POSSIBLY a humorist does not care for appreciation. Perhaps he sees it in a comic light as a thing he would rather dispense with. Nevertheless, when a humorist does good work, it is only reasonable for his contemporaries to appreciate it. And though many appreciate it silently—or perhaps not quite silently because of spasms of the diaphragm—an occasional sufferer may give tongue in a more explicit, but not necessarily more intelligent, manner.

Archie of New York.

My first acquaintance with Mr. P. G. Wodehouse’s work was in connection with his friend Archie, of New York, domiciled at the expense of his father-in-law at the Biltmore Hotel. I know the Biltmore Hotel and its proprietor—a man as different as possible from the curmudgeon whose daughter Archie married, and whose uncompromising and devastating sanity was responsible for a good many of Archie’s adventures. Archie and his friends were good enough, and, taken in monthly instalments, must have amused thousands of readers of the Strand Magazine: the peculiarly Wodehousian method of relating certain incidents, and the conversation which accompanied them, rendering it almost impossible to read some of these incidents aloud; at least when self and audience were in the right mood.

ARCHIE.

(Reproduced by permission of the artist,
W. Smithson Broadhead.)

“Jill the Reckless.”

But now he has gone one better, and in “Jill the Reckless” (Herbert Jenkins, 7s. 6d.) has achieved what I venture to say is a masterpiece. Archie has become Freddie Rooke, now a comparatively subordinate character, with all Archie’s good-heartedness, with rather less than his brain capacity, and with more than his liability to blunder along in a perfectly well-meaning manner. But besides Freddie there are other characters, not blundering at all, though some of them are reckless and all of them amusing, introduced in such a way that the humour is a decoration of a real plot; so that the book is not only of the dimensions of an ordinary novel, but really is a novel, and sustains its human interest to the end.

Jill is no doubt the dominating character: but Wally Mason too is full of life and vigour, and so are some of the theatrical managers in New York, together with their office-boys. Then there is Nelly Bryant and her unforgettable parrot, with the loquacious ’Erb and the ill-used ’Enry. The study of the parrot is splendid, a piece of observation as accurate as is the record of the futile and ridiculous manner of conversation of the young man about town. The episode of the parrot is part of the plot, and it is an injustice to separate it from the book; and yet a small portion must be quoted:—

His subsequent adventures in the street, his encounter with a dog and two men, must be read in the book. I will only quote here the account of the parrot’s meeting them:—

A dog intervenes.

Ultimately, through the casual intervention of a dog, the well-meaning and friendly ’Enry got bitten, thereby losing the price of half a pint of beer to ’Erb, and being stimulated to summary vengeance. Whereupon Jill and Freddie came on the scene, and with her usual rashness Jill proceeded to interfere in a sensational manner, after Freddie had conducted his usual futiie conversation with the long-suffering and ill-used ’Enry, whose antipathy to wearers of spats is expressed with Cockney eloquence.

Indeed, the book is full of admirable episodes. The fire at the theatre, for instance, which reintroduced Wally Mason to Jill; and that extraordinary character, Uncle Chris, his well-meaning but absolutely dishonest dealing with money matters, his good-natured impudence in occupying other people’s flats, when hard up, and the geniality which makes him popular in spite of everything—are all extraordinarily well depicted.

Good and wholesome.

In my opinion, the whole book is as good and wholesome a piece of humour as has been produced in this generation. And there is a tale of living interest running through it all. I am not sure that we of this generation are sufficiently appreciative of the good work that is being produced now. It is apt to be swamped by a mass of inferior quality. But whether regarded as a record of contemporary life and manners or from a more literary point of view, we appear to me to be favoured with the work of a few authors who are able to hold their own with any of those in the past. I am not now referring specially to Mr. Wodehouse, but to other of our contemporary writers whose work, though doubtless well known and appreciated, seems hardly as yet to be appraised by critics at its real value. There seems to be always a tendency to glorify the age that has preceded, at the expense of one’s own. It is now becoming usual to glorify the Victorian age; but, during that period, it was customary to lavish praise on Jane Austen and a preceding epoch. I suppose that every age has the literature that it deserves; but I think we lose something if we do not recognize genius while the possessors of it are still living. Encouragement of a kind more wholesome than that of merely being “a good seller” would surely be stimulating, and might result in the production of still better and less hasty work.