Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3825/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Coasting Bohemia is the attractive title of a series of essays upon men and matters by Mr. Comyns Carr, issued in a portly volume published by Macmillan. During the last forty years Mr. Carr, eminently a clubbable man, has made the acquaintance and enjoyed the friendship of a galaxy of painters, authors and actors. He was equally at home with Millais, Alma-Tadema, Rosetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler, George Meredith, Henry Irving and Arthur Sullivan. A shrewd observer, quick in sympathy, apt in characterisation, he has much that is interesting and informing to say of each. Perhaps the chapter on Whistler is the most attractive, since in some respects his individuality was the most pronounced. In a couple of brief sentences, pleasing in the slyness of their gentle malice, Mr. Carr hits off a striking quality in the character of the Whistler we most of us knew. "At times," he writes, "Whistler was even greedy of applause, and, provided it was full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source or authority. There were moments indeed when, if it appeared to lack volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient." Mr. Carr has in his time played many parts. He made a start at the Bar, but did not get further than the position of a Junior, which suited him admirably. As a critic, he cannot plead in extenuation the dictum of Disraeli that critics are those who have failed in Literature and Art. He has written several successful plays, was English editor of L'Art, was among the founders of the New Gallery, and remains established as one of our best after-dinner speakers. Of such is the kingdom of Bohemia. From these various sources he draws a stream of reminiscence that runs pleasantly through many pages. The only drawback to the delight with which I read them arose from the circumstance that the volume was uncut. Why should a harmless reviewer be compelled to "coast Bohemia" armed with a paper-knife, interrupted, when he comes to an exceptionally interesting point, by necessity for cutting a chunk of pages? R.S.V.P., Messrs. Macmillan.
In Yankee-land is severed—such is
The underlying theme of what
The Letter of the Contract touches;
So, but that Basil King has brain
And uses it when he is writing,
The book (from Methuen) might contain
Little that's novel or inviting.
I rather fear, the approbation
Of folk who hope such books as this
May help the cause of reformation;
For, if divorce in U.S.A.
Inspires such work, it stands to reason
To change the law in any way
Amounts to literary treason.
In contemplating the present season's output of fiction I have been impressed by the number of novels that might apparently have been written with an eye to the conditions that attended their publication. Which, unless one credits our romancers with much further sight than is commonly supposed to be their portion, is absurd. The thing is a coincidence; and of this there is no more striking example than the story that Anne Douglas Sedgwick has prepared for the world this autumn. She calls it The Encounter (Arnold), and it is all about the struggle between "the Nietzschean attitude of mind in Germany," as exemplified in an egotistical, crack-brained genius named Ludwig Wehlitz, and the ideals of civilized Christianity exemplified in several other more agreeable persons. You will own that this is at least a propos. The whole thing is, of course, quite charmingly told. All the characters are thoroughly alive; most of all perhaps the placid, tolerant and entirely practical mother of the heroine. Persis Fennamy had been introduced to the genius as a suitable disciple and possible helpmate by the Signorina Zardo, who worshipped him from afar. Persis met Ludwig, was interested, impressed and even willing to admire. There were two other men also, attendant upon the great one: Conrad Sacks, who was gentle and deformed, and Graf von Ludenstein, who represented another type of German manhood. He repre-sented it so well, indeed, that, when Mrs. Fennany discoveredt hat he had taken Persis off for an intimate conversation in a wood, even her tolerant placidity was deranged. But it was all right, and Persis escapes heart-whole from the lot of them, clay superman and all. She is to be congratulated. So is the author, for her book is both apt to the moment and interesting in itself.
There is, for all its gaiety, a certain external quality of pathos (now that the German is to us so sinister a figure) in much of The Pastor's Wife (Smith, Elder), With its types of an East Prussian village drawn in with those deft, half kindly, half malicious touches to which the creatrix of Elizabeth of the Garden has accustomed us. Ingeborg is the daughter of an English bishop—a bishop, by the way, so needlessly odious that even those who would cheerfully believe the worst of the order must protest against this hitting below the gaiters—and she meets her pastor in a railway carriage on a cheap trip to Lucerne. This so-utterly-by-the-pursuit-of-knowledge-dominated Herr Dremmel (his subject is scientific manure) has a lapse from the even paths of research into the disturbing realms of love, and with an egotistic single-mindedness which is beyond all praise overwhelms her into marriage by the heroic process of ignoring all objections, refusals and obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Kokensee we have a problem! Elizabeth, tongue in cheek, in the mask of Ibsen!... I couldn't get myself to believe in the effable preoccupations of Herr Dremmel that made sa desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting Ingeborg in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the bishop. But I heartily and thoroughly enjoyed the story, the happy little strokes of humour and irony, the apt, pert thumbnail-sketches of the subsidiary characters, the tender love of country things and moods; and saw that I'd been an ass to take it all too seriously. It was written to charm—and it's charming.
Laughter in these dark days is so wholesome a corrective that we mustn't be too exacting with Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, that fertile spinner of yarns, when in The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton (Methuen) he presents us with the diverting idea of a mean, little, loud, untruthful auctioneer's clerk converted by the eating of a mysterious brown bean into a paragon of candid truth, refined taste and romantic desire. There's an amusing scene when Burton's chief, a thoroughly resourceful specimen of his tribe, cries down, under the same mysterious influence, the pseudo-antiques he is selling, and so intrigues his old friends the dealers that, with a curious naïveté, they make absurdly high bids in the belief that the auctioneer is up to some profitable little game. Mr. Alfred Burton himself becomes at a stroke a famous author just by merely writing what he sees and seeing true. (But wouldn't his readers also need a nibble at the bean?) Finally falling from grace as the effect of this food of the gods wears off, he accepts a directorship of the new mind-food company, "Menatogen," which brings him untold wealth. Quite innocent fooling which yet leaves one with the impression that our popular authors let themselves off rather lightly from the labour of working out their themes.