THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 SOME AMERICAN 
 STORY TELLERS 
 
 A critical analysis of the work 
 
 of Marion Crawford, Robert Her- 
 
 rick, Ellen Glasgow, Robert W. 
 
 Chambers, Gertrude Atherton, 
 
 Winston Churchill, Kate Douglas 
 
 Wiggin, David Graham Phillips, 
 
 Frank Norris/'O. Henry," Owen 
 
 Wister, Booth Tarkington, Edith 
 
 Wharton, and Ambrose Bierce. 
 
 "An invaluable source of information." 
 — The Dial. 
 
 With portraits, $1.60 net 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD
 
 SOME ENGLISH 
 STORY TELLERS 
 
 A BOOK OF THE YOUNGER NOVELISTS 
 
 BY 
 FREDERIC TABER COOPER 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 19 1 2
 
 
 Copyright, 19 12, 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published November, 1912
 
 PREFACE 
 
 As in the case of Some American Story Tellers, 
 the title of the present volume has been deliberately 
 chosen, in order to place the various types of 
 modern writers of fiction more or less on a level, 
 as primarily public entertainers, whose first duty 
 is to hold public attention with the spell of the 
 spoken word. There is no intention to minimize, 
 by the use of this title, the high function that 
 fiction is tending more and more to play as a 
 criticism of contemporary manners and ethics ; 
 but it does permit of a more indulgent attitude 
 towards such writers as take their responsibilities 
 more lightly, and to recognize that, within its 
 class and in view of its author's purpose, Anthony 
 Hope's Dolly Dialogues is as finished a piece of 
 story-telling as Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale. 
 
 Furthermore, this volume does not pretend to 
 have made a definitive choice of the fifteen novelists 
 of the day who are best deserving of critical recog- 
 nition. It is necessarily to some extent a matter 
 of personal preference ; and, since the limits of 
 space prevent the inclusion of all the present-day 
 writers about whom the author has views that 
 he would gladly express, the consequence is that 
 
 v
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 several of the younger novelists who well deserve 
 a place in these pages have been crowded out, — 
 notably, Mr. Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith 
 and Mr. W. B. Maxwell, — in order to make room 
 for older writers, such as Rudyard Kipling and 
 Anthony Hope, whose recognized importance as 
 story tellers makes their inclusion a matter to be 
 taken for granted. For the most part, however, 
 the intention has been to give preference to those 
 novelists about whom comparatively little has yet 
 been written, in the way of definitely placing 
 them, — writers who are of interest quite as much 
 for their promise as for their fulfilment, and 
 whose best work, there is reason to believe, still 
 lies in the future. And that is the reason why 
 many story tellers of the recognized worth of Sir 
 Arthur Conan Doyle, — to mention only one of 
 many names, — have been with some reluctance 
 omitted. 
 
 Most of the essays in this volume have ap- 
 peared, either in whole or in part, in the New 
 York Bookman; portions of the articles on Alfred 
 Ollivant, " Frank Danby " and W. J. Locke were 
 published in the Forum; those on John Galswor- 
 thy and John Trevena have been expanded from 
 short papers contributed to the Book News 
 Monthly; and certain paragraphs of that on Rud- 
 yard Kipling are modified extracts from reviews 
 of The Five Nations and Traffics and Discoveries,
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 published respectively in the issues of November, 
 
 1903 and 1904, of the World's Work. And to the 
 
 editors of these several periodicals, the author 
 
 wishes herewith to express his appreciation for 
 
 their courtesy in permitting him to reproduce 
 
 the aforesaid articles. 
 
 Frederic Taber Cooper. 
 New York City, 
 October 29, 1912.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 Joseph Conrad 
 
 1 
 
 II. 
 
 William Frend De Morgan . 
 
 31 
 
 III. 
 
 Maurice Hewlett . 
 
 54 
 
 IV. 
 
 Eden Phillpotts . 
 
 94 
 
 V. 
 
 Rudyard Kipling . 
 
 . 122 
 
 VI. 
 
 William John Locke 
 
 ' . 148 
 
 VII. 
 
 John Galsworthy . 
 
 . 177 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Arnold Bennett 
 
 . 206 
 
 IX. 
 
 Anthony Hope 
 
 . 232 
 
 X. 
 
 May Sinclair 
 
 . 252 
 
 XI. 
 
 Alfred Ollivant 
 
 . 280 
 
 XII. 
 
 Mrs. Henry Dudeney . 
 
 . 297 
 
 XIII. 
 
 John Trevena 
 
 . 324 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Robert Hichens 
 
 . 342 
 
 XV. 
 
 " Frank Danby " 
 
 . 376 
 
 Bibliography .... 
 
 . 417 
 
 Index 
 
 • • • • • • 
 
 . 457
 
 PORTRAITS 
 
 Joseph Conrad 
 
 William Frend De Morgan 
 Maurice Hewlett 
 Eden Phillpotts 
 Rudyard Kipling 
 William John Locke 
 John Galsworthy 
 Arnold Bennett 
 Anthony Hope 
 May Sinclair 
 Alfred Ollivant 
 Mrs. Henry Dudeney 
 John Trevena 
 Robert Hichens . 
 " Frank Danby " 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 
 31 
 54 
 94 
 . 122 
 . 148 
 . 177 
 . 206 
 . 232 
 . 252 
 . 280 
 . 297 
 . 324 
 . 342 
 . 376
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 With the possible exception of Mr. Henry 
 James, there is no living writer of fiction in Eng- 
 lish whom it behooves the critic to approach with 
 more modesty and self-mistrust than Joseph Con- 
 rad. There is no other writer of similar magni- 
 tude whose treatment in the past has been so inade- 
 quate, so prejudiced, so blindly narrow and one- 
 sided. From the time when one of his earliest 
 book notices bore the caption, " A Puzzle for Re- 
 viewers," his detractors have never become tired 
 of insisting that he knows neither how to write 
 correct English nor how to construct a story; 
 and his admirers have expended their energies in 
 explaining and apologizing for him — whereas, in 
 reality, he needs neither apology nor explanation, 
 but merely a far heartier recognition than he has 
 yet received. The attitude of criticism toward 
 him has not seriously troubled Mr. Conrad. As 
 he himself writes, in A Personal Record — a unique 
 human document, from which it will be profitable 
 to draw freely in this article — " fifteen years of 
 unbroken silence before praise or blame testify 
 sufficiently to my respect for criticism, that fine
 
 2 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 flower of personal expression in the garden of let- 
 ters." But, though the author himself can afford 
 to be tolerant of miscomprehension and under- 
 valuation, the serious student of modern tendencies 
 in fiction cannot afford to overlook the fact that 
 Conrad is one of the very few who have added 
 something absolutely new to the art and the tech- 
 nique of his vocation. 
 
 It is worth while before passing on to examine 
 more specifically the qualities of Conrad's fiction, 
 to take up for a moment a couple of special 
 articles of comparatively recent date, that of Mr. 
 John A. Macy in the Atlantic Monthly and of 
 John Galsworthy in the Contemporary Review. 
 These articles are singled out from a number of 
 others because, while fairly representative in tone, 
 they were put forth with the semblance of special 
 authority and finality. Mr. Macy, while question- 
 ing the greatness of modern writers in general, 
 somewhat dubiously suggests Mr. Conrad as the 
 one possible claimant. He extols Mr. Conrad's 
 lofty ideals, and then, on the ground that a 
 writer of such high standards must be judged 
 with exceptional rigidity, proceeds to devote a 
 large part of his article to picking flaws in the 
 construction of his author's several stories, as 
 measured by the pocket rule of cut-and-dried 
 technique. The sum and substance of what he 
 has to say is to blame Conrad for not having
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 3 
 
 done as other and lesser writers were contented 
 to do before him — instead of seeking to discover 
 how and why he has succeeded in being splendidly 
 and triumphantly himself. 
 
 Mr. Galsworthy's article deserves a brief word 
 for quite a different reason. Here we have a 
 cordial appreciation by a fellow-craftsman who 
 already occupies as dignified a position in his own 
 generation as Mr. Conrad does in his. That Mr. 
 Galsworthy's critical acumen is distinctly in- 
 ferior to his creative power becomes apparent 
 long before we reach the following paragraph, so 
 extravagant that it largely discounts its own 
 value : 
 
 The writing of these (Conrad's) ten books is prob- 
 ably the only writing of the last twelve years that 
 will enrich the English language to any extent. 
 
 The technical side of Joseph Conrad's work 
 does not especially interest Mr. Galsworthy. He 
 is concerned mainly with an attempt to sum up 
 the essential spirit of Conrad in some epigram- 
 matic, easily portable form, to find some catch- 
 phrase that sounds like an explanation, and 
 that really is as futile as an attempt to reduce 
 a myriad-sided solid to a plane surface. The 
 Universe, in the words of Mr. Galsworthy, " is 
 always saying: The little part called man is al- 
 ways smaller than the whole ! " — and the writer
 
 4 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 who recognizes the truth of this possesses, so he 
 tells us, the cosmic spirit. Consequently, Mr. 
 Conrad's claim to recognition rests upon the fact 
 that he is unique among novelists in possessing 
 this spirit: 
 
 In the novels of Balzac and Charles Dickens there 
 is the feeling of environment, of the growth of men 
 from men. In the novels of Turgenev the characters 
 are bathed in light; nature in her many moods is all 
 around, but man is first. In the novels of Joseph 
 Conrad nature is first, man is second. 
 
 Now, if this were literally true, if Mr. Conrad 
 really believed that a rainbow or a water-spout 
 was of more importance to mankind than man 
 himself: then, instead of proving his claim to 
 greatness by pointing out this fact, Mr. Gals- 
 worthy would simply have knocked the idol from 
 his pedestal and proved him to be stuffed with 
 straw. It is all very well to have enough of the 
 cosmic spirit to recognize that in the ultimate 
 scheme of things the part is always smaller than 
 the whole, and that, as a rudimentary principle of 
 physics, a mountain contains more molecules than 
 a man. But Mr. Conrad is not writing for an 
 audience of mountains, but for his fellow-men — 
 and no really good work can be done by any liv- 
 ing creature, man, beast or bird, whose chief con- 
 cern is not with his own species. A member of a
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 5 
 
 beehive would make a pretty poor bee if he were 
 not convinced of the supreme importance of bees. 
 
 As a matter of fact, Mr. Conrad's books leave 
 no such impression on the mind of the average 
 reader as they seem to have left upon Mr. Gals- 
 worthy. It is almost incredible that any one 
 could read them without feeling, above all else, 
 their vital and tremendous human interest. It 
 is quite true that he deals by preference with 
 titanic forces : the unbridled rage of the ocean, 
 the invincible sweep of a wind-driven storm, the 
 unmeasured and impenetrable depths of a tropic 
 forest. But everywhere and always his unit of 
 measurement is man ; man measuring his puny 
 strength against the universe, and foredoomed to 
 defeat ; yet in his defeat remaining always the 
 focal point of interest. 
 
 In order to understand how Mr. Conrad has 
 formed his style and built up his literary creed, 
 it is necessary to keep in mind just a few bio- 
 graphical details. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski 
 — to give him his full original name — was born in 
 the Ukraine in about the year 1857. He comes 
 of an old and illustrious family, distinguished for 
 many services in peace and in war. His father 
 was a poet and critic, and a translator of many 
 English books. When he was still a little lad, he 
 shared the exile of his parents, following upon the 
 political disturbances of the early sixties — and
 
 6 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 it was as a result of this exile that his mother lost 
 her life, through the callous refusal of the Rus- 
 sian authorities to allow her time to recover from 
 a dangerous illness. The last thing on earth that 
 his family dreamed of for Conrad was a sea career, 
 and his choice, when announced, aroused much 
 astonishment and some characteristically mild op- 
 position. He has recorded the happenings of a 
 certain day spent with his tutor in the Alps, as 
 being one of the great turning points in his life: 
 " Of his devotion to his unworthy pupil there can 
 be no doubt. He had proved it already by two 
 years of unremitting and arduous care. I could 
 not hate him. But he had been crushing me 
 slowly, and when he started to argue on the top 
 of the Furca Pass he was, perhaps, nearer suc- 
 cess than either he or I imagined." But fate had 
 arranged it otherwise ; and a seemingly trivial in- 
 cident turned the scales. They met and passed a 
 middle-aged and jovial Englishman who, in pass- 
 ing, cast upon the boy of fifteen " a glance of 
 kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big, 
 sound, shiny teeth " ; and Conrad says further, 
 with Ins naive, illuminating, inimitable power of 
 self-revelation : 
 
 His glance, his smile, the unextinguishable and 
 comic ardor of his striving forward appearance, 
 helped me to pull myself together. . . . The 
 enthusiastic old Englishman had passed — and the
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 7 
 
 argument went on. What reward could I expect 
 from such a life at the end of my years, either in 
 ambition, honor or conscience? An unanswerable 
 question. But I felt no longer crushed. Then our 
 eyes met and a genuine emotion was visible in his 
 a3 well as in mine. The end came all at once. He 
 picked up his knapsack suddenly and got onto his feet. 
 "You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. 
 That's what you are." 
 
 And after that, adds Conrad, there was no 
 further question of his " mysterious vocation, no- 
 where nor with any one." There are few things 
 in all his autobiography more typical of the man 
 than the ability shown here, to lay his finger 
 unerringly upon this seemingly trivial little detail, 
 without which we should never have had Almayer's 
 Folly, nor all the sequence of magic volumes which 
 followed it. For twenty years, Conrad sailed the 
 waters of the globe, working his way upward in the 
 English merchant-marine service, through all the 
 grades, until he won his Master's certificate, and 
 took chief command. There is every reason to be- 
 lieve that, as a seaman, he was as painstaking and 
 admirable in those days as he now is in the 
 capacity of author. But he was unique among 
 seamen for his love of reading — for his choice of 
 books and his understanding grasp of them. No 
 one can study Conrad profitably without keeping 
 these all-important formative years in mind;
 
 8 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 years spent in the unconscious amassing of infinite 
 and priceless material, in the slow absorption of 
 strange and alien personages, exotic and pic- 
 turesque cities and harbors, fierce and un- 
 disciplined regions on the edge of the world; 
 all the stage-settings and raw materials for human 
 drama in the bulk. And all the while that he was 
 unconsciously assimilating his material, Conrad 
 was, with equal unconsciousness, learning how best 
 to use it, by his tireless and voracious reading, — 
 reading of books which some inborn instinct led 
 him to choose with wonderful wisdom. The 
 French writers were his favorites, and he learned 
 his respect of the mot juste from Flaubert, and 
 something of construction from Maupassant. In 
 English, his tastes were similarly healthy. 
 Dickens naturally appealed to him in a mild de- 
 gree, for he shares with Dickens the love of 
 drawing straight from life odd, grotesque, often- 
 times misshapen oddities of humanity, and slightly 
 caricaturing them in doing so. But Trollope is 
 an author whose name crops up more frequently in 
 Conrad's autobiographical pages, — and another 
 whose influence is even more potent is Henry 
 James, — Henry James, who, with all his manner- 
 isms, has done more, than any other living master 
 of fiction, to teach those who read him under- 
 standing^, the sheer craft of story writing. 
 These facts : twenty years face to face with
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 9 
 
 hardship and heroism ; twenty years of leisure and 
 isolation in which to grow up slowly to a knowledge 
 of precisely how he could make the best use of his 
 material; twenty years to drill himself in a lan- 
 guage to which he was a total stranger up to his 
 twentieth year, are a sufficient answer to those 
 critics who were at one time too ready to dismiss 
 Conrad's work lightly, as that of a man who had 
 not learned his craft. The simple truth is that he 
 had learned it with a thoroughness such as is hard 
 to duplicate; that he knows his own reason for 
 every episode, every paragraph, every separate 
 word ; that if he makes a mistake, if there are 
 better ways for doing any one particular thing, 
 his fault is committed with his eyes open, and 
 in an honest belief that, for him at least, it is the 
 one and only way. 
 
 Accordingly, it is well to take up the two re- 
 proaches most frequently made against him, and 
 to consider to what extent they are justified. As 
 a matter of fact, it would be easy to take up a 
 hundred apparent faults instead of two, because 
 there is hardly any known rule of technique that 
 Mr. Conrad does not deliberately break when he 
 chooses, — for of what good are rules based on the 
 practice of the older writers save to be broken by 
 the new writer who happens to be big and strong 
 enough to justify his iconoclasm? But the two 
 reproaches in question are : first, that he follows no
 
 10 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 logical development of a story, but goes zigzag- 
 ging back and forth, from east to west, from past 
 to future, apparently quite without purpose or 
 orientation. And, secondly, that he has no sense 
 of proportion, that some parts of his stories are 
 inordinately long, and others absurdly short ; that 
 he will squander a full-length plot on a short story, 
 and amplify a mere episode into four hundred 
 pages. Both these charges are true, — a fact that 
 does not matter in itself, but does vitally matter if 
 he fails to prove that for his specific purpose his 
 way is the one and only way to get the best result. 
 Did you ever watch a common garden spider 
 preparing to spin its web? From some appar- 
 ently irrelevant point on a leaf or branch, it sud- 
 denly drops a number of inches to some other 
 equally irrelevant point ; then it proceeds at a 
 tangent to a new point of departure, hesitates, 
 retraces its steps, picks up some lost thread, 
 crosses and recrosses its path, pausing to tie a 
 knot here and there, — and all of a sudden this 
 apparently aimless zigzagging takes on a definite 
 design, of perfect and marvelous symmetry. Now, 
 it may be cheerfully granted that this would not 
 be the approved method of knitting stockings or 
 weaving calico ; there are some purposes, and 
 worthy ones, where the conventional, straight- 
 ahead method is praiseworthy. But there are cer- 
 tain types of genius that must work according to
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 11 
 
 their inborn nature : and it happens that Mr. Con- 
 rad shares with the spider the genius of the zig- 
 zag method, and by the help of it spins fabrics 
 quite as marvelous and inimitable. He cannot 
 help himself; his mind works in that way. When, 
 in Almayer's Folly, he tells us the story of the 
 degeneration of a white man exiled in the heart 
 of the Malay Peninsula, and of his crushing dis- 
 appointment at the marriage of his half-caste 
 daughter with a native, it is characteristic of him 
 that the story should open when the end is already 
 is sight, and that a majority of the chapters 
 should be concerned with filling in the missing 
 links ; still more characteristic that a subsequent 
 volume, The Outcast of the Island, announced as 
 a sequel, should prove to be, not a continuation, — 
 since Almayer's Folly left nothing to continue, — 
 but rather a sort of preface, reverting to the 
 earlier da} r s of Almayer's prosperity and his 
 daughter's infancy. A still more convincing 
 proof that this is the way in which Mr. Conrad 
 sees a story is that he adopts the same identical 
 method for telling his own biography. A Per- 
 sonal Record is an exceptionally frank and self- 
 revealing document covering Mr. Conrad's entire 
 life, from his earliest recollections down to the 
 present day; but the first of its eight chapters 
 opens during the winter in the early nineties, when 
 he was icebound in the river harbor of Rouen,
 
 12 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 when he was engaged in writing the tenth chapter 
 of Almayer's Folly, — and no two chapters and 
 scarcely two pages are consecutive in point of 
 time. And the reason for this is so palpable that 
 even a dunce could hardly miss it. The greatest 
 adventure that Mr. Conrad's soul ever underwent 
 was his first experiment in fiction: and accord- 
 ingly his biography is built up with the deliberate 
 intent of making the genesis of Almayer's Folly, 
 from its inception to its final publication, the one 
 triumphant leitmotiv of his whole life history. 
 
 In precisely the same way we may explain the 
 indirect and zigzag progress of his other writings. 
 Your cut-and-dried critic, who insists on measur- 
 ing a mountain with a footrule and quarrels with 
 it for daring to be out of line, insists also on 
 labeling a certain character hero and another 
 heroine. And, naturally, when this critic notes 
 that his so-called hero drops out of sight for a 
 considerable number of chapters, and, it may be, 
 the heroine vanishes altogether in mid-channel, 
 he feels himself aggrieved and says that the 
 author does not know how to construct. The 
 truth about Mr. Conrad is simply this : he is more 
 likely than not to take some force of nature as his 
 protagonist ; in Typhoon, the leading part is 
 taken, not by Captain MacWhirr, nor his under- 
 officer, nor by any one of the two hundred coolies 
 between decks, but by the typhoon itself. And,
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 13 
 
 similarly, in The Nigger of the Narcissus, the 
 leading part is not taken by any one of the of- 
 ficers or crew, — not even by the Nigger of the 
 title, — indeed, like Vanity Fair, it might be called 
 A Novel Without a Hero, and with only one 
 heroine, the treacherous, implacable sea. 
 
 And, secondly, as regards the question of sheer 
 material length in story writing. It is a deep- 
 rooted fallacy that there are some themes suit- 
 able for a full-length novel and others fit only for 
 a short story. As a matter of fact, such a dis- 
 tinction is disastrously misleading. There are 
 some minds who see in a battlefield a long-volume 
 epic, a Peace and War, a Debacle; there are 
 others who, like Browning, see only an " Incident 
 of the French Camp," material at most for a 
 dozen lines of verse. The difference does not lie 
 in the theme, but in the temperament of the in- 
 dividual, the fashion in which he looks upon life 
 in general and upon some specific story in par- 
 ticular. In the whole range of contemporary fic- 
 tion it would be difficult to find this truth better 
 exemplified than it is in the work of Conrad. In 
 all of his writings he has set his own pace, fallen 
 into his own particular stride, so to speak, ig- 
 noring all precedents regarding a conventional 
 proportion between subject and space, crumpling 
 up a world-wide theme into the narrow limits of a 
 few pages, and stretching out some transitory in-
 
 14 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 cident into the bulk of a portly volume, — and yet 
 the very last objection which a critic, who has 
 learned to read understandingly and recognizes 
 genius in unfamiliar garb, would dream of mak- 
 ing, is that certain of his stories are too short 
 and certain others too long. Take, for instance, 
 his Nigger of the Narcissus — better known in this 
 country as Children of the Sea, — being one of the 
 many English stories whose titles have suffered 
 an unfortunate sea-change during their passage 
 into an American edition. Let any other writer 
 submit the synopsis of the plot to his publisher, 
 and, if that publisher knows his business, he will 
 tell the author frankly that there is barely enough 
 plot in it for a Sunday special, to say nothing 
 of a book. Yet Mr. Conrad wove out of it a 
 magic volume, full of the life and breadth and 
 infinite variety of the sea; and, in the center of 
 the picture, the inert figure of a sickly, malinger- 
 ing negro stands out as clear-cut as an ebony idol 
 against a background of ivory, mysterious, fore- 
 boding, the embodiment of fate. Or again, take 
 The Heart of Darkness, one of the shortest stories 
 Mr. Conrad has written, and at the same time 
 containing one of the biggest, most suggestive of 
 his themes. It is nothing less than a presentment 
 of the clashing of two continents, a symbolic pic- 
 ture of the inborn antagonism of two races, the 
 white and the black. It pictures the subtle dis-
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 15 
 
 integration of a white man's moral stamina under 
 the stress of the darkness, the isolation, the im- 
 mensity of the African jungle: the loss of dignity 
 and courage and self-respect through daily con- 
 tact with the native man and the native woman. 
 The whole thing is a matter of a few score pages, 
 and yet, such is its strength coupled with a cer- 
 tain indescribable trick of verbal foreshortening, 
 that it gives the impression of measureless time 
 and distance. We feel that we have spent years 
 in his company, roaming through the murky at- 
 mosphere of physical and moral darkness — and 
 still beyond stretch unexplored vistas, measure- 
 less, forbidding, unspeakable. 
 
 It must be conceded that Mr. Conrad's style, 
 unique and finished as it is, does not make easy 
 reading. It resembles nothing so much as the 
 depth, the mystery, the riotous luxuriance of 
 those tropical forests wherein so many of his 
 earlier stories were laid. There are whole pages 
 and chapters where you are forced to move for- 
 ward gropingly, with the caution of a pioneer, 
 peering ahead at the vague forms of thought that 
 you see suggested ; and then, suddenly, there comes 
 an open spot, illuminated with the sunshine of 
 perfectly clear mental pictures, crowding tumul- 
 tuously upon you ; a flash and flare of rainbow 
 coloring seems to streak the page with scarlet 
 and purple and gold. That, in brief, is an
 
 16 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 epitome of Conrad's art ; to keep you at one time 
 groping in the dark, shrinking from unguessed 
 horrors, dimly seen through the fog and mist; 
 and the next moment to blind you with the un- 
 expected flood of mental light. And back of 
 his method lies a vein of unguessed rich- 
 ness, an inexhaustible mine of untold stories. 
 He gives you the impression that, instead of pour- 
 ing out all that he knows of strange lands and 
 alien races, he is holding himself severely in check, 
 — sketching in here and there one face and form 
 out of the hundreds that elbow themselves for- 
 ward in his memory; condensing these sketches 
 down to the fewest possible, strong, impressionistic 
 strokes, so as to leave space on his crowded can- 
 vas for other importunate memories constantly 
 clamoring for recognition. Other writers before 
 Conrad have possessed the art of painting crowds, 
 jostling throngs in the street, armies of men on 
 the march and in the heat of action ; but they 
 have produced their effects by a flood of detail 
 poured out upon the page with the reckless lav- 
 ishness of one who paints with a palette knife. 
 Conrad's distinction lies in the power of sug- 
 gestion, the ability to make you feel that, how- 
 ever much he shows you of life, there is vastly 
 more that he leaves untold. 
 
 To produce these effects, it is not enough 
 merely to will to do so. It is necessary above all
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 17 
 
 to be a consummate master of words, and at the 
 same time to have a profound reverence for them. 
 It is not too much to say that Mr. Conrad is in 
 this respect the peer of Rudyard Kipling, — with 
 this difference: that being an alien by birth, he 
 does, in a deliberate and highly sophisticated way, 
 what the author of Kim does by instinct. In this 
 connection, it is profitable to take two extracts 
 from Conrad's own avowals, the first dating back 
 to the beginning of his career as an artist, in 
 about 1897 ; the second representing his latest ut- 
 terance. The first appeared in a most interesting 
 personal foot-note in the New Review: 
 
 It is only through complete, unswerving devotion 
 to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is 
 only through an unremitting, never discouraged care 
 for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach 
 can be made to plasticity, to color; and the light of 
 magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an 
 evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of 
 words; of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by 
 ages of careless usage. The sincere endeavor to ac- 
 complish that creative task, to go as far on that road 
 as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by 
 faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid 
 justification for the worker in prose. And if his 
 conscience is clear, his answer to those who, in the 
 fullness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, 
 demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused;
 
 18 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 who demand to be promptly improved, or encour- 
 aged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must 
 run thus: My task which I am trying to achieve is, 
 by the power of the written word, to make you hear, 
 to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. 
 That — and no more, and it is everything. If I suc- 
 ceed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, 
 encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you de- 
 mand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for 
 which you have forgotten to ask. 
 
