(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
Why is it that novels with scamp-heroes are so much more interesting
than the conventional kind? _Bellamy_ (METHUEN) is a case in point, for
the central character, who gives his name to it, is about as worthless
an object, rightly-considered, as one need wish to meet. He steals and
lies and poses; he betrays most of his friends; and throughout a varied
life he only really cares for one person--himself. Yet Miss ELINOR
MORDAUNT never seems to have any difficulty in making us share
_Bellamy's_ delight in his own conscienceless career. Perhaps it is this
very delight that does the trick. Charlatan as he is, and worse,
_Bellamy_ is always so attractively amused at the success of his
impostures that it becomes impossible to avoid an answering grin. It was
not a little courageous of Miss MORDAUNT to write a story about a hero
from the Five Towns district; but, though this may look like trespass
upon the preserves of a brother novelist, _Bellamy_ is Miss MORDAUNT'S
very own. I have the feeling that she enjoyed writing about him--a
feeling that always makes for pleasure in reading. Perhaps of all his
manifold phases I liked best his _rôle_ of assistant necromancer at a
kind of psychical beauty parlour. There is some shrewd hitting here,
which is vastly well done. But none of the adventures of _Bellamy_
should be skipped. I am sorry to add that the copy supplied me for
review did not apparently credit me with this view, as it ruthlessly
omitted some forty of what I am persuaded were most agreeable pages. The
fact that it so far relented as to go back about ten, and repeat a
chapter I had already read, did little to console me. I could have
better spared part of a duller book.
* * * * *
A story by Mr. DION CLAYTON CALTHROP, with the title _Wonderful Woman_
(HODDER AND STOUGHTON), may almost be regarded as a work of expert
reference. Because what he does not know about The Sex, and has not
already written in a galaxy of engaging romances, is hardly worth the
bother of remembering. So that his views on the matter naturally command
respect. _Wonderful Woman_ is perhaps less a novel than an
analysis--painfully close, with a kind of regretful brutality in it--of
one special type of femininity, and a glance at several others. Perhaps
its realistic quality may astonish you a little. You may have been
delighting in Mr. CALTHROP'S fantastic work (as I do myself) and yet
have cherished the suspicion that his Columbines and Chelsea fairies and
Moonbeam folk generally were the creations of a sentimentalist who would
have little taste for handling unsympathetic things. Well, if so,
_Philippina_ is the answer to that. Here is the most masterly
portraiture of a woman utterly without imagination or heart or anything
except a kind of futile and worthless attraction, that I remember to
have met for some time. As I say, it is all rather astonishing from Mr.
CALTHROP. The men who love _Flip_, and whose lives are ruined by her,
are easier to understand. About _Sir Timothy Swift_, for example, there
is a touch of the Harlequin, or rather Pierrot, that betrays his
origin. I will not tell you the story, for one reason because its charm
is too elusive to retrieve. I content myself by saying that it seems to
me the best work we have yet had from Mr. CALTHROP, combining his
special and expected graces with an unusual and moving sincerity.
* * * * *
A month or two ago I have no doubt that the England of CHARLES II.'S
declining years would have seemed to me a monstrously exciting country
to live in; at the present moment (unfairly enough) I feel more like
congratulating the hero of Monsignor BENSON'S _Oddsfish!_ (HUTCHINSON)
on the mildness of his adventures for the furtherance of the Catholic
faith. It is true that _Mr. Roger Mallock_ beheld some notable
executions after the TITUS OATES affair, and on the night of the Rye
House Plot had a large meat chopper thrown at his head by one of the
conspirators; but, emissary of the Vatican as he was, he was actually
only once compelled to whip out his sword in self-defence, though on
that occasion he had the extreme bad luck to lose his _fiancée_ through
a misdirected dagger-thrust. Even this tragedy, sufficiently
overwhelming in an ordinary romance, is not, of course, wholly
disastrous in Monsignor BENSON'S eyes, since it enabled _Mr. Mallock_ to
resume the religious life and habit for which he had been originally
intended. For the rest the book is written in a most captivating manner,
and with a plausibility of incident and dialogue only too rare in novels
of the Restoration period. Evidently the author has studied his
authorities (and more particularly Mr. PEPYS) with a praiseworthy
diligence. But in view of the anti-Protestant bias which he naturally
exhibits I feel bound to bid him have a care. If he intends to pursue
his historical researches any further, and discover (let us say) virtue
in the Spanish Inquisition and villainy in Sir FRANCIS DRAKE, I shall
load my arquebus to the muzzle.
* * * * *
The hero of _King Jack_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) "made sport," as his
creator, Mr. KEIGHLEY SNOWDEN, says, "nearly a hundred years ago" in
Yorkshire, and incidentally he also made records. For instance, he
cleared four-and-twenty feet at a "run-jump," and with this in my mind I
find it satisfactory to think that he lived in another century, or I
might find myself regretting the eclipse of the Olympic Games. As an
upholder of law and order I ought to be (I am not) ashamed to admire a
man who, to say the least of it, was a very prickly thorn in the side of
the police. My excuse is that _Jack Sincler_ and his brother _Lishe_
were kindly men withal. The game-laws were their trouble, but as far as
I could make out they did not poach for the sake of pelf but from sheer
love of sport. Among poachers they ought, anyhow, to be placed in Class
I., for they loved the open air and the freshness of the morning and all
the things that make for a clean mind in a clean body. _Jack_, though a
shade arrogant at times, is a stimulating figure, human both in his
weakness and his strength; and Mr. SNOWDEN deserves more than a little
gratitude for the care with which he has reproduced the atmosphere of
times that were conspicuously lawless and exciting.
* * * * *
When _Dicky Furlong_, the brilliant and aspiring artist of _The
Achievement_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) who was in love with _Diana Charteris_,
sloshed her husband, _Lord Freddy_, over the head with his own decanter
(_vide_ Chap. XXI.) he rather overdid it. For "the jagged thing fell
with a sullen thud behind his (_Lord Freddy's_) ear," and that
discourteous nobleman collapsed to rise no more. When the detective
arrived the following noon he convinced himself that there was no
necessity to detain any of the guests, even though no windows had been
found open or doors unlocked, and though Dicky had a contused lip from
the conflict overnight and everybody had coupled his name with
_Diana's_. However, the methodical sleuthhound ran his quarry to earth a
year or two later, just as he had put the finishing touches to his great
(seventeen-foot) canvas. And _Dicky_ took a little bottle out of his
pocket. In fact, our old friend the novelette, with its unexacting
canons of plausibility; tacked on, as it happens, to twenty chapters of
meandering incident, a long way after the well-known Five-Towns formula,
garnished with pleasantly romantic little notices of _Dicky's_ pictures
and _Dicky's_ love affairs. But you don't begin to see the _Dicky_ of
the decanter phase (even though a fight about an ill-treated dog is
lugged in for the purpose), or indeed any other _Dicky_ of real flesh
and blood, in this haphazard selection of episodes and comments. The
truth is there is more in that difficult and dangerous formula than Mr.
TEMPLE THURSTON is aware of. He has wandered into the wrong galley. A
pity. For _Mrs. Flint_ is a dear, if a stupid dear, and _Dicky_ himself
has his points.
* * * * *
Illustration: _The Old Man._ "I SEE BY THE PAPER HERE THAT THE
ROOSHIANS ARE ATTACKING A TOWN THEY SPELL P-R-Z-E-M-Y-S-L. D'YE THINK,
NOW, WUD THAT BE A MISTAKE OF THE PRINTER'S OR WUD THE LETTERS OF IT BE
MIXED UP, LIKE, WI' THE BOMBARDMENT?"
* * * * *