Four Out of Seven
Seven Men of Wit. By Margaret J. Miller. (Hutchinson, 12s. 6d.) EDWARD LEAR was the second youngest of twenty-one children, grew up to draw birds and animals in beautiful detail, was sickly but travelled, painted huge forgotten oils, and died :. in the, year Old Possum was born. 'How
1 plea- s
s nt to know Mr. Lear!' Pleasant, indeed, in rs. Miller's gentle haphazard version of his e; and she serves her other subjects as kindly. er procedure is to invent short dialogues they Tight have taken part in at various turning- points in their fortunes. Mr. Dodgson sighed loudly. ' " Tyrants!" he cried. "All right, then— you shall have your story. And the heroine of it shall be—Alice."' There are little ironies. 'If you work hard at your books, Stephen, you may get to college one day. You may even be a teacher yourself.' And young Mr. Leacock went on to become a university professor. Simple progres- sions of fact link the talk, and some quotation from the authors' work. It's all quite attractively done and might well create new appetites for writers out of fashion. After all, how many of today's children know the splendidly heartless Night Watchman of W. W. Jacobs?
But how bland it all is, too. One understands that a children's book is not the place for Emp- sonian exegesis of Alice; and those photographs of naked nymphets would have put Carroll under analysis, if not behind bars, in our warier age. Yet some solider intimations might have fciiind room—of Twain's occasional brutality, crouched underneath the farce; of Jerome K. Jerome's awful religiosity, jostling with the tales of Harris and pineapple-tins; of the infantile sickliness of Sylvie and Bruno. 'They had a cer- tain way of looking at things which helped them to turn even their own private tragedies into comedies,' says Mrs. Miller in a blanket of vagueness. I wish she'd enlarged on the differ- ences between their escape-routes, the distance that separated W. S. Gilbert, say, from Mark Twain (it was only a year in time). Anyway, the one clear moral to emerge from these discreet histories as they stand is refreshingly seditious: if you want to be a funny writer, pray Daddy will lose all his money. Four daddies out of seven did.
JOHN COLEMAN
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