 The second extract will be found in " A 
 Familiar Preface," which forms the introduction 
 to A Personal Record: 
 
 He who wants to persuade should put his trust, 
 not in the right argument, but in the right word. The 
 power of sound has always been greater than the 
 power of sense. I don't say this by way of dis- 
 paragement. It is better for mankind to be impres- 
 sionable than reflective. Nothing humanly great — 
 great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass of lives — 
 has come from reflection. On the other hand, you 
 cannot fail to see the power of mere words ; such 
 words as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I won't men- 
 tion any more. They are not far to seek. Shouted 
 with perseverance, with ardor, with conviction, these 
 two by their sound alone have set whole nations in 
 motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which 
 rests our whole, social fabric. There's " virtue " for 
 you if you like! . . ,.
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 19 
 
 Mr. Conrad is not one of the authors whom it 
 is profitable to study book by book. In spite 
 of a few dissenting opinions, he has not greatly 
 grown in the course of years. He is one of those 
 rare Minervas of literature who issued in the first 
 instance of full stature. Almayer's Folly, his 
 first volume, the product of five years of inter- 
 mittent and laborious, although loving work, has 
 remained, there is reason to suspect, the favorite 
 child of his brain. The theme already mentioned, 
 — that of the disintegration of the European 
 amid the debasing surroundings of Eastern bar- 
 barism, is one to which he reverts again and 
 again, in his later works. But coming first, it 
 had, not only the glamor of a maiden effort, but, 
 what was infinitely more important to the author, 
 the nostalgia of vanished days, the fascination of 
 une chose vecue. The Nigger of the Narcissus is 
 almost equally a personal document. It repre- 
 sents a composite picture of the types of officers 
 and seamen grown familiar through a score of 
 years. It is impossible to appreciate even re- 
 motely the personal element of this book without 
 having read a volume which followed it a decade 
 later, The Mirror of the Sea. In reading that 
 storehouse of personal reminiscences, one guesses 
 between the lines how much heart-ache, how many 
 lost friendships, what a host of vanished memories 
 went into the making of that wonderful verbal
 
 20 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 mosaic which American readers know under the 
 name of Children of the Sea. 
 
 Close upon its heels followed a volume of short 
 stories, — really short stories, in the accepted sense, 
 — entitled Tales of Unrest. This is worth an 
 additional emphasis, because it called forth the 
 first big public recognition that Conrad received. 
 Together with Hewlett's Forest Lovers and Sid- 
 ney Lee's Life of William Shakespeare, it com- 
 pleted the trio of volumes which at that time 
 the London Academy was in the habit of " crown- 
 ing " each year and rewarding with a prize of 
 fifty guineas. Most of the stories in this vol- 
 ume are wrought from his familiar material of 
 Malays, half-castes, and degenerate Europeans ; 
 but there is just one story, " The Return," which 
 is worth signaling, because it is his first, last and 
 only attempt to do the familiar French analytical 
 story of wedded incompatibility. It is memorable 
 because it comes so exasperatingly near being a 
 tremendously big story, — and instead, speaking 
 frankly, it is a failure. The scene is London, the 
 chief actors are an average business man and his 
 still more average wife. He thinks he under- 
 stands her. As a matter of fact, they have 
 through five years been imperceptibly drifting 
 apart. One day he comes home as usual, to find 
 awaiting him a letter from her, telling him that 
 she has eloped with another man. His surprise,
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 21 
 
 his conventional dismay, his whole cut-and-dried 
 attitude of mind are interpreted with a skill that 
 baffles praise. But, because she is the hopelessly 
 average woman, she lacks the courage of her re- 
 volt ; she comes back. And here comes the part 
 that spoils the story. Throughout a dialogue 
 that drifts on endlessly, the woman remains a 
 living, throbbing bundle of nerves, and the man 
 becomes a stilted, unreal mouthpiece of Mr. Con- 
 rad's vain imaginings. Mr. Galsworthy was ab- 
 solutely right when he said that the hero of this 
 story was one of the few instances in which Con- 
 rad had drawn a character that was hopelessly 
 wooden. 
 
 As already suggested, there is no purpose in 
 analyzing one by one all of Conrad's stories. Be- 
 cause of his peculiar trick of foreshortening, 
 some of his longest books may be summed up in 
 a dozen words. Lord Jim, which many com- 
 petent judges regard as his masterpiece, is simply 
 the epic of a man's rehabilitation after being 
 proved a coward. Typhoon is an allegory, half 
 epic, half satiric, of the impotence of physical life 
 before the blind, unchained forces of nature, — a 
 fable told with all the forceful brevity of Le 
 Chene et le Roseau of La Fontaine. Nostromo 
 belongs to a different category. From whatever 
 side you view it, it is too big, too complex, too 
 full of dim, unfathomed places, to be easily or
 
 22 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 briefly epitomized. More than one critic has 
 openly avowed his preference for this book, and 
 the present writer owns his personal predilection 
 for it. It has more actual story to it, of a 
 dramatic sort, more of the greed and sordidness 
 and knavery of human nature, than any of Con- 
 rad's previous books. Primarily, it is the story of 
 a silver mine and a buried treasure, in a little 
 South American republic, where the people, like 
 the republic itself, are volcanic. It is a kaleido- 
 scopic picture of a grasping, rapacious conflict 
 between a government, on the one hand, ever tot- 
 tering on the brink of revolution ; and the private 
 owners of the mine, on the other, for such mutual 
 concessions and privileges as would convert that 
 mine from the white elephant it has always been 
 into a profitable investment. More specifically, it 
 is the story of the life of an exceptional man. 
 Nostromo, as he is called by his English em- 
 ployers, the officials of the Oceanic Steam Navi- 
 gation Company, — who coin the name out of the 
 Italian words which they misunderstand and mis- 
 pronounce, — is a Genoese sailor, who decides to 
 remain at Sulaco, in the capacity of Capataz de 
 Cargadores, captain of the company's lighter- 
 men and caretaker of the jetty. Now, the key- 
 note of Nostromo's character is a curious sort of 
 pride, a love of self-importance. By day and by 
 night, sleepless, vigilant, alert, he is ever at the
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 23 
 
 service of the entire population, native and for- 
 eign. Of infinite resource and magnetic tempera- 
 ment, he has worked his way into the confidence 
 and esteem of Spanish officials, English agents, 
 and the scum and rabble of the foreign quarters ; 
 and none in Sulaco is too low or too high to touch 
 hat to him and exchange cordial words of greeting. 
 Perhaps the nearest approach to a brief analysis 
 of the complex web of this book is to say that it 
 tells how this Nostromo, whose pride and joy, 
 whose whole stock-in-trade in life is his integrity, 
 his unblemished reputation, becomes a thief, — it 
 is a study of the curse which may come from the 
 secret knowledge of a buried treasure. 
 
 In view of the personal preference above ex- 
 pressed for this volume, above his other writings, 
 it seems worth while to quote Mr. Conrad's own 
 words, telling us how large a place it held in his 
 own life, during the greater part of two years : 
 
 Nostromo, a tale of an imaginary (but true) sea- 
 board, which is still mentioned now and again, 
 and indeed kindly, sometimes, in connection with 
 the word " failure " and sometimes in conjunction 
 with the word " astonishing." I have no opinion on 
 this discrepancy. It's the sort of difference that can 
 never be settled. All I know is that, for twenty 
 months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall 
 to the lot of the humblest on this earth, I had, like 
 the prophet of old, " wrestled with the Lord " for my
 
 24 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the dark- 
 ness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the 
 clouds on the sky, and for the breath of life that had 
 to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of 
 Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are, 
 perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to character- 
 ize otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative 
 effort in which mind and will and conscience are 
 engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, 
 away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that 
 makes life really lovable and gentle — something for 
 which a material parallel can only be found in the 
 everlasting somber stress of the westward winter 
 passage round Cape Horn. 
 
 Next in importance to the two novels, Nostromo 
 and Lord Jim, come a number of mid-length 
 stories, including Heart of Darkness, already al- 
 luded to ; and Typhoon, that unequaled picture 
 of the titanic warfare between sea and sky, in 
 which a vessel laden with human freight is made 
 the colossal joke of the elements, and we are 
 shown the inimitable sight of two hundred Chinese 
 coolies, together with their sundered chests, 
 hurtling back and forth between decks, clawing 
 and snarling like so many cats, in their vain pur- 
 suit of an infinite number of fugitive silver 
 dollars. 
 
 Two or three more of these middle-distance 
 stories deserve mention. To-morrow pictures a
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 25 
 
 father who has disinherited his son, driven him 
 from home, and later repented of the act. 
 Through long, lonely years he has comforted him- 
 self with the belief that the son will some day re- 
 turn, perhaps to-morrow — and he has brooded 
 upon this hope until it has become a fixed idea, an 
 obsession, that the son will come to-morrow. At 
 last the son does come, but since things in this 
 material, work-a-day world necessarily happen in 
 the present, and not in the future, the father's 
 clouded brain refuses to recognize him, because 
 he has come to-day, when he should have come to- 
 morrow, — the morrow which must always remain 
 in the future. Equally simple is the structure of 
 Amy Foster, the story of a mute, inglorious 
 tragedy. It pictures the fate of a young Slavonic 
 emigrant, driven, together with hordes of his 
 kind, on board an ocean liner, tossed for days in 
 a watery prison, and then cast by night upon the 
 English coast, the sole survivor of a whole ship's 
 company. Ignorant of his whereabouts, speaking 
 an outlandish tongue, hounded, penniless and 
 hungry, from door to door, a terror to women and 
 children, who think him a madman, he dies at last 
 in destitution, like a homeless dog, having awak- 
 ened a passing compassion in just one heart, the 
 Amy Foster of the title. In reducing these 
 crowded, concentrated stories of Conrad's to a 
 mere skeleton, it is so easy to over-reach one's self.
 
 26 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 It is only fair to say, by way of postscript, that 
 there is a second interest in this story. Amy 
 Foster, caught, like many another woman before 
 her, by sheer novelty, marries the refugee, and 
 then, strangely enough, and yet as the doctor 
 says, not without parallel, after her child is born, 
 she conceives a growing dislike for him. There is, 
 perhaps, in all of Mr. Conrad's writings, no single 
 scene more poignant than that in which the dying 
 Slav, delirious from fever, forgets his few words of 
 English, and, in his frantic supplications for 
 water, which might have saved his life, frightens 
 out of the house the woman who has vowed to 
 love, honor and obey, and who leaves him to die in 
 agony. 
 
 But one of the finest and most characteristic 
 stories that Mr. Conrad ever wrote is Folk. 
 Curiously enough, it is drawn, in a measure, from 
 a memory of his childhood. There was a family 
 legend of a great-uncle who served under Na- 
 poleon, and who, during the retreat from Moscow, 
 owed his life to the capture and utilization, for 
 culinary purposes, of a very old, very mangy, 
 Lithuanian dog. " It was not thin — on the con- 
 trary, it seemed unhealthily obese ; its skin showed 
 bare patches of an unpleasant character. How- 
 ever, they had not killed that dog for the sake 
 of the pelt. He was large. ... He was eaten. 
 . . . The rest is silence. . . ." In his childhood,
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 27 
 
 Mr. Conrad underwent innumerable pleasurable 
 shudders over the story of the cooking and con- 
 sumption of that dog. He confesses that, in sober 
 middle-age, he still can shudder over the memory 
 of that story. 
 
 I have lived on ancient salt junk, I know the 
 taste of shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript 
 dishes containing things without a name — but of the 
 Lithuanian village dog — never ! I wish it to be dis- 
 tinctly understood that it is not I, but my grand- 
 uncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier 
 de la Legion d'Honneur, etc., who, in his young days, 
 had eaten the Lithuanian dog. I wish he had not. 
 The childish horror of the deed clings absurdly to 
 the grizzled man. I am perfectly helpless against it. 
 
 Now, Mr. Conrad does not admit any connec- 
 tion between this incident and Falk. Neverthe- 
 less, it takes no special discernment to realize that 
 without that childhood thrill, something would 
 have been missing from the tale. On the sur- 
 face, Falk gives promise of pure comedy, — a trick 
 not without precedent in Mr. Conrad's method of 
 work. It opens with a grotesque wooing of a 
 Dutch girl, phlegmatic, florid, and opulent of 
 physique, by a thin, taciturn Scandinavian pilot, 
 on board her uncle's vessel in the harbor of a 
 Chinese river town. But Falk is a man haunted 
 by the memory of a revolting deed; he shows it
 
 28 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 in his face, somber, taciturn, sinister, and in his 
 manner, his trick of periodically covering his 
 features with both hands, and then drawing them 
 downwards with a slow, shuddering movement, as 
 though to wipe away the vision of a waking night- 
 mare. The truth is that once, under the dire 
 stress of shipwreck and starvation, it had become 
 evident that human flesh alone stood between a 
 whole ship's crew and death. In the face of this 
 horror, they had not drawn lots, but had fallen 
 upon one another like wild beasts, and Falk, in 
 whom the lust for life had been strongest, was the 
 sole survivor. For six years this memory has 
 haunted him ; and now his suffering is doubled, be- 
 cause he has at last found a woman " generous of 
 form, Olympian and simple, indeed the siren to 
 fascinate the dark navigator," and he is con- 
 fronted with the question whether any woman 
 could knowingly wed a man who has been guilty of 
 cannibalism. 
 
 Of Mr. Conrad's more recent books it is not 
 necessary to speak at this time and in this place. 
 Whatever he does, whether alone or in collabora- 
 tion, whether in the form of fiction or personal 
 reminiscence, is all essentially imbued with the 
 same spirit, and stamped with the same careful and 
 deliberate workmanship, the same daring original- 
 ity of style. But the true, the unadulterated soul 
 of Conrad is in the books of his middle period, in
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 29 
 
 the shorter stories, such as Typhoon and Heart of 
 Darkness, in novels like Nostromo and Lord Jim. 
 To spend time analyzing his tales of anarchists, 
 whether in London, as in The Secret Agent, or in 
 Russia, as in Under Western Eyes, would be for 
 the present purpose an anticlimax. It is true 
 that Mr. Conrad is a sort of literary amphibian ; 
 he is almost as much at home when writing of the 
 land as of the sea. None the less, the latter is 
 his true abode, and his best pages are those that 
 deal with ships and harbors, docks and quays, 
 sluggish tropical rivers, swarming water fronts, 
 and all the motley crowds, the flaring colors, the 
 babel of speech, the unnumbered and indistinguish- 
 able mixture of racial types and nationalities, to 
 be found nowhere on earth save where land and 
 sea touch shoulders. Yet, if one were making a 
 prediction, it would be safest to say that Mr. 
 Conrad will live longest in his pages of the life 
 on ships in mid-ocean. In certain unforgettable 
 pages in The Mirror of the Sea, he tells us of a 
 first mate under whom he once sailed, and who, 
 during the long weeks spent in an Australian port, 
 habitually returned from shore intoxicated, in 
 the mid watches of the night. And one night, 
 when more unsteady than usual, the mate lingered 
 on deck a moment, swaying heavily and support- 
 ing himself on his companion's arm, and voiced his 
 wish that he were out at sea : " Ports are no good ;
 
 30 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 ships rot, men go to the devil ! " And that one 
 sentence sums up the difference between Conrad's 
 stories of the sea and of the harbor. They are 
 equally good, equally poignant with truth ; but 
 on the one hand, the stories of the sea breathe 
 freely of ozone and clean salt spray, and simple 
 faith and bravery ; and on the other, the stories of 
 the harbor are redolent of physical and moral de- 
 cay : " Ships rot, men go to the devil." Through- 
 out Conrad's stories, he shows us man fighting a 
 losing fight; but at sea it is a physical fight, and 
 on land it is a moral one. In either case, his work- 
 manship remains, as it always has been, very nearly 
 flawless.
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 Of the various English novelists who have come 
 into prominence since the opening of the twentieth 
 century, the case of Mr. De Morgan is in a num- 
 ber of ways exceptional. Here we have a man in 
 advanced middle age suddenly and successfully in- 
 vading a new field of art, breaking all records for 
 belated achievement in fiction, venturing with the 
 courage of inexperience to give us stories running 
 close upon a quarter-million of words and written 
 in the manner of half a century ago, — and never- 
 theless receiving an immediate, enthusiastic and 
 widespread acclaim almost without precedent. It 
 is probably for these reasons that practically all 
 the critics who have devoted any extended space to 
 an analysis of Mr. De Morgan's writings have 
 bestowed a quite disproportionate attention upon 
 genealogical and biographical details, — much as 
 though the author in question were a newly dis- 
 covered zoological species, and it behooved them to 
 trace carefully his line of evolution. 
 
 For practical purposes of criticism, however, 
 all that we need to remember about Mr. De Mor- 
 gan's personal history is that he began life as an 
 
 31
 
 32 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 artist, abandoned painting five years later in 
 favor of making designs for stained glass, entered 
 shortly afterward upon the manufacture of pot- 
 tery, and, in spite of small pecuniary returns, con- 
 tinued to devote himself to ceramics until the age 
 of sixty-four, when his first novel, Joseph Vance, 
 was published. These few brief details picture a 
 man who, in spite of versatility, has always con- 
 sistently adhered to one or another form of 
 creative art; yet, quite early in life, rejected that 
 form which, even more than literature, demands 
 an inborn gift for grouping and composition, a 
 fine instinct for proportion and symmetry. Mr. 
 De Morgan's chief preoccupation, throughout half 
 a normal lifetime, was the beauty of minute detail, 
 the quality of glaze upon a teacup, the excellence 
 of color or design in a tile. His is the type of 
 mind which gradually, through the passage of 
 years, might be expected to gather up a treasure- 
 house of fine, delicate, unique ideas about life in 
 general, much as a connoisseur gathers together 
 rare gems of porcelain, quite indifferent as to 
 whether they group themselves harmoniously upon 
 their respective shelves. 
 
 In view of these facts, Mr. l)e Morgan's first 
 novel proved to be precisely what might have been 
 expected: a novel almost destitute of plot con- 
 struction, and with as many loose ends of nar- 
 rative, as many interruptions and asides of author
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 33 
 
 to gentle reader as may be found in Dickens and 
 Thackeray in their most unrestrained mood. The 
 author of Joseph Vance may or may not be a 
 reader of modern fiction ; but so far as the internal 
 evidence of his own volumes goes, his reading may 
 well have stopped with the decease of the great 
 Early Victorians. One looks in vain for any 
 trace of his having profited from Hardy or Mere- 
 dith, from Henry James or Rudyard Kipling or 
 Joseph Conrad, or from any one of that splendid 
 band of Frenchmen who, in recent years, have 
 raised the technique of plot to the level of a fine 
 art. There is something about the term " Early- 
 Victorian " which Mr. De Morgan seems vaguely 
 to resent. He protests that there is no good 
 reason for affixing this label to him permanently, 
 merely because the scenes of his earlier books were 
 laid some fifty years ago, and that the public is un- 
 just in finding fault with him for choosing in his 
 later volumes either to go back a couple of cen- 
 turies earlier or to come down a generation or so 
 nearer to our own time. Apparently Mr. De 
 Morgan has misunderstood the spirit of a good 
 deal of the adverse criticism that followed An 
 Affair of Dishonor. The trouble was not with the 
 supposed date of the story, but with the quality 
 of the achievement as a whole. It makes no dif- 
 ference in what century or country the author of 
 A Likely Story may choose to lay his scenes : he
 
 34. WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 himself remains consistently Early-Victorian in 
 spirit. For, be it said without offence, Mr. De 
 Morgan is, in a mild sense, a literary anachronism, 
 — as, in a slighter degree, Du Maurier was be- 
 fore him, — and his best work, the work by which 
 he is most likely to be remembered, is that which 
 in time and atmosphere best harmonizes with the 
 spirit in which it is conceived. 
 
 No discerning critic could read Joseph Vance 
 without saying : " Here we have the work of an 
 author who drives his pen ahead largely at hap- 
 hazard* with only a minimum of preconception 
 to help him out, and largely deriving his pleasure 
 and inspiration from the surprises which his char- 
 acters every little while persist in forcing upon 
 him. This is precisely the method of the authors 
 of Vanity Fair and the Pickwick Papers; it is a 
 method rendered well-nigh obsolete by the require- 
 ments of modern craftsmanship : yet it is still the 
 method of Mr. De Morgan." 
 
 I asked him (records Mr. E. V. Lucas, one of his 
 most indulgent critics) what were his methods of 
 work, and he replied that his only method was to sit 
 before a piece of paper with his pen in his hand — in 
 summer in Chelsea, and in winter in Florence — and 
 wait for the words to come. It sounds very simple; 
 about two thousand words a day is his average, and 
 he rejects about as much as he keeps. He has a very 
 definite general idea before him, but many of the
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 35 
 
 details surprise him as much as they surprise the 
 reader. In other words, his novels, like Topsy, are 
 not born, but grow. 
 
 And here is an even franker confession, recorded 
 verbatim by Mr. Bram Stoker : 
 
 I make no scenario. I just go on finding, as one 
 often does, such inspiration as is necessary from my 
 pen. I find that the mere holding of a pen makes 
 me think. The pen even seems to have some con- 
 sciousness of its own. It can certainly begin the 
 work. Then I forget all about it, and go whitherso- 
 ever thought or the characters lead me. 
 
 It is due, no doubt, to this distinctly amorphous 
 quality of his writings that Lady Cecil remarked 
 in what another critic has termed her " somewhat 
 supercilious manner," that " Agreed as we are 
 that Mr. De Morgan's success is deserved, we are 
 yet more agreed that his deserved success has had 
 very little to do with art." Without attempting 
 to minimize Mr. De Morgan's deficiencies, one 
 must concede that so sweeping a judgment is un- 
 fair. Construction of plot is not the only ele- 
 ment in fiction writing that requires art. There 
 is the equally important art of portrait painting, 
 and in this respect Mr. De Morgan has achieved 
 an enviable fame. He is one of the few writers 
 since Trollope who have been conspicuously sue-
 
 36 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 cessful in portraying convincingly the slow growth 
 and development of character through a long suc- 
 cession of years. 
 
 On the other hand, it does not do to overlook 
 entirely Mr. De Morgan's weakness in technique, 
 on the ground advanced by one of his enthusiastic 
 champions, that he is " one of those authors who 
 are big enough to break all the rules." The 
 authors who are big enough to break all the rules 
 content themselves with breaking one or two or 
 perhaps half a dozen, and adhere all the more 
 scrupulously to the others, to atone for the lib- 
 erties they have taken. A departure from rule 
 is vindicated only when the author guilty of such 
 boldness succeeds in obtaining bigger, better re- 
 sults than he could have obtained in the accepted, 
 conventional way. Otherwise, the most that may 
 be said is that his book is good, not because of his 
 disregard of rules, but in spite of it. And this 
 judgment applies in large measure to Mr. De 
 Morgan. 
 
 Let us consider briefly what this middle-aged 
 gentleman with the Early-Victorian mind has 
 actually achieved in the seven years since he 
 launched upon a tardy literary career. There 
 are, up to date, six uniform volumes, of portly and 
 imposing appearance. No greater mistake can 
 be made than to attempt to read them hastily ; 
 they are essentially designed for the leisurely-
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 37 
 
 minded reader, who can wait without impatience 
 until day after to-morrow or week after next be- 
 fore learning whom Lossie married, or whether 
 Joseph proposed a second time to Janey, or what 
 old Vance had saved so carefully in the rescued 
 package. The interest is not in the suspense of 
 expectation, but in the pervading sense of kindly 
 optimism, the whimsical humor, the author's own 
 obvious share in our enjoyment of each and all 
 of his characters. Some of these volumes almost 
 defy an attempt to condense their substance into 
 a brief paragraph. Joseph Vance, for instance, 
 may be baldly described as the life history of a 
 boy, rescued almost from the gutter and educated 
 by a kind-hearted and cultured gentleman, for 
 whose younger daughter, five years older than 
 himself, the boy conceives a romantic attachment 
 that never dies out, and that much later in the 
 story prompts him to take upon his own shoul- 
 ders the guilt of the girl's brother, in order to 
 spare her pain. But this gives literally no idea 
 of the inimitable quality of this rare and tender 
 story, that has made the names of Christopher 
 Vance and Dr. Thorpe, Violet and Lossie, Jeanie 
 and Janey, household words among untold scores 
 of readers. Or we might try again and tell 
 how this story would never have had a start had 
 not Christopher Vance tried to drown his sorrow 
 at losing his job, and after absorbing more half-
 
 38 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 pints of beer than was discreet, quarreled with a 
 " sweep " for having " crocked a hinsect," lurking 
 in the bottom of the glass, and in the fight that 
 ensued, seriously injured his spine by falling 
 backward upon an upstanding brick. The sobri- 
 ety resulting from some weeks in the hospital ; an 
 illogical purchase, from a pedlar, of a second-hand 
 sign-board, by which, thanks to some alteration 
 in the name, he proclaimed himself a builder and 
 drain-man ; sudden trouble with the flues and the 
 drains at the neighboring house of Dr. Thorpe, 
 and an emergency call upon Vance, who, despite 
 the sign, had never dug a drain nor built a flue 
 in his life: — these are just a few of the initial 
 details that lead to an acquaintance between two 
 families apparently hopelessly separated in the 
 social scale, and open brilliant prospects for the 
 future of Vance's six-year-old son Joe. Yet this 
 method is even less satisfactory than the other; 
 because, at this rate the epitome would run to 
 several thousand words ; and even then it would 
 fail to explain why the heroine, Lossie, re- 
 mains in our thoughts as the embodiment of all 
 that is essentially feminine and good and lovable. 
 The secret of her charm eludes us : there is no 
 single verbal description that sets her plainly be- 
 fore us with the blunt frankness of detail such as 
 one finds in a passport. We see her through the 
 eyes of the men who love her ; we see her through
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 39 
 
 the gentle witchery of her spoken words, and 
 through the influence she diffuses around her. 
 And perhaps the secret lies in this : that because 
 she is surrounded by this sort of halo of vague- 
 ness, each one of us is free to picture her after 
 the fancy of his own heart. 
 
