Book: Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919
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Various >> Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919
My own early ones no longer exist; but it would be a very searching
test of our educational system to study these reports thirty-five
years after and subject them to an honest commentary. How little that
one learned then has persisted, has survived the probation of time and
necessity. At the age of fifteen I knew the principal rivers of South
America ("Geography--Has made great progress"); to-day at fifty I have
no recollection of any, nor any desire to have it. Instead I can order
dinner. Gastronomy for geography; new lamps for old! In any report
drawn up now there would be a totally different series of subjects.
Thus:--
Business Method . . . Might be better.
Punctuality . . . . . Tries his best.
Patriotism . . . . . Good.
Veracity . . . . . . Moderate.
Financial Soundness . Very variable.
As a means of constructive criticism the report system might be useful
in Parliament. The Speaker, as headmaster, should be entrusted with
the task of preparing the documents. I can see some such results as
the following:--
THE PRIME MINISTER.
Logic . . . . . . . . Weak.
Opportunism . . . . . Strong.
Golf . . . . . . . . Shows little improvement.
Belligerence . . . . Very good.
Tonsorial Artistry . Far from satisfactory. Should give it
more attention.
Oratory . . . . . . . Fluent and powerful, but must guard
against impulse. Too fond in perorations
of drawing metaphors from Welsh
physical geography.
MR. BONAR LAW.
Mediation . . . . . . Admirable, but must not be overworked.
Oratory . . . . . . . Fair. Has tendency to unnecessary candour.
Does not sufficiently employ periphrasis.
Fidelity . . . . . . Beyond praise.
MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL.
Oratory . . . . . . . Effective, if given enough time to prepare.
Modesty . . . . . . . Room for improvement.
Polarity . . . . . . Weak.
Ambition . . . . . . An honest worker.
Lastly, let us take the report sheet of one not wholly absent from
the public eye, whom I will designate merely by the initials W.W.
Pride . . . . . . . . Far less than he had two or three years ago.
Facial beauty . . . . More than adequate.
Subrisivity . . . . . Phenomenal.
Oratory . . . . . . . Admirable, but too fond of telling the
same story.
Popularity . . . . . Could not be greater.
* * * * *
HAIR-CUTTING AND DENTISTRY.
I am going to get my hair cut. But I must first mention the matter to
my wife.
Why do I do this? It is not because I am a coward, for there are few
men who are in reality braver than I am. I carried my firstborn in my
arms round the drawing-room when she was a week old, and I have done
other things equally brave, the enumeration of which I spare you.
But I could no more think of getting my hair cut without previously
informing my wife than I could think of wearing a top hat in the
Strand.
I know what will happen when I have told my wife. She will look up and
say, "That's right; you always do it."
And I shall say, "What do I always do?"
And she will answer, "You always get yourself cropped like a convict
just when your hair was beginning to look nice."
And I shall say, "I can't help that; it's got to be done." And then I
shall go and get it done.
But I wonder if my wife is right after all. There used to be a nice
wave in my front hair, a wave into which you could lay two fingers. Is
that there still? No, it's gone. In fact there is not sufficient front
hair to make a wave with. It's odd how gradually these things happen.
I could have sworn that I had that wave, and there is a photograph
of me in the drawing-room with a fully-developed tidal bore; and I
went on brushing my front hair and combing it and thinking of it all
the time as constituting a wave, and lo it had vanished, leaving me
under the impression that it was still there and accountable for the
pleasing effect I produced in general society.
But if it wasn't the wave that produced this effect, what could it
have been? My voice? Perhaps. My moustache? I doubt it. My teeth?
Possibly. See advertisements of tooth powders _passim_. You know how
it's done, in the before and after style. Before you use Dentoline you
apparently do not possess so much as a front tooth. After you have
used it once you are in possession of thirty-two regular and brilliant
white teeth, and it seems plain that no dentist will ever make his
fortune out of your mouth. All this, however, has nothing to do with
getting my hair cut. But it brings me to an analogous consideration.
When I tell my wife I am going to get my teeth attended to, does she
try to restrain me from the fatal deed? Not she. She urges me to it,
and leaves me no loophole for escape. She indulges in reminiscences
of herself and the children defying pain in the dentist's chair, and
heartens me with the statement that the instrument she likes best is
the one that goes _berr-r-r-r_ and makes you jump.
