Deader Than the Dodo

Queen Lucia — By E. F. Benson

‘Lucia, with her enthusiasms and absurdities, is a delightful creature, worthy to rank with the immortal Dodo.’ These are the concluding words of that paragraph page 242 on the paper wrapper which is to tempt the reader to open or not to open Mr. Benson's new novel. It is a great many years since we read ‘Dodo.’ How immortal does it remain for us? Memory, with some reluctance and hesitation, dives and fetches up … a slim creature with a wasp waist preening herself before a mirror, Beethoven, a great, blond, Newfoundland dog of a man on watch beside a cradle, a hunting crop, and over all a high, rapid, ceaseless chatter which may or may not have sparkled then, but which the action of the years has dreadfully dulled…. But we did imagine that the ‘whole point’ of the novel, as they say, was the charm of Dodo. The author and the reader agreed—did they not?—that she was a delightful creature, with her enthusiasms and absurdities. Lucia, however, in spite of that paragraph, is an extremely unpleasant elderly cat, with eyes ‘like round buttons covered in black leather,’ and ‘hard, neat undulations of black hair.’ Let us take the reader into our confidence. We believe there has been some extraordinary confusion on the part of the author and the publisher and the characters, with the result that the lady to whom the paragraph applies is not Lucia at all, but her rival in the case, the opera-singer, who whistles on her ringers, calls her men friends ‘my dear,’ and tells them not to blush when they mention the fact that babies are born. We are prepared to eat our pen that it is she who is Dodo revived, but how aggravating and tiresome it is that the question should be raised, for at each fresh appearance of Lucia we find ourselves looking for the likeness, and at each new vulgarity of the opera-singer's we find ourselves recalling the resemblance.

There is the fact, however, that the author's chief concern is with Queen Lucia and her little country town of a kingdom. The silly, vain creature living in her Elizabethan house, with her Shakespeare garden, her ‘amusing’ furniture and her tame cat of a husband who writes prose-poems, is described at immense length. Likewise her immense importance as a leader of culture, a page 243 propagator of new ideas, an authority upon Music and the Arts, is drummed into our heads. For from the very first it is clear that Mr. Benson has no opinion of our heads at all. He does not even dream that we shall succeed in seeing his joke at first, but, once he has made it, rushes to try-try-try again as a matter of course. And what jokes they are!

Then she looked at my pearls and asked if they were genuine. So I looked at her teeth, and there was no need to ask about them.

Or:

‘Oh! it's so diffy!’ said Lucia, beginning again. ‘Georgie, turn over!’

Georgie turned over, and Lucia, counting audibly to herself, made an incomparable mess all over the piano.

These are small particular stars. But the truth is that the whole book is one over-arching joke. Having succeeded, to his satisfaction, in making clear to us just how great a pretentious fool Queen Lucia was, the author proceeds to entertain us with the spectacle of her pride having fall after fall. The method is to spy upon the lady, to peep through the blind, over the wall, to snigger, to cry, ‘That served her right,’ ‘That was a nasty one for her,’ and ‘She won't show her face after that in a hurry.’ Her subjects are the comic figures of every comic country town. There is the old lady with the ear-trumpet, the elderly Colonel who feels young, the elderly young ladies who are giddy and slap each other in their playful way. And if we add that they were—Queen and all—taken in by an Indian who pretended to be a great teacher, and was a brandy-drinking burglar in disguise, and afterwards by an elderly ruffian who pretended to be a Russian Princess and a Spiritualist—it will be plain to see what matter for mirth is here!

But the dismallest feature of all is that Mr. Benson's humour should have gone—not to the dogs, but to the cats.