 Alice-for-SJwrt is in one sense a companion 
 piece to Joseph Vance. This time, instead of a 
 boy, it is a little girl who is rescued from the gut- 
 ter and adopted by well-to-do people ; instead of 
 owing her good luck to a drunken father, half 
 killed in a fair fight, she receives her blessing in 
 disguise through the murder of her drunken 
 mother, whose husband completes his task by com- 
 mitting suicide. Alice, both as a child and later, 
 as she approaches maturity, is another of Mr. De 
 Morgan's triumphs in feminine portraiture, a 
 worthy companion piece to Lossie, yet not likely 
 to usurp the latter's rightful priority in the affec- 
 tions of the majority of readers. One feels that in 
 in creating his first heroine, Mr. De Morgan gave 
 us the best that there was in him, the favorite and 
 most perfect of his dream-women; and in subse- 
 quent books he has to content himself with stars 
 of lesser magnitude, — much as Joseph Vance, 
 when he found that Lossie was unattainable, must 
 needs content himself with Janey. But the real 
 reason why Alice-for-Short does not wear quite 
 as well as Joseph Vance, does not tempt us back
 
 40 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 to it for a second and third reading, is because, 
 while still unmistakably Early-Victorian, it is not 
 of the same sustained quality. Those who love 
 their Thackeray may be fearlessly referred to Mr. 
 De Morgan's earliest book ; but Alice-for-Short is 
 largely diluted with Wilkie Collins, — and Mr. De 
 Morgan has not assimilated Collins so successfully 
 as he has Thackeray. A suggestion of ghostly 
 visitors, the skeleton of a young woman discov- 
 ered in an ancient cellar, a whole history of a for- 
 gotten crime glimpsed tantalizingly through frag- 
 mentary evidence, — all this in itself is good 
 material for a mystery tale, in which character 
 counts for little and the mystery counts for every- 
 thing. It is curious that an author to whom his 
 personages are all so supremely alive, so personal, 
 so closely interwoven into his affections, should 
 not realize that the public finds his interest in 
 them contagious, and needs no melodramatic hap- 
 penings to hold its attention. Nevertheless, the 
 author of Alice-for-Short deserves credit for a 
 most effective method of finally unraveling the 
 mystery: there is just one person living who holds 
 the key to the vanished past, and she is a frail old 
 woman of four score and upwards, who for sixty 
 years has lived in body only, her mind being a 
 blank. A daring surgical operation lifts the 
 cloud from her brain, and makes it possible to fill 
 in the gaps of the ancient story, and connect past
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 41 
 
 causes with present consequences. The idea, of 
 course, is not new, — for that matter, when do we 
 ever run across any plot in fiction that has not 
 been used before? There is, for instance, a close 
 parallel in that now almost classic juvenile story, 
 Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates; and doubt- 
 less a little thinking would bring to mind a num- 
 ber of others. But one thing may be said with 
 confidence : that no one has ever surpassed Mr. 
 De Morgan in driving home a sense of the infinite 
 tragedy of a woman, awakening from a sleep of 
 sixty years, taking up life at the identical point 
 at which her injured brain had ceased to record; 
 taking for granted that a lifetime of youth and 
 gladness and love still lies before her, and then 
 little by little grasping the incredible, inexorable 
 fact that all these treasures have slipped away 
 from her, that she is old and wrinkled and hideous, 
 a poor wreck of humanity, standing on the 
 threshold of death before she has really begun to 
 live. It is one of those rare episodes that refuse 
 to be forgotten; and no critic does full justice to 
 Mr. De Morgan who fails to give it a generous and 
 heartfelt recognition. 
 
 Having made one story hinge upon the 
 suspended consciousness of an old woman, Mr. De 
 Morgan apparently told himself that it would not 
 be a bad idea to repeat the experiment by sub- 
 stituting for the old woman a young man, or at
 
 42 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 least a man still on the sunny side of middle age. 
 Some critics have pronounced Somehow Good to 
 be its author's crowning achievement: the present 
 writer has seen this claim advanced a number of 
 times, and every time has wondered vainly on what 
 basis it was made. To be sure, Somehow Good is, 
 of all six of his novels, the one which most nearly 
 approaches a good piece of construction ; it sticks 
 most closely to its central theme, it has the 
 smallest number of superfluous characters. It is 
 a book which can be summed up adequately in 
 a couple of hundred words. Some twenty years 
 before the story opens, a certain young woman, 
 good enough at heart but vain and rather head- 
 strong, went out alone to India, where her future 
 husband awaited her coming. Through a series 
 of mishaps, he failed to meet her on her first ar- 
 rival, and she stayed for a time with a married 
 friend, whose husband's marriage vows lay all 
 too lightly on his conscience. Just what hap- 
 pened during the days spent under his roof we are 
 never explicitly told. — Mr. De Morgan has re- 
 duced reticence to a fine art. But what hap- 
 pened afterward was soon public property. Like 
 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the girl lacked the 
 courage to tell the truth before her marriage ; her 
 husband, learning it later, promptly repudiated 
 her and sued for a divorce, but lost his suit upon 
 a technicality ; she returned to England, where her
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 43 
 
 child was born, and where she continued to live 
 quietly, under an assumed name. Twenty years 
 later, a series of coincidences brings the husband 
 to her door. An electric shock, received in the 
 London " Tuppenny Tube," has left no visible 
 physical injury, but has robbed him of his mem- 
 ory. The wife, whom he once discarded and now 
 does not recognize, takes him in ; he soon falls 
 in love with her, and they are remarried, and the 
 problem of the story simplifies itself to this one 
 issue: How soon will the husband recover his 
 memory, and when he does, what will be his at- 
 titude toward the woman whom he once cast off? 
 It is a theme full of big possibilities, and on the 
 whole Mr. De Morgan takes advantage of them. 
 But it rests on a basis of coincidence, and bristles 
 throughout with glaring improbabilities. If the 
 hero had not chanced to meet in the " Tuppenny 
 Tube ' ; the girl who was his wife's daughter, 
 though not his own; if she had not happened to 
 tread on his foot, and thus been led into a most 
 unlikely conversation with a stranger ; if he had 
 not dropped a coin and fished for it under the 
 seat, in spite of the conductor's repeated warn- 
 ing; and, finally, if the young girl had not obeyed 
 a quixotic impulse and insisted upon taking this 
 utter stranger to her home, the story would never 
 have happened. And as for the second marriage, 
 there are two obstinate little facts that insist on
 
 44 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 being remembered ; first that, although the woman 
 knows that she has a right to marry, knows, in- 
 deed, that no marriage ceremony is needed, other 
 people do not share her knowledge; they simply 
 know that she was once married and has never 
 been legally divorced. And, secondly, the hus- 
 band, to whom the past is a blank, admits that he 
 may have been married before, and is haunted with 
 a vague fear that, somewhere in the world, a wife 
 and half a dozen children may be in sore want 
 because of his disappearance. In real life a man, 
 under such conditions, would shrink from a mar- 
 riage which, so far as he knows, may mean bigamy. 
 The people of the story are real enough ; some of 
 the minor characters are strokes of genius ; the 
 scandal-loving " Other Major," for instance, with 
 his interminable " I don't mind tellin' you! Only, 
 look here, my dear boy, don't you go puttin' it 
 about that / told you anythin'. You know I 
 make it a rule — a guidin' rule — never to say any- 
 thin'' "; and again, that delightfully literal-minded 
 German, Baron Kreutzkammer, who, when a lady 
 remarks, " How sweet the singing sounds under 
 the starlight," corrects her by observing, " It 
 would sount the same in the taydime. The fibra- 
 tions are the same." Yes, the characters are 
 real, delightfully so ; it is what they do at certain 
 crucial moments that fails to carry conviction. 
 Yet, in justice to Mr. De Morgan, it is only
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 45 
 
 right to add that the foregoing judgment of 
 Somehow Good by no means represents the con- 
 sensus of critical opinion regarding its relative 
 importance among his novels. There has been, 
 on the contrary, a strong tendency not merely to 
 recognize it as the best of his volumes, but to hail 
 it as a message of good cheer, a piece of fine 
 optimism regarding the possible forgiveness of an 
 erring wife and her social rehabilitation, as well 
 as that of the innocent but nameless daughter. 
 Now, it is true that Mr. De Morgan has suc- 
 ceeded in manufacturing a situation, in which, if 
 we grant him all his conditions precedent, his 
 amazing coincidents and interventions of fate, it is 
 possible to accept the final outcome as fairly 
 plausible. But the inherent improbability of the 
 whole complex structure leaves upon the thought- 
 ful mind much the same impression as though Mr. 
 De Morgan had said, " Yes, there is just one 
 possible case out of a million, in which infidelity 
 and illegitimacy may be condoned ; but it requires 
 a series of little miracles as difficult of accomplish- 
 ment as that of the camel and the needle's eye." 
 
 The next volume, in order of time, It Never Can 
 Happen Again, is in point of form a reversion to 
 Mr. De Morgan's early manner in its prolixity of 
 style and multiplicity of themes. It has one cen- 
 tral issue clearly emphasized in the title, but 
 requiring in the narrative itself some little con-
 
 46 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 scious effort to disinter it from beneath numerous 
 other overlappings. The significance of the title 
 is to be found in the well-known peculiarity of the 
 English marriage law regarding a deceased wife's 
 sister. Alfred Challis, a successful young nov- 
 elist, has defied public opinion by actually going 
 through the marriage ceremony with Marianne, 
 who, although only a half-sister of his deceased 
 wife, comes so nearly within the letter of the pro- 
 hibited degree, that it is tacitly conceded in social 
 circles that she is an " impossible person," whom 
 it will not do to receive. Consequently, Challis, 
 whose profession as a writer of novels of high life 
 requires that he shall mingle freely with the upper 
 circles, finds himself obliged not only to accept 
 invitations which ignore his wife, but to overlook 
 the slight thus put upon her and to manufacture 
 a fund of conventional and formulaic excuses for 
 her non-appearance, which deceive neither himself 
 nor society at large. Now it happens through a 
 curious series of accidents, which no amount of 
 structural cleverness can quite make plausible, that 
 Marianne's deceased sister was, after all, not 
 Challis's legal wife. The disclosure of this little 
 fact immediately makes Marianne's social position 
 beyond reproach, even in the eyes of the strictest, 
 most conservative adherents to the Church of 
 England. The fact that recent acts of Parlia- 
 ment have changed the marriage law regarding a
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 47 
 
 deceased wife's sister, furnishes the justification 
 for Mr. De Morgan's title. But one wonders 
 whether there is not a certain intentional and un- 
 derlying irony in Mr. De Morgan's use of the 
 phrase ; because it is impossible for any thought- 
 ful person to read this book without realizing 
 that while the story may not again be duplicated 
 in the letter, the tendency of real life is to dupli- 
 cate it continuously in spirit. Whenever cir- 
 cumstances make it possible for a brilliant, at- 
 tractive, and rather famous man to be lionized by 
 fashionable society, invited to an unceasing round 
 of dinners, receptions, and week-end parties, while 
 his wife is systematically ignored by a well- 
 organized social boycott, the seeds of family dis- 
 cord are inevitably sown ; and when, — as is almost 
 sure to happen sooner or later, — such a man en- 
 counters some young woman who chooses to pity 
 him and give him her sympathy, the seeds of dis- 
 cord take root and sprout with amazing fertility. 
 One cannot read this book without being once 
 again impressed with Mr. De Morgan's ability to 
 demonstrate the importance of little things, to 
 show us how the first vague doubts and discords 
 germinate and grow; and how, not only for the 
 people in this story, but for every one of us, there 
 is at each hour of the day a choice of actions that 
 apparently matters little, but that actually may 
 make a vital and life-long difference. It Never
 
 48 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 Can Happen Again is essentially a wise book, and 
 its chief wisdom lies in proving that while we may 
 learn to be independent of fate in large matters 
 and rise superior to the big fluctuations of success 
 and failure, we can never escape from the tyranny 
 of the gnat-like swarms of trivial circumstances. 
 The hackneyed phrase, " crowded canvas," 
 seems curiously inadequate to describe the al- 
 most unwieldy mass of social portraiture in this 
 volume, its spacious and kaleidoscopic pictures of 
 English life that constantly fade into a blur of 
 dim vistas, along thronging thoroughfares and 
 down crowded and ofttimes unsavory alleys. 
 Whatever underlying purpose Nature may have 
 in her working-out of life, the pattern is too vast 
 for human comprehension to grasp. In our 
 actual, daily experience, much that vitally con- 
 cerns us seems hopelessly haphazard. In Mr. De 
 Morgan's lack of art, or perhaps it is fairer to 
 say, his deliberate intent to ignore art, there is 
 at times a certain resultant realism that by its 
 very disorder and lack of plotting approximates 
 more closely to the truth of actuality than any 
 amount of minute and purposed planning can ever 
 come. It is a dangerous method ; carried too far 
 and too boldly, it leads to artistic anarchy. Yet 
 sometimes, as in this particular book of Mr. De 
 Morgan's, it achieves results that could hardly be 
 gained in any other way.
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 49 
 
 It would not be fair to leave this volume with- 
 out a passing word of tribute to an interwoven 
 thread of interest, second only to the main issue 
 of the story : namely, the pathetic love of the 
 blind beggar, Jim Coupland, for his little six-year 
 daughter, Lizarann, and the details of their life 
 of poverty in the unsavory cul-de-sac known as 
 Tallack Street. It may be freely conceded that 
 in drawing certain humble and needy, yet none the 
 less lovable types of Cockney, Mr. De Morgan 
 stands to-day almost without a rival; and Lizar- 
 ann, with her precocious wisdom and patient 
 bravery, and Jim, the father, a hopeless wreck in 
 early manhood, with nothing to hold him to life 
 but his memories of the wife he has lost, and his 
 fears for the child whose face he will never see, — ■ 
 these characters somehow fasten themselves so 
 closely upon our hearts that, at least while we 
 read, we forget to ask whether Mr. De Morgan 
 can construct well or ill, and think of him only 
 in sheer gratitude for his possession of the magic 
 touch that makes us feel the kinship of humbler 
 humanity. 
 
 There remain two recent volumes, An Affair of 
 Dishonor and A Likely Story, both of which may 
 be dismissed quite briefly, as not belonging in the 
 same class with Mr. De Morgan's earlier work. 
 The fault with An Affair of Dishonor is, as al- 
 ready suggested, not that it is an historical
 
 50 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 novel, but that, as such, it lacks distinction. In 
 volumes like Joseph Vance and Alice-for-Short 
 and It Never Can Happen Again he produced 
 work of a unique quality ; whether we like them or 
 not, we cannot fail to recognize that they are 
 sui generis, that they cannot even have successful 
 imitators. To have been equally successful in the 
 vein of historical romance, Mr. De Morgan would 
 have had to produce a volume similar in magnitude 
 to Maurice Hewlett's Richard-Yea-and-Nay, or 
 Alfred Ollivant's The Gentleman. Instead, he 
 was content to write a book which, in manner and 
 in substance, is easily outrivaled by the work of 
 a dozen present-day writers, ranging from Conan 
 Doyle to Max Pemberton. An Affair of Dishonor 
 puts the heaviest tax upon our credulity of any of 
 Mr. De Morgan's novels. It asks us to believe that 
 after a young man has so far violated the laws 
 of hospitality as to abduct his host's daughter, 
 and is challenged by the outraged father, furi- 
 ously determined upon avenging her lost honor, 
 he adds the father's death to his earlier crime, 
 and so skilfully keeps the truth from the girl that 
 for long months she continues to live with him, 
 wondering, though not too curiously, why her 
 father does not write that he forgives her, and 
 why no news of any kind comes from him. Of 
 course, in the days before the advent of railways 
 and telegrams, news traveled slowly ; in those days
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 51 
 
 also human life was comparatively cheap, and a 
 man's disappearance did not provoke the hue and 
 cry, was not proclaimed in the flaunting headlines, 
 that would follow to-day. None the less, even in 
 what Mr. De Morgan has defined as " Pre-Crom- 
 wellian " times, it required an extraordinary 
 number of coincidences and interventions of fate to 
 keep the heroine unenlightened ; and after all, the 
 whole theme is so unsavory and so artificial, that 
 the reader is well justified in asking: Was it 
 worth while? 
 
 Mr. De Morgan takes much credit to himself 
 that A Likely Story has been boiled down to the 
 conventional length of the average English novel. 
 Frankly, however, he is not entitled to credit, be- 
 cause the theme is so slight that it scarcely merits 
 ampler treatment than that of a short story. A 
 sixteenth century Italian portrait is in an artist's 
 studio, for the purpose of repairs, and happens 
 to witness, — if one may use the phrase regarding 
 an inanimate object, — a certain scene between the 
 artist and a servant girl, Sairah, and also the 
 quarrel between the artist and his wife about this 
 same servant, which leads to a separation and a 
 hint at divorce. Now this picture is quite a re- 
 markable one, and one evening when a certain 
 imaginative little old gentleman is facing it, and 
 dreaming over the fitful blaze of a wood fire, he 
 finds himself listening to an astonishing story
 
 52 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 which the lips of this portrait tell him, a story of 
 jealousy and cruelty and revenge enacted centuries 
 earlier in Italy. Incidentally, the portrait tells of 
 the foolish quarrel between the artist and his wife, 
 and expresses a wish to reconcile them. So the 
 little old gentleman, not quite knowing whether 
 the portrait's story is a dream or an actuality, is 
 instrumental in having a photograph of the pic- 
 ture sent to the artist's wife; and she, in turn, 
 holding the photograph between herself and the 
 firelight, hears the self -same story from the lips of 
 the photograph, and knows that her husband was 
 wrongly blamed. It is an amusing story, but one 
 impossible to take seriously. It would almost 
 seem as though its author were deliberately per- 
 petrating a joke upon the public. 
 
 In conclusion, it remains only to be said that, 
 if we regard these six books without bias, refusing 
 to be influenced either by prejudice or partisan- 
 ship, they show, with the one exception of It Never 
 Can Happen Again, a steady deterioration. Each 
 of Mr. De Morgan's volumes has its own cham- 
 pions, and naturally the critic who cares for good 
 technique will feel more kindly toward the later 
 volumes, which show a gain in that direction. But 
 he should be taken, not for what he might have 
 been, but for what he is. As Mr. Boynton has 
 aptly phrased it, he has " more in common with 
 Dr. Holmes than with Mr. Pinero." For more than
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 53 
 
 half a century he has been studying people, ab- 
 sorbing life, formulating his own philosophy ; 
 through all these years, his thoughts have been 
 slowly ripening, like a rare old wine. And when 
 he first brought them forth, in Joseph Vance, he 
 served them, like a rare old wine, in the old bottle, 
 — his manner harmonized with his matter. Alice- 
 for-Short was still from the same old vintage, 
 but blended with another, less full-bodied stock. 
 And after that, one feels with each successive 
 volume, that the supply in the bin is running low ; 
 it has to be diluted with a younger wine that has 
 not had time to mature. For there is always one 
 saddening little fact about those rare old vintages, 
 — there is so very, very little of them to be had. 
 But let no one assume that this is said in a spirit 
 of ingratitude. Had Mr. De Morgan never writ- 
 ten another line after Joseph Vance, his fame 
 would still rest on an assured foundation. No 
 future success or failure can amplify or diminish 
 its fair fame. And even though it be an an- 
 achronism, we of the twentieth century should be 
 the more grateful, since it enables us to claim for 
 ourselves the honor which, in point of form and 
 substance, would otherwise have belonged to the 
 nineteenth.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Theke are some authors whose good fortune it is 
 to go steadily forward along a fairly straight and 
 evenly ascending path year by year, fulfilling the 
 promise which it required no great critical insight 
 to discover in their earlier works nor great bold- 
 ness to point out. There are others who, possessed 
 it may be of even greater gifts, but erratic and un- 
 even in workmanship, follow a tortuous route, full 
 of unexpected turnings and retraced steps. No 
 sooner has literary dogmatism ventured to assign 
 them a definite place in the current movement than 
 they riot off on some tangent pathway, hotly chas- 
 ing some new bubble of reputation. Mr. Maurice 
 Hewlett serves admirably as a case in point. To- 
 day it would seem incongruous to bracket his 
 name with those of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph 
 Conrad, as pioneers in a new movement in fiction. 
 The Kipling of Rewards and Fairies, the Conrad 
 of bombs and nihilism and secret service, the new 
 Hewlett, the would-be Meredithian, have drifted 
 too hopelessly apart. Yet there was a short pe- 
 riod, less than a decade ago, when, in spite of wide 
 differences in theme, in treatment and in outlook 
 
 54
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 55 
 
 upon life, the respective authors of Kim and Nos- 
 tromo and Richard Yea-and-Nay seemed to form 
 a little group apart from their contemporaries. 
 And the kinship between them lay not merely in a 
 certain dynamic quality of words, an ability to 
 wring new and subtle meanings out of old and well- 
 worn forms of speech, a trick of making you see, 
 behind and beyond the printed page, a lengthening 
 vista of thoughts unspoken, oftentimes unspeak- 
 able. It was something that went deeper than 
 all this and that showed itself in an epic bigness of 
 theme, an irrepressible virility of thought, an au- 
 dacious iconoclasm of precedent, overriding and 
 bearing down established principles of technique, 
 and justifying the lawlessness by the results. 
 Dangerous models they all three were, for the 
 slavish imitator of small mentality. But there 
 was a rich fund of new artifice to be acquired from 
 each of them, by those who had the eyes to see and 
 the ability to apply. 
 
 Of the three, Mr. Hewlett had, it would seem, by 
 far the hardest road to travel and under the heav- 
 iest handicap, if he was to stir us to a tingling 
 sense of reality. Kipling in India, Conrad in 
 Africa and the South Sea Islands, could freely 
 let their pens run riot in pyrotechnic outbursts 
 of local color; life in all its primeval crudity, 
 the raw, unmixed materials of fiction, lay on every 
 side of them, barbarism and civilization in all de-
 
 56 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 grees of transition ; they had but to paint what 
 they saw, and could scarcely keep pace with the 
 tropical luxuriance around them. Their pictures 
 carried overwhelming conviction because of the 
 white heat of first-hand impressions, the unmis- 
 takable poignancy of a chose vecue. Mr. Hew- 
 lett's stories, on the contrary, — at least down to 
 the point when, with Halfway House, he tempo- 
 rarily went grievously astray, — are largely of the 
 stuff that dreams are made of; they tell of scenes 
 and of people that he has never visited, save 
 through the medium of musty volumes and faded 
 frescos ; because the scenes of his stories, or at 
 least of such as it is a delight to remember, are 
 the world of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, 
 and his heroes and heroines are men and women 
 whose hearts have been for centuries a handful of 
 dust. And yet, such is the magic thrall that he 
 succeeds in throwing over his readers that, when 
 still hot and breathless from a swift, tumultuous 
 reading of Richard Yea-and-Nay or The Queen's 
 Quair, one is almost tempted to fling down the 
 gauntlet and challenge all comers to deny that it 
 is Maurice Hewlett, rather than Joseph Conrad 
 or Rudyard Kipling, who excels in picturing the 
 tumultuous joys and- sorrows of life. 
 
 Here is obviously something of a paradox, which 
 clamors for an explanation. How has such an 
 obviously bookish person, a literary dilettante,
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 57 
 
 with the erudition of an archeologist, and a pre- 
 ciosity of style that he has nurtured as one might 
 nurture a rare orchid, learned to galvanize dead 
 bones and moldering dust into an anguished 
 quiver of pain and pleasure? His very language, 
 vocabulary, style and rhythm are redolent of the 
 night lamp and the study table; often he uses 
 phrases like fine embroidery, traceries and scroll- 
 work in an architecture of words. Tapestry Novel 
 is a term that was first coined to fit the class of 
 books represented by The Forest Lovers; and it 
 admirably expressed the impression conveyed of an 
 almost feminine delicacy of workmanship, as 
 though each phrase were a separate knot carefully 
 chosen and tied and trimmed, in the slow, laborious 
 progress of the woven picture. And the perennial 
 wonder of Mr. Hewlett's art centers in his power 
 of reincarnation, his ability to show us knights and 
 ladies of olden times, who have so obviously just 
 trooped forth from dim and crumbling hangings, 
 suddenly flushing into the warmth of life and 
 youth and riotous passion. Undeniably, he 
 achieves his effects. The chief distinction which 
 marks his volumes as something apart, something 
 differing both in quality and in kind from the cur- 
 rent mass of so-called historical fiction, is his in- 
 imitable trick of breathing the breath of life into 
 the famous figure-heads of history ; making you 
 feel the human pulse-beat still throbbing under the
 
 58 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 yellowed page and faded writing of musty chron- 
 icles ; discovering in cracked and time-dimmed por- 
 traits some trick of the glance, some luring curve 
 of lips, some coquetry of dress or ornament that 
 makes the human frailty of these long dead women 
 a living thing, to touch us with a personal appeal. 
 A war that cost the flower of the land, a battle that 
 changed the map of Europe, interest Mr. Hewlett 
 merely as clues to the hearts of men and women in 
 high places, whose whim begot the strife. And 
 because he possesses this magic power of visualizing 
 the pomps and pageantries, the revelries and the 
 bloodshed of those dim and far-off times, reading 
 whole histories from a faded fresco or a rust- 
 stained coat-of-mail, it is the most natural thing 
 in the world to conclude that Mr. Hewlett must 
 love for their own sakes these relics of the past 
 that give him his material : — that he must never be 
 so happy as when roaming through dismantled 
 palaces and venerable abbeys, museums of old 
 paintings, old furniture, old armor. Such is the 
 mental picture that, on the evidence of his nov- 
 els, one is quite likely to form of Mr. Hewlett's 
 tastes and pastimes: and yet, as he has elsewhere 
 taken pains to tell us, nothing could be further 
 from the truth. 
 
 Somewhere in the pages of The Road in Tus- 
 cany, Mr. Hewlett, having occasion to quote from 
 Villani's History of Florence, tersely dismisses it
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 59 
 
 as " a charming story, which gives us as much in- 
 sight into the good Villani as into Florentine be- 
 ginnings." This is an apt phrase, and one worth 
 clinging to and making over, to fit the coiner of it ; 
 for The Road in Tuscany is also one of those rare 
 books possessing charm, and one which gives no 
 less insight into Mr. Hewlett himself than into the 
 hearts of all the dead and living Tuscans about 
 whom he writes so understandingly. Indeed, it 
 is not too much to say that, when the time comes 
 to judge the life-work of Maurice Hewlett in its 
 entirety, The Road in Tuscany will stand with The 
 Queen's Quair, as one of the two volumes which his 
 future biographer cannot afford to neglect ; the 
 one, because it is the crowning achievement of a 
 unique method in historical romance; the other, 
 because it gives the key to the peculiar workings 
 of the mind which wrought that method. 
 
 It teaches us, for instance, that as a matter of 
 fact Mr. Hewlett has scant interest in ancient mon- 
 uments, churches, palaces, the works of men's 
 hands, excepting as clues to the men themselves ; 
 and that, unless it be a locomotive drawing a 
 train of cars, there is scarcely anything towards 
 which he feels a stronger hostility than an art gal- 
 lery. The greatest of galleries, not excepting the 
 Uffizi itself, are nothing more than " so many 
 leagues of imprisoned pictures torn from their
 
 60 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 sometime homes and flowering-places, and pinned 
 to the walls. . . . They belong to the Holy of 
 Holies, and here they are brazening it out, like 
 tavern signs ! " And not only art, but history and 
 literature as well, interest him chiefly as means to 
 an end, " short cuts to the human heart," whether 
 in Italy or out of it ; while " to talk of a history 
 of Tuscany is to talk nonsense." The most he 
 will concede to any of the Tuscan towns is " a 
 biography which is the sum of all the biographies 
 of all its unknown citizens." These worthy burgh- 
 ers and thrifty housewives, the Donna Bertas and 
 Ser Martinos of proverbial speech, are more to 
 him than all the poets and painters that Italy can 
 boast. " Learn," he preaches, " to look upon 
 cities, great buildings, pompous monuments, gilded 
 altar-pieces, carved Madonnas, as so much har- 
 vest for the eye, neither the best nor the worst. 
 The best is a wise man or a pretty woman, the 
 worst a railway or a bore. There is plenty of 
 room between these extremes for altar-pieces." 
 Yes, man delights Mr. Hewlett ; aye, and 
 woman too, a pretty woman especially, and 
 smilingly he confesses it. He will at any time 
 interrupt himself, in the midst of more important 
 matters, to show you a girl in a window, " leaning 
 her bare arms there and crying strangely inti- 
 mate matter to another across two streets, singing 
 the pretty names of things not pretty, caressing
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 61 
 
 her friend from afar." And at a turn of the page, 
 3 r ou will find him chatting with equal relish and 
 equal intimate assurance, of Dante's Beatrice, no 
 symbol of theology in his eyes, but a real, living 
 woman, with a personal and physical appeal, a 
 woman capable of love and of jealousy too. " Who 
 she was or what is no matter. . . . It is enough 
 for us to be sure that she was lovely and good, had 
 green eyes and died young. To which I add for 
 my private contentation, — that she was a little 
 woman." 
 