Let me now resume my commentary on hair-cutting. I wonder if I am
sufficiently chatty with my hair-cutter. Most men talk to their
hair-cutter all the time. They discuss politics and revolutions and
Britain's unconquerable might, while I, having made a blundering start
with the weather, am brought up with a round turn on the Bolsheviks
and President WILSON'S manner of dealing with the situation. I cannot
lay bare my inmost thoughts about the League of Nations while someone
is running a miniature mowing-machine along the back of my neck ...
At this moment my wife entered the room.
"My dear," I said, "I am going to get my hair cut."
She gave me one mind-piercing look and said, "It's time you did. I've
been noticing it for the last day or two."
Nothing, you see, about convicts. Isn't that like a woman, never to
say the thing you expect her to say? It's taken all the pleasure out
of my visit to the barber. In fact I don't think I shall go at all.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMAN.
_First Voter_. "SO MR. JONES HAS BEEN ELECTED. YOU VOTED FOR HIM, OF
COURSE?"
_Second Voter_. "NO, I VOTED FOR THE OTHER MAN. YOU SEE, MR. JONES
SUPPORTED WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE, WHICH I ABHOR."]
* * * * *
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
_(BY MR. PUNCH'S STAFF OF LEARNED CLERICS.)_
_Secrets of the Bosphorus_ (HUTCHINSON) is one of the happily large
number of books to which time and tardy-footed justice have now added
an unwritten chapter that makes amends for all. But for the glories
of the last few months I think I could hardly have borne to read many
of these "revelations" of Mr. HENRY MORGENTHAU, sometime American
Ambassador to Turkey. They make strange and often tragic reading. One
of them is already famous: the disclosure of the narrow margin by
which the attack of the Allied fleets upon the Dardanelles came short
of victory. For that, with all its ghastly sequence of misadventure,
no happy end can quite compensate. But one may read more pleasantly
now of the Prussian Baron WANGENHEIM, sitting the day long on a bench
before his official residence to exult publicly in what looked like
the triumphal march to Paris. Mr. MORGENTHAU has many other matters
of interest in his note-book, a large part of which is occupied by the
story, almost incredible even in an age of horrors, of the planned
slaughter by the Turkish rulers, with Germany as accessory before and
after the act, of "at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as 1,000,000"
Armenians. He rightly calls this murder of a nation probably the
blackest deed in all the foul record of the war, in which (at the
precise moment of its execution) the same people who now protest
against the severity of our terms were taking a horrible and ruthless
joy. The reminder is apt.
* * * * *
Much of the pleasure that I have just enjoyed over Mr. ARTHUR SYMONS'
essays of travel in _Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands_ (COLLINS)
belongs to the wistful joy of recollection: remembered loveliness in
the beautiful places of which he writes so vividly, remembered peace
of the quiet unpreoccupied days in which they were written. The
book is made up of three groups, studies of Spain, of London and of
certain coasts, chiefly Cornish. For several reasons I found the last
interested me most. There is entertainment in watching Mr. SYMONS,
so essentially a dweller in cities, discovering the open air like
an explorer. You know already his mastery of delicate and sensitive
words; many of these pages catch with exquisite skill the subtle charm
of the country between land and wave, as it would present itself to a
receptive summer visitor rather than the returned native. Mr. SYMONS'
similes are essentially urban; the sea (to take an example at random)
has for him "something of the colour of absinthe." In fine, though he
can and does get into his pages much of the exhilaration of a tramp
over heathery cliffs "smelling of honey and sea wind," one retains
throughout a not unpleasing consciousness of Paddington. I have left
myself too little space to deal adequately with other papers, among
which I was delighted to find again that called "Dieppe 1895," long
remembered from _The Savoy_ (though here, of course, lacking the
interpretation of the BEARDSLEY drawings). Certainly a book to read
at leisure and to keep "for further reference," perhaps in a future
when travel studies may again become of more than merely sentimental
interest.
