Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/433

Officer. "Well, Paddy, how do you like soldiering?"

Irish Recruit. "Rightly, Sorr. All me life I worked for a farmer, an' ne niver wanst tould me to shtand at aise."

Since Loneliness (Hutchinson) is unhappily the last novel we shall read over the signature of Robert Hugh Benson I wish I could with truth call it at least one of his best. But to write this would be a poor tribute to a distinguished memory; the fact being that, though it has qualities of power and observation, it is very far below some others of its author's works. For one thing, in his theme (marriage between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant) he is more frankly polemical than ever. The factor of religion is naturally never absent from his stories; but they have won their position by their humanity rather than by any more controversial qualities; and in Loneliness the humanity is lacking. Marion Tenterden, the heroine, is a young woman who has risen from obscurity to fame and fortune by the possession of a marvellous voice. She had been a devout Romanist, but in the fierce light that beats upon a successful prima-donna her religion lost something of its hold, especially when she found herself in conflict with authority over the question of her intended marriage. Deliberately and one by one all the joys that make life worth living from a worldly standpoint are withdrawn from Marion. Her voice fails; her betrothed—a little inhumanly—retires from the engagement; and, worst of all, her familiar friend, Maggie Brent, far the best character in the book, is killed in a motor accident. Throughout I was reminded of a shrewd criticism made by Mr. A. C. Benson in a recent appreciation of his brother, where he speaks of those cultured, attractive and apparently broad-minded Anglicans who in Robert Hugh's pages are foredoomed to collapse before the snuffy village priest. You must read this story; but it will not make you forget the far better things that you already owe to the same pen.

There appears to be no diminution in the cult of the crook, either in fiction or drama. The latest exponent of the gentle art of police-baiting is Mr. Max Rittenberg, who has strung a volume of adventure-stories round the figure of John Hallard, and published them under the somewhat cryptic title of Gold and Thorns (Ward, Lock). I have often admired Mr. Rittenberg's method before this; he has an easy and faintly cynical humour that makes agreeable reading. But I can't say that the present volume shows him to advantage. The fact is that the exploits of Hallard scarcely give the author scope for his best. The trail of the popular magazine is over them all a little too palpably. Hallard and his wife and their confederate (who called themselves Sir Ralph and Lady Kenrick and servant) move largely in the cosmopolitan smart set of swindlers and financiers who haunt international watering-places—a milieu especially beloved of the less expensive monthly journals. Their adventures vary pleasingly from the swindling of a dusky potentate at Venice to the discovery of faked treasure-trove at Monte Carlo. Myself I liked best the very promising scheme by which floating Casino was to be established in a liner anchored outside the jurisdiction limit of Rapallo. In this, as in most, there is an agreeable sequence of bluffs and