 There in a single brief quotation, — indeed, in 
 the five short words that make up the tag-end of 
 it, " she was a little woman," — we have the key to 
 some of Mr. Hewlett's strongest effects, the clue 
 to his gift for making vanished centuries live again, 
 and to his failure to picture the life of to-day 
 convincingly. The secret, of course, lies in the 
 trick of the small, familiar touch, the trick of 
 throwing in some detail that helps us to see, by 
 appealing to our own personal experience. An 
 author may be taking you through the strange, 
 tortuous by-ways of some oriental city, dazzling 
 and bewildering you with a medley of colors, scents 
 and sounds, and then suddenly add the soothing, 
 commonplace detail, " it was a gray morning and 
 the streets were muddy." It tells you nothing of 
 real moment regarding the strange city, yet it 
 gives you at once a sense of seeing more clearly, for
 
 62 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 it conjures up other gray days when you yourself 
 have strayed through muddy streets in unfamiliar 
 towns, and seen odd buildings silhouetted against 
 the leaden sky. Of course it is a trick, albeit an 
 unconscious one, serving to bridge the gulf of time 
 and space, and delude us into believing, for the 
 moment, that we too can clearly visualize the un- 
 known. In the use of this trick Mr. Hewlett is an 
 adept ; and the reason why his use of it is mar- 
 velously effective in a story of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, and comparatively ineffective in a story of 
 the twentieth, is fairly simple to explain. The 
 familiar touch is really a makeshift, an attempt to 
 find some common measure for things really incom- 
 mensurate, to help us to form an approximate pic- 
 ture of something unseen. It ceases to be of help 
 in a description of things within our own intimate 
 experience. To mention that a certain thing hap- 
 pened on Wednesday, or that yesterday morning 
 the first strawberries were in market, immediately 
 makes a remote and fantastic setting tingle with 
 actuality ; whereas, in a story laid in our town and 
 day it is merely one added detail that merges into 
 the rest. If you tell a child, who has never visited 
 a menagerie, that an elephant is a big animal with 
 a long nose, you give him something for his imagi- 
 nation to work upon; he may not really picture 
 anything within a thousand miles of an elephant, 
 but the important point is that he thinks he does.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 63 
 
 But if you tell him that a cat is a furry animal with 
 prickly feet, you may, to be sure, evoke a memory 
 of past discomfort, but the familiar touch has 
 failed to give him any sense of new knowledge. And 
 there is one more equally important distinction 
 that, helps to throw light upon Mr. Hewlett: we 
 might, in describing an elephant, make several 
 blunders, but they would not prevent the child's 
 imagination from seizing upon the detail of the 
 long nose ; but if we chanced to be inaccurate re- 
 garding the cat, the one familiar touch, the prickly 
 feet, would serve only to make our errors stand 
 out more glaringly. 
 
 It is a matter of instinct, — and a true one, — 
 with most of us, to feel, as we look at old-time por- 
 traits, Rembrandt's men, Botticelli's women, that 
 there is a remoteness about them not wholly due to 
 quaint costumes and faded pigments, but far more 
 vitally to a physical and temperamental difference, 
 shown in an alien cast of features, a different arch 
 of brow and contour of cheek and chin. We won- 
 der how men and women so different from the mod- 
 ern type would meet the emergencies of life, and 
 whether in their hopes and fears, their loves and 
 hatreds there was not an element with which we 
 would find ourselves out of sympathy. Mr. Hew- 
 lett solves this difficulty with the calmness of omnis- 
 cience. He brushes aside the differences as though 
 they were non-existent. Human nature, he seems
 
 64 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 to say, is a constant quantity, the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever. He makes his men and 
 women, of whatever nationality and epoch, speak 
 and act from big, basic, primitive emotions, shows 
 them to us as strong, simple, ardent souls, dom- 
 inated by some one ruling passion, symbolic of 
 some single vice or virtue. They live fierce, tu- 
 multuous lives, in fierce, tumultuous times ; and 
 because they and their epoch lie outside of 
 our experience, we yield to Mr. Hewlett's hyp- 
 notic power and give him credence, especially 
 when he adroitly reminds us by his small, familiar 
 touches, that his King Richard and his Queen 
 Mary are at heart just human beings, like the man 
 next door, or the girl across the street. But when 
 he leaves the vantage-ground of the remote past 
 and ventures to show us fantastic figures, crea- 
 tures of legendary romance, in modern garb, 
 against the incongruous background of present- 
 day England, no amount of familiar touches can 
 gloss over the glaring, blatant unfamiliarity of 
 his picture as a whole. And this is why, with all 
 his art, Mr. Hewlett's modern stories refuse to 
 be alive. 
 
 But since Mr. Hewlett's blunders have been few 
 and his triumphs many, it will be no more than a 
 matter of simple justice to touch only cursorily 
 upon his modern trilogy, and to linger in the sin-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 65 
 
 cerest admiration over certain unchallenged and 
 incomparable masterpieces. His earliest volumes, 
 Earthwork out of Tuscany and The Forest Lovers, 
 need not detain us. They were enough for the 
 founding of a reputation, a challenge for the 
 world's attention that could not be ignored, an 
 earnest of better and bigger things to come. In 
 the former of these two volumes, the author re- 
 vealed the country of his predilection, the setting 
 of what we must recognize as the volumes that he 
 has written most directly from his heart. In The 
 Forest Lovers, he allowed himself, more than any- 
 where else, to riot at will in the realm of pure fan- 
 tasy, to create an imaginary world peopled by men 
 and women of Arthurian legend. The story of 
 Prosper le Gai and how he wed Iseulte la Desi- 
 reuse, reputed witch though she was, to save her 
 from the hangman, and all the delicate and charm- 
 ing idyl that follows, is wrought with a rare and 
 welcome artistry. It revealed the author as a 
 stylist of a new order, with a delicate sense of 
 prose rhythm, and a reverence for the value 
 of words akin to that of a jeweler for the value of 
 precious stones. Not that he fully mastered in 
 these earliest volumes the style for which he strove. 
 A lack of smoothness, here and there, an occasional 
 archaism so violent as to be almost grotesque, be- 
 trayed the labor of his art to conceal itself. But 
 it paved the way to greater mastery. It formed
 
 6G MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 the apprenticeship that led to the fuller fruition of 
 Richard Yea-and-Nay. 
 
 The term " historical novel " has been so often 
 profaned that one instinctively shrinks from ap- 
 plying it to such noble pieces of literary art as 
 Mr. Hewlett has given us in his two biggest novels, 
 Richard Yea-and-Nay and The Queen's Quair. 
 Yet what alternative name is there to give to vol- 
 umes that picture historic scenes and royal per- 
 sonages with such rare vividness and power? With 
 the epoch of the Crusades for its stage setting, 
 and the figure of the Lion-Hearted King for its 
 focus of interest, the historic aspect of Richard 
 Yea-and-Nay refuses to be ignored. Yet no 
 amount of careful documentation, no degree of 
 fidelity to early chronicles, of painstaking accu- 
 racy in mere names and dates could have created 
 that atmosphere of the Middle Ages with which 
 every page is redolent. The truth is that Mr. 
 Hewlett is at heart a poet, with all a poet's de- 
 light in verbal form and color, in the caressing 
 assonance of fluent syllables, the rise and fall of 
 cadenced sentences. His Richard Yea-and-Nay 
 is really a sort of medieval epic, a chanson de 
 geste in prose, full of the sensuous word-coloring 
 of jongleur and troubadour, the spectacular opu- 
 lence of tourneys and coronations, the valor of 
 battle and of siege. Considered as a study of hu- 
 man emotions, however, the book is essentially mod-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 67 
 
 era in its appeal, thanks to that habit of mind 
 already alluded to, which makes Mr. Hewlett rep- 
 resent human nature as essentially the same at all 
 epochs. And that his interest in the psychological 
 side of his story is far keener than in the more 
 spectacular brilliance of his picture, he himself 
 sets forth in unmistakable terms : 
 
 Differing from the Mantuan as much in sort as in 
 degree, I sing less the arms than the man, less the 
 panoply of some Christian king offended than the 
 heart of one in its urgent private transports; 
 
 and to such good purpose does he sing the man 
 that the varying fortunes of war, the downfall or 
 the victory of Saracens, the fate of Christendom 
 itself become for the hour a matter of less moment 
 than the inner conflicts of the heart of King Rich- 
 ard, — Count Richard he is when we first meet 
 him, — and his love for Jehane Saint-Pol, Jehane of 
 the Fair Girdle. They are a noble pair, as Mr. 
 Hewlett has conceived them, tragic figures caught 
 in the toils of destiny, very real, thanks to a rare 
 artistry of words yet unimaginable outside their 
 special setting of time and place. It is impossible 
 in a brief epitome to do even scant justice to the 
 intimate drama enacted between these two. It is 
 the chronicle of a woman's utter self-abnegation, 
 her sacrifice of love, of honor, personal liberty and
 
 68 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 the rights of her child, for the sake of the man who 
 has awakened her to the j oy of living. 
 
 She was the creature of his love, in and out by now 
 the work of his hands. God had given her a magnifi- 
 cent body, but Richard had made it glow. God had 
 made her soul, a fair room; but his love had filled 
 it with light, decked it with flowers and such artful 
 furniture. He, in fact, as she very well knew, had 
 given her the grace to deal queenly with herself. He 
 knew that she would have strength to deny him, hav- 
 ing learned the hardihood to give him her soul. Fate 
 had carried her too young into the arms of the most 
 glorious prince in the world. . . . What was to be- 
 come of herself? Mercy upon her, I believe she never 
 thought of that. His honor was her necessity. 
 
 She is an extraordinary creation, this Jehane 
 Bel-Vezir, and one of whom Mr. Hewlett himself is 
 obviously much enamored, for he has lavished all 
 the riches of his art upon her. It would be difficult 
 to find in modern fiction a woman uniting such 
 prodigality of love, such fierce abandonment to 
 passion, with so much nobility of soul, such self- 
 immolation when the need comes. In her, as once 
 again in Queen Mary, Mr. Hewlett has pictured a 
 woman from whose spell it is difficult to escape. 
 She holds henceforth a place in each reader's 
 Dream of Fair Women, this girl whose fate it was 
 to love King Richard, that " blend of German dog 
 and Angevin cat," whom " all women loved and
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 69 
 
 very few men ;" who saw from the start so clearly 
 and unfalteringly that there could be no lasting 
 union between him and her; and who had the 
 strength to deny her own emotions, but could not 
 stem the imperious current of his. The story 
 moves with a swiftness of phrase, a tumult of in- 
 cident that gives a sense of breathlessness. Rich- 
 ard wins a first brief victory over his twofold 
 nature, leaves Jehane and goes to his father, in 
 order to accomplish his betrothal to Alois, sister 
 of Philip of France. But on arriving, he finds, in- 
 stead of a joyous bride, " a white furtive, creeping 
 girl, from whose hair peered out a pair of haunted 
 eyes," eyes that half reveal to him a certain 
 grim secret that causes him to repudiate the alli- 
 ance in hot haste, and madly ride back, to inter- 
 rupt another man's bridal and snatch Jehane from 
 the very altar rail. Then follow the six " burn- 
 ing days of honeymoon," the unforgettable mid- 
 night siege in the wooden tower, the leper's ghastly 
 prophecy, the swift strokes of fate that crown 
 Richard king of England, — and then Jehane's com- 
 pact with the Queen-Mother, the " flinty old shrew 
 of Aquitaine," who none the less mingled her tears 
 with Jehane's ; her surrender of Richard to the 
 Church and Christendom, and his final " Words of 
 Yea," by which he consents to set aside Jehane, — 
 mother of his child which is to be, although of this 
 fact he is not yet aware, — and marry the " little
 
 70 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Spaniard," Berangere. When he does know, the 
 lion awakens, and then begins the " Book of Nay." 
 Out of a red haze of war and bloodshed, certain 
 facts emerge with poignant clearness : Conrad 
 of Montferrat's plot to murder Richard through 
 aid of the emissaries of the Old Man of Musse, 
 Lord of the Assassins, " who lived on Lebanon and 
 was most wise in the matter of women ;" Jehane's 
 gift of herself as ransom price of King Richard; 
 the passing of Montferrat, and the dead hand 
 shown in evidence ; and the final great scene of 
 Richard's death, in presence of the three women 
 who marked epochs in his life. There are Alois, 
 whom he had scorned to take as cast-off mistress 
 of his brother John ; Jehane, whom he would have 
 married, had she not renounced him ; Berangere, 
 whom he had married, " so far as the Church could 
 provide," and forthwith deserted for the Crusades, 
 — Berangere, whom he had wronged in having 
 given her " the right to anything." " To give it 
 you I thieved, and in taking it again I thieved 
 again." Listen to Jehane's words, as she kneels 
 beside the dying king: 
 
 " Dost thou question my right, Berangere," she said 
 fiercely, " to kiss a dead man, to love the dead and 
 speak greatly of the dead ? Which of us three women, 
 thinkest thou, knoweth what report to make concern- 
 ing this beloved, thou, or Alois, or I? Alois came, 
 speaking of old sins; and you are here, plaining of
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 71 
 
 new sins; what shall I do, now that I am here? Am 
 I to speak of sin to come? Thou dear knight," and 
 she touched his head, " there is no more room for 
 thy great sins, alas ! But I think that thou shalt 
 leave behind thee some spark of fire." 
 
 A wonderful, passionate, tumultuous book, burn- 
 ing with a glowing fire of words, in structure some- 
 what lawless and amorphous, with characters and 
 incidents crowding and jostling on each other's 
 heels, — and nevertheless, leaving at the end a crys- 
 tal-clear presentment of an incarnate contradic- 
 tion, a nature eternally at war with itself: 
 
 So generous as he was, all the world might have 
 loved him, as one loved him; and yet so arrogant of 
 mind that the very largess he bestowed had a 
 sting beneath it, as though he scorned to give less to 
 creatures that lacked so much. All his faults and 
 most of his griefs sprang from this rending apart of 
 his nature. His heart cried Yea ! to a noble motion. 
 Then came his haughty head to suggest trickery, and 
 bid him say Nay! to the heart's urgency. 
 
 The Queen 's Quair, which followed Richard 
 Yea-and-Nay after an interval of more than three 
 years, deserves, even more than its predecessor, the 
 appellation of " unique." One quality it has in 
 common with the earlier volume : It leaves the 
 reader quite indifferent as to how many other 
 writers before him have handled the same theme.
 
 72 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 The Richard of Mr. Hewlett may or may not be 
 the Richard of history, or of Ivanhoe and The 
 Talisman; but he is a living, breathing human 
 being, a man whom we can see and under- 
 stand, as we have never seen and understood the 
 more shadowy Richard of history. Similarly, his 
 Mary Stuart may not be the Mary Stuart of the 
 old chroniclers or the modern poets ; but he has 
 made her a tangible reality, always more of a 
 woman than a queen, — a slight, frail woman, way- 
 ward, changeful and moody ; full of the witchery of 
 her sex and desperately dependent upon human 
 sympathy and adulation. In Richard Yea-and- 
 Nay, Mr. Hewlett had a much easier task. He 
 was less hampered by the recorded facts ; 
 he could still give free play to his imagina- 
 tion, without robbing the volume of its convincing 
 quality. But the story of Mary Stuart is not 
 merely a twice-told tale ; it has been told a hundred 
 times. Every reader brings to the reading of this 
 volume a knowledge of precisely what is destined 
 to happen ; there are no surprises held in reserve ; 
 and no magic of cunningly wrought phrases could 
 cheat us into accepting a version at variance with 
 the familiar facts. Nor has Mr. Hewlett ventured 
 to disregard them. On the contrary, he seems to 
 have studied the original sources with the con- 
 scientious and exhaustive minuteness of a serious 
 historian. He has saturated himself with the con-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 73 
 
 tents of musty tomes and yellow letters ; the 
 uniqueness of this work lies in the use that he has 
 made of his materials. He seems so unhesitat- 
 ingly sure of the psychological value of each one 
 of these old chronicles and diaries and memoirs ; 
 here is a writer, he tells us, who was mistaken ; 
 here is another who blundered badly, and a third 
 who lied boldly and with malevolent purpose. 
 Sometimes he will take a voluminous document, on 
 which the methodical historian sets great store, 
 and he will get from it just one suggestive fact, 
 one single luminous phrase, and then fling it care- 
 lessly aside, like a wrung-out rag. And again, 
 he will seize upon some fugitive page, some half- 
 forgotten letter, and absorb it greedily, turning 
 and analyzing and dwelling upon it, until he tricks 
 you into the belief that here at last is the heart 
 of the mystery. And thus, without meddling with 
 the accepted facts of history, he has so subtly and 
 insidiously probed down below the surface and 
 suggested secret motive of love and hatred, jeal- 
 ousy, anger and shame, that the result is an inter- 
 woven tissue of fact and fancy which only an his- 
 torical expert could unravel. Probably not since 
 the days of Herodotus have truth and fiction been 
 more ingeniously blended. 
 
 What strikes the reader most forcibly, however, 
 on every page of The Queen's Quair, is that it 
 is the supreme example of Mr. Hewlett's use of the
 
 74 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 familiar touch, the final test of his power to make 
 us see, — or think we do. He will take a dry-as- 
 dust paragraph from some musty old chronicle, a 
 mere catalogue of old Scotch names ; and he will 
 throw in a phrase here, a single adjective there, 
 which will turn that catalogue of names into a 
 portrait gallery of vivid, speaking likenesses. 
 There is one passage almost at the outset of the 
 book, which every reviewer is likely to quote, not 
 merely because it is the portrait of Mr. Hewlett's 
 heroine, but because it illustrates, better, perhaps, 
 than any other paragraph in the whole volume, the 
 wonderful and striking vividness that he can gain 
 by the use of simple, every-day Anglo-Saxon 
 words. A foreigner, reading it, might almost infer 
 that English, like Chinese, was a monosyllabic lan- 
 guage. 
 
 A tall, slim girl, petted and pettish, pale yet not 
 unwholesome, she looked like a flower of the heath, 
 lax and delicate. Her skin — but more, the very flesh 
 of her — seemed transparent, with color that warmed 
 it from within, faintly, with a glow of fine rose. 
 They said that when she drank you could see the red 
 wine run like fire down her throat; and it may be 
 partly believed. . . . The Cardinal, who was no 
 rhapsodist, admitted her clear skin, but denied that 
 she was a beautiful girl — even for a queen. Her 
 nose, he judged, was too long, her lips were too thin, 
 her eyes too narrow. He detested her trick of the
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 75 
 
 sidelong look. . . . Beautiful she may not have been; 
 but fine, fine she was all over — sharply, exquisitely 
 cut and modeled ; her sweet, smooth chin, her amorous 
 lips, bright red where all else was pale as a tinged 
 rose; her sensitive nose; her broad, high brows; her 
 neck, which two hands could hold, her small shoulders 
 and bosom of a child. She had sometimes an intent, 
 considering, wise look — the look of the Queen of De- 
 sire, who knew not where to set the bounds of her 
 need, but revealed to no one what that need was. 
 
 " Her trick of the sidelong look," — there is one 
 of those small familiar touches that have magic 
 in them. It recalls at once a peculiarity in the 
 eyes of more than one familiar portrait of the 
 Queen of Scots, — a peculiarity that seemed to 
 elude a definition. Now that Mr. Hewlett has put 
 it into words, it fairly haunts us ; nowhere in the 
 book can we get away from it ; at every turn of the 
 page, we are asking ourselves to what extent the 
 effect of the queen's words is enhanced by that 
 trick of the sidelong glance. 
 
 As to the story, there seems small profit in 
 dwelling here upon what every reader knows in ad- 
 vance ; while the especial shadows and high lights 
 added by Mr. Hewlett cannot be given at second 
 hand. All the old, familiar figures enter and play 
 their part, — names that have a halo of romance 
 and poetry around them ; the bevy of the queen's 
 Marys ; Chatelard, and Darnley, and Rizzio ; the
 
 7G MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 whole host of Scottish lords, with Bothwell, like 
 a malignant star, always in the ascendant. He is 
 a well-drawn villain, Earl Bothwell; Mr. Hewlett 
 shows no small self-satisfaction in filling in the 
 lines ; there are times when he seems fairly to gloat 
 over him: 
 
 A galliard, if ever there was one, flushed with rich 
 blood, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with a laugh 
 so happy and so prompt that the world, rejoicing to 
 hear it, thought all must be well wherever he might 
 be. He wore brave clothes, sat a brave horse, kept 
 brave company bravely. His little eyes twinkled 
 so merrily that you did not see they were like a 
 pig's, sly and greedy at once, and blood-shot. 
 
 And then follows another of those luminous little 
 touches : " The bridge of his nose had been 
 broken ; few observed it, or guessed at the brawl 
 which must have given it to him." But if there 
 is one little detail more significant, more luminous 
 than all the others, about this Bothwell of the 
 " great jowl," it is that of " some mockery latent 
 in him, and the suspicion that whatever you said 
 or did he would have you in derision." For it was 
 this which " first drew Queen Mary to consider 
 him," it was this which kept him in her thoughts ; 
 and indirectly, it was this which led them ulti- 
 mately to wreak their mutual undoing. Of the end, 
 it is best to let Mr. Hewlett tell in his own words:
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 77 
 
 Spited had he been by Fortune, without doubt. 
 He had had the Crown and Mantle of Scotland in 
 his pair of hands; having schemed for six years to 
 get them, he had had them and felt their goodly 
 weight; and here he was now in hiding, trusting for 
 bare life to the help of men who had no reason to 
 love him. Where, then, were his friends? He had 
 none, nor ever had but one, — this fair, frail woman, 
 whom he had desired for her store, and had emptied, 
 and would now be rid of. 
 
 If his was a sorry case, what was hers? Alas, 
 the heart sickens to think of it. With how high a 
 head came she in, she and her cohort of maids, to 
 win wild Scotland! Where were they? They had 
 received their crowns, but she had soiled and be- 
 drabbled hers. They had lovers, they had children, 
 they had troops of friends; but she, who had sought 
 with panting mouth for very love, had had husbands 
 who made love stink, and a child denied her, and no 
 friend in Scotland but a girl and a poor boy. You 
 say she had sought wrongly. I say she had over- 
 mastering need to seek. Love she must; and if she 
 loved amiss it was that she loved too well. You say 
 that she misused her friends. I deny that a girl set 
 up where she was could have any friends at all. She 
 was a well of sweet profit, — the Honey-pot; and they 
 swarmed about her for their meat like house-flies; 
 and when that was got, and she drained dry, they 
 departed by the window in clouds, to settle and fasten 
 about the nearest provand they could meet with: 
 carrion or honeycomb, man's flesh, dog's flesh or 
 maid's flesh, what was it to them? In those dreadful
 
 78 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 days of silent waiting at Borthwick, less than a month 
 after marriage, I tell you very plainly that she was 
 beggared of all she had in the world, and knew it. 
 
 Beside these two books, all subsequent work 
 of Mr. Hewlett's is in the nature of an anti-climax, 
 some more, some less, but none of it attaining a 
 similar amplitude of theme, a like commanding 
 dignity of treatment. If it were not for fear of 
 doing violence to a fair sense of proportion, it 
 would be a pleasure to give some space to his 
 shorter tales, to the Little Novels of Italy, The 
 New Canterbury Tales, and the Fond Adventures, 
 and more especially the first and the last of these 
 three, for they are many of them flawless little 
 gems of artistry, glowing with a sort of verbal 
 opalescence. Every reader will have his own fa- 
 vorites ; but to the present writer there is no one 
 of these tales which it is such a pleasure 
 to read and read again as that inimitable 
 tale of early Florence, " Buondelmonte's Saga." 
 To-day the man who, with his marriage 
 day as good as set, should with scant cere- 
 mony break off the alliance, for no better reason 
 than that he had seen another woman's face 
 that was better to his liking, might hear some 
 hard things said of him ; but the end need not 
 be tragedy. In medieval Florence, it meant blood- 
 shed, riots, a city rent asunder with civil strife.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 79 
 
 How much of this saga is true, how much the coin- 
 age of Mr. Hewlett's brain, he himself would prob- 
 ably be puzzled to tell. He makes one feel curi- 
 ously the remoteness of those vanished centuries, 
 yet at the same time his pages tingle with vitality, 
 as though reciting the happenings of yesterday. 
 You see, as if in the flesh, Buondelmonte seeking 
 to patch up an old family feud by forming an 
 alliance with the Uberti; you see smoldering 
 anger and black looks giving place to a strained 
 and ceremonious courtesy. You see Buondelmonte, 
 now that he is pledged, suddenly falling tumultu- 
 ously in love with Foreste Donati's younger 
 daughter, Piccarda, and rashly concocting the first 
 clumsy excuse that comes into his mind for break- 
 ing off the alliance with the Uberti. You see the 
 latter gathered in secret council weighing the evi- 
 dence, anxious to be sure of the justice of their 
 quarrel, sure that the affront has been deliberately 
 put upon them. Then one more unforgettable 
 scene; a lover in bridegroom's attire hasting to a 
 rendezvous, waylaid at the bridge ; a brief confu- 
 sion of men and horses, huddled together ; the flash 
 of a knife or two; a dead man, lying muffled in his 
 cloak, and the whole city in an uproar. 
 
 There are two or three other volumes which it 
 seems worth while to mention somewhat in detail, 
 before passing on to a brief estimate of Mr. Hew- 
 lett's ill-starred attempt at novels of contempo-
 
 80 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 rary life. These are The Fool Errant, Brazenhead 
 the Great, and The Stooping Lady. The Fool 
 Errant is a less pretentious book than the novels 
 which preceded it ; there is a latent vein of whim- 
 sical humor in it which some readers have found 
 somewhat baffling; yet it is likely to bring a cer- 
 tain quiet joy to those who have an epicurean 
 taste for delicate workmanship in fiction. 
 
