Chapter 3

"If an owl would enter the nuthatch's nest Its figure would have to be much compressed. If the nuthatch had but the face of an owl It would be a most unpopular fowl."

A slightly different formula is to be noted in the lines on the snipe, but the spirit is substantially the same:--

"If a snipe were the size of a threepenny bit It would be a great deal harder to hit. But if it grew to the size of an emu It wouldn't be better to eat than seamew."

Lastly I may quote the only couplet in which beasts as well as birds are subjected to this searching analysis. I think you will admit that it is the most sagacious and impressive of them all:--

"If a pig had wings and the legs of a stork It would damage the quality of its pork,"

Thine, MCDOUGALL POTT.

_Poets' Corner House, Dottyville._

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"As a result of trying to find an escape of gas with a light, a flat in Westminster was seriously damaged."--_Provincial Paper_.

Serve him right.

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REPORTS.

The other day I was looking through some school reports. Holidays always bring them forth. You know the kind of thing: History--Is most diligent but needs concentration; Music--Lacks purposefulness, does not practise sufficiently; Mathematics--Weak; General Conduct--Might be better; Conversational French--_Sera plus facile avec plus de confiance_; Theology--A sad falling off; and so on; and it occurred to me that it might not be a bad thing if the report system, instead of stopping with our school-days, pursued us through life. The periodical perusal of a report, drawn up with as much authority as a scholastic staff possesses, might have very beneficial results.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"ALL BOOKS

"noticed in the Editorial pages of '----&----' (see Book Reviews), or listed in its advertising columns, may be obtained post free from the offices, at the marked prices, plus postage."--_Trade Paper_.

We felt sure there was a catch somewhere.