Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3810/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Ellen Melicent Cobden can certainly not be accused of writing too hurriedly. I don't know how many years it is since, as "Miles Ambed," she captured my admiration with that wonderful first novel, Wistons; and now here is her second, Sylvia Saxon (Unwin), only just appearing. I may say at once that it entirely confirms my impression that she is a writer of very real and original gifts. Sylvia Saxon is not a pleasant book. It is hard, more than a little bitter, and deliberately unsympathetic in treatment. But it is grimly real. Sylvia herself is a character that lives, and her mother, Rachel, almost eclipses her in this same quality of tragic vitality. The whole tale is a tragedy of empty and meaningless lives passed in an atmosphere of too much money and too little significance. The "society" of a Northern manufacturing plutocracy, the display and rivalry, the marriages between the enriched families, the absence of any standard except wealth—all these things are set down with the minute realism that must come, I am sure, of intimate personal knowledge. Sylvia is the offspring of one such family, and mated to the decadent heir of another. Her tragedy is that too late she meets a man whom she supposes capable of giving her the fuller, more complete life for which she has always ignorantly yearned. Then there is Anne, the penniless girl, hired as a child to be a play fellow for Sylvia, who herself loves the same man, and dies when his dawning affection is ruthlessly swept away from her by the dominant personality of Sylvia. A tale, one might call it, of unhappy women; not made the less grim by the fact that the man for whom they fought is shown as wholly unworthy of such emotion. A powerful, disturbing and highly original story.
"Saki" has been now for a number of years a great delight to me, and his last work, Beasts and Super-Beasts (Lane), is as good as any of its predecessors. Clothed in the elegant garments of Clovis or Reginald, Mr. Munro makes plain to us how lovely this world might be were we only a little bolder about our practical jokes. In the art of introducing bears into the boudoir of a countess or pigs into the study of a diplomat, and then clinching the matter with the wittiest of epigrams, Clovis is supreme. He knows, too, an immense amount about the vengeance that children may take upon their relations, and ladies upon their lady friends. I like him especially when he manoeuvres some stupid but kind-hearted woman into a situation of whose peril she herself is only cloudily aware, while the reader knows all about it. That is the fun of the whole thing. The reader is for ever assisting Clovis and Reginald; in the course of their daring adventures he connives from behind curtains, through key-holes, from ambushes in trees, and always, whilst the poor creature is being harried by wild bows or terrified by menacing kittens, Clovis may be observed, with finger on lip, begging of the intelligent reader that he will not give things away. Of the present collection of stories I like best "A Touch of Realism," "The Byzantine Omelette," "The Boar-Pig," and "The Dreamer;" but all are good, and I can only hope that it will not be too long before Clovis once again invites us to further delightful conspiracies.
Ars est celare artem, and not to define and emphasise it in a forward to the reader. The motive of The Last Shot (Chapman and Hall) appears in due course in the narrative; I would have preferred to discover it gradually for myself rather than have the essence of it extracted and poured into me in advance. The preface has not the excuse of a mere advertisement; to open this book at any point is to read the whole, and every page is the strongest possible incentive to the reading of the others. If (as is not admitted) any personal explanation was necessary, it should have been put at the end and in small type so that those who, like myself, detest explanations might have avoided this one. I am the more severe about this, because there can be no two opinions as to Mr. Frederick Palmer's success in achieving his purpose, which, obviously, was to conceive modern warfare as between two First-class Powers, firghting in the midst of civilisation, and to reduce it to terms of exact realism, showing the latest devices of destruction at work, but carefully excluding those improbable and impossible agencies which the more exuberant but less informed novelist loves to imagine and put in play. Mr. Palmer's conception, though based upon some experience, is for the most part speculative, of course, but I am confident that he gives us an excellent idea of how the military machine would work in practice, how its human consistuent parts would feel inwardly, and what physical and moral effects a battle would have upon those civilians who inhabited and owned the battlefield. Whether or no the future will prove the truth of the author's somewhat Utopian conclusions, he certainly founds them upon a most exciting and convincing story, in which the "love interest" is as powerful as could be desired.
Would you like to pay a round of visits to some delightful Shropshire houses, as the friend and guest of a charming woman, who knows all about what is most interesting in all of them, and has a pleasantly chatty manner of telling it? Of course you would; so would anyone. That is why I predict another success for Lady Catherine Milnes Gaskell's latest house-book, Friends Round the Wrekin (Smith, Elder). Perhaps you have pleasant memories of her former volumes in the same kind; if so, I need say no more by way of introduction; but, if not, I must tell you that her new book is very fairly described, in the words of the publisher, as "a further collection of history and legend, garden lore and character study." What the publishers modestly refrain from mentioning is the real charm with which it has been written, a quality that makes all the difference. There are also photographs of a number of wholly fascinating houses (the kind that make me wistful when I see them in the auctioneers' windows), and the author has some personal anecdote or quaint scrap of legend to tell you about each. I am quite willing to admit that the rambling book has increased lately to an extent imperfectly justified by its average quality. Too many of them confuse rambling with drivelling. But for the reflections of a cultivated woman, one who has steeped herself in the lore of a country she evidently loves, and can transcribe it with such tender and persuasive charm, there should always be room. I may add—and your own tastes must decide whether this is a flaw or a fresh merit—that Lady Catherine's sympathies, political and social, are undisguisedly with the past, and that the "Education of the People" comes in, upon almost every other page, for as shrewd raps as her gentle nature will allow her to administer.
I wish I were Mr. Justus Miles Forman. Because then, if I ever chanced to wake up suddenly and find that I had been drugged in my sleep, and the six immense rubies, brought here from the East by a far-off ancestor and set in a black agate shield above my bed, to represent the "six gouttes (or drops) gules on a field sable" of my immemorial coat-of-arms, had been rudely reaved from me in the night by my cousin, who had sent one each to his six sons, I should have no fear. I should feel perfectly convinced that in a short time, by my own personal exertions, but without exercising the least particle of intelligence, I should recover those six rubies (representing six gouttes or drops gules) and replace them in the black agate shield (representing a field sable); and naturally enough , like the autobiographical hero of The Six Rubies (representing———I beg your pardon, I mean, published by Ward, Lock), I should not dream of calling in the aid of the police. Another jolly thing that would inspirit me would be the fact that each of my adventures in search of the missing hewels would conform to a separate and well-known type of magazine story: there would be one fire, one notorious cracksman, one haunted castle, one cabinet with a secret drawer, and so on. There would be plenty of excitement, plenty of hairbreadth escapes. But I think that, when collating my experiences and putting them into six-shilling form, I should delete some of the tautologous references to the past which are one of the stern necessities of serial publication. Otherwise my readers might begin to feel slightly fatigued by my six ancestral gouttes. They might even begin to feel that they did not much care if I had hereditary sciatica.