 The " Fool Errant " of the title is one Francis 
 Strelley, a young Englishman, sent by his father 
 to Italy to complete his education and incidentally 
 to be kept out of mischief, under the guardianship 
 of Dr. Porfirio Lanfranchi, of the University of 
 Padua. Dr. Lanfranchi is briefly summed up as a 
 " disorderly genius, a huge, blotch-faced, tumble- 
 bellied man, bullet-headed, bull-necked and with 
 flashing eyes." Now it happens that this ungainly, 
 panting behemoth of a man possesses a slender 
 dainty little wife; "sparkling eyes, a delicate 
 flush, quick breath, a shape at once pliant and 
 audacious, flashing hands with which half her 
 spells were woven — all these, and that wailing, 
 dragging, comico-tragic voice, that fatal appeal of 
 the child, trained by the wisdom of the wife, com- 
 pleted the rout of our youth. Before supper was 
 over he was her loyal slave." 
 
 The opening chapter of The Fool Errant reads 
 like the opening stanzas of Don Juan, with this 
 difference, that young Strelley was content to set
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 81 
 
 his lady high upon a pedestal and read aloud to 
 her from the Commentaries of Villani and Mala- 
 volti's History of Sienna. Then comes the mo- 
 mentous night when the good Dr. Lanfranchi, ar- 
 riving as an untimely interruption to the evening's 
 reading, finds young Strelley stowed away in a 
 closet, and quite naturally refuses to believe that 
 he is there solely in pursuit of historical 
 learning. Young Strelley is almost an impossible 
 character; in hands less able than Hewlett's he 
 would degenerate into pure burlesque. To every 
 one else, the fair Aurelia, with her comico-tragic 
 voice, is plainly no better than she should be, an 
 intriguing little baggage, whom the worthy Doctor 
 was quite right in discarding. But Francis Strel- 
 ley, having once enshrined her as a saint, would be- 
 lieve no ill of her. Through his fault, so he be- 
 lieves, her husband had repudiated her. He must 
 dedicate his life to the pious task of vindicating 
 her and restoring her to her husband's arms. 
 Starting on his self-appointed mission, he delib- 
 erately severs himself from all communication 
 with his family, and goes forth penniless, friend- 
 less, nameless to wander through the disordered 
 and warring states of eighteenth-century Italy. 
 
 There follows a fascinating chronicle of a 
 strange and bizarre Odyssey through hospitals and 
 prisons and monasteries, alone and in company of 
 thieves, mendicant priests and strolling players.
 
 82 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 It has been said that The Fool Errant was an at- 
 tempt to duplicate the success of The Forest 
 Lovers in a setting of eighteenth-century Italy, 
 just as it was subsequently said that the trilogy 
 ending with Rest Harrow was an attempt to do the 
 same thing once again in a setting of modern Eng- 
 land. Be that as it may, the atmosphere of The 
 Fool Errant is still sufficiently alien and romantic 
 to permit of an idealistic treatment, and in spite 
 of actual places and dates the central love story 
 is imbued with a spirit of romance that is nowhere 
 forced. It pictures the gradual awakening of a 
 man who, after having mistakenly exalted an un- 
 worthy woman, finds his model of constancy in an- 
 other and very different type of girl whom he has 
 rescued, out of sheer pity, from a degradation 
 amounting to slavery. 
 
 Brazenhead the Great, considered purposely out 
 of its chronological order, is a volume which 
 tempted a good many critics to exalt it above its 
 strict deserts, out of sheer gratitude for Mr. Hew- 
 lett's return to his own manner, after several years 
 of literary vagrancy. As a matter of fact, it is 
 not going to be remembered as one of its author's 
 big achievements. There is in it a somewhat irri- 
 tating note of extravagance, almost of burlesque. 
 But on the other hand it is the old Hewlett back 
 again, with all his rich embroidery of words and 
 fantastic play of imagination. Captain Brazen-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 83 
 
 head is not a new creation ; we had met him before 
 in the New Canterbury Tales. But here we have 
 no less than four of his adventures, each of them 
 unique, each of them surcharged with concentrated 
 vitality, and each of them conveying that special 
 refinement of pleasure which we get from the reali- 
 zation of an inimitable artistry. As for Brazen- 
 head himself, " who was born greatly, lived greatly, 
 loved greatly and died greatly," there is none quite 
 like him in extant fiction. The product of a coarse 
 age, whose business, as he himself laconically sums 
 it up, is death, Captain Brazenhead is not over nice 
 in his speech ; but to those who are not unduly sen- 
 sitive to the crudities of Elizabethan English, there 
 is a certain enjoyment to be derived from a mighty 
 blast of words like the following: 
 
 Who eats me chokes, for I am like that succulent 
 that conceals, d'ye see, his spines in youthful bloom. 
 You think you have to do with a stripling: not you, 
 pranking boy, not you. I am a seamed and notch- 
 fingered soldier, who belched Greek fire while you 
 were in your swaddling-clout. I was old in iniquity 
 ere they weaned you. Or do you vie with me in 
 perils, by cock, do you so ? Five times left for dead ; 
 trampled six times out by the rear-guard of the host 
 I had led to victory; crucified, stoned, extenuated, 
 cut into strips; in prisons frequent, in deaths not 
 divided — what make you of it? And you to tell me 
 that your green guts can pouch old Leather-tripes,
 
 84 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 for so they dub me who dare? Foh, you are a blad- 
 der, I see! 
 
 Yes, Brazenhead the Great rightly takes his 
 place among the big swashbuckler heroes of ro- 
 mantic fiction, and his death, like his life, refuses 
 to be forgotten. In this final adventure, Mr. Hew- 
 lett has done a remarkable piece of work, one that 
 fits in perfectly with our sense of what is adequate, 
 and yet at the same time utterly foreign to his 
 usual methods. Brazenhead's death is allegory, 
 pure and simple. He is a mighty warrior, Hercu- 
 lean, invincible. To satisfy our sense of fitness he 
 must meet a warrior's death, he must fall in a fair 
 fight ; and yet on the other hand, we could not bear 
 to have him meet a mightier foe than himself. Mr. 
 Hewlett has hit upon a way of satisfying us in all 
 these respects. He sets his unconquered, uncon- 
 querable hero face to face with his own youth, with 
 the man that he was fifty years earlier. The scene 
 is a deep valley, the whole event is strange, por- 
 tentous, titanic, a picture such as Dore might have 
 drawn. And here Brazenhead falls, slain by his 
 own youth, since " none but his own youth could 
 have slain him, nor any slain his own youth but 
 himself " — which of course is only another way pf 
 stating the universal truth that it is our past life 
 that is apt to prove our worst enemy. Brazenhead 
 the Great, although not one of Mr. Hewlett's big-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 85 
 
 gest efforts, contains certain scattered pages, 
 single episodes that rank with the best that he has 
 ever done or is ever likely to do. 
 
 The reason why it seems worth while to discuss 
 The Stooping Lady at some length is that it was 
 in the nature of a transition work, Mr. Hewlett's 
 first hesitant attempt in the direction of modernity. 
 The flavor of a remote past was so much a part 
 of the warp and woof of all that he had hitherto 
 produced that the interesting question arose 
 whether it was an inherent quality of his style, or 
 simply a part of his carefully studied method of 
 giving an historic atmosphere, just as you may 
 give a spurious age to carved woodwork by the 
 application of the right stain and varnish. At 
 first sight, The Stooping Lady seemed to have ade- 
 quately answered the question. There was nothing 
 of the Tapestry Novel about the new volume, and 
 yet, from the first page to the last, it was unmis- 
 takably Hewlett. There was the same sureness of 
 touch in word and phrase, the same wonderful 
 power of making you see precisely what he saw in 
 his mind's eye — only this time the pictures were as 
 unmistakably early nineteenth century as in The 
 Queen's Quair they were Elizabethan. And yet no 
 competent judge of fiction could fail to recognize 
 that, measured by Mr. Hewlett's earlier standard, 
 The Stooping Lady fell considerably short of full 
 achievement. Why this should be so is not immedi-
 
 86 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 ately apparent. The opening years of the nine- 
 teenth century, with its attendant unrest, its war- 
 cry of reform, its violent clash of awakening de- 
 mocracy, with the hereditary arrogance of caste, 
 are inherently as full of interest as other epochs 
 of English history already treated by Mr. Hewlett. 
 And there is no lack of dramatic strength in the 
 story of a stalwart young butcher who resents with 
 his fists the murder of his favorite horse by a 
 drunken lord ; who finds himself summarily clapped 
 into jail for having thus dared to assert his 
 rights; and, through the injustice that he suffers, 
 wins the notice, then the sympathy, then the love 
 of the drunken lord's wayward, impetuous, brave- 
 hearted niece, who is not herself conscious that she 
 is stooping when she bestows her heart upon a man 
 whose clean, fine manhood has taught her to respect 
 and honor him. And yet, fine as the story is in 
 conception and in workmanship, it somehow lacks 
 bigness, finality and enduring interest. 
 
 The fate of Mary Stuart will stir the hearts and 
 fire the imagination for untold generations yet to 
 come ; but the fate of a London butcher, even a self- 
 educated butcher with a poetic soul and a gift for 
 oratory, seems somehow to lack the magnitude that 
 we expect to find in Mr. Hewlett's later work. 
 Even the author himself appears to have felt at the 
 last that there was no better ending for the story 
 than an anti-climax. So when the Stooping Lady
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 87 
 
 has stooped even to the point of standing beside 
 her lover while he endures his sentence to exposure 
 in the pillory, and the turbulent mob gathers, and 
 the riot act is read and the soldiers fire a volley 
 into the crowd, the author shifts his responsibility 
 over to a stray bullet that finds its way to the brain 
 of the pilloried butcher and saves the undeniably 
 charming lady of the title role from the necessity 
 of stooping any longer. 
 
 The real trouble, I am afraid, with The Stoop- 
 ing Lady, is that in proportion as the author 
 comes nearer to the present day, his magic slips 
 away from him. In a brief novelette, called The 
 Spanish Jade, the scene and date are Spain in the 
 year of I860 — fully half a century later than The 
 Stooping Lady. But territorial remoteness counts 
 for something, and it is quite likely that, if he chose 
 to lay his scene sufficiently far away, Mr. Hewlett 
 could write a novel of the present hour that would 
 stil have the mystic, intangible charm of The 
 Forest Lovers. His Spanish Jade, as it happens, 
 is a girl of the gutters, with a savage beauty, a 
 wild-hearted, passionate, lawless nature. And a 
 certain delicate, thin-lipped young Englishman, 
 who saves her from a pack of human curs who are 
 hounding her, is the first man from whom, in all 
 her young life, she has received a real kindness. 
 So, under the sway of love and gratitude, she stabs 
 to death the Spaniard who would have killed them
 
 88 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 both, and then offers her own life in atonement, to 
 save her Englishman from the blood-vengeance of 
 the dead man's kin. As a story, this little volume 
 is not especially important. As a piece of tech- 
 nique, Mr. Hewlett has wrought in it a very per- 
 fect and surprising thing. He has told a story 
 which, while you read, gives you the impression of 
 great dimensions — a vast canvas, overspread with 
 a vista of " a great, roomy, haggard country," a 
 kaleidoscopic, shifting panorama of scenes and of 
 people; a sense of gazing into measureless depths 
 of human passions ; of having known and lived with 
 the personages of the story, not merely through 
 the brief space of a few printed pages, but through 
 the intimacy of a lifetime. And yet, when the 
 story is finished, and the cover closed, the human 
 truths he has told are so simple and so clear that 
 a single chapter might have embodied them. 
 
 It remains only to comment quite briefly upon 
 Open Country: A Comedy with a String, Halfway 
 House: A Comedy of Degrees, and Rest Harrow: 
 A Comedy of Resolution. The three volumes form 
 a trilogy, but the trilogy was obviously an after- 
 thought. As a matter of fact, the second volume, 
 Halfway House, was issued first, and had scant 
 connection with the other two. It dealt with a 
 theme that would have been dear to the heart of 
 Meredith — and nine reviewers out of ten noted the 
 fact. It told of the belated passion of an elderly
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 89 
 
 country gentleman, John Germain, for a neighbor's 
 governess, Mary Middleham, by name — a young 
 woman of ample charms and numerous embryo love 
 affairs. Now, it happens to come to the ears of the 
 middle-aged suitor that one of her lovers is a family 
 connection of his and one of his prospective heirs. 
 The girl is honest, according to her lights ; on the 
 wedding night, she makes certain girlish confes- 
 sions, which leave the reader guessing as to the 
 degree of their girlishness. At all events, they are 
 sufficient to kill his elderly, half-spent passion, and 
 their relations, during his brief remaining span of 
 life, are strictly platonic. Now, there is a certain 
 eccentric personage named Senhouse — John Sen- 
 house — expert botanist, gipsy by choice, philoso- 
 pher and outcast, whom the young wife in question 
 runs across by accident, communes with, over a 
 roadside fire, and accepts as her secret mentor. It 
 is Senhouse who saves Mary from compromising 
 rashness and convinces her that she really does not 
 love her husband's cousin. It is he who enables her 
 to return unashamed to her husband's death-bed, 
 whisper to him a last confession and receive the 
 mute forgiveness of his dying glance. But from 
 his will she learns that the dead husband pre- 
 judged her, that he has left her a certain income 
 only for so long a time as she remains a widow, and 
 that there is a codicil, bearing date just prior to 
 her wedding, leaving the cousin a generous share,
 
 90 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 provided he too remains unmarried. Of course, it 
 is natural to assume that the widow and cousin 
 brave poverty for the sake of love, and defy the 
 selfish terms of the will. But the reader would be 
 wrong, for the image of Senhouse, the gipsy phi- 
 losopher, has come between them, and the widow, 
 with her eyes wide open, elects to leave home and 
 country, and follow his nomad destiny through the 
 woodlands of Germany. And at this point Half- 
 way House ends, and the reader assumes that they 
 will marry and live happily ever after — and here 
 again the reader is mistaken. 
 
 Open Country, published subsequently, but deal- 
 ing with the earlier history of Senhouse, shows how 
 idle it was to have assumed his marriage with the 
 heroine of Halfway House. It shows us Senhouse 
 as a social iconoclast, a man in revolt against the 
 established customs of his times, a man who has no 
 use for cities, wealth, the luxuries of civilization, 
 and who has a topsy-turvy code of ethics, among 
 which is his chief dictum that the crowning insult 
 that any man can offer to a woman is a proposal of 
 marriage. Now, the whole plot, both of Open 
 Country and of Rest Harrow, is simply the effect 
 of Senhouse's irregular doctrines upon a very 
 charming young woman, named Sanchia Percival, 
 whom he first meets when she is wading in a pool, in 
 quest of water-lilies, and whose limbs, thus uncon- 
 ventionally exposed to public gaze, the reader has
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 91 
 
 continually forced upon his attention, with the 
 persistency of an obsession. Senhouse loves San- 
 chia, but with an exalted and mystic passion that 
 precludes, at first, any thought of earthly satisfac- 
 tion. Sanchia meanwhile absorbs his unwholesome 
 teachings with the enthusiasm of a votary ; and 
 since she cannot have him, she proves her sincerity 
 by going off with another man named Ingram, an 
 ordinary, rather coarse-minded fellow, already en- 
 cumbered with a wife. True to her principles, 
 Sanchia continues to live openly with this man for 
 upward of eight years — and it is somewhere mid- 
 way in this period that Senhouse and Mary Ger- 
 main try their unsuccessful experiment of life in 
 common, also without the fetters of matrimony. 
 Then comes the death of Ingram's wife, his offer to 
 square accounts by marrying Sanchia, and reviving 
 hopes on the part of her long scandalized family 
 that at last she may be socially rehabilitated. But 
 these hopes prove groundless. Almost on the eve 
 of the tardy wedding, she slips quietly away in the 
 night-time, to join Senhouse in his bare little shack 
 among the goat pastures, for a honeymoon beneath 
 the stars — a honeymoon that may or may not later 
 receive the sanction of the Church. Such is the 
 substance of these three volumes which, in spite of 
 Mr. Hewlett's mature artistry, and some shrewd 
 observance of modern types, remain unconvincing, 
 exaggerated, at times almost grotesque. As an idyl
 
 92 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 of romantic love, it is all as absurdly out of place 
 as a knightly tourney in the midst of Piccadilly ; 
 while if we are to take the volumes seriously and to 
 imagine that the preposterous doctrines preached 
 by Senhouse in any way represent Mr. Hewlett's 
 own views, it becomes necessary to regard them as 
 distinctly unwholesome as well as inartistic. 
 
 Accordingly, we have Mr. Hewlett standing 
 openly to-day at the crossroads, trying to follow 
 two paths at once, and sadly in danger of making 
 no further advance. It would be futile to advise 
 him to revert to his earlier method of Richard Yea- 
 and-Nay, and The Queen's Quair; for, when an 
 artist has once outgrown a certain mood, outlived a 
 definite phase of his development, there can be no 
 successful going back ; his heart would not be in 
 the work, and it could not be sincere. Yet he ought 
 to have given us more than those two volumes. His 
 special equipment for the task was the patient 
 labor of years ; his whole style was elaborated to 
 that one end, and the peculiar archaic flavor of it 
 is something that he can no longer lay aside at will, 
 but must needs retain, in spite of its incongruity in 
 a modern setting. It is as though a musician, with 
 slim, flexible fingers, trained to an exquisite sensi- 
 bility, skilled to caress the tremulous strings of a 
 violin with hair's-breadth accuracy, should deliber- 
 ately choose to waste their magic touch in ham- 
 mering out socialistic tracts upon a typewriter.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 93 
 
 There is good reason to fear that the best we may 
 hope to have from him in the future is further in- 
 stalments of extravagant, braggadocio satire of 
 the Brazenhead type, and the worst, other volumes 
 of the pseudo-Meredithian type of Rest Harrow. 
 But this does not alter the fact that in the earlier 
 Maurice Hewlett we have the chief living champion 
 of purely romantic fiction, and a stylist of the first 
 order, whose cadenced prose is a delight to the ear, 
 whose verbal color has the gleam of many jewels, 
 and who has given us at least two novels and many 
 short stories which the epicures of literature will 
 not willingly allow to die.
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 It is a simple matter and one requiring compara- 
 tively little space, to set forth the qualities that en- 
 title Mr. Eden Phillpotts to high consideration 
 among contemporary English novelists. He has 
 not the perplexing versatility of Mr. Kipling or 
 Mr. Hewlett or Mr. Ollivant; having found his 
 path, he is content for the most part to tread it 
 faithfully, even though it lead him in a beaten cir- 
 cle ; he is wise in preferring to do one kind of thing 
 with finished art, rather than half a dozen things 
 indifferently well. Like other writers, he passed 
 through an experimental stage; he made the very 
 common mistake of thinking that merit lay 
 in the strange and startling and sinister — and 
 when there was a dearth of the sensational 
 at home, he sought it far afield, as in Loup- 
 garou! Impressions of West Indian Life. But 
 these early tentative writings have left less than 
 the shadow of a memory on the public mind. Mr. 
 Phillpotts is definitely labeled as the author of 
 Children of the Mist, of The River and The Whirl- 
 wind, the exponent of the life of Devonshire in 
 much the same definite and exclusive way that 
 
 94
 
 EDEN PHII.T. POTTS
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 95 
 
 Thomas Hardy is of Wessex and George W. Cable 
 of New Orleans. It seems inevitable to write of 
 Mr. Phillpotts without making mention of Hardy ; 
 the points in common, especially in his earlier 
 Devon stories, must strike even a novice at criti- 
 cism. Even Mr. Howells, to whom Mr. Phillpotts 
 came as a new discovery, a couple of years ago, 
 found himself echoing this same stereotyped com- 
 parison, and adding to it another that we all must 
 feel — the George Eliot of St. Oggs and The Mill on 
 the Floss. As the product of a younger genera- 
 tion, Mr. Phillpotts has at least one important 
 point of technique in his favor ; he is more imper- 
 sonal. Hardy, splendid and unfaltering painter 
 that he is of human nature, always leaves with me 
 an impression that he has chosen his characters 
 for the express purpose of proving some theory of 
 life, some canon of his somber philosophy. Mr. 
 Phillpotts shows us his little group of actors on 
 their miniature stage, and then leaves the outcome 
 to themselves and to destiny. And his great 
 strength lies in the exceeding simplicity of his 
 people, his themes, his entire artistic material. His 
 men and women, the best of them, are primitive, al- 
 most elemental ; his situations all hinge upon the 
 basic, primeval emotions, love and hate, envy and 
 greed — and are worked out on lines of almost 
 Greek austerity. In depicting life, the crude, un- 
 tutored peasant life, he simply does not know how
 
 96 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 to be artificial. If anything, he errs too far the 
 other side, and in depicting the speech and con- 
 duct of his rustics there is often a Zolaesque 
 frankness beyond the immediate exigencies of the 
 picture he would paint. But his grip upon his 
 types of character, men and women alike, is un- 
 deniable. One feels that here is a weaver of pic- 
 tured life who spins his thread direct from the raw 
 material of human nature. And in doing so, he 
 achieves some curious and striking results. The 
 modern spirit, full of questionings and doubtings, 
 has penetrated like a pestilence, if we are to ac- 
 cept Mr. Phillpotts's evidence, among these " Chil- 
 dren of the Mist," and played havoc with their 
 peace of mind, leaving them at a sad disadvantage 
 in their efforts to cope with the puzzling problems 
 of ethics and morality. 
 
 It is for such reasons as these that, if asked to 
 name the most distinctive feature of the work of 
 Mr. Phillpotts, I should say that he enjoys the ad- 
 vantage of being unusually well rounded, that 
 within a circumscribed area he sees life with pe- 
 culiar clearness and sees it as a whole. His novels 
 are in no sense religious novels, yet he never lets us 
 forget that religion and scepticism are potent 
 factors in our daily life ; they are not sex-problem 
 novels, yet he keeps in mind the fact that man and 
 woman are human animals as well as embodied 
 spirits ; they are not political or socialist novels,
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 97 
 
 yet the existence of class distinction and of hered- 
 itary injustice between man and man is brought 
 into the fabric of every page. In short, the little 
 corner of Devon in which most of his dramas are 
 enacted is a miniature cosmos, wherein nothing 
 pertaining to human nature is alien to his purpose. 
 This is his first distinction, his all-around and 
 sympathetic understanding of humanity. And his 
 second, hardly less in importance, is his artist's 
 joy in the ever changing face of nature. As a 
 landscape painter in words, he has no equal since 
 the days of William Black. He is a master of the 
 effects of light and shade, the glint of faint sun- 
 shine through breaking clouds, the shifting forms 
 of distant hills, seen vaguely through curtains of 
 slanting rain, the shimmer of moonlight through 
 thin leafage, the riot of color when nature bursts 
 into blossom — all these things he gives us with a 
 prodigality that would be excessive, if they were 
 not their own justification — if he did not use them 
 so triumphantly to interpret character, to explain 
 the environment and the influences that have pro- 
 duced certain human types. One is tempted to 
 paraphrase a familiar definition, and to character- 
 ize the novels of Mr. Phillpotts as " cross-sections 
 of life, seen through an atmosphere." 
 
 The first book that brought Mr. Phillpotts into 
 general notice, both in England and America, was, 
 curiously enough, not laid in the district destined
 
 98 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 later to be identified with him, but in the adjacent 
 county of Cornwall — and incidentally proves him 
 to be as skilled a painter of the marine landscape 
 as he is of mountain and of moor. Lying Proph- 
 ets, which appeared in 1897, is undoubtedly the 
 corner-stone of Mr. Phillpotts's reputation. And 
 yet the theme is as old as the origin of fiction itself. 
 It is merely one more of the countless versions of a 
 simple, untutored young woman whom nature has 
 chosen to make beautiful, who longs for something 
 better than her lot in life affords her, who lends a 
 credulous ear to a handsome and cultured 
 stranger, and pays the penalty which, under ex- 
 isting conventions, woman must pay for breaking 
 the unwritten law. Joan Tregenza belongs to a 
 race of fanatics. Her father, known as Gray 
 Michael, is a leading spirit in the sect known as 
 the Luke Gospelers ; a sect which finds a perverse 
 joy in believing all the rest of humanity and a 
 goodly share of their own number to be predestined 
 to damnation. Bigotry, self-righteousness, phar- 
 isaical complacency have seldom been better por- 
 trayed than in the character of Gray Michael. 
 And yet one realizes that he is a pagan at heart ; 
 that if it were not for the restraints of the law he 
 would gladly commit, in the name of God, atroci- 
 ties worthy of those ancient Phoenician pioneers 
 who are the legendary ancestors of Cornishmen. 
 From the time when Gray Michael beat Ins
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 99 
 
 daughter until she fell in a faint at his feet, for no 
 more serious sin than attending an evening service 
 at Saint Peter's, the girl lived in secret rebellion 
 against her surroundings ; but no opportunity for 
 self-assertion presented itself until the advent of 
 John Barron, famous artist, invalid of numbered 
 days and faithful exponent of finished egotism. 
 Joan, it may be remarked in passing, is betrothed 
 to a fisherman known as Joe ; and the sight of her 
 standing on a promontory, in the midst of a yellow 
 glory of gorse in blossom, waving good-by to a 
 receding schooner, gives Barron the inspiration for 
 which he has been waiting, the germ idea for his 
 last great picture, " Joe's Ship." The substance 
 of this book is the history of Joan's slow trans- 
 formation under the tutelage of John Barron ; the 
 insidious poison of his esthetic pantheism work- 
 ing upon a spirit in revolt against the stifling 
 narrowness of the religious creed in which it has 
 been nurtured. Joan is a splendid portrayal of 
 triumphant physical womanhood, instinct with the 
 supreme joy of living; and she welcomes Bar- 
 ron's glorification of the divine spirit of nature, 
 the divinity lurking in every blossom and blade of 
 grass, as a doctrine for which she has been uncon- 
 sciously thirsting all her life. Week by week she 
 visits him secretly; week by week the picture of 
 " Joe's Ship," with Joan as its central figure, 
 moves toward consummation — and with it her will
 
 100 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 yields to that of the artist. And, of course, the 
 inevitable, which is also the irreparable, comes to 
 pass. And John Barron, whose acknowledged rule 
 of life is " to sacrifice all things to mood," passes 
 out of Joan's life, with many a promise which he 
 has no intention of keeping, leaving her to make 
 pathetic daily pilgrimages to the post office at 
 Penzance, seeking for letters that do not come, and 
 hoping against hope for a marriage ring that will 
 antedate the advent of her child. The ending of 
 the book is weak ; Mr. Phillpotts was at this epoch 
 still straining after the ususual and the startling, 
 still liable to mistake the intervention of natural 
 forces for a satisfactory solution of a purely 
 human problem. John Barron, yielding to the 
 last caprice of a dying man, writes to Joan telling 
 of his condition and pitifully appealing to her to 
 come to him. It is this letter which sends Joan 
 blindly out into the night, in her enfeebled condi- 
 tion, just at the hour when pent-up torrents are 
 about to break their bounds in a devastating flood. 
 Joe, her affianced husband, who throughout these 
 months has been away, comes into the story at the 
 eleventh hour, to find his promised bride a corpse, 
 with a lasting stain upon her memory, and rushes 
 off in hot haste to London, to exact vengeance. 
 But here again he comes just too late, for Fate 
 has already intervened and Barron also is dead. 
 In two respects this ending is bad art ; first, in the
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 101 
 
 intrusion of blind chance as a solution of the prob- 
 lem ; and secondly, in the introduction, at the clos- 
 ing scene, of a character that has previously had 
 no speaking part in the drama. Yet, just as it 
 stands, this book possesses a certain finished work- 
 manship and a truthfulness to life that eminently 
 justify the praise bestowed by the Athenceum, 
 that " nothing so powerful in this line has ap- 
 peared since Esther Waters." 
 
