Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3832/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
If The Prussian Officer, a study of morbidly vicious cruelty practised by a captain of Cavalry on his helpless orderly (and the first of a sheaf of collected stories, short or shortish, by Mr. D. H. Lawrence, issued by Messrs. Duckworth), had been written since the declaration of war it would certainly be discounted as a product of the prevailing odium bellicosum. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace, and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. Lawrence's method. It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of these stories is a story in the accepted mode. They are studies in (dare one use the overworked word?) psychological portraiture. I don't know any other writer who realises passion and suffering with such objective force. The word "suffering" drops from his pen in curiously unexpected contexts. The fact of it seems to obsess him. Yet it is no morbid obsession. He seems to be dominated by sympathy in its literal meaning, and it gives his work a surprising richness of texture… I dare press this book upon all such as need something more than mere yarns, who have an eye for admirably sincere workmanship and are interested in their fellows—fellows of all sorts, soldiers, keepers, travellers, clergymen, colliers, with womenfolk to match.
On a map of the North you may be able to find an island named after one Margaret. It should lie, though I have sought it in vain, just about where the florid details of the Norwegian coast-line run up to those blank spaces that are dotted over, it would seem, only by the occasional footprints of polar bears. Anyhow it was so christened by two bold mariners who lived in the Spacious Days (Murray) of Queen Elizabeth. That they both loved the lady (Elizabeth, of course, too—but I mean Margaret) may be assumed; but that they should eventually, with one accord, desire to resign their claims upon her affection must be read to be understood. I for one did not quarrel with them on this score. For had not their mistress in the meantime found companionship more suitable than theirs? Besides, if even the author is so little courteous to his heroine as to invite her to appear only in two chapters between the third and the twenty-seventy, why should two rough sea-dogs—or you and I—be more attentive? And indeed it is a correct picture of his period that Mr. Ralph Durand is concerned to present rather than a love story. In the writing of the love scenes considered necessary to the mechanism of the plot he seems very little at his ease; and so marked at times is his discomfort that I must confess to having felt some irritation when my willingness to be convinced was not met halfway. In the handling of his sheets and oars I like the author better, though even here I miss what might have brought me into a companionship with his people as close as I could wish on a most adventurous journey of nearly four hundred pages. But perhaps that is my fault; and, at the least, here is a straightforward sea story—as honest as the sea and as clean.
Llanyglo was a child with fair hair and blue eyes, and how she grew and what she learnt, and all the changes of her dresses and her soul, are set forth by Mr. Oliver Onions in Mushroom Town (Hodder and Stoughton). She differed from the children of other novelists who grow up to be men and women, because she was made of bricks and mortar and iron girders and romantic scenery and ozone (especially ozone), and the people who lived with her or took trips to see her are treated as a mere emblematical garnish of her character and growth. Llanyglo is a daughter of Wales, but she is not any town that you may happen to have seen, although possibly Blackpool and Douglas and Llandudno have met her, and turned up their noses at her, as she turned up her nose at them. Lancashire built and conquered her, to be conquered and annually recuperated in turn. Cymria capta ferum... might have been the motto of her municipal arms. Exactly how Mr. Onions exhibits the romantic spectacle of her development, with the strange knowledge she picked up, as from virgin wildness she became first select and then popular, I cannot hope to explain. Suffice it to say that the process is epitomised in sketches of the various people who helped in the moulding of her—the drunken Kerr brothers, who built a house in a single night; Howell Gruffydd, the wily grocer; Dafydd Dafis, the harper; and John Willie Garden, son of the shrewd cotton-spinner who first saw the possibilities of the place, and won the heart of the untamed gipsy girl, Ynys. This is surely Mr. Onion's best novel since Good Boy Seldom; and as Llangglo is safely ensconced on the West coast you should go there at once for the winter season.
Spragge's Canyon (Smith, Elder) takes its title, as you might guess, from the canyon where the Spragges lived. It was a delightful spot, a kind of earthly paradise (snakes included), and the Spragge family had made it all themselves out of unclaimed land on the Californian coast. Wherefore the Spragges loved it with a love only equalled perhaps by the same emotion in the breast of Mr. H. A. Vachell, who has written a book about it. The Spragges of the tale are Mrs. Spragge, widow of the pioneer, and her son George. With them on the ranch lived also a cousin, Samantha, a big-built capable young woman, destined by Providence and Mrs. Spragge to be the helpmate of George. But George, though he was strong and handsome and a perfect marvel with rattle-snakes (which he collected as a subsidiary source of income), was also a bit of a fool; and when, on one of his rare townward excursions, he got talking to Hazel Goodrich in a street car, her pale attractiveness and general lure proved too much for him. Accordingly Hazel was asked down to the ranch on a visit (I am taking it on trust that Mr. Vachell knows the Californian etiquette in these matters) and has the time of her life, flirting with the love-lorn George, impressing his mother, and generally scoring off poor Samantha. At least so she thought. Really, however, Mrs. Spragge had taken Hazel's measure in one, and was all the time quietly fighting her visitor for her son't future. This fight, and the character of the mother who makes it, are the best things in the book. I shall not tell you who wins. Personally I had expected a comedy climax, and was unprepared for creeps. But George, I may remind you, collected snakes. A good and virile tale.
Sir Melville Macnaughten hopes, in his Introduction to Days of my Years (Arnold), that his reminiscences "may be found of some interst to a patient reader"; and, when one considers that Sir Melville spent twenty-four years at Scotland Yard, many of them as chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, he can hardly be accused of undue optimism. Speaking as one of his readers, I found no difficulty at all in being patient. I have always had a weakness for official detectives, and have resented the term "Scotland Yard bungler" almost as if it were a personal affront; and now I feel that my resentment is justified. Sotland Yard does not bungle: and the advice I shall give for the future any eager-eyed, enthusiastic young murderer burning to embark on his professional career is, don't practise in London. I would not lightly steal a penny toy in the Metropolitan area. There are two hundred and seventy-nine pages in this story of crime, as seen by the man at the very centre of things, and nearly every one of them is packed with matter of absorbing interest. Consider the titles of the chapters: "Bombs and their Makers"; "Motiveless Murders"; "Half-a-day with the Bloodhounds." This, I submit, is the stuff; this, I contend, is the sort of thing you were looking for. There is something so human and simple in Sir Melville's method of narration that it is with an effort that one realises what an important person he really was, and what extraordinary ability he must have had to win and hold his high position. Even when he disparages blood-hounds I reluctantly submit to his superior knowledge and abandon one of my most cherished illusions. I hate to do it, but if he says that a blood-hound is no more use in tracking criminals than a Shetland pony would be, I must try to believe him.