Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3829/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
In The Wife of Sir Isaac Hannan (Macmillan) that impenitent pamphleteer, H. G. Wells, returns yet again to the intriguing subject of marriage, and in a vein something nearer orthodoxy. Not, certainly, that worthy stubborn orthodoxy of accepted unquestioned doctrine, or that sleeker variety of middle-aged souls that were once young, now too tired or bored to go on asking questions, but an orthodoxy rather that is honest enough to revise on the evidence earlier judgments as too cocksure and hasty. Sir Isaac Harman was a tea-shop magnate, and a very pestilent and primitive cad who caught his wife young and poor and battered her into reluctant surrender by a stormy wooing, whose very sincerity and abandonment were but a frantic expression of his dominating egotism and acquisitiveness. Wooing and winning, thinks this simple ignoble knight, is a thing done once and for all. Remains merely obedience in very plain and absolute terms on the part of lady to lord, obedience which, in the last resort, can be exacted by withholding supplies—not so uncommon a form of black-mail as it suits the dominant sex to imagine. Lady Harman's emancipation does not take the conventionally unconventional form, for some deeper reason, I think, than that her sententious friend and would-be lover, George Brumley, could not altogether escape her gentle contempt; indeed, she recognises Sir Isaac's claims upon her for duty and gratitude in a way which modern high-spirited priestesses of progress would scarcely approve. She fights merely for a limit to the proprietorship, for the right to a separate individuality, the right to be useful in a wider sphere (a phrase that stands for so much that is good and less good). Mr. Wells has realised this gracious, shy and beautiful personality with a fine skill. It is no mean feat. He might so easily have made a dear mild ghost. And oh if ladies of influence who regiment their inferiors in orderly philanthropic schemes had some of the wisdom and tolerance of Lady Harman in her dealings with the tea-shop girls. You see one instinctively pays Mr. Wells the serious compliment of assuming that he has something material to say about the things which matter.
As a demonstration of the irony of history, I can hardly imagine a better subject for romance at the present moment than the fortunes of William of Orange, and if Miss Marjorie Bowen's Prince and Heretic (Methuen) shows some traces of having been rather hastily finished it is easy to pardon this defect. The alchemist's assistant, part seer and part quack, whom she introduces into the earlier part of the story foretells the violent deaths of the young princes of the house of Nassau and the ravaging and looting of the Netherlands by Alva, Defender of the Catholic Faith and servant of the House of Hapsburg; but he cannot conjure up out of his crystal the sight of a Catholic Belgium suffering these things, three hundred and fifty years later, at the hands of a Lutheran King allied with a Hapsburg and fighting for the sake of no cause but his own vanity. Most of the action takes place in Brussels—a Brussels placarded with squibs against Cardinal Granville; and the final retreat of William, ruined in everything except his spirit, to join the army of the Prince de Condé, has a pathetic significance to-day that not many historical romances can claim. Miss Marjorie Bowen has a remarkable gift for the presentation of a number of lifelike portraits against a vivid and gorgeous background, and the successive pictures of the Dutch and Flemish Schools which she creates in Prince and Heretic, make it, if not quite so successful as I Will Maintain, at least a book which no lover of the Lowlands can afford to miss.
Our Sentimental Garden (Heinemann) is one of the very pleasantest garden-books I have encountered. One reason for this is that it is about such a lot of other things besides gardens. Volumes that are exclusively devoted to what I might call horticultural hortation are apt to become oppressive. But Agnes and Egerton Castle are persons far too sympathetic not to avoid this clanger. Instead of lecturing, they talk with an engaging discursiveness that lures you from page to page, as it might from bed to border, were you an actual visitor in the exquisite Surrey garden that is their ostensible subject. One thing with them leads to another. "Lilacs," they say. "Ah, lilacs—" and immediately one of them is started upon a whole series of rambling, Du Maurierish recollections of school-days in Second Empire Paris. Kittens and Pekinese puppies, village types, politics (just a little) and Roman villas—all these are the themes of their happy talk. "The Garden Garrulous" they might have called the book; and I for one have found it infinitely charming. Not that shrewd hints upon the choice of roses, the marshalling of bulbs, and other such aspects of the theme proper are wanting. Moreover, what they tell of garden triumphs is at once realised for you by a prodigality of drawings scattered among the text, some glowing in a full page of colour, others in line alone, from the pencil and brush of Mr. Charles Robinson. Altogether a very gentle book, of which one may echo the hope expressed by the writers in their graceful preface that "some unquiet heart, labouring under the strain of long-drawn suspense," may find in it "a passing relaxation, a forgotten smile."
Ernest students of military history should be grateful to Mr. Edward Foord for the patient labour and perseverance he has spent on the compilation of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812 (Hutchinson). The book appears at a most opportune date, for most of us nowadays are military critics, and here we can, if we like, compare the Russian methods of 1812 with those of 1914. On the other hand, in these strenuous days we may not have the time, even if we have the inclination, to devote ourselves to campaigns a hundred years old. For my own part, while frankly admitting the value of this book, I confess that I had sometimes to skip in an endeavour to avoid being bewildered by names and numbers. Using this desultory mode of progression I was still abundantly informed and profoundly interested. Mr. Foord is out to give facts, however tedious, and I agree with him that it is the business of an historian to be accurate before he is entertaining. Yet I could have wished that he had been less parsimonious with his human appeals, for whenever he unbends he can be at once interesting and informing. The struggles of Barclay de Tolly against jealousy and intrigues are vividly told, and nothing could he more graceful than the tribute Mr. Foord pays to the memory of that great soldier, General Eblé. It is impossible to read the history of this disastrous campaign without being impressed by the terrible penalties of overweening arrogance and ambition, and without realising the flaming spirit of patriotism that has glorified, and will always glorify, the Russians in time of national peril.
In A Morning In My Library ("Times" Book Club), Mr. Stephen Coleridge has put together an anthology of English prose which has some high advantages to recommend it to popular favour even in what the compiler calls "these tumultuous times." It is a small book and fits easily into a coat pocket; it is well and clearly printed, and, best of all, the selection is admirably made and does credit to Mr. Coleridge's taste. Every extract bears the stamp of inspiration, a quality difficult to define but unmistakable. Raleigh's invocation to Death; Johnson's preface to the Dictionary; Napier's description of the battle of Allmera; Richard Shiel's appeal on behalf of his fellow-countrymen, and Abraham Lincoln's immortal speech at Gettysburg—all these are to be found, and many more; and all go to show the might, majesty, dominion and power of that great language which it is our privilege to speak. I think we shall value that privilege a little more highly and shall endeavour to place a more careful restraint on our tongues and our pens after we have dipped through Mr. Coleridge's little book. He is a judicious guide, and such explanations as he adds are always short and never tiresome. Yet it must in fairness be added that King Charles's head, in the shape of an anti-vivisection footnote, has once, but only once, crept into the "memorial." However the fault is such a little one that those who love noble English prose will easily forgive it.