 The Children of the Mist, the first of the really 
 significant Devon stories, is in itself a sufficient 
 corner-stone on which to build a solid reputation. 
 I question whether, among his subsequent volumes, 
 Mr. Phillpotts has produced any that is at once 
 so simple in material, so human, so unmistakably a 
 transcript from the life he knew and studied at 
 first hand. It is not so well constructed as his 
 later books ; the plot is loose, diffuse, with too 
 many side interests ; the leading characters are 
 disappointingly small at critical moments, and the 
 final solution, as in Lying Prophets, turns on a 
 whim of fate. Yet the net impression left by the 
 book is of something rare and fine and true ; some- 
 thing more spacious and more inspiring than a 
 mere chronicle of a few narrow human lives — it is 
 all Devon that he has given us, flung broadly be- 
 fore us in " a radiance of misty silver." It is the 
 physiognomy of a landscape, the psychology of a 
 community that he has tried to interpret in
 
 102 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 Children of the Mist; and in a canvas so ample, 
 the individual is necessarily dwarfed. If the two 
 brothers, Martin and John Grimbal, had not re- 
 turned from Africa, after many years' absence, 
 bringing with them substantial riches, Will Blan- 
 chard's courtship of Miller Lyddon's daughter, 
 Phoebe, would have been met with less violent op- 
 position, and Will's sister, Chris, might have found 
 less tragedy in her love for Clem Hicks, expert 
 bee-keeper and rustic poet. Will Blanchard's be- 
 setting sin is his violent temper, that leads him 
 into reckless deeds the consequences of which he 
 does not stop to weigh. When Miller Lyddon, im- 
 movable in his stolid obstinacy, refuses to listen to 
 Will's suit, and vows that his daughter shall wed 
 John Grimbal, Will hot-headedly leaves home and 
 under an assumed name enlists in the army, lured 
 by fantastic visions of prosperity and fame, and 
 tells his secret to no one but his friend, Clem 
 Hicks. Months drift by, and slowly Phoebe's op- 
 position to Grimbal is overborne, her confidence in 
 Will is shaken, and she consents to marry as her 
 father wishes. Then follows an urgent message 
 from Clem, and Will commits his second rash act 
 by deserting and returning on the eve of Phoebe's 
 wedding day, bearing her off in triumph and 
 marrying her through the aid of an uncle in a dis- 
 tant village. The greater part of the story that 
 follows, so far as there is any clear-cut story,
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 103 
 
 concerns the slow and at first almost hopeless 
 efforts of the young couple to win forgiveness 
 from the dogged, stubborn old father, his reluc- 
 tant decision not to have Will prosecuted for ab- 
 duction and, after two years of weary waiting, his 
 inability to keep the husband and wife any longer 
 apart. It is a slow, leisurely chronicle, witnessed 
 through the shifting seasons of sun and rain ; a 
 peaceful chronicle, too, except for the stormy un- 
 dercurrent of hatred between Blanchard and the 
 man whom he robbed of a wife. John Grimbal 
 guesses vaguely that there is some secret con- 
 nected with Will's mysterious absence from home, 
 which, if known to him, would give him a chance 
 for vengeance. And after years of patient wait- 
 ing he discovers the secret through pure accident. 
 Once before, it was almost in his grasp. Clem 
 Hicks, the only person whom Will had ever told, 
 has quarreled with him bitterly, is about to square 
 a grudge and betray him to Grimbal, when a false 
 step off the lofty edge of Oke Tor lands him on the 
 rocks far below, with a broken neck. And, if fate 
 must intervene to save him from betraying the 
 brother, it would have been kinder had it acted 
 soon enough to spare the sister too ; for by his un- 
 timely death, Clem leaves the woman he loves to 
 face the world, not as a wife, yet as the mother of 
 his child. But this second tragedy is subordinated 
 by the author to the main issue of what use John
 
 104 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 Grimbal will make of his knowledge that his enemy, 
 now for ten years the husband of the woman he 
 coveted, is a deserter and liable to arrest and 
 punishment. The scene between the two, in which 
 each arises to unexpected heights, the one in mag- 
 nanimity, the other in a newly awakened desire to 
 expiate his crime, is a striking instance of the 
 author's ability to take a situation tensely dra- 
 matic in itself, and wring new and unexpected 
 poignancy from it by making awakened conscience 
 sweep conditions aside, as one might sweep the 
 pawns from a chessboard. It is something more 
 than a pity that, when Grimbal has decided to 
 spare Will, and Will, refusing to be spared, has 
 gone to deliver himself up, the credit should be 
 taken from both of them by the accidental mailing 
 of a letter that Grimbal meant to destroy, and 
 that reaches the Commandant at Plymouth ahead 
 of Blanchard ; and secondly, after he had sur- 
 rendered, prepared to take the punishment that 
 awaited him, it is again a pity that his liberation 
 and return to his wife and newly born heir should 
 be due to the fact that, on the occasion of her 
 Jubilee, the Queen has chosen to pardon all de- 
 serters. It is sheer coincidence and a blot on a 
 story otherwise admirable in workmanship. 
 
 Sons of the Morning will not need much atten- 
 tion. Although the setting is essentially the same 
 as in Children of the Mist, the substance of the
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 105 
 
 story shows a falling back to the author's earlier 
 melodramatic tendency. The opening situation is 
 not unsimilar to that of the previous book. Honor 
 Endicott might have married Christopher Yeo- 
 land, whose estates border on her own, and been 
 very happy with him, in spite of his volatile 
 character, his inability to settle down to useful 
 work, if Myles Stapleton, older, graver, of more 
 sterling worth, had not chanced to come back from 
 his travels at a crucial hour. But here the two 
 stories part company. Unconsciously, Honor 
 finds herself drifting into a closer friendship with 
 Myles than is right for the promised bride of an- 
 other man ; before she is quite aware how it hap- 
 pened, she is in love with two men at once, and 
 cannot tell even herself which of the two means 
 the more to her. Christopher, had he been less 
 impulsive, might have triumphed ; but instead, he 
 quarrels with Honor, departs tempestuously for 
 Australia, and a few months later the news comes 
 that he has been bitten by a snake and is dead. 
 Now that her doubt is solved for her, Honor mar- 
 ries Myles, and settles down contentedly to a life 
 which, if lacking the keen joy of living that 
 Christopher's ardor once promised, at least offers 
 years of untroubled domesticity. But it happens 
 that Christopher is not dead, that the man bitten 
 by a snake is a distant cousin, and that in one of 
 his rash impulses he has quixotically allowed the
 
 106 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 false report to go uncorrected, in order to insure, 
 as he thinks, the happiness of the woman whom he 
 loves and who has learned to love another man. 
 Having done this deed, Christopher should have 
 abided by it ; no man has the right to play Enoch 
 Arden one day and resurrect himself the next. Yet 
 that is precisely what Christopher, the sport of his 
 own transient whims, sees fit to do; and his secret 
 return to his home, and the sight of him, suddenly 
 and without warning, in the gloom of woods at 
 night, costs the life of Stapleton's unborn heir, and 
 very nearly costs the life of the mother. The plot 
 fails to carry conviction, and drags on quite 
 unnecessarily. The idea of three people making 
 themselves wretched because the wife will not de- 
 cide between them, the husband is reluctant to as- 
 sert himself, and the other man is too selfish to do 
 the honorable thing, is all so preposterous as to be 
 almost grotesque. And then, finally, when hus- 
 band and wife have their crucial talk together, 
 and she awakens to a sense of her own unfairness 
 and declares unequivocally her preference for him 
 and her wish to be taken away where she will never 
 again hear the sound of Christopher's voice, an- 
 other trick of fate intrudes itself, the happy hus- 
 band falls headlong from Teign's Head, and the 
 widow, although she eventually marries the other 
 man, goes through life with the secret and re- 
 morseful fear that she had failed to convince Myles
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 107 
 
 of her love for him and that his death was not an 
 accident. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible, in the case of a 
 writer so uniformly industrious, to attempt to dis- 
 cuss in detail even a majority of his volumes; and 
 some of them, as, for instance, The Good Red 
 Earth, do not deserve it. It has the customary 
 flavor of the soil, but in essence it is a mystery 
 story, turning upon the discovery of some hidden 
 documents, and the identity of a child, supposed 
 to be a caretaker's daughter. A book of very 
 different caliber, one of the books, in fact, that 
 really count, is The River. Here again, as in Chil- 
 dren of the Mist, Mr. Phillpotts's dominant pur- 
 pose has been to show the mighty and far-reaching 
 influence of environment on character. If it were 
 not for the River, the Dart, he seems to say, none 
 of these lives would have been lived as here set 
 down. It is an ever present influence, moulding 
 characters, shaping destinies, emphasizing at once 
 the ceaseless changefulness of nature and the 
 mutability of man. In this volume, more than 
 anywhere else, we get a glimpse of Eden Phill- 
 potts's kinship with Joseph Conrad, in his ability 
 to measure man alongside of the titanic forces of 
 nature. Take for instance this bit of description 
 of the Dart at flood-time: 
 
 From the granite centers of the hills, headlong 
 down the rocky places, boiling, shrieking over steeps
 
 108 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 and shallows like a Fury with lightning in her hair, 
 she (the Dart) came. From the playground of the 
 wind, from the hidden secrets of her springs, swollen 
 to a torrent, swelled to ungovernable cataracts, she 
 poured herself between the heights; and the noise of 
 her passing was mingled with the thunder, with the 
 reverberations and concussions of the air and repeti- 
 tions of the earth. Her hoarse ravings ascended to 
 the sky, and, borne by echoing ravines and crags, 
 fell upon the frightened ear ; her maniac shout knelled 
 death and disaster, and set the husbandmen shaking 
 for their beasts. Into the valley she rolled, and 
 rioted even as high as the branches of the trees that 
 shadowed her ; her locks of foam were tawny and her 
 current black. 
 
 As for the story, it is merely the oft-told theme 
 of the way of a maid with two men. Hannah 
 Braidridge, " tall, full-blooded, with sleepy eyes 
 and strong, budding passions," is the heroine. 
 She finds herself wavering between Nicholas Edge- 
 combe, a warrener, clean of limb and of thought, 
 who dwells " among immortal things," and Tim- 
 othy Oldrew, a gentleman farmer, essentially bad 
 at heart, who nevertheless exhibits from time to 
 time a momentary flash of elemental decency. 
 Hannah's faithlessness, and her shifting back and 
 forth between the farmer and the warrener, form 
 the mainspring of the human narrative, which is 
 necessarily somewhat subordinated to the central 
 theme of the River itself. It is the Dart which is
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 109 
 
 the real heroine, the Dart that is full-blooded, with 
 strong, budding passions, the Dart whose change- 
 ful moods no human heroine could rival. 
 
 It is not necessary to waste time or space upon 
 a volume such as The Golden Fetish, narrating the 
 quest of a great treasure of precious stones, hid- 
 den in the land of the Batoncas, in Central Africa. 
 It may be defined as a fairly adequate attempt to 
 perform an unfamiliar, if not uncongenial task. 
 But, in view of the fact that Mr. Phillpotts is 
 capable of better and higher things, it seems a pity 
 that he could not be content to leave riotous 
 romance of this particular brand in the eminently 
 capable hands of Mr. Rider Haggard. It is a relief 
 to turn to a subsequent volume that finds Mr. 
 Phillpotts once more back in the familiar setting 
 of the tors and woodlands of Dartmoor, and once 
 more interpreting the strong, rugged elemental 
 men and women who inhabit it. The Secret 
 Woman stands high among the best works its 
 author has given us ; and, what is more, he has 
 gained in unity of theme, as is shown by the com- 
 paratively few words needed to expound it. It 
 deals with a tragedy as old as human nature itself. 
 Anthony, Redvers is in his heart a rebel against the 
 laws of marriage, social and divine. According to 
 his secret creed, " 'Tis only a wicked saying of the 
 parson's that a man can't love two womei true an' 
 tender. Love's an honest thing, an' them as have
 
 110 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 made it to be a wicked thing are black-coated devils 
 that would starve the nature out of human life, 
 if they could." He sees no lack of loyalty toward 
 the faithful, austere, prematurely aging wife, 
 after fifteen wedded years, in giving a share of his 
 own turbulent and lawless affections to the young 
 woman whom fate has flung secretly into his arms. 
 The only shame and wrong would be to let the 
 knowledge come to his wife and distress her. One 
 day, however, the secret is betrayed, and the wife, 
 in a jealous frenzy, strikes her husband dead. It 
 chances that both the erring women, the murderess 
 and her rival, escape detection ; and the book 
 becomes the history of two long and silent 
 martyrdoms — that of the wife, longing to confess 
 her guilt, and that of the other, who dare not 
 openly mourn her dead. Mr. Phillpotts has writ- 
 ten nothing since The Children of the Mist that 
 compares with this volume in strength of theme 
 and careful character drawing. 
 
 The Portreeve, which comes next in order of 
 sequence, is, in spite of its obvious merits, not to 
 be rashly pronounced an advance upon its author's 
 previous works. It lacks the grim intensity of 
 The Secret Woman, the lyric enthusiasm of Chil- 
 dren of the Mist; but on the other hand, it has a 
 more even strength, a greater dignity that comes 
 from reserve force. Yet, it is like his previous 
 books in being made from material surprisingly
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 111 
 
 simple and primitive. It tells the story of a young 
 couple estranged on the eve of their marriage, 
 because another man, socially beneath her, wants 
 the girl, and another woman, socially above him, 
 wants the man. Dodd Wolverstan has worked his 
 way slowly up, from the workhouse to a modest 
 competence. At thirty he is an independent 
 farmer, holds the local and ancient honorary office 
 of Portreeve, and has just won the promise of Ilet 
 Yelland to marry him. But Primrose Horn, only 
 daughter of the prosperous master of Bowden 
 Farm, accustomed always to have what she wants, 
 has long since determined that she wants the Port- 
 reeve, and when she learns that Abel Pierce, un- 
 couth and unprincipled, will stop at nothing if 
 he may win Ilet away from Wolverstan, she enters 
 into a shameless plot with Abel to rake up an old 
 and discredited scandal and put new life into it 
 with a few ingenious lies. The plot works with an 
 ease that would fail to carry conviction, if Mr. 
 Phillpotts did not show, with his accustomed lucid- 
 ity, how tradition, religious bigotry and the easy 
 credulity of primitive minds all worked together 
 to separate and estrange the young couple. The 
 plot, however, succeeds only in part, and from 
 Primrose Horn's point of view, the less important 
 part. Convinced that her lover has driven another 
 young woman through shame to suicide, Ilet tries 
 to forget her chagrin, through a hasty marriage
 
 112 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 with Abel. Wolverstan is made of sterner stuff. 
 Although Ilet seems hopelessly lost to him, years 
 pass before he can even bear the thought of marry- 
 ing another woman, even a woman so desirable as 
 Primrose Horn, now in the full ripeness of her 
 beauty. But at last a day comes when the pro- 
 posal she has so long awaited is trembling on his 
 tongue, his arms are around her, his kisses on her 
 lips, when a messenger arrives in hot haste with 
 the news that Ilet's husband, Abel, has been 
 crushed in the stone quarries, and has a confession 
 to make before he dies — a confession that will be- 
 tray Primrose's unsuspected treachery. The half- 
 spoken proposal is destined never to be finished, 
 because when next he meets Primrose, Wolverstan 
 and Ilet are once more betrothed, and when a year 
 has passed, they are married. Primrose Horn is 
 the type of woman whose love when scorned turns 
 to hate ; and the second and stronger half of The 
 Portreeve deals with her slow, deliberate method 
 of revenge. Inexorable as fate, she robs him, one 
 by one, of his farm, his cattle, his local prestige, 
 his wife's health, his child's life, his ambition, hope 
 and faith ; until at last fate takes the guidance out 
 of her criminal hands and her revenge recoils, with 
 unexpected grimness, on her own head. 
 
 The Whirlwind, I am aware, has been rated 
 very high by some critics. Mr. Howells, for in- 
 stance, singles it out as his personal favorite
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 113 
 
 choice, among all of Mr. Phillpotts's writings, and 
 does not hesitate to add the high praise that " it 
 has all the mystic quality of Anna Karenina's 
 dream, in which her husband and her lover are 
 reconciled in their common possession." Never- 
 theless, I fail to see by what right The Whirlwind 
 could be numbered among his strongest books. It 
 is certainly not on a level with The Children of the 
 Mist or The Secret Woman. There is less spon- 
 taneity in the character drawing ; his men and his 
 women lack something of the vital individuality of 
 the earlier volumes ; they suggest something stereo- 
 typed and worked over from earlier impressions. 
 The central plot is not merely repellent, but diffi- 
 cult of acceptance. Many personages have speak- 
 ing parts in the drama, but only three are inti- 
 mately concerned : The Master, the Man and the 
 Man's Wife. They are rather closer to the soil, 
 more frankly, elementally peasant types than even 
 Mr. Phillpotts usually gives us. In Daniel Brendon 
 we have a splendid specimen of physical manhood, 
 a young giant exulting in his strength, a true son 
 of the " good red earth," slow of speech and of 
 thought ; and in Sarah Jane Friend, whom he mar- 
 ries, he finds a mate physically worthy of him, in 
 spite of the fact that her father is caretaker of an 
 abandoned peat works and that his vocation has 
 eaten into his spirit until he lives and talks wholly 
 in peat. Intellectually, Sarah Jane is superior,
 
 114 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 both to her father and to her husband. She has a 
 restless, inquiring turn of mind; she has her pri- 
 vate doubts about many things, about religion, 
 about social conventions, about the established 
 order of things. Nevertheless, she is happy in her 
 love for her husband, her daily round of duties ; 
 she will never deliberately accomplish her own un- 
 happiness. But it happens that the Master, 
 Woodrow by name, neurotic, selfish, doomed to a 
 short life and aware of it, is attracted by her 
 splendid womanhood and determines to take her 
 for himself. His is the old, threadbare argument 
 of Iago, that " He who is robbed, not wanting 
 what is stolen, let him not know it, and he is not 
 robbed at all." He sets forth the terms of the 
 bargain to her in all its unashamed nakedness. 
 If she consents, then all the great estate, all the 
 splendid piece of moorland where her husband now 
 toils as little higher than a serf, will become his 
 own, as soon as the brief span of its present 
 owner's life has run its course. And the woman, 
 for the sake of her husband's material gain, con- 
 sents — that is, if we can bring ourselves to accept 
 Mr. Phillpotts's statement, a thing which is diffi- 
 cult to do. He should have wrought his woman of 
 a coarser clay, a clay more closely akin to that of 
 her own father, if he wanted us to believe that she 
 would suffer herself to be put to so base a service. 
 It has pleased some critics, among others, Mr.
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 115 
 
 Howells, as the above quotation implied, to read 
 into this story a rather subtle explanation, and 
 find excuse for the woman on the ground that she 
 was caught in the vortex of a double passion, per- 
 plexed and tormented by having fallen, almost un- 
 consciously, in love with two men at once. This 
 theory is ingenious, but over-subtle. Mr. Phill- 
 potts usually is quite capable of stating unequivo- 
 cally what he means. In Sons of the Morning he 
 leaves no doubt whatever that his heroine is a 
 victim of precisely this dilemma, of loving two 
 men at once; but Honor Endicott is a wealthy 
 landowner, not a peasant; she is, moreover, a 
 highstrung, introspective young person, all nerves 
 and temperament, and separated by an im- 
 measurable distance from the physical opulence 
 of the Sarah Jane type. In his written words, Mr. 
 Phillpotts implied, in The Whirlwind, nothing 
 more than a physical bargain and sale — and he 
 can usually be trusted to know his peasants. 
 
 It is a temptation to linger unduly over each 
 separate volume ; there are several which challenge 
 attention and the relative merit of which is fairly 
 open to dispute. There is, for instance, The 
 Mother of the Man, proclaimed, not without 
 reason, as a masterpiece of tragic motherhood, the 
 anguish of a woman torn between mother love and 
 an overpowering sense of duty. The Three Brothers 
 is still another volume which has eager champions
 
 116 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 among the special followers of Mr. Phillpotts ; and 
 undoubtedly they have a right to their preference 
 among volumes where the quality is, year after 
 year, so surprisingly well sustained. But, in a 
 study like the present, where it is impossible to be 
 exhaustive, the volumes to be dwelt upon are not 
 those built upon the established formula, and so 
 well built as to make choice difficult, but rather 
 those — if there are any such — which show a touch 
 of novelty, a freshness of thought or of theme. 
 Precisely this new note is afforded by The Beacon, 
 and for that reason it deserves a rather careful 
 analysis. Although it still deals with Dartmoor 
 folk, and is full of the quaint humor, crude philoso- 
 phy and odd character drawing that he has taught 
 his readers to expect in almost too generous pro- 
 portions, its central theme strikes an unwontedly 
 modern note. While not a suffragette novel, it 
 deals with the modern, independent woman, the 
 woman who believes that she has a wider mission 
 than to perform the duties of wife and mother, 
 that she should strive to be an inspiration to her 
 husband and raise him to a higher standard, a 
 broader and nobler outlook upon life. Having 
 propounded his theme, Mr. Phillpotts does not 
 hesitate to make quite clear his own utter disbelief 
 in the modern attitude ; and he proceeds to set 
 forth, in intimate detail, two modern marriages 
 that begin bright with promise and are wrecked
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 117 
 
 simply because the wives insist upon trying to re- 
 model their husbands to suit their own ideas. 
 With one of these marriages, that of the village 
 innkeeper, it is not necessary to concern ourselves 
 here. However well done, it is none the less of 
 subordinate interest, part of the background and 
 stage setting of the other marriage, the real cen- 
 tral theme of the volume. Lizzie Denster is a 
 London barmaid who, tiring of city life, secures a 
 position at the principal tavern in a small Dart- 
 moor village, and promptly wins the hearts of the 
 two most desirable suitors in the neighborhood. 
 Charles Trevail is nephew of old Abraham Trevail, 
 owner of extensive quarries, an old miser, hot of 
 temper and foul of tongue, and above all a woman- 
 hater. Reynols Dunning, young Trevail's rival, 
 and some years his senior, is a man lacking in all 
 the outward refinements of dress and speech, the 
 little courtesies and attentions that appeal to 
 women ; but he is a man to be depended on, a 
 rugged, big-souled man whose joy in life would be 
 to guard and fight for the woman he loved. Inci- 
 dentally, he and old Abraham Trevail have had a 
 lifelong feud, and the latter has been heard to vow 
 that sooner or later he will kill his enemy. Be- 
 tween her two suitors Lizzie wavers. She knows 
 that she can control Trevail; he is weak, and his 
 obvious need of some one on whom to lean, some 
 one to uplift him, appeals to her. Dunning, on
 
 118 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 the other hand, she fears, because he is masterful ; 
 as his wife she never would be able to dominate 
 him. She docs not realize, Mr. Phillpotts tells us 
 parenthetically, that of the two tasks, it is far 
 harder to arouse a weak man than to soften and 
 subdue a masterful one. And because she does not 
 understand this, she makes her first big mistake and 
 marries young Trevail. Her second and more seri- 
 ous error lies in trying to goad her husband into 
 assuming a courage that he does not possess. Uncle 
 Abraham and she quarrel violently, and a day 
 comes when, in the heat of passion, he strikes her. 
 From this moment, her fixed purpose in life is to 
 bring about a breach that cannot be healed, to 
 force her husband to make clear to his uncle that 
 he rejects his aid during life and his money after 
 he is dead. And because she fails to gain her 
 point, because she is slowly forced to the convic- 
 tion that Charles has again failed her, that he is 
 constitutionally too great a coward ever to brave 
 his uncle, she leaves him at last and goes to the 
 house of Dunning, the masterful man, ready to re- 
 main with him if he will have her. Then follows 
 swift tragedy. Footsteps are heard approaching. 
 Lizzie, believing that her husband has tracked her 
 to Dunning's home, takes refuge in an upper room 
 and listens in dumb anguish to the faint sound of 
 voices below. Then follow other sounds, then 
 silence. When, after long suspense, she ventures
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 119 
 
 to creep down, she finds Dunning alone, stretched 
 upon the floor, with his head crushed in by a blow 
 dealt from behind. The rest of the volume deals 
 with the mystery of this murder, the way in which 
 suspicion fastens upon Charles, and the fixed con- 
 viction of Lizzie that the real murderer is Uncle 
 Abraham, and that if she persists she will at last 
 force his stubborn nature to the point of con- 
 fession. Eventually, the woman attains her ob- 
 ject, and saves her husband; but what Mr. Phill- 
 potts makes clear beyond all question is that, even 
 after she has done all this, the two cannot come 
 together again — that the union of the masterful 
 woman and the weak husband is fundamentally 
 wrong, and no amount of patching up will remedy 
 it. 
 
 Here, with this book, which two years ago 
 sounded a new note of promise, it is well to take 
 leave of Mr. Phillpotts. The subsequent volumes, 
 while they might afford congenial material for a 
 paragraph or more of comment that would be 
 neither eulogy nor reproach, neither add nor sub- 
 tract anything of importance from an estimate of 
 him as a whole. Mr. Phillpotts is not, to-day, a 
 vital force in the new fiction. He is a curious 
 blending of British tradition and of the realistic 
 movement of quarter of a century ago. His faults 
 are the faults of a big and lasting tradition — the 
 faults for which modern apologists are ever revert-
 
 120 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 ing to Fielding and Smollett and Scott, to Dick- 
 ens and Thackeray, for precedent and justifica- 
 tion. In construction lies his great weakness ; his 
 cardinal sins are a rambling looseness, an exas- 
 perating tendency to digress and allow subordinate 
 characters to usurp the center of the stage at their 
 own sweet will ; and, least pardonable of all, to 
 shirk his task, not once but over and over again, 
 and dodge the solution of some problem concerning 
 an immortal soul, by letting a foot stumble or a 
 finger slip, and precipitating a human carcass 
 down a sheer five hundred feet on to Dartmoor 
 granite. On the other hand, Mr. Phillpotts has a 
 few qualities that are admittedly rare in the school 
 of younger writers, any one of whom could give 
 him valuable points on the art of construction. He 
 has an amazing keenness of vision ; nothing in 
 physical life, not the quiver of a leaf nor the glint 
 of a ray of light escapes him. And he has some- 
 thing more important than this ; he has, developed 
 to a rare extent, that invaluable quality — I was 
 almost on the point of calling it the hall-mark — 
 of a good realist, namely, the gift of being abso- 
 lutely objective. And in this connection it is in- 
 teresting to quote briefly from a letter written by 
 Mr. Phillpotts himself and published not so very 
 long ago in the Bookman: 
 
 Serious modern novelists are engaged upon this 
 high business and have no time to think about them-
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 121 
 
 selves, or air their predilections, hobbies or opinions. 
 The men who paraded themselves, consciously and 
 unconsciously, were actuated by the old values, held 
 in check by religion, morality and a thousand 
 other conventional restrictions; but we feel that all 
 these things are only so many bars and hindrances 
 to that pure, scientific curiosity whose goal is the 
 stark truth of human nature. An absolutely imper- 
 sonal attitude is what we seek. A good surgeon in 
 the midst of a life or death operation has no time 
 to demonstrate or advertise. And we, who try to 
 make live men and women — for novel writing is a 
 life or death operation too — are similarly far too 
 concerned with the enormous difficulties to intrude our 
 own personalities or play showman. 
 
