Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3826/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
If, as is just conceivable, the Teuton braggart fails to convert the universe into a German empire, his downfall will be partly due to his lack of humour. Among the things that go to make this saving grace are an agile imagination and a nice sense of proportion, and it is when a man starts lying about himself that he shows most clearly whether or not he has it. Some weeks ago an "Honorary Committee of thirty-four distinguished" (or, if you will, notorious) "Germans and a Board of Editors," eleven strong, gathered together to concoct an epoch-making fib, which, upon completion, was labelled "The Truth about Germany: Facts about the War," and was circulated, secretly but thoroughly, throughout the United States. The Forty-five Liars content themselves with a methodical misstatement of every fact, disregarding all the evidence, and, indeed, their own diplomatists' admissions, to the contrary. There is no ingenious perversion of the truth, no subtle invention of argument and no appeal whatever to the intelligence of the reader; it is from beginning to end heavy and quite incredible bosh. Though it was never intended to be read in this country, Mr. Douglas Sladen has been lucky or clever enough to secure a copy of it, which he reproduces cheaply under the title Germany's Great Lie (Hutchinson). I congratulate him upon having obtained such excellent copy, but I think he has somewhat spoilt the effect of it by the manner of his annotations interposed in italics. His facts and quotations are apt and useful, but his indignant denials and sarcastic epithets run to excess; every time one reads the emphatic assertion that black is white one does not want to have also to read that this is an amazing lie. I recommend the public to consume every word of the text, but to omit the larger part of the notes.
In the nature of things it is possible that the 1914 crop of gift-books for boys may not be a bumper one as far as quantity is concerned, but Mr. Henry Newbolt has already removed any danger of a famine. indeed, he has done more than that, for, if quality can (as it should) be considered a satisfactory substitute for bulk, there is no reason why 1914 should not be remembered as a year in which the palates of discerning boys were most delightfully tickled. I find a difficulty in preventing my congratulations upon The Book of the Blue Sea (Longmans) from being fulsome. To begin with, the title itself is simply irresistible. Then, before you even get to the preface, there are some verses, "The Song of the Larboard Berth," which cry "halt" so arrestingly that after I had got by them and was fairly revelling in the entrancing pages that follow I kept on going back to have another look at
And engines rumble slow..."
To a nicety Mr. Newbolt knows how to reproduce the spirit of the sea and of adventure thereon, and whether he is writing of Edward Pellew, John Franklin, David Farragut, or of Trafalgar, it is only possible to escape from his grip when he endeavours to be a little edifying. Boys may conceivably resent this tendency to point out what they can see extraordinarily well for themselves, but all the same they will admit their heavy debt to him. The Book of the Blue Sea (I must write that again), excellently illustrated by Mr. Norman Wilkinson, had better be confiscated forthwith by parents who do not wish their sons to become sailors. And in the end I am left wondering whether the Admiralty, overburdened by clamorous applicants, would not be wise to intern Mr. Newbolt in one of those camps where no ink or paper is provided, because, if he repeats this performance, we shall want a dozen new naval colleges and hundreds and hundreds more ships.
Shifting Sands (Lane) reads like a book with a purpose from which the purpose has been by some oversight omitted. When a young person fails to "find herself" (as the phrase used to go) there should surely be provided some foil to her instability, either implicit in the behaviour of other characters or expressed in the meditations of the author. Even if the author only means to tell us that human life is all like this, she ought at least to let us know that sho means it. Gabrielle Brenda is presented to us by Alice Birkhead as a girl brought up in the remoter parts of Cornwall by a father who was a semi-retired doctor and something of a dreamer. She develops dramatic talent, and having become engaged to her instructor gives him up to her younger sister for no better reason apparently than that she has always been accustomed to give that sister everything she wants. Afterwards Gabrielle becomes the secretary of a domineering little manufacturer in the Black Country with expensive sons and daughters. She resists his proposals of marriage and also the temptation to purloin his eldest daughter's fiancé, and then reverts to her original vocation, without finding on the stage either satisfaction or any remarkable success. For I see no indication that the offer of a fairly lucrative engagement in America, with which the book ends, is regarded by the author as the golden moment of her heroine's career. Altogether I am at a loss whether to learn from Shifting Sands the disadvantages of a haphazard education, the unfair position of woman in the labour-market, or merely the irony of fate. And this is a pity because, though the manner of the story is very episodic, there are scenes and conversations of considerable vivacity and truth.
Baroness Orczy is to be congratulated on a distinctly ingenious idea. Searching about her, no doubt, for a successor to the famous Pimpernel, her attention was caught by a certain picture in the Wallace Collection, a picture everyone knows and admires for its rollicking and adventurous high spirits. "Capital!" said she (as I imagine it): "why not trace back the line of Blakeney, and make the subject of this picture the ancestor from whom he inherited his endearing qualities?" The Laughing Cavalier (Hodder and Stoughton) is the result. Having thus divined the origin of the hero, I feel that any further indication of his character would be almost superfluous. You will certainly not find this new Blakeney unworthy of his house. It is perhaps something of a surprise to find him a mercenary in seventeenth-century Holland; but the old touch is there. Thus, having been hired by a gang of conspirators to abduct the sister of one of them, who has overheard their plans for the slaying of the Stadtholder, and keep her prisoner till the deed be done, what more Blakeneyish than that he should recognise in his captive the particular object of his affections? or that, having abducted the girl according to instructions received, he should presently be offered untold gold by her distracted parent for her discovery and return. A faintly embarrassing situation this, even for an ancestor of the elusive Pimpernel. How he manages to turn it all to favour and romance you must allow Baroness Orczy to tell you herself. Incidentally, the appearance of the book at this particular moment, and in spite (so the publishers inform me on a slip) of the author's first resolve to postpone it, proves her to possess something of the sporting spirit of her creation. Here's luck to them both!
A novelist creating a novelist-hero is on dangerous ground. If he be a little less than perfectly sincere he runs risk of being pretentious, fatuous even. But sincerity is just Mr. Charles Marriott's conspicuous quality, and here in The Unpetitioned Heavens (Hutchinson) it commands a dexterous and fastidious workmanship. You'll find, if you read a scene over again, that there's more, not less, in it than you thought. Mr. Marriott makes his characters alive by realisation of their subtleties rather than of their obviousnesses, and that's a feat to which I doff my beaver. The main theme, sensitively felt and developed, is a delicate one—the love of a middle-aged woman for a man who is rapt in worship at a distance of a younger woman, the other's friend. The manoeuvring of the elder, which might easily have been vulgarised on the one hand or devitalised on the other, just remains refreshingly and believably human. Mr. Marriott's story is not a yarn, but a brocade of intricate design and exquisite colouring. Let justice be done and The Unpetitioned Heavens fall to a wide circle of perceptive readers.