Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/64

60  I tremble to imagine the things that certain fair critics would have said about him. But since a woman is the creator, and one, moreover, with the well-won reputation of Miss Author:Stella Callaghan, what is there to say? After all she must know. As a portrait of futility, Jacynth is the most mercilessly realistic thing that I have met for some time. Pretty, brainless, egotistical, utterly unable ever to understand even the least of the men who loved her—this was Jacynth. The picture is so unsparing that (though I am not calling the book a masterpiece or free from dull moments) the very completeness of the dreadful thing fascinates you unwillingly. Jacynth was the typical product of a seaside town, where she was adored by two men—a young squire and a famous novelist. I was just a little bored by her beginnings, especially when she sprained her ankle—a gambit I had imagined démodé even with the most provincial of heroines. However, Jacynth married the novelist, and after the honeymoon settled down to a steady course of fatuousness and general interference with his work which presently reduced the poor man to exasperation, and finally constrained him to pack her off on a prolonged visit to the seaside home of her maidenhood. After that Jacynth went from worse to worst; too preposterous a fool even to be greatly moved when she brought tragedy into the lives of those who came under her malign influence. I will not follow her vicissitudes in detail. Throughout the book the most sinister thing in her story was to me the fact that a woman had written it. Moreover I have a lurking suspicioun that the portrait is no imaginary one. Perhaps this is a high tribute to Miss skill; it certainly is meant to be a compliment to her courage.

I've often longed to come upon
 * Some giant spoor and dog the track till

I ran to earth a mastodon,
 * A dinosaur, a pterodactyl;

But I supposed my natal date—
 * However distantly I view it—

Was several thousand years too late
 * To give me any chance to do it.

And yet Sir Author:Arthur Conan Doyle
 * Has found a man who's penetrated

Through bush and swamp on virgin soil
 * And seen the things I've indicated,

Creatures with names that clog your pen—
 * Dimorphodon and plesiosaurus—

And carried home a specimen
 * To silence any doubting chorus.

In The Lost World the tale is told ( do it cheap) in diction So circumstantial that its hold
 * Is more than that of common fiction;

If you can run the story through,
 * By aid of portraits when you need it,

And not be half convinced it's true,
 * You simply don't deserve to read it.

There is nothing wrong with Mr. Author:Eden Phillpotts latest collection of short stories, The Judge's Chair, but there is something vigorously to protest aginst upon the wrapper that covers them. For there I found an uncompromising statement to the effect that these stories "bring to a conclusion the author's Dartmoor work," and no sooner had I read it than my heart sank into my heels. Solemnly I plead with him to reconsider this decision, for if he does not his innumerable admirers will be deprived of something almost as annual and quite as enjoyable as Christmas. If he wants a holiday let him have one by all means, though personally I was not pleased when he left Dartmoor for Italy. But let it be only a holiday, a break in his real business. As for the book, I advise everyone who can appreciate dry humour and quaint philosophy to sit behind The Judge's Chair. "The Two Farmers" is in its way a masterpiece, grim and very real, and there is not the ghost of a sign in the whole collection that Mr. has written of Dartmoor until he is tired of it or it of him. He has made a niche for himself in that old temple of Nature, and we must all try to persuade him to stay there.

I have been reading a book, written by the Rev. Author:Rev. H. S. Pelham, and published by, which is at least twenty times as absorbing and moving as any novel. It is called The Training of a Working Boy. I daresay you may have met with other volumes on something like the same theme before, and may suppose you know all about camps and evening schools and blind-alley employment and the rest of it. But I am pretty well sure that you have read nothing more practical and human on the questions of boydom. It is, indeed, the humanity, sympathetic and more than half humorous, of Mr. attitude that gives his book its appeal and incidentally, I fancy, explains his success with the object of it. His little volume is a plea for personal rather than pecuniary help, and is directed more especially to Midlanders, since its chief concern is with the boy population of Birmingham. I can only wish for it the largest possible number of readers in the shires and elsewhere, since to read it is inevitably to be moved to active sympathy.



"'The selection of a player for the leading role, that of Pallas Athene, the beautiful goddess of Greek mythology, was successfully accomplished when Miss Genevieve Clark, the pretty and vivacious daughter of Speaker Clark, consented to take the part. Those who know Miss Clark and Greek mythology will realise at once that there will be a natural affinity between the player and the character.' Washington (D. C.) Post."

We never actually met Pallas Athene, but have always heard of her as being neither very pretty nor vivacious.