 It is this absolutely impersonal attitude which 
 constitutes Mr. Phillpotts's chief claim to recog- 
 nition in contemporary fiction. In certain other 
 respects, he is out of the current movement. Eng- 
 lish and American fiction both owe a debt to the 
 best of the French realists somewhat beyond Mr. 
 Phillpotts's personal debt to them, and the result 
 is that the net impression left by his works is that 
 of a relatively greater diffuseness, a lack of the 
 ruthless pruning of the Continental school, the in- 
 sistence on perfect form. None the less, Mr. Phill- 
 potts takes a high rank for his deep interest and 
 profound understanding of human nature and his 
 reverence for absolute truth to life.
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 This is not an auspicious time for adding to the 
 already over-abundant accumulation of critical 
 studies of Rudyard Kipling. On the one hand, it 
 is still too early to sum him up with an assured 
 finality ; and on the other, although we may still 
 hope that he has many a surprise yet in store, 
 many a unique product of his mature powers, the 
 fact remains that the day when one was compelled 
 to write of him exuberantly, in the sheer joy of 
 speculating on what his erratic and undisciplined 
 genius would do next, is a thing of the past. Con- 
 sequently, a chapter on Mr. Kipling at this time 
 and place has just one excuse; that he is too im- 
 posing a figure among contemporary English 
 story tellers to be omitted ; his inclusion will be 
 taken for granted. Yet, beyond some minor re- 
 adjustments, beyond attempting to point out a 
 safe mid-channel between the relative claims of the 
 earlier and the later Kipling, there is really very 
 little that is new to say about an author who has 
 intrenched himself in the hearts of the Anglo- 
 Saxon world more widely and more solidly than 
 any other writer since Dickens — who, more than 
 
 122
 
 RUDYARI) KIPLING
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 123 
 
 any other, has enriched the language of the people 
 with words and phrases that have become part of 
 our verbal medium of exchange, the legal tender 
 of our current speech. 
 
 A great deal has been idly written about the 
 " Decline of Kipling," about " Kipling at the 
 Crossroads," about the contrast between the old 
 Kipling and the new. The plain truth is that, ex- 
 cepting for a widened horizon, an awakened under- 
 standing, the author of Traffics and Discoveries 
 and of Rewards and Fairies is the same old Kip- 
 ling of Soldiers Three and Barrack-Room Ballads, 
 and that he is so because he has always been the 
 new Kipling, always doing the strange and unex- 
 pected, always refusing to be definitely labeled as 
 the story teller of India, the self-appointed lau- 
 reate of Tommy Atkins, the Anglo-Saxon Aesop. 
 There are some geniuses too big to run smoothly in 
 a beaten track. That Mr. Kipling has grown and 
 broadened with the passage of years needs no ar- 
 gument. To take the measure of that growth, 
 one has only to compare any one of the Depart- 
 mental Ditties with such a poem as " The Truce of 
 the Bear," or " The White Man's Burden." 
 
 It follows, quite naturally, that critics of the 
 academic sort feel driven to explain the source of 
 Mr. Kipling's wide appeal, to analyze his works 
 and prove by the careful logic of a proposition 
 from Euclid, wherein his greatness lies. They try
 
 124 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 to show that in his earliest as well as in his latest 
 writings we already have a man of fully developed 
 purpose, self-appointed spokesman of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race, champion of Imperialism, discipline, 
 law and order. Now, it is quite true that you can 
 go back as far as you please in Mr. Kipling's 
 writings, back even to those fugitive and inconse- 
 quential pieces collected in Abaft the Funnel, and 
 find in them many a germ idea which was destined 
 later to bear big fruit. But this you can do with 
 almost any man of Kipling's mental stature. To 
 take a single example, Zola's Lettres de Jeunesse 
 show in embryo almost every one of the ideas that 
 later became with him articles of faith, corner- 
 stones of his biggest achievements. But to claim 
 that Zola, as a raw collegian, had already fully 
 mapped out his Quatre Evangiles or that the 
 author of The Rescue of Pluffles had already for- 
 mulated his philosophy of life, is to utter nonsense. 
 Among the products of Mr. Kipling's mature 
 powers is a story which has with justice been much 
 admired, The Ship That Found Herself. It nar- 
 rates, you will remember, the first trans-Atlantic 
 voyage of the new ship Dimbula, and tells how from 
 the weighing of the anchor and the first turn of 
 the screw there began a clamor, an insistent babel 
 of voices, a discord of each and every part of the 
 ship, airing their grievances, blaming their neigh- 
 bors, the rivets complaining to the plates, the
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 125 
 
 shaft denouncing the propeller, one and all con- 
 sumed by an over-weening egotism. And then, fin- 
 ally, one day a new, deep voice booms out calmly 
 but commandingly, " What is all this noise 
 about? " And when the thousand plates and rivets, 
 planks and beams wonderingly chorus the question, 
 " Who are you? " the answer comes, " Why, I am 
 the ship Dimbula, of course, and I have never been 
 anything else, only I didn't quite know it — that, 
 and a good deal of a fool." Now, this story is 
 usually interpreted, and justly, as an inimitable 
 allegory of the awakening of civic consciousness in 
 a community, the realization of organized 
 strength. Yet it is equally legitimate to apply it 
 to an individual instead of a mob — even to apply 
 it to Mr. Kipling himself. From the beginning, 
 certain of his pet hobbies and aversions had been 
 insistently crying out in everything that he wrote, 
 vociferously clamoring to be heard, drowning each 
 other, working at cross purposes, not yet con- 
 scious that, taken together, they made up a rather 
 remarkable personality. And then, all of a sud- 
 den, Mr. Kipling seems one day to have awakened, 
 stretched himself and announced in calm surprise, 
 " Why, I am Rudyard Kipling, of course, and I 
 never have been anything else : — only I was not 
 precisely aware of it." 
 
 This way of looking at Mr. Kipling was forced 
 upon me recently as the result of having tried the
 
 126 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 experiment of rereading in wholesale quantities 
 all of his earlier volumes, Under the Deodars, 
 Mine Own People, The Phantom Rickshaw — re- 
 newing acquaintance with a large majority of these 
 stories after an interval of nearly a score of years. 
 The old glamour was still there, yet what im- 
 pressed me chiefly in thus going back to them was 
 a lack of unity, an absence of any common purpose, 
 a suggestion of experiments in a hundred different 
 directions, as of a man groping for his path. The 
 truth is that Mr. Kipling was cursed with a pre- 
 cocious talent, a marvelous facility which would 
 have been disastrous to a writer of smaller caliber. 
 Fate had played into his hands by giving him an 
 exotic setting of unrivaled brilliance, an oppor- 
 tunity for pyrotechnic bursts of verbal color, 
 through which we glimpse strange dramas and the 
 clash of alien races. He had, however, the natural 
 instinct of the story teller. He grew up in a land 
 where this instinct is bred in the bone, and where 
 many of the oldest tales of the world, which have 
 since migrated to every civilized country, were 
 first slowly wrought into shape, gathering perfec- 
 tion as they were passed down by word of mouth 
 through uncounted generations. How much of 
 this native gift of story-telling Mr. Kipling may 
 have unconsciously assimilated in boyhood it would 
 be interesting to know; at least, there is much of 
 the same laborious process of endless polishing
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 127 
 
 shown in the Jungle Books and the Just-So Stories. 
 But in his early years he did not always take time 
 to shape his stories ; they impress one, many of 
 them, as having largely written themselves. He 
 was often content to tell his stories in the first 
 person, not coming in directly as a participator, 
 but merely as a witness, recording certain events 
 glimpsed in passing, things which happened, in a 
 certain way, not because it was inevitable that 
 they should have happened that way, but just be- 
 cause they did so happen. Now, the bigger type 
 of story, the type which Mr. Kipling himself has 
 given us in abundance in his riper years, is that 
 which leaves the conviction that it was inevitable, 
 that it had to happen in a certain way, because the 
 people in it had such-and-such natures and were 
 therefore foreordained to act precisely so. In his 
 earlier stories he was inordinately fond of invoking 
 Fate to cut short a tangle, thus begging the main 
 question, but securing a touch of sensational 
 horror. Thus, in The Tertium Quid, a prospective 
 elopement is cut short, not by any deliberate ac- 
 tion on the part of the man and woman involved, 
 but by a catastrophe due to the breaking away of 
 a rain-washed embankment ; and the man makes no 
 answer to the woman's despairing cry, because he 
 is lying underneath his horse, nine hundred feet 
 below the cliff, " spoiling a patch of Indian 
 corn." And again, even in the fine artistry of
 
 128 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Without Benefit of Clergy, we realize, that, as a 
 protest against racial intermarriage, the argu- 
 ment is weakened by the form of death both of 
 mother and of child — because it is impossible to 
 hold the mixed marriage responsible for the fact 
 that an epidemic of fever and of cholera happen to 
 choose this particular woman and child among the 
 victims. 
 
 Perfect self-assurance sometimes covers a mul- 
 titude of sins ; and the assurance of Mr. Kipling 
 in those earlier days was nothing if not perfect. 
 He consistently assumed a studied pose, the pose 
 of the man for whom life contains no surprises, 
 the weary cynic who is quite sure that he knows 
 precisely what is wrong with the world and smiles 
 with the infinite superiority of vast experience over 
 the follies of potentates and of governments. He 
 was still separated by half a lifetime from the 
 mature Kipling who has learned to express a 
 deeper wisdom in stories fitted to the understand- 
 ing of little children. He had not quite yet out- 
 grown that bumptiousness of youth which thinks 
 to prove itself manly by professing a scorn of 
 young women. It is this feature, among others, no 
 doubt, which was so keenly felt by Henry James 
 when he wrote with one of his inimitable flashes of 
 comparison that Mr. Kipling's " extreme youth is 
 indeed what I may call his window-bar — the sup- 
 port on which he somewhat rowdily leans while he
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 129 
 
 looks down at the human scene with his pipe in his 
 teeth." 
 
 Yet, with all their shortcomings, their auda- 
 cious disregard of technique, which has made the 
 " splendid carelessness " of Mr. Kipling a favor- 
 ite phrase for critics to conjure with, those stories 
 caught the imagination of the public with a swift- 
 ness and a permanance almost without parallel. 
 People did not realize that even while they were 
 reading the rapid output of American and Eng- 
 lish reprints of earlier Indian volumes, the author 
 had already, in a measure, outgrown the mood 
 that begot them, that his eye was opening upon a 
 wider horizon. In literature as well as in life, no 
 man can serve two masters — no man with Kip- 
 ling's rugged sincerity and sledge-hammer earnest- 
 ness can keep one creed of politics, morals and 
 religion for his verse, and another for his prose. 
 It has never been adequately pointed out how 
 closely the dominant moods of Kipling's poems at 
 any epoch have found an echo in his other writ- 
 ings. " Mandalay," for instance, you will find al- 
 ready blocked out in the rough in Letters from 
 the East, down to the Burmah girl, and the che- 
 root, and the hathis piling teak. " The Truce of 
 the Bear " was the product of the same mind that 
 was brooding in Kim over the " great game " of 
 strategy played in India against the standing 
 menace to the northern frontier. And the Kip-
 
 130 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 ling of later years, absorbed in dreams of Anglo- 
 Saxon supremacy and voicing in dynamic verse 
 the pent-up popular opinions of a nation, could 
 not, if he would, keep these thoughts out of the 
 short stories which comprise his volume of 
 Traffics and Discoveries. That is why a reader, 
 here and there, who is not interested in the des- 
 tinies of England, or the shortcomings of her 
 army and navy, or the ethics of her struggle with 
 the Boers, but who did care very much for the pic- 
 turesqueness of Kipling's India, with its palm 
 trees and its sunshine and its dearth of the Ten 
 Commandments, not unnaturally lays down such a 
 volume as Traffics and Discoveries with a keen 
 sense of disillusion. 
 
 Nevertheless, when, in the fullness of time, the 
 life-work of Rudyard Kipling comes to be weighed 
 in the balance in its entirety, it is safe to predict 
 that the volumes which will necessarily receive a 
 detailed consideration, will not be Soldiers Three 
 nor Plain Tales from the Hills nor Barrack- 
 Room Ballads; they will be, if one may venture 
 upon what Mr. James calls the luxury of prophe- 
 sying — the Jungle Books, as a unique childhood 
 classic, Kim, as the author's highest attainment 
 in fiction, and The Five Nations, as an apotheosis 
 of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and a most interesting 
 human document into the bargain. Even in an 
 article on Mr. Kipling as a story teller, it is im-
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 131 
 
 possible to pass these poems over in silence, for 
 they form the key to so much of his later prose. 
 They stand as a sort of personal creed, a con- 
 fession of faith in the British Empire. Mr. Kip- 
 ling has an unfaltering belief in the divine right of 
 the Anglo-Saxon to inherit the earth, and in this 
 spirit he dedicated these poems to the " Five Free 
 Nations," the mother Island and the Colonies that 
 already encircle the globe. Probably no other 
 poet has so curiously blended the spirit of Impe- 
 rialism with such genuine democracy. It is not 
 merely the prerogative of the Anglo-Saxon — The 
 White Man par excellence — to overrun the four 
 quarters of the globe, sword in hand — it is his 
 duty, the " White Man's Burden," to conquer and 
 civilize perforce " the new-court, sullen peoples, 
 half-devil and half-child." No poet of Homeric 
 days ever sang the glories of war with more whole- 
 souled enthusiasm. The soldier's life is " the lord- 
 liest life on earth," and when he writes of it, if 
 only in a " Service Song," his very meter takes on a 
 martial spirit ; one hears, behind and through the 
 words, the sound of bugle calls, the tramp, tramp, 
 tramp of many men, the dominant note of fife and 
 drum that set the reader's blood tingling and his 
 feet to beating time with contagious enthusiasm 
 as he reads. 
 
 Peace, Mr. Kipling teaches, is to be had only at 
 the price of war ; army and navy are the bulwarks
 
 132 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 that the forefathers reared for England's protec- 
 tion, like the dikes that the Hollanders reared to 
 keep out the sea — they can be maintained only at 
 the price of eternal vigilance : 
 
 Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion 
 
 our shame ! 
 These are the dikes our fathers left, but we would 
 
 not look at the same. 
 Time and again were we warned of the dikes, time 
 
 and again we delayed; 
 Now, it may fall, we have slain our sons, as our 
 
 fathers we have betrayed. 
 
 And again, in " The Islanders," — that scathing 
 and it may be intemperate indictment of " flan- 
 neled fools " and " muddied oafs," — he reiterates 
 this same idea of neglected duty and trust be- 
 trayed. Civilization, he insists, 
 
 . . . was not made with the mountains, it is not one 
 
 with the deep, 
 Men, not gods, devised it, Men, not gods, must keep, 
 Men, not children, not servants, or kinsfolk called 
 
 from afar, 
 But each man born in the island broke to the matter 
 
 of war. 
 
 Yet, for all his imperialism, for all that he is the 
 self-constituted laureate of " The Five Free Na- 
 tions that are peers among their peers," — that he 
 hails the Commonwealth of Australia as the Young
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 133 
 
 Queen, and Canada as Our Lady of the Snows — 
 he is nevertheless at heart the poet of the barrack- 
 room still, in the best sense of the term — the poet 
 who sings the praises of the rank and file, in the 
 armies of peace as well as in the armies of war. 
 In the old days, it was " not a Duke nor Earl nor 
 yet a Viscount," whom he chose to sing; it was 
 plain Mr. Thomas Atkins. And still to-day, in 
 poems like " Pharaoh and the Serjeant," it is not 
 the "big, brass general," it is the neglected and 
 forgotten sergeant, " the man in khaki kit who can 
 handle men a bit, with his bedding labeled Sergeant 
 Whatsisname." From first to last, Mr. Kipling 
 has shown unmeasured scorn for bureaucracy, the 
 red tape of officialdom, the tinsel glitter of empty 
 titles. There is nothing more eminently healthy 
 in all his writings than the admirable sanity, the 
 unmistakable earnestness with which he recognizes 
 honest work, " the simple, sheer, sufficing, sane 
 result of labor spent," and gives credit where it 
 belongs, to 
 
 . . . the men who merely do the work 
 For which they draw the wage, — 
 
 Men like to gods that do the work 
 For which they draw the wage. 
 
 There are other poems which do not need to be 
 separately proclaimed — poems like " The Truce of 
 the Bear," "The Islanders," "The Lesson"—
 
 134 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 poems that are bound to be read and remembered 
 as long as the events that they commemorate, be- 
 cause they are not poems alone, but political pam- 
 phlets in verse, audacious indictments of existing 
 conditions, that passed from lip to lip with the 
 speed of wings and refused to be forgotten. In 
 spite of his verbal audacities, Mr. Kipling has at 
 heart always been something of an epicure in his 
 use of words. He appreciates, to a nicety, their 
 ultimate shade of meaning, he knows how to wring 
 from them their uttermost force and energy. 
 Rugged strength was what he wanted first of all 
 in these poems of big, vital, ethical problems — 
 and he obtained it with a simplicity of word and 
 phrase that one must marvel at while one reads. 
 Not that his later verse is altogether lacking in 
 his old-time verbal daring. Such a poem as " The 
 Sea and the Hills " is full of curious alliterations, 
 words forced into strange and unexpected partner- 
 ships, sonorous syllables following one another 
 with a rush and tumble and cumulative force of 
 many waves: 
 
 Who hath desired the Sea? The sight of salt water 
 
 unbounded — 
 The heave and the salt and the hurl and the crash 
 
 of the comber wind-hounded? 
 
 But for the most part the effective lines of the 
 later poems, the lines which linger and echo in the
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 135 
 
 memory are simple Anglo-Saxon lines, monosylla- 
 bic, almost prose. Some of them have already 
 passed into circulation, been added to the current 
 coin of English speech. Whatever may be thought 
 of the wisdom or the justice of such poems as 
 " The Lesson " or " The Islanders," there can be 
 nothing but admiration for the splendid audacity 
 which inspired them. 
 
 Just as it is impossible to read " The Truce of 
 the Bear " without thinking of Kim, in the same 
 way it is impossible to consider Kim apart from its 
 relation to the Jungle Books; for these two books 
 are bound together by such a logical sequence that 
 it is strange so little emphasis has even yet been 
 laid upon their obvious relation to each other. 
 Like his own British soldier in " Mandalay," Mr. 
 Kipling obviously felt, for many years, a lingering 
 nostalgia for the Orient : " If you've 'eard the 
 East a-callin', why, you won't 'eed nothin' else." 
 He industriously tried to heed other things, the 
 fishing banks of Newfoundland, the school-boy life 
 in England, the veldt and kopje of South Africa. 
 Yet all the while he was plainly haunted by a per- 
 sistent, yet elusive desire to write a book, a big 
 book, embodying the life of India as a whole, with 
 all its wonderful maze of conflicting beliefs and 
 superstitions and races and castes. 
 
 Every reader of Plain Tales from the Hills 
 must remember Wressley of the Foreign Office,
 
 136 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 poor Wressley who wrote a book on India, with his 
 heart and soul at the end of his pen, catching and 
 analyzing Rajahs, and "tracing them up into the 
 mists of Time and Beyond," for ten hours a day, 
 and in the end his book was a Book, because he 
 had put into it not only his vast special knowl- 
 edge, but, " a spirit, a poetry, an inwoven human 
 touch which are beyond all special knowledge." 
 Wressley did all this for the sake of " one frivolous 
 little girl," Tillie Venner. Do you happen to re- 
 member her summing up of the book? " Oh, your 
 book? It's all about those howwid wajahs. I 
 didn't understand it." 
 
 Now, when at last it came Mr. Kipling's turn to 
 write another book on India, it also proved to be 
 " a book which is a Book." It was written, if ever 
 any book was, with heart and soul and mind at the 
 end of his pen, and inspired with that all-seeing 
 comprehension that makes its pages luminous ; and 
 no sooner had it appeared than a certain class of 
 critics, like so many Tillie Venners, began to say, 
 under varied forms and twists of phrase, " Oh, 
 your book? It's all about rajahs, and babus, and 
 lamas, and we can't understand it." But here the 
 analogy ceases, for Tillie Venner not only hurt 
 Wressley, but was the moral death of him ; while 
 no amount of unfair criticism stayed Mr. Kipling 
 in his chosen course nor lessened the worth of 
 what is still his finest achievement.
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 137 
 
 The central thought which was destined eventu- 
 ally to beget Kim seems to have taken shape 
 slowly, and to have deterred, perhaps even over- 
 awed Mr. Kipling, by its magnitude. It seemed 
 at first too big ever to be embodied in a picture of 
 real life, and accordingly his first attempts at in- 
 terpreting it took the form of fable, just as the 
 Hindoos themselves, centuries ago, chose to em- 
 body their wisdom in the beast tales of the Hito- 
 padeca or the Katasaritsagara. To those who 
 read beneath the lines, the Jungle Books are far 
 more than a new childhood classic. They are the 
 life of modern India, told in allegory, and in Ka 
 and Bagheera and all the rest we have the types 
 of native life, with its stored-up wisdom of old, 
 primeval instincts, its childlike simplicity of out- 
 look upon the present-day world. The same con- 
 ception which gave us the Jungle Books took final 
 shape in Kim, and to those who enjoy such lit- 
 erary analysis I suggest the task of following out 
 the analogy between the animal personages in the 
 former and the chief actors in the latter book. 
 
 It is quite likely that Kim, this story of the 
 Little Friend of All the World, is not destined 
 ever to be popular in the broad sense in which 
 Without Benefit of Clergy and The Man Who 
 Would Be King are popular. It is too especial, 
 too profound, too esoteric. But those to whom it 
 appeals and who have come under its spell find
 
 138 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 some difficulty in speaking of it temperately. 
 There can be no question that India is there in its 
 pages — the whole of India as it is to-day, with all 
 its numberless and intricate substrata of mixed 
 faiths and languages and races, reaching back 
 through the uncounted years to the time when 
 those first and unknown Aryan pioneers pushed 
 their ways southward through the mountain passes 
 to find a resting place beside the waters of the 
 upper Indus. There is something of epic bigness 
 in the book, the comprehensiveness of view that 
 makes the petty things of life so small and yet 
 throws those minute details which really count into 
 such luminous relief. The India of Kipling is so 
 manifold that it is not easy to grasp. There is 
 the superficial Anglo-Indian side, with its social 
 functions and its Mrs. Hauksbees, and its " Res- 
 cues of Pluffles," and the like; there is the obvious 
 native life, with its sunshine and its palm trees 
 and its tinkly temple bells — the side to which the 
 Ortherises and the Mulvaneys get a good deal 
 nearer than all the Mrs. Hauksbees and Captain 
 Gadsbys ever do. Back of this, layer upon layer, 
 extends the personal, intimate, unrevealed life of 
 the Hindoo, the result of untold generations, the 
 sum total of instincts and traditions and stored- 
 up wisdom of past ages, the purport of which the 
 average Occidental mind can scarcely fathom. 
 And lastly, there is that stirring, vital side, the
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 139 
 
 secret conflict between East and West now going 
 on silently but surely — the Great Game, as Mr. 
 Kipling calls it — the game that is being played 
 night and day by the Anglo-Saxon secret service, 
 which stretches in a vast reticulation, like a 
 gigantic checkerboard, throughout the length and 
 breadth of the peninsula. 
 
 The way in which Mr. Kipling has chosen to set 
 this vast, complex picture before us is little less 
 than a stroke of genius. It was too big to be given 
 in its entirety ; so he has shown only a frag- 
 ment, a cross-section, as it were, seen through the 
 eyes of a boy, a poor little waif called Kim. It has 
 pleased some reviewers to compare Kim with the 
 little drummer boys in The Drums of the Fore- 
 and-Aft. Personally, I fail to see the resemblance. 
 Kim is, in spirit, a foster-brother of Mowgli, a sort 
 of missing link between the primitiveness of the 
 East and the civilization of the West. He is the 
 son of a certain Kimball O'Hara, one time Color 
 Sergeant of the Irish regiment known as the 
 Mavericks, who had married a nurse-maid in his 
 colonel's family, and after her death had gone the 
 pace and met the end of many another broken- 
 down white man in India. Kim had been adopted 
 by a half-caste woman in the bazaar of Lahore. 
 He had grown up, not merely a la grace de Dieu, 
 but under co-operative protection of several 
 hundred native gods, to all of whom he extended
 
 140 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 polite recognition, without standing in awe of any 
 of them. Kim's father had left papers which would 
 have gained him protection either from the regi- 
 ment, or from the Jadrogher or local masonic 
 lodge; but instead of using them, Kim wore these 
 papers in a leather amulet case around his neck, 
 and " carefully avoided missionaries and white men 
 of serious aspect, who asked who he was and what 
 he did." The whole story, to put it briefly, deals 
 with the manner in which this small boy of no ap- 
 parent account, who has the training of the 
 Oriental grafted upon the intelligence of the West, 
 is gradually prepared to become one of the cog- 
 wheels in that complicated mechanism which goes 
 to make up the Great Game. Of the details of the 
 story and the motley crowd of personages that 
 take part in it, this is hardly the place to speak. 
 They are figures which, taken out of their setting, 
 are unintelligible to the Western mind. Indeed, 
 the danger is that the best of them, even the old 
 Thibetan Lama, will not be understood beyond a 
 certain point. This venerable figure, from his far- 
 off lamasery in the mountains of Thibet, who has 
 come on his hopeless quest in search of a 
 sacred river, the river that gushed forth where 
 Buddha's arrow once fell, is a combination of 
 stored-up wisdom and child-like simplicity that is 
 likely to be wholly misunderstood by many a West- 
 ern reader. There is something about his vener-
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 141 
 
 able dignity that is reminiscent of certain passages 
 in King Lear. But one might go on indefinitely 
 speculating about the significance of this book and 
 of its separate characters. There can be no doubt 
 that as a whole it symbolizes the gulf which sep- 
 arates Orient and Occident. 
 
