Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/453

Pal (from within shouting distance of German trenches). "How many of ye's there?"

Voice from German trenches. "Tousands!"

Pat (discharging jampot bomb). "Well, divide that amongst ye!"

The industry of Mr. G. B. Burgin seems only equalled by the fertility of his invention. This reflection was evoked by my discovery, opposite the title-page of The Herb of Healing (Hutchinson), of a list of forty-eight other books by the same author. It makes me blink. Of course, when any human writer has so many pages to cover he must of necessity spread his plots a little sparingly. The plot of Herb of Healing, for example, is rather thin stuff, the quest of a lover called Old Man (he was but twenty-four really, so the name is misleading) for an Indian herb which should restore the consumptive schoolmistress whom he loved. You guess that Mr. Burgin is here back again in the Ottawa setting, where you have perhaps enjoyed meeting him before. There are other interests, notably Miss Wilks. In many ways indeed Miss Wilks deserves to be called the chief personage of the story. She was a mule, wall-eyed, and of such super-asinine sagacity that I began at last to find her some tax on my credulity. Not once but many times does she rescue the good personages, with heels and teeth, from the attacks of the evil-minded. Dialogue is freely ascribed to her. At one time she goes of her own accord to be re-shod in preparation for the journey of her master. Hereabouts I began to be haunted by a memory of similar quadrupeds that I had seen on the pantomime stage. Eventually of course the herb is found, the schoolmistress restored to health and the lovers united. My only surprise in all this was that the mule did not join their hands. A pleasant, ingenuous story, which will bring much content to the admirers of Mr. Burgin and the lovers of tall animal tales.

The Prussian has not exactly the knack of making himself devotedly loved even in peace time. Going for him in When Blood is their Argument (Hodder and Stoughton), Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer frankly adopts the bald-headed method. The South German blood in him and the remembered tradition of an older, simpler, well-beloved Germany add a bitterness which no mere outsider critic can command. You might sum it up as the quarrel of the Artist with the Professor (German: New Style), with all his nationalised, organised Kunst and Kultur, his killing of the spirit with the (dictated) letter. He thinks it is the German Professor who has scotched for ever the leisurely scholarship which expanded over the port wine, and has replaced it by a formidable and loathly apparatus of meticulously futile cramming labelled Philologie. He airs the interesting thesis that Goethe as the literary Superman was deliberately manufactured, in first instance, by Falk, the evil genius behind the Kulturkampf which led Bismarck to his Canossa; that the incomparably greater but intractably liberal Heine was relatively and as deliberately diminished. As to Bismarck himself, he was "a very great, very human and quite amiable figure." That actor-manager autocrat, Wilhelm II., is the real villain of the piece, and the Professors, threatened and controlled to an inconceivable degree by a tyrannous bureaucratic direction, mere dishonest mouthpieces of official doctrine. Mr. Hueffer has written an intriguing, inaccurate and incoherent book, but he creates his impression. He has