like hearing slang
from a Dean. As a matter of fact, though, I was wrong in calling
_Brenda Walks On_ a story. It is rather a disquisition about stage
people, stage art and life, and anything else whatever upon which
Sir FREDERICK wishes to talk at the moment, from the beauties of
the North-Eastern coast (the Scarborough part of the book carried
me back to the far-off days of _Renunciations_) to the treasures of
Hertford House. Even _Brenda's_ chief suitor is capable of breaking
off the avowal of his love to deliver a few well-chosen remarks
about theatrical rents and the hazards of management. This suitor,
_Penfold_, is perhaps the nearest approach to an actual character
that the book contains. He was a writer of papers upon the drama of
whom the author observes, "With a ready pen, indeed, Heaven forbid
that he should have been cursed! It was better to have a careful one,
faithfully ordered, allowing him to make sensible utterance of some
part of the knowledge and thought that were in him." Which, by a happy
coincidence, is exactly my verdict author's method in this graceful
causerie.
* * * * *
_Christina's Son_ (WELLS GARDNER) is a disarming book. It overcomes
criticism by the direct simplicity of its attack, in which only later
do you begin to suspect a concealed art. Miss W. M. LETTS tells a
tale that (you might say) has nothing in it; nothing certainly at all
sensational or strikingly original. But this story of a middle-class
North-country woman grips the attention, and holds it, by some quality
hard to define. _Christina_, as wife of a man she can never greatly
love, and, later, as mother of a son whom she adores but only half
understands, becomes, for all her commonplace environment, a figure
that dwells in the memory because of what you feel to be its absolute
truth. The atmosphere of the story is so crystal clear that every
detail of its chief characters stands out with the distinctness of a
landscape after rain. And because, by all the rules, these characters
should be so little interesting, and the very provincial society
in which the thirty or so years of the book pass is so entirely
undistinguished, you are faintly astonished all the way through (at
least I was) at not being bored. I see that one critic has praised a
previous story by Miss LETTS for its humour, should not have picked
this out as a characteristic of _Christina's Son_. Rather has it a
certain gravity and sobriety of aim, which in part explains its appeal;
if there is humour it is generally below the surface and never insisted
upon. There is a moment when its rather restrained style rises suddenly
to rare beauty, where the theme is old age; and throughout there is
a maturity of judgment in the writing that will make it perhaps less
attractive to the young than to those whose outlook has reached the
same stage.
[Illustration: A FAVOURITE OF THE HALLS WAS GREATLY PLEASED WITH THE
NEW POSTER OF HIMSELF----]
[Illustration: UNTIL HE CAME TO A HOARDING WHERE THE EXIGENCIES OF
SPACE HAD PLAYED HAVOC WITH THE COMPOSITION.]
* * * * *
If I were to give away the plot of Miss MARY L. PENDERED'S _The Secret
Sympathy_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) I think that you would sniff. It is not
likely to cause animated discussion in intellectual circles. We are
introduced to a girl who, finding herself reduced from affluence
to poverty, takes a garage and runs it with success, and we become
acquainted with a chauffeur and a peer, and the former turns out to
be--but that is just what I am not going to tell you. If you want a
book in which the hero is a very perfect gentleman indeed and the
villain really is a villain, then here you are. Miss PENDERED'S
scheme is not too subtle, but what she has set out to do she has
done, and done well. Although her characters play their part in the
War, she resists the temptation to smother them with V.C.'s and other
decorations, and for this abstinence and for _Miss Chetwynd_, a
middle-aged spinster of shrewd sense and humour, I warmly commend her.
I confess myself in love with _Miss Chetwynd_ and should dearly like
to hear her candid opinion of _The Secret Sympathy_. But I feel sure
that, if she smiled a little at the wonderfulness of it all, her final
verdict would be as benevolent as mine.
* * * * *
Mr. RICHARD MAHER'S _The Shepherd of the North_ (MACMILLAN) looks a
little like one of those rather elaborate Catholic tracts in form of
a novel of which we have so many classic examples. _Mgr. Winthrop_,
the Bishop of Alden, way up in the Adirondacks, was indeed a noble old
fellow, somewhat given to long speeches, but with a great heart in the
right place, and wise and tolerant withal. He was known and loved by
the small farmers and lumber-men as _The White Horse Chaplain_ for a
deed of valour done in his youth in the Civil War. And he carried that
high quality of courage into his work of defending his people against
the machinations of the U. & M. Railroad, which swept down upon them
and stuck at nothing, not arson on a Teuton scale or judicial murder,
to get the prize it was after--valuable iron ore in the hills through
which its track ran. However, it was the Bishop's oar, dexterously
thrust in, which finally won the victory. There is a point which
puzzles me considerably. The crisis of the story turns on the secret of
the Confessional. A young man is accused of murder, and the Bishop, his
friend, has heard the confession of the real murderer, so that his lips
are sealed. But his fiancée also unwittingly overheard the essential
of the confession screamed by the dying man. Mr. MAHER seems to think
her bound by the same sacred ties as the Bishop, even to the point
of allowing her lover to go to the chair because of her silence. But
is that sound moral theology? I should doubt it. I ought to add that
there's nothing to shock the most sensitive evangelical conscience, and
quite a good deal to edify, instruct and entertain.
* * * * *