First Native. "We're doin' fine at the war, Jarge."
Second Native. "Yes, Jahn; and so be they Frenchies."
First Native. "Ay; an' so be they Belgians an' Rooshians."
Second Native. "Ay; an' so be they Allys. Oi dunno where they come from, Jahn, but they be devils for fightin'."
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Why is it that novels with scamp-heroes are so much more interesting than the conventional kind? Bellamy (Methuen) is a case in point, for the central character, who gives his name to it, is about as worthless an object, rightly considered, as one need wish to meet. He steals and lies and poses; he betrays most of his friends; and throughout a varied life he only really cares for one person—himself. Yet Miss Elinor Mordaunt never seems to have any difficulty in making us share Bellamy's delight in his own conscienceles career. Perhaps it is this very delight that does the trick. Charlatan as he is, and worse, Bellamy is always so attractively amused at the success of his impostures that it becomes impossible to avoid an answering grin. It was not a little courageous of Miss Mordaunt to write a story about a hero from the Five Towns district; but, though this may look like trespass upon the preserves of a brother novelist, Bellamy is Miss Mordaunt's very own. I have the feeling that she enjoyed writing about him—a feeling that always makes for pleasure in reading. Perhaps of all his manifold phases I liked best his rôle of assistant necromancer at a kind of psychical beauty parlour. There is some shrewd hitting here, which is vastly well done. But none of the adventures of Bellamy should be skipped. I am sorry to add that the copy supplied me for review did not apparently credit me with this view, as it ruthlessly omitted some forty of what I am persuaded were most agreeable pages. The fact that it so far relented as to go back about ten, and repeat a chapter I had already read, did little to console me. I could have better spared part of a duller book.
A story by Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop, with the title Wonderful Woman (Hodder and Stoughton), may almost be regarded as a work of expert reference. Because what he does not know about The Sex, and has not already written in a galaxy of engaging romances, is hardly worth the bother of remembering. So that his views on the matter naturally command respect. Wonderful Woman is perhaps less a novel than an analysis—painfully close, with a kind of regretful brutality in it—of one special type of femininity, and a glance at several others. Perhaps its realistic quality may astonish you a little. You may have been delighting in Mr. Calthrop's fantastic work (as I do myself) and yet have cherished the suspecion that his Columbines and Chelsea fairies and Moonbeam folk generally were the creations of a sentimentalist who would have little taste for handling unsympathetic things. Well, if so, Philippina is the answer to that. Here is the most masterly portraiture of a woman utterly without imagination or heart or anything except a kind of futile and worthless attraction, that I remember to have met for some time. As I say, it is all rather astonishing from Mr. Calthrop. The men who love Flip, and whose lives are ruined by her, are easier to understand. About Sir Timothy Swift, for example, there is a touch of the Harlequin, or rather Pierrot, that betrays his
