Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3823/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Some part of the fascination that I found in Tributaries (Constable) was perhaps due to the interest of a problem. On the cover I am told that the author "chooses to be anonymous in order that his story should not suffer from the least suggestion of a party bias." And of course, after reading this, I simply had to discover who it was. By the time I reached the last page I had formed a tolerably confident guess. But I will not commit myself further than to say that no one, however "well-known in Great Britain and America" (the publisher again is my authority), need be ashamed to own up to Tributaries, which is quite one of the best written novels of the year. It is the story of a modern demagogue, a young apostle of political nonconformity, part charlatan, part zealot, who comes to town from a provincial chapel, and ends up a glorious failure as a soured and unpopular Cabinet Minister. There is an unusual quality in the characterisation and humour of this story of Maurice Sangster. Page after page abounds with touches of observation which betray the practised hand. The end, in its dry, unemotional justice, approaches real tragedy. One small point. Maurice's father-in-law, who hates and wishes to humiliate him, finds his opportunity when a turn of the party wheel throws the Minister out of office and into poverty. Her father thereupon allows Mrs. Sangster fifteen hundred a year for household expenses on condition that Maurice, who is scraping a bare hundred by his pen, shall not learn of this help till the old man's selected moment for abasing him. An intelligent woman who read the tale objected that no man, even a journalist, could long remain ignorant that he was spending fifteen hundred pounds more than he earned. I think she had a case. But the book remains a remarkable one.
My own feeling about A Soldier of the Legion (Methuen) is that it suffers from some excess of plot. That clever couple, C. N. and A. M. Williamson, can handle a complicated intrigue better than most; but here their battle-front, so to speak, is of such extent that even they seem to have found it impossible to sustain the attack at every point. We began splendidly. When Max Doran, rich, popular and just betrothed to a star of musical comedy, hears suddenly that he isn't Max Doran at all, but a pauper changeling, and that the real child of his parents (if I make myself clear) is a dull-witted girl who has been spirited away to Africa—I said to myself, now there is an exciting time ahead. So there was, but not in the way I had expected. For when Max goes out to Africa to find the missing one he finds her all right, but himself gets involved in a totally different and not so promising complication. The consequence is that the career of the enriched Josephine and her union with the wicked lawyer (all things about which I greatly wanted to hear) have to be dismissed in a few lines. As compensation we get some good desert pictures and a moving description of life in the Foreign Legion, of which Max becomes a member. But his other African adventures, and the sub-sub-plot of the abduction of a Moorish maiden by her Spanish lover, left me disappointed and detached. Of course Max embraces the heroine on the last page; and I could not but admire the resource with which, having dropped the curtain upon this climax, the authors ring it up again for an added paragraph (my metaphor is getting somewhat uncertain, but no matter), which brings the story to the warlike present. On the whole a readable book, but not quite equal to the best from the same firm.
Since the short prefatory note to Raymond Poincaré (Duckworth) tells me that the book was not hastily mobilised and sent into the firing line earlier than its author had intended, I must conclude that he is prepared to meet the onset of the critic. I will therefore suggest to him—and this the more boldly because he is anonymous—that he sometimes treats French politics, both international and domestic, with an allusiveness rather tantalising to the average English reader. "The events of 1904," he says airily, and expects us to remember them at once. This is a Gallic trait which would have caused us, I suppose, had we possessed it here, to allude to the open space at the top of Whitehall as "the square of the 21st of October." There is a supreme interest for us at the present moment in this study of the man whose dignified attitude towards Germany during the Moroccan crisis, and support of the entente with ourselves, has gone far to alter England's traditional policy in European affairs. It is noteworthy that the writer takes a very firm line about our duty in this respect, and gravely deprecates the then growing feeling of friendship with Germany. It is his opinion that M. Poincaré probably "exercises more influence in his own country... as regards foreign policy than did any of his predecessors." He would also have us appreciate the French President's many-sided ability as a lawyer, financier, and educationalist. Indeed, his proposed Budget of 1906 might well have earned him a reputation as formidable as that of one whom I will not name. They tell me that M. Poincaré has been to the front. I hope he saw there some worthy fruits of his strong policy in time of peace.
I have not before met with a book by A. S. M. Hutchinson, the author of The Clean Heart (Hodder and Stoughton). That is my loss, for he has a curious intensity of vision, an arresting way of making objective his thoughts by a sort of nervous battering emphasis of repetition. And he has things to say. A curious theme and painful. One Wriford, editor and novelist, breaks down from overwork and hovers about the ineffably dread borderline, crossing and recrossing. And first that grotesque tramp, Puddlebox, drunken, devout, affectionate optimist, with his "Oh, ye loonies of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him for ever;" then the oldest sea-captain living, with his "portograph" in The Daily Picture; then a preparatory school, full of boys; last, and most effectively, simple, sweet laughing Essie, daughter of the cert. plumber—all help variously to win him out of his morbid wrestling to mental and spiritual health. A live book this, and to be commended very warmly. But there are one or two difficulties. Those grotesqueries of the tramp and the fantastically laughable adventures of Wriford in his company—do they mingle quite smoothly with the painfully realistic manifestations of poor Wriford's state? Can so dreadful a theme ride off successfully on so bizarre a steed? And then again, was not the whole agony of the man on the physical and mental, not the spiritual plane? For did not Wriford before his illness give many obvious signs of unselfishness? Is there not in effect a certain confusion of the clean heart with the unclouded mind? I suspect the author has some subtle sufficient answer. And anyway I urge everyone to make acquaintance with two very lovable folk, the tramp and little Essie, among many others.
Ape's Face (Lane) takes its title from the name bestowed by her family upon the heroine. It is not, you will admit, either a usual or an attractive name; but then Miss Marion Fox is by no means a usual writer, though she is in many ways a strangely attractive one. Perhaps you recall certain earlier tales of hers which displayed the same characteristics that you will find in this, though I think they were not perhaps quite so definitely bogie. I used a wrong qualification there. Definite is exactly what Miss Fox's bogies are not, and in this they show their own good sense, and hers. She knows quite well that to define a supernatural element is to lessen enormously its flesh-creeping capabilities. Your flesh will creep all right over Ape's Face several times; though perhaps you may agree with me at the end that the book is really an enlarged Christmas tale, and would gain by being reduced to magazine dimensions. I have not yet told you what it is all about. Very briefly, there is a family and a curse. This curse—with regard to the exact details of which I still find myself a little vague—used to express itself by causing murders from time to time among the brothers and sisters of the House. The tale is told in a detached and purposely elusive way that adds much to its effect, chiefly as it is felt by one Armstrong, a stranger who comes to stay with the Mortons at a time when their very unpleasant family habit was due to manifest itself. "You cannot move about the house without feeling that the thing has nearly broken through." The italics in this chance quotation are mine, and used to emphasize a rare feeling for the most haunting phrase, a feeling which gives distinction throughout to the story.