was ultimately disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a generation later.

In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has produced in Mr. Punch's History of Modern England a book that is pathetic rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokesthe offspring of a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more often than he was funny. Punch, indeed, has been for the most part a grinner rather than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on its staff. But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant contributors. Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who dislikes the advance both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has undoubtedly made itself the most successful comic paper in the world, but one sometimes wonders whether it has done so as a result of allying itself with comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet the fact remains that other men have started rivals to Punch, and that they have not only been not so successful as Punch but not so comic. Punch always baits the hook of its odious politics with a reasonable amount of comedy about things in general, and in the comedy of things in general, even if we think it might be done still better, it has at least always

been ahead of its rivals. There have been men who have dreamed of a Punch that would bring the spirit of comedy to bear on all sides impartially. There are others who have dreamed of bringing the spirit of comedy to bear on the right side. One would not, perhaps, mind what side Punch was on if only it were a little more generous-if only it purveyed the human comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of working men, Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama.

X

MR. H. M. TOMLINSON

Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers-those who do what they are told and those who do what they please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book as to write one. He never echoes other men's curiosity. He travels for the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers of The Sea and the Jungle know. Even in his more English volumes of sketches, essays, confessions, short stories— how is one to describe them?-he takes us with

him to the north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France in war time. But the English sketches-the description of the crowd at a pitmouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a derelict railway station and a grocer's boy in spectacles-almost equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson's books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.

As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the transparent deeps "like sunken moons." A boat sailing on a windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves "with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper." A queer Lascar on a creeping errand in an East-end street "looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a draught." How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become

softened and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.

Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does must be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and demons. The weather is at once the day's adventure and the day's pageant. Mr. Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the world simply about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said to be the first novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye open. Mr. Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad's sensitive care for these things. His description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills makes you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an unadorned and simple sentence like

As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of wind and white rain, pressing us into

the sea,