Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/473

November 18, 1914.]

Tommy (reaching flooded trench lately occupied by the enemy).



Sinister Street, Vol. II. is a book for which I have been waiting impatiently this great while, and I welcomed it with eagerness. The first volume left off, you may remember, with Michael just about to go up to Oxford. Knowing what Mr. Author:Compton Mackenzie could do with such a theme, I have anticipated all these months that to watch his hero at the university would be to renew my own youth. The book has appeared now, and I am justífied of my faith. I say without hesitation that the first half of this second volume (which, by the way, to show that it is a second volume and not a sequel, starts at page 499) is the most complete and truest picture of modern Oxford that has been or is likely to be written. For those who, like myself, have their most cherished memories bound up with the life of which it treats, the actuality of the whole thing would make criticism impossible. But as a matter of fact these seventeen chapters seem to me to show Mr. art at its best. They display just that strange combination of realism and aloofness that gives to his writing its special charm. No one has ever (for example) reproduced more perfectly the talk of young men; and this scattered speech, in what Mr. himself might call its infinitely fugacious quality, contrasts effectively with the deliberate, somewhat mannered beauty of the setting. Mr. is an overlord of words, old and new, bending them to strange an unexpected uses, yet always avoiding affectation by the sheer vitality of his strength. As for th ematter of these first chapters, one might say that nothing whatever happens in them. They are an epic of adolescence wherein growth is the only movement. Events are for the second half of the volume. Here Michael has come down from Oxford, and has set himself to find and rescue by marriage the girl Lily, whom (you remember) he loved as a boy, and who has since drifted into the underworld. About this part of the story I will only say that, though the art is still there and the same haunting melody of style, Mr. has too strong a sense of atmosphere to allow him to treat squalor in a fashion that will be agreeable to the universe. Frankly, the over-nice will be prudent to take leave of Michael on the Oxford platform. The others, following to the end, will agree with me that he has placed his creator definitely at the head of the younger school of English fiction.

For me, the pleasure of travelling consists less in the sight of museums, cathedrals, picture galleries and landscapes, than in the study of the native man in the street and his peculiar ways. When abroad, "I am content to note my little facts," and so is Mr. Author:George A. Birmingham; in fact, it was he who first thought of mentioning the matter. The reverend canon tours in the U.S.A., which is, when you come to think of it, about the only safe area for the purpose nowadays; he observes the manners and oddities of the Americans, whether as politicians, husbands or wives, and remarks upon them, in Connaught to Chicago, with just that quiet and unboisterous humour which his public has come to demand of him as of right. His first chapter shows that he has ever in mind the multitude of his fellow-countrymen who have, in the past, made the same journey but for good and all. This memory leads