* * * * *
Sir ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, on the strength of _Danger! and Other Stories_
(MURRAY), may claim a place among the prophets who were not accepted
by their own country. "Danger!"--written some eighteen months before
the outbreak of war--foretells the horrors of the unrestricted use of
the submarine. In those days Sir ARTHUR could get no one to listen to
him, because "in some unfortunate way subjects of national welfare are
in this country continually subordinated to party politics." Possibly
now that we have been taught by painful experience all we want to know
about U-boat warfare, excitement in this tale is rather to seek, but
it remains a most successful prophecy. In the last story of the book
we have the author in his very worst form. "Three of Them" is a study
of children, and the only excuse I can find for it is that it must
be intended as a sop to the sentimentalists. Of the others my first
vote goes to "The Surgeon of Gaster Fell," and my second to "The
Prisoner's' Defence;" but if you are susceptible to Sir ARTHUR'S
sense of fun I can also recommend "The Fall of Lord Barrymore" and
"One Crowded Hour." Not a great collection, but just good enough.
* * * * *
Mr. ROMER WILSON has devoted the nearly three hundred pages of his
_Martin Schuler_ (METHUEN) to describing what it feels like to be a
genius, and, speaking from a very limited knowledge of this class, I
should say that he had mapped the mind of a genius of a certain sort
very well. His estimate of the creative artist's anguish of emptiness
rings true, and will, perhaps surprise the people who think that his
lot, like a policeman's, is a very happy one. His _Martin_, who struck
me as a very unpleasant young man, was a composer who meant to achieve
immortality, but turned down the broad way of musical comedy and
acquired money instead. Just in time he repented and wrote a grand
opera, and then Mr. WILSON cut short his career in a fashion that
seemed to me regrettably hackneyed, which was the only reason why I
shared the other characters' sorrow. Why so many people, all rather
nasty people too, came to devote themselves to _Martin_ I could not
discover, although I had the publisher's word for it that he was
"attractive"; but perhaps his genius accounted for it. Probably it
is my duty to declare here that _Martin_ and his friends were almost
all made in Germany before the War, but as they are exceptionally
disagreeable and quite unlikely to inspire anyone with an unjust
tenderness for their nation I have no hesitation in recommending the
book as a clever study of temperament and a just picture of a part
of the German musical world as it was when one last knew anything
about it.
* * * * *
It is all a matter of taste, of course, but personally I don't
envy Mr. J.G. LEGGE his self-imposed task of convicting the Hun out
of his own mouth of--well, of being a Hun. Germans they were and
Germans they remain, and the author goes to great lengths, even to
the length of 572 pages, to show that their peculiar qualities date
back at least as far as 1813. His _Rhyme and Revolution in Germany_
(CONSTABLE) is not so much a history of the scrambling undignified
revolutionary movements culminating in the year 1848, as a collection
of contemporary comment thereon, in prose and verse. The prose is
generally bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with
relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that
he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. The
bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of
all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe
one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest
of the world, run through all these quotations, even the earliest.
But the particular value of this book at the moment is its reminder
that twice already has the House of Hohenzollern humbly pledged its
All-Highest word to give constitutional government, only to resume
"divine right" at the earliest convenient moment. Ruling Germany, and
as much else as possible, with a view to the glorification of one's
personal family and one's personal God, must be an exhausting labour,
and once again the head of the dynasty is afforded an opportunity
for a respite. It is a temptation which one feels sure he will find
himself strong enough to resist if occasion serves. History and Mr.
LEGGE suggest that he will be willing--even enthusiastic--to grovel
in the dust to assist that occasion.
* * * * *
Mr. SPENCER LEIGH HUGHES is a brilliant and distinguished member of
the great brotherhood of the Press; he is also a Member of Parliament
and has devoted himself heart and soul to the propagation of his
principles on the platform. He has therefore, save in respect of great
age (he is barely sixty), every right to compile and publish a book
with the title, _Press, Platform and Parliament_ (NISBET). It is one
of the most genuinely good-tempered books I have ever read; but that
was to be expected from the author of the column signed "_Sub Rosa_,"
who had in this course of desultory writing made innumerable friends
and never lost one; and, more pleasing sport than that, had brought
two people together through a matrimonial agency conducted by W.T.
STEAD, and had met the pair many years after, to find that they were
perfectly and unexpectedly happy.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Dealer (trying to sell horse to Government Buyer)_.
"THAT 'ORSE, SIR, 'AS GONE A MILE IN A GOOD DEAL LESS THAN THREE
MINUTES."
_Government Buyer_. "ON WHAT RAILWAY?"]
* * * * *
"ALL BOOKS
"noticed in the Editorial pages of '----&----' (see Book Reviews),
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We felt sure there was a catch somewhere.