COS I LOVE YOU--IT'S 'COS YOU SMELL SO NICE."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.)

The Great Man is, I suppose, among the most difficult themes to treat
convincingly in fiction. To name but one handicap, the author has in
such cases to postulate at least some degree of acquaintance on the
part of the reader with his celebrated subject. "Everyone is now
familiar," he will observe, "with the sensational triumph achieved by
the work of X----;" whereat the reader, uneasily conscious of never
having heard of him, inclines to condemn the whole business beforehand
as an impossible fable. I fancy Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM felt something of
this difficulty with regard to the protagonist of his quaintly-called
_The Moon and Sixpence_ (HEINEMANN), since, for all his sly pretence
of quoting imaginary authorities, we have really only his unsupported
word for the superlative genius of _Charles Strickland_,
the stockbroker who abandoned respectable London to become a
Post-impressionist master, a vagabond and ultimately a Pacific
Islander. The more credit then to Mr. MAUGHAM that he does quite
definitely make us accept the fellow at his valuation. He owes this,
perhaps, to the unsparing realism of the portrait. Heartless, utterly
egotistical, without conscience or scruple or a single redeeming
feature beyond the one consuming purpose of his art, _Strickland_ is
alive as few figures in recent fiction have been; a genuinely great
though repellent personality--a man whom it would have been at once
an event to have met and a pleasure to have kicked. Mr. MAUGHAM has
certainly done nothing better than this book about him; the drily
sardonic humour of his method makes the picture not only credible but
compelling. I liked especially the characteristic touch that
shows _Strickland_ escaping, not so much from the dull routine of
stockbroking (genius has done that often enough in stories before now)
as from the pseudo-artistic atmosphere of a flat in Westminster and a
wife who collected blue china and mild celebrities. _Mrs. Strickland_
indeed is among the best of the slighter characters in a tale with a
singularly small cast; though it is, of course, by the central figure
that it stands or falls. My own verdict is an unhesitating _stet_.

* * * * *

If there be any who still cherish a pleasant memory of the Bonnie
Prince CHARLIE of the Jacob