(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
There has recently been a notable output of books of "personalities"
and critical appreciations, contemporary, historical and (for the
most part) iconoclastic. One may therefore say that Mr. HORACE G.
HUTCHINSON is distinctly of the movement in compiling his _Portraits
of the 'Eighties_ (UNWIN). This is certainly a volume that anyone
can dip into with instruction and entertainment, even if (to be quite
honest) the former is likely to predominate. The fact is that one has
become so used to the satirical method in portraiture, in which the
attack is all and the subject emerges only as a beriddled target, that
an ordinary pen-picture, however faithful, is apt to seem heavy by
contrast. Mr. HUTCHINSON certainly is not of the slingers; he will
just "tell you about" the notable persons of his period, setting down
nothing in malice, omitting little however banal, and rejecting no
aphorism or anecdote as outworn. Perhaps his nearest approach to the
popular method is a very occasional touch of gentle irony, as when he
permits himself to say of G. W. E. RUSSELL (to whose _Portraits of the
Seventies_ the present volume is intended as a sequel) that he "used
to drive about London in a carriage picked out in colours that did not
suggest that he sought seclusion." I have no space for the barest list
of the sitters in Mr. HUTCHINSON'S crowded picture of a time rich
in character, his treatment of which aims rather at covering a
wide ground than at intimacy of detail. To mention but one, it is
interesting to compare his General GORDON with the recent presentment
of him by another hand. If the result is more creditable to Mr.
HUTCHINSON'S kindliness than to his wit, it may serve as an apt
comment on the whole book.
* * * * *
_Beauty and Bands_ (CONSTABLE) is not, as you might excusably suppose,
a treatise on syncopation or the decline of Jazz, but takes its title
from a verse in the Book of Proverbs. Really what the story most
illustrates is the extent to which a clever and experienced writer
can clothe a wildly impossible plot with some aspect of reality. Miss
ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER assuredly does not lack courage; having
thought out a "good situation" (which it certainly is) she was not
going to be put off by any considerations of probability. I can't
resist some sketch of it, even at the risk of spoiling your pleasure.
Suppose a lovely but selfish wife, bored to the point of flight from
a well-intentioned husband, then involved in a railway smash which
disfigures her beauty, destroys her memory and incidentally reforms
her character; let her by plausible circumstance be mistaken for
another traveller in the wrecked train and under a new name and
personality meet her husband, fall in love with him, but be compelled
to reject his suit by the presumption that his vanished wife may still
be living--as I hinted, the result in situations is enough to satisfy
the most exacting, the only real drawback being that not all Miss
FOWLER'S pleasantly persuasive efforts can make me believe a word of
it. If she had dared a little more, and inflicted the husband with
blindness, impaired hearing and slight mental decay, I would have
stretched a point and supposed that, during a protracted courtship, he
might never have recognised his own wife. Lacking these concessions I
can only report an entertaining but preposterous absurdity.
* * * * *
Those of us who read _With the Persian Expedition_ know something
about the Hush-Hush Army; enough, at any rate, to whet our appetites
for more. Let me then recommend _The Adventures of Dunsterforce_
(ARNOLD) to your notice, and assure you that it is a most lively
account of as strange an enterprise as any that the War brought forth.
Briefly, the object of General DUNSTERVILLE'S mission was to prevent
German and Turkish penetration in the area of the Caucasus, Baku and
the Caspian Sea. In January, 1918, he set out from Baghdad with what
he calls "the leading party." Continually hampered by lack of men,
the mission failed to achieve its original object; but what it
accomplished in most difficult circumstances was of great value to the
Allies. The conditions at the time when the author sailed from Enzeli
with his "Dunsterforce" to raise the siege of Baku were delightfully
cosmopolitan. He describes himself as "a British General on the
Caspian, the only sea unploughed before by British keels, on board
a ship named after a South African Dutch President and whilom enemy,
sailing from a Persian port under the Serbian flag to relieve from the
Turks a body of Armenians in a revolutionary Russian town." "Let the
reader," he adds, "pick his way through that delirious tangle, and
envy us our task who may." After pursuing the tricky course of this
astounding adventure I confess myself lost, not in its mazes, thanks
to an excellent map, but in profound admiration for "Dunsterforce" and
its leader.
[Illustration: WHEN PEOPLE DO POSTERS--