Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3822/Our Booking-Office
(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 origin. I will not tell you the story, for one reason because its charm is too elusive to retrieve. I content myself by saying that it seems to me the best work we have yet had from Mr. Calthrop, combining his special and expected graces with an unusual and moving sincerity.
A month or two ago I have no doubt that the England of Charles II.'s declining years would have seemed to me a monstrously exciting country to live in; at the present moment (unfairly enough) I feel more like congratulating the hero of Monsignor Benson's Oddsfish! (Hutchinson) on the mildness of his adventures for the furtherance of the Catholic faith. It is true that Mr. Roger Mallock beheld some notable executions after the Titus Oates affair, and on the night of the Rye House Plot had a large meat chopper thrown at his head by one of the conspirators; but, emissary of the Vatican as he was, he was actually only once compelled to whip out his sword in self-defence, though on that occasion he had the extreme bad luck to lose his fiancée through a misdirected dagger-thrust. Even this tragedy, sufficiently overwhelming in an ordinary romance, is not, of course, wholly disastrous in Monsignor Benson's eyes, since it enabled Mr. Mallock to resume the religious life and habit for which he had been originally intended. For the rest the book is written in a most captivating manner, and with a plausibility of incident and dialogue only too rare in novels of the Restoration period. Evidently the author has studied his authorities (and more particularly Mr. Pepys) with a praise-worthy diligence. But in view of the anti-Protestant bias which he naturally exhibits I feel bound to bid him have a care. If he intends to pursue his historical researches any further, and discover (let us say) virtue in the Spanish Inquisition and villainy in Sir Francis Drake, I shall load my arquebus to the muzzle.
The hero of King Jack (Hodder and Stoughton) "made sport," as his creator, Mr. Keighley Snowden, says, "nearly a hundred years ago " in Yorkshire, and incidentally he also made records. For instance, he cleared four-and-twenty feet at a "run-jump," and with this in my mind I find it satisfactory to think that he lived in another century, or I might find myself regretting the eclipse of the Olympic Games. As an upholder of law and order I ought to be (I am not) ashamed to admire a man who, to say the least of it, was a very prickly thorn in the side of the police. My excuse is that Jack Sincler and his brother Lisle were kindly men withal. The game-laws were their trouble, but as far as I could make out they did not poach for the sake of pelf but from sheer love of sport. Among poachers they ought, anyhow, to be placed in Class I., for they loved the open air and the freshness of the morning and all the things that make for a clean mind in a clean body. Jack, though a shade arrogant at times, is a stimulating figure, human both in his weakness and his strength; and Mr. Snowden deserves more than a little gratitude for the care with which he has reproduced the atmosphere of times that were conspicuously lawless and exciting.
When Dicky Furlong, the brilliant and aspiring artist of The Achievement (Chapman and Hall) who was in love with Diana Charteris, sloshed her husband, Lord Freddy, over the head with his own decanter (vide Chap. XXI.) he rather overdid it. For "the jagged thing fell with a sullen thud behind his (Lord Freddy's) ear," and that discourteous nobleman collapsed to rise no more. When the detective arrived the following noon he convinced himself that there was no necessity to detain any of the guests, even though no windows had been found open or doors unlocked, and though Dicky had a contused lip from the conflict overnight and everybody had coupled his name with Diana's. However, the methodical sleuthhound ran his quarry to earth a year or two later, just as he had put the finishing touches to his great, (seventeen-foot) canvas. And Dicky took a little bottle out of his pocket. In fact, our old friend the novelette, with its unexacting canons of plausibility; tacked on, as it happens, to twenty chapters of meandering incident, a long way after the well-known Five-Towns formula, garnished with pleasantly romantic little notices of Dicky's pictures and Dicky's love affairs. But you don't begin to see the Dicky of the decanter phase (even though a fight about an ill-treated dog is lugged in for the purpose), or indeed any other Dicky of real flesh and blood, in this haphazard selection of episodes and comments. The truth is there is more in that difficult and dangerous formula than Mr. Temple Thurston is aware of. He has wandered into the wrong galley. A pity. For Mrs. Flint is a dear, if a stupid dear, and Dicky himself has his points.