 To discuss in detail any other volume by Mr. 
 Kipling, after Kim, would be to indulge in an anti- 
 climax. There are some who find a special merit 
 in the mysticism of stories like Wireless and They; 
 there are others who exalt Puck of Pook's Hill to 
 the position of his crowning achievment — a posi- 
 tion which, if books could be supposed to have 
 feelings, would sadly embarrass it to live up to. 
 But if we forget for a moment the question of 
 relative greatness, and speak only of individual 
 preferences, then there are a score of titles that 
 clamor for a passing word. Personally, without 
 being blind to its numerous shortcomings, I must 
 confess that The Story of the Gadsbys is even yet 
 numbered among my minor literary vices. It is 
 crude, it is very young, yet it has its big moments 
 — that, for instance, in " The Tents of Kedar," 
 where Mrs. Hcrriott drops her light tone and says 
 tensely, " My God, Pip ! I was a good woman 
 once." Mr. Kipling must have shaken hands with 
 himself when he wrote that line. The Mulvaney 
 stories contain probably a large percentage of the 
 best of his early stories ; it is my own loss that,
 
 142 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 with the exception of The Courting of Dinah 
 Shadd, they leave me cold. The Mark of the Beast 
 and At the End of the Passage miss their goal, like 
 a spiritual seance after you know the trick — but 
 the atmosphere of the second of these stories, with 
 its heat and loneliness, of the kind that drives one 
 mad, is brutally real — it can hardly be read with- 
 out a sense of suffocation, and the burn of prickly 
 heat breaking out all over one. On the other 
 hand, Beyond the Pale, On the City Wall, Without 
 Benefit of Clergy, are among the great short 
 stories of the world. They bear the test of un- 
 counted re-readings, they wear well. 
 
 And side by side with them belong certain 
 stories of his mature period ; stories of widely dif- 
 ferent substance, the product of different influ- 
 ences, yet refusing to be ignored, even in the hasti- 
 est summary of his works. In this choice I find 
 myself passing over the stories which, in popular 
 estimation, are his most characteristic, the stories 
 born of his ability to see the poetry of mechanical 
 power. Undoubtedly, he has accomplished more 
 than one striking tour de force in this direction: 
 he stands alone in his ability to see the drama 
 latent in the motor car, the railway engine, the 
 rapid fire of modern armament. The red glow of a 
 furnace, the wild gyrations of a broken piston rod, 
 are to him as much a part of the vital, tingling life 
 of to-day as the flush on a woman's cheek or the
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 143 
 
 contortions of a man in his death agony. Through 
 most of his later stories he makes us hear the 
 throb of machinery, the hiss of escaping steam, the 
 mighty drone of huge propellers ; and, as a symbol 
 of the encroachment of materialism, our old 
 friends, the immortal Soldiers Three, give place 
 to one Pyecroft, a naval machinist, who weighs 
 and measures life in the language of the engine 
 room. 
 
 Many of these stories are curiosities of the pass- 
 ing hour. But there are others, in which mechan- 
 ics play little or no part, that have a far better 
 right, and better chance to live. There is, for in- 
 stance, a unique little bit of dialogue, Below the 
 Milldam, written somewhat in the mood of the 
 Jungle Books. Surely there is no other living 
 writer to whom it would have occurred to write a 
 pungent satire upon English conservatism and the 
 encroachment of modern thought, in the form of a 
 discussion between a Gray Cat, a Black Rat and 
 an ancient Mill Wheel, that creakingly drones out 
 whole pages of the Doomsday Book as it monot- 
 onously grinds forth its daily task. Then there 
 is An Habitation Enforced, written in a manner 
 reminiscent of Henry James, telling how a young 
 American couple who have gone abroad, seeking 
 for a quiet spot where the husband may heal his 
 shattered nerves and escape for the time from the 
 killing drive of American business, temporarily
 
 144 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 rent a beautiful old English estate, and little by 
 little find themselves taken possession of by the 
 place, by its traditions, by its delicious yet in- 
 tangible charm. It is a story which shows more 
 plainly than any other the distance that Mr. Kip- 
 ling has traveled since he wrote The Story of the 
 Gadsbys — it is the difference between youth's 
 scorn of marriage and of the safe prosperity of 
 country life, and the wisdom of middle age, that 
 sees the tranquil beauty of domesticity, the mellow 
 charm of an English landscape. 
 
 There is just one more story that refuses to be 
 passed over, for it has the double appeal of fault- 
 less technique and a haunting personality — Mrs. 
 Bathurst. A great deal has been said about the 
 incomprehensibility of this story, its downright 
 opacity. There are people of average intelligence 
 who will assure you that after reading it twice and 
 even three times, they can make nothing at all out 
 of it. As a matter of fact, there is nothing ob- 
 scure about what Mr. Kipling has seen fit to tell us 
 — only, as often happens in real life, we are not 
 privileged to hear more than a few disjointed, ran- 
 dom facts — " the rest is silence." What we do 
 hear is that Vickerey, a warrant officer, with a 
 wife living in England, met a certain Mrs. Bath- 
 urst, attractive and popular keeper of a public 
 bar in Auckland, much frequented by naval men. 
 What there was between Vickerey and Mrs. Bath-
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 145 
 
 urst, we are not told, but it is implied that " there 
 must have been a good deal." At all events, Vick- 
 erey leaves her, not knowing, we infer, the real 
 extent of her interest in him — perhaps, also, dog- 
 gedly determined to do his duty by the wife in 
 England. Then later, when his duties have taken 
 him to South Africa, he idly drifts, one day when 
 he has shore leave, into a cinematograph show; 
 and among the pictures is one showing a London 
 railway station, a train pulling in, coming to a 
 stop, the doors of the compartments opening, and 
 then suddenly, beyond the shadow of a merciful 
 doubt, Mrs. Bathurst stepping out, and coming 
 down the platform, looking straight ahead of her, 
 with the unforgotten " blindish look in her eyes." 
 What Vickerey feels is not recorded ; but just at 
 this time he has news that his wife is dead, and we 
 conclude that, whether right or wrong in his be- 
 lief, Vickerey believes that Mrs. Bathurst has fol- 
 lowed him to London, is perhaps even now on her 
 way to the Cape. Day after day, so long as it 
 remains in town, Vickerey haunts the cinemato- 
 graph, waiting dumbly, blindly, for the few brief 
 seconds when he may once more see Mrs. Bathurst 
 come down the platform, with the " blindish look 
 in her eyes." In the belief of his friends he is tem- 
 porarily out of his mind, and his Captain appar- 
 ently concurs in this verdict ; for after an official 
 interview, which is one of the things we are not
 
 146 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 permitted to overhear, he sends Vickerey up 
 country, to recuperate; then comes the news 
 that Vickerey has deserted, and mystery for 
 the time being swallows him up. Then, at the 
 end, another broken fragment of grisly import ; 
 far up the line of rails running northward 
 through newly opened country, a lightning-seared 
 tree, and beneath it two charred forms, literally 
 human charcoal, the one still upright, looking 
 down on " his mate." And some false teeth, and 
 a few tattooed letters, standing out whitish 
 against the black, complete the identification. 
 Now, the whole strength of this story lies in the 
 method of its telling. You hear it from the 
 lips of stolid, callous naval men, rude of speech, 
 coarse in their views of life in general and of 
 women in particular. And through the medium of 
 their very coarseness, their picturesque vulgarity, 
 their lack of finer perceptions, you get an impres- 
 sion of a tragic drama which no amount of finer 
 methods could have given. In its suggestion of 
 vague, unspeakable things, lying behind the writ- 
 ten words, lengthening vistas where the imagina- 
 tion may stray and lose itself, it stands as an ex- 
 ceptional tour de force, one of those few stories 
 that you cannot forget, even if you would. 
 
 It is because he can thus work magic with words, 
 because he has an unmatched genius for taking life 
 as a whole, with all its crudeness, its sordidness, its
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 147 
 
 materialism, and weaving it into pictures of haunt- 
 ing mystery and romance, that Mr. Kipling holds 
 among story tellers of to-day a prestige which 
 shall not soon be taken from him. But behind the 
 craft of the story teller, beyond the lure of the 
 unfolded tale, lies the potency of a personality, 
 the dynamic force of a mind that, right or wrong, 
 has an unshaken confidence in its own philosophy 
 of life.
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 On the question of popular judgment in art and 
 letters, Mr. Ruskin uttered very nearly the ulti- 
 mate word when he pointed out the illogic of ex- 
 pecting the opinions of a crowd to be correct, when 
 the opinions of any individual in that crowd were 
 more than likely to be wrong. Black is not made 
 white by calling it so, and the mere fact that a 
 mob of a thousand are simultaneously shouting 
 their mistake does not make it one shade the whiter 
 than a single voice would do. It follows that, 
 when an author of real artistic worth and delicacy 
 of style, after being consistently neglected by the 
 general public, suddenly receives the popular vote, 
 it is the part of wisdom to scrutinize his later work 
 with more than usual care and question seriously 
 whether he has not sacrificed some of his ideals. 
 A case in point is afforded by Mr. William J. 
 Locke, author of The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne 
 and The Beloved Vagabond, also — and there is a 
 sense of anti-climax in naming them — of Septimus 
 and Simon the Jester. 
 
 Let us ask briefly just what Mr. Locke stands 
 for in contemporary fiction, and what his own at- 
 
 148
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 149 
 
 titude is toward the craft of story-telling. To any 
 one asking these questions a few years ago, the 
 answer would have been that Mr. Locke did not 
 consider himself primarily a man of letters ; that 
 he was, on the contrary, known to the world 
 chiefly through his chosen profession of architec- 
 ture, and more especially through his post of 
 honor as Secretary of the Royal Institute of Brit- 
 ish Architects ; and that his novel-writing was 
 mainly a relaxation, an avenue of escape from the 
 daily routine, a method of enjoying indirectly a 
 certain blithe and irresponsible Bohemianism. But 
 as a matter of fact, no great number of people 
 were asking these questions a few years ago ; there 
 was no urgency on the part of the general public 
 to acquire information concerning Mr. Locke's 
 personality or literary methods ; one could search 
 the index of periodical literature in vain for any 
 special articles devoted to him. In England he 
 had a small but slowly augmenting circle of 
 readers. In America he had practically no fol- 
 
 jwing at all, and the reviews which greeted each 
 su<" essive book, while often cordially recognizing 
 t) dir peculiar quality, were apt to refer to him 
 
 aguely as " a certain W. J. Locke," as though 
 his name awakened no chord of memory in the 
 reviewer's mind. But presently a number of little 
 things happened, the cumulative force of which 
 must have caused considerable surprise to a per-
 
 150 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 son of so retiring a disposition as Mr. Locke. In 
 the first place, the experiment of building a play 
 from the Morals of Marcus resulted in a very big 
 London success, in spite of the fact that at the time 
 there was a feud between the actor-manager, Mr. 
 Arthur Bourchier, and the dramatic critics, in 
 consequence of which the play was practically ig- 
 nored by the daily press. Then came the Ameri- 
 can production of Marcus, followed by the dram- 
 atization of what is easily Mr. Locke's best 
 work, The Beloved Vagabond; then the sudden 
 awakening of the general public to the fact that 
 he was an author about whom they ought to 
 know something; and finally the serialization of 
 Mr. Locke's next novel, Septimus, in a popular 
 magazine of big circulation. That was, of course, 
 an immense difference between the modest succes 
 d'estime of former years and the new flamboyant 
 heralding with its award of crowded houses and 
 a place among the Six Best Selling Books. And 
 because all this is calculated to confuse one's 
 sense of relative values, it seems worth while to 
 try to forget, for the moment, these misleading 
 factors of popular success and to ask calmly and 
 judicially what Septimus really stands for in the 
 literary development of Mr. Locke and how the 
 workmanship of his later volumes compares with 
 that of his earlier. 
 
 There is, on the surface of it, something para-
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 151 
 
 doxical in the contrast between the quiet correct- 
 ness of the author's personality and the riotous 
 unconventionally of his themes. Among the many 
 utterances of Sir Marcus which one suspects to! 
 be the embodiment of Mr. Locke's own views, his 
 private philosophy of life, is the following sug- 
 gestive passage, which offers a key to the puzzle: 
 
 Hasn't a phase of the duality of our nature ever 
 struck you? We have a primary or everyday nature 
 — a thing of habit, tradition, circumstance; and we 
 also have a secondary nature which clamors for vari- 
 ous sensations and is quite contented with vicarious 
 gratification. There are delicately fibered novelists 
 who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by writ- 
 ing books whose pages reek with bloodshed. The most 
 placid, benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I 
 I know, a man who thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, 
 has a curious passion for crime and gratifies it by 
 turning his study into a musee macabre of murderers' 
 relics. In the same way predestined spinsters obtain 
 vicarious enjoyment of the tender passion by reading 
 highly colored love-stories. 
 
 There in a nutshell we have the secret source of 
 the delightful unconventionally of Mr. Locke's 
 stories, the charm of irresponsible Bohemianism 
 with which they were permeated. This quiet, cor- 
 rect gentleman of forty-nine years — he was born 
 in the Barbados, March 20, 1863 — this graduate
 
 152 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 of St. John's College, Cambridge, with special 
 honors in mathematics ; this dignified Secretary of 
 the Royal Institute of British Architects, has a 
 secondary nature which craves the varied sensa- 
 tion of the Vie de Boheme, and gratifies it vicar- 
 iously in his leisure hours by writing the annals of 
 more than one lovable and philosophic vagabond. 
 As has already been intimated, there are no Eng- 
 lish writers with whom Mr. Locke is closely re- 
 lated, in style, mood or subject-matter. He is 
 quite sui generis, an unimitative as he is inimitable. 
 A rebellious vein of romanticism, a love of the 
 quixotic, a tender chivalry, an indulgent irony: 
 these are some of the qualities possessed by his 
 most characteristic volumes. His deliciously irre- 
 sponsible vagaries, his whimsical tenderness, his 
 audacious disregard of the conventions of story- 
 writing, and not less than these his undeniable 
 quality of style entitle him to be recognized as one 
 of that small group who have a chance to outlive 
 that great host of ephemeral novelists who write 
 for the day and hour. He is not a master of fiction 
 in the sense in which we think of Maupassant and 
 Meredith and Henry James — masters equally of 
 technique and of the truth of life. Mr. Locke's 
 mastery is of an entirely different sort. His 
 power lies almost wholly in the personal equation, 
 the whimsical, extravagant, ironical conceptions 
 that he flings before us often in defiance of com-
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 153 
 
 mon sense and the laws of probability — now and 
 then almost crossing the border-line of caricature, 
 and yet kept curiously real by the very genuine 
 and whole-hearted understanding of human na- 
 ture that lies behind them. In the feeblest passages 
 of his earlier works, his romanticism sometimes be- 
 trayed him into lapses to which an unkind critic 
 might suggest a parallel from Ouida. In the best 
 pages of Marcus Ordeyne and The Beloved Vaga- 
 bond there is an intangible charm which finds its 
 kinship in French literature, rather than in Eng- 
 lish — that typically Gallic vein of satire and 
 humor which in one epoch and enviroment pro- 
 duced a Henry Murger, and in another an Ana- 
 tole France. Mr. Locke could never have created 
 a Sylvestre Bonnard or a M. Bergerat, but he 
 might have embodied their philosophy, their erudi- 
 tion, their love of letters in some one of the 
 patient and courageous denizens of that bohemia 
 which he haunts by proxy and which Murger him- 
 self once defined as " the antechamber to the 
 Academy, the hospital or the morgue." 
 
 With the appearance of The Beloved Vagabond, 
 Mr. Locke rounded out his first ten volumes ; and, 
 while these show a fairly steady advance in con- 
 structive ability, it may be said without fear of 
 contradiction, that if measured by his plots alone, 
 Mr. Locke would always be rated very much 
 below his real worth. It is curious to see, in his
 
 154 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 earlier volumes, what a mistaken importance he at- 
 tached to plot, how he tortured the law of prob- 
 abilities and racked his imagination for startling 
 and unheard-of situations. As a matter of fact, 
 the plot is the part for which the sympathetic 
 reader cares least in Mr. Locke's books. What 
 ultimately happens to his characters is a minor 
 consideration ; what they think and say and do 
 from day to day makes up the vital interest. And 
 one suspects that it is the same with Mr. Locke 
 himself as with his readers ; he loves his characters 
 less for what they achieve than for what they are. 
 He no longer troubles himself to seek for great 
 variety in plot. Like Marcel's famous painting 
 of " The Passage of the Red Sea," in La Vie de 
 Boheme, which underwent an annual metamor- 
 phosis into " The Passage of the Rubicon," " The 
 Passage of the Bersina," and finally " The Port of 
 Marseilles," the ground plans of several of Mr. 
 Locke's books prove to be clever variations on 
 one and the same air. You know the typical 
 Ouida plot, the mistaken generosity that makes a 
 man give up a title, a fortune and the woman he 
 loves, take upon himself the crime of another, and 
 disappear from the world that knew him into a 
 life of vagabondage and obscurity. Worked out 
 with Ouida's riotous melodrama, her ignorance of 
 life, her false ideals, we have Pascarel and Under 
 Two Flags. Substitute for her deficiencies a rare
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 155 
 
 sense of humor, a delicious philosophy of life, a 
 command of irony as dexterous as the rapier play 
 of a practised swordsman, and you get the meas- 
 ure that separates William John Locke from 
 Ouida. His heroes are often purposely, extrava- 
 gantly, incredibly quixotic. They go into exile 
 to shield a rival, as in Where Love Is, or to save 
 the heroine's father from bankruptcy, as in The 
 Beloved Vagabond. And the fact that the reader 
 accepts their most preposterous actions with 
 equanimity, and even with approval, is Mr. Locke's 
 sufficient justification. 
 
 The truth is that the plot is the thing about 
 which Mr. Locke, in his secret heart, has come to 
 care very little; it is a mere scaffolding on which 
 to erect a new structure of flashing epigrams, di- 
 verting paradoxes, absurdities veiling a wise 
 philosophy of life. But a thoughtful survey of his 
 books in the order of production shows at least 
 this : that he has steadily weaned himself away 
 from his first tendencies toward melodrama ; that 
 while one and all of his books are impossible when 
 measured by life's actualities, the later ones have 
 grown steadily more deliciously, refreshingly im- 
 possible with less and less of the ranting, bom- 
 bastic, Ouidaesque tone of his first efforts. Un- 
 doubtedly, the process of development culminated 
 in The Beloved Vagabond. If Mr. Locke is ever 
 to give us a better book, or even as good a book,
 
 156 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 he must do so by giving us something radically 
 different, and not a compound of the same ingre- 
 dients mixed according to the same receipt. And 
 a mixing of the same old ingredients, as we shall 
 presently see, is unfortunately a fair description 
 of the way in which he has compounded more than 
 one of his later volumes. 
 
 It is hardly worth while to survey in sequence 
 all of Mr. Locke's earlier volumes in order to see 
 the essential sameness of their structure ; it will be 
 sufficient to single out just two or three typical 
 samples such as Derelicts, Where Love Is and 
 Idols. Derelicts has one peculiarity: the hero, 
 Stephen Chiseley, actually committed the fraud — 
 or was it embezzlement? — for which he suffered a 
 term of years in prison. Upon his release, he finds 
 only one old friend who stands by him, a charm- 
 ing little lady, Yvonne Latour, a public singer of 
 some note, whose experiment in matrimony has 
 been so unfortunate that she cannot even feign 
 sorrow when the news comes from Paris that the 
 dissipated, absinthe-drinking French tenor who 
 was her husband is dead. Now, Chiseley has a 
 cousin, Everard, who is a dignitary of much im- 
 portance in the Church of England, a man whose 
 religion is of the pharisaic kind that teaches him 
 it is his duty to disown and have no dealings with 
 his erring relative. It happens, further, that this 
 austere canon falls captive to the charms of " little
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 157 
 
 brown Yvonne " and marries her ; and when sub- 
 sequently the disreputable French husband turns 
 out to be still living, the canon, with much heart- 
 felt reluctance, discards Yvonne and has himself 
 transferred to a charge in Australia or New Zea- 
 land, without making any provision for the woman 
 he had believed to be his wife. Luckily for her, at 
 the moment of her darkest trial, when a serious ill- 
 ness has robbed her of a livelihood by ruining her 
 voice permanently, Stephen drifts once more across 
 her path and these two human derelicts find mutual 
 comfort and support in a purely platonic fellow- 
 ship. And they never suspect it to be a basis for 
 deeper feeling until the day comes when the canon 
 returns to England to announce that the French- 
 man is at last really dead and that he is eager to 
 take Yvonne back and remarry her. And, of 
 course, this is precisely the one thing that he will 
 be unable to do, for she has outgrown him. Theft, 
 drunkenness, bigamy, woven into a tissue of gross 
 improbabilities — such is a fair summing up of a 
 representative volume of Mr. Locke's very early 
 work. 
 
 In Where Love Is we have one of the first of the 
 long series of delightful and eccentric Bohemians 
 that are Mr. Locke's special and inevitable crea- 
 tions. Jimmie Padgate, careless of dress and 
 speech, superbly indifferent to conventions, has the 
 misfortune to fall in love with Norma Hardacre,
 
 158 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 beautiful daughter of a worldly-minded mamma, 
 and duly drilled in her duty to marry advanta- 
 geously. So, when she crowns her mother's hopes 
 by accepting the financially eligible, but morally 
 unspeakable, Morland King, and certain disrepu- 
 table episodes in King's past life insist on coming 
 to light, Jimmie Padgate saves the situation by 
 assuming the responsibility of King's wild oats — 
 and incidentally receives a bullet from an angry 
 fanatic bent on avenging the honor of King's 
 victim, who had added self-murder to infanti- 
 cide. Such is the choice assortment of crimes 
 by the help of which Mr. Locke drives Jimmie Pad- 
 gate into exile, estranges all his friends, ruins his 
 chances of winning fame and fortune as an artist, 
 and reduces him to a garret and a crust — and, 
 what is more, a rather shabby garret and a pretty 
 dry crust. The novel really does not get any- 
 where ; but it does give Mr. Locke an opportunity 
 to indulge in some rather caustic irony regarding 
 the mutability of women ; because, after all, Norma 
 Hardacre finds herself unable to put Jimmie out 
 of her mind, and, much to the dismay of her fam- 
 ily, consents to share his garret and his crust, and 
 for a few brief hours raises Jimmie to the pinnacle 
 of bliss. But it happens that when, by appoint- 
 ment, she goes to join him in his much too aerial 
 studio, and enters, out of breath, to find it empty, 
 she is struck with the sordidness of it, the soiled
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 159 
 
 tablecloth, the fly-specked walls, the cracked and 
 grimy ceilings ; she realizes that she cannot face a 
 succession of days and weeks and months in such 
 surroundings. So she pens a hasty, conscience- 
 stricken note and flees incontinently. 
 
 Idols is easily the best example of Mr. Locke's 
 earlier period. It is first of all a study of a woman 
 who, having the opportunity to choose between two 
 men, the one sterling and the other dross, takes 
 the dross and spends bitter years in slowly learn- 
 ing her mistake. Yet, although Hugh Colman is 
 the man of sterling metal, he is human and he errs. 
 He foolishly contracts a secret marriage with the 
 daughter of a wealthy and influential Jew; and 
 when, too late, he goes to the father to make a 
 formal offer for her hand, he learns that the Jew's 
 opposition is immovable and that he has guarded 
 against such a marriage by disinheriting his 
 daughter in case of it. The two have a violent al- 
 tercation which is overheard by servants. Later 
 in the night Colman joins his wife surreptitiously 
 by means of a side window; and he is actually in 
 the house of his father-in-law at the very moment 
 when the old man is being murdered by another in- 
 truder. It is inevitable that suspicion should fall 
 upon Colman, and his arrest follows as a matter of 
 course. His urgent request to Minna, his Jewish 
 wife, to tell the truth and establish his alibi, is met 
 by her frantic refusal, her tearful insistence that
 
 160 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 he shall keep his promise of secrecy, because to 
 tell means to forfeit her inheritance. The court 
 scene is the big moment in the book. Irene Mer- 
 rian, the woman who has married the wrong man, 
 the woman who has worshiped idols, mistaking 
 them for gods, knows by intuition that Hugh Col- 
 man, her husband's best friend and her own, is in- 
 nocent ; she knows that her husband shares her be- 
 lief ; she sees, day by day, as she attends the trial, 
 how inexorable a network of condemnatory evi- 
 dence is gathering around him. So, when she her- 
 self is called to testify, she deliberately commits 
 perjury, publicly swearing away her own honor 
 and convincing the jury beyond a doubt that the 
 prisoner was not in the vicinity of the murdered 
 man. And when, crushed with the strain of the 
 ordeal, she leaves the court, sustained, neverthe- 
 less, by the sense of a duty performed and a friend 
 saved, she discovers that she has convinced one 
 more than she had intended. With the announce- 
 ment that her husband will at once bring suit for 
 divorce, the last of her idols crumbles into dust. 
 
 Whether you approve of Idols or not, the fact 
 remains that, up to the publication of The Morals 
 of Marcus Ordeyne, it remained Mr. Locke's high- 
 water mark in fiction. With this last-named book 
 we come quite suddenly to the period of Mr. 
 Locke's mature development. The Morals of Mar- 
 cus Ordeyne is the first of his books that fully de-
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 161 
 
 serves to be indorsed as refreshingly whimsical, 
 the sort of book that might have been written by 
 an Anglo-Saxon Anatole France in holiday mood. 
 Yet told in epitome, it sounds like a tissue of ab- 
 surdities. Marcus Ordeyne — Sir Marcus, to give 
 him his due — is a bookworm and a confirmed 
 bachelor, the hopeless sort of bachelor who oc- 
 casionally enjoys a couple of hours with some 
 child, because " the enjoyment is enhanced by the 
 feeling of utter thankfulness that he is not my 
 child, but somebody else's." The opening pages 
 are a deliciously frank portrayal of egotistical 
 content between his stolid English valet, Stenson, 
 his fat French cook, Antoinette, his one-eyed cat, 
 Polyphemus, his treasured cinquecento volumes 
 and his long-standing and vaguely defined rela- 
 tions with Judith, an intelligent and sympathetic 
 little lady living in " the purlieus of Tottenham 
 Court Road." And all of a sudden Sir Marcus's 
 carefully planned scheme of existence, even his 
 code of morals, is rudely shaken to its foundations 
 by a most unprecendented occurrence. Fate leads 
 him one day to the Thames Embankment, where 
 by rights nothing extraordinary should have hap- 
 pened to him, but where, as a matter of fact, he 
 encounters a strange young woman, a poor little 
 waif whose only knowledge of life has been gleaned 
 within the walls of an Eastern harem, and who is 
 now utterly dazed and terrified by the rush and
 
 162 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 whirl of the metropolis. When this strange ap- 
 parition in bizarre apparel appeals to him for 
 help, and tells an extraordinary tale to account 
 for her presence in London, it is the turn of Sir 
 Marcus to feel dazed. It is not a tale which in- 
 vites confidence, and Sir Marcus frankly disbe- 
 lieves it until he looks into her big, innocent eyes. 
 Then he capitulates. 
 
 I told her to give me time. One is not in the 
 habit of meeting abducted Lights of the Harem in 
 the Embankment Gardens, beneath the National Lib- 
 erty Club. It was, in fact, a bewildering occurrence. 
 I looked around me. Nothing seemed to have hap- 
 pened during the last ten minutes. A pale young 
 man on the next bench, whom I had noticed when 
 I entered, was reading a dirty pink newspaper. 
 Pigeons and sparrows hopped about unconcernedly. 
 On the file of cabs, just perceptible through the foli- 
 age, the cabmen lolled in listless attitudes. 
 
 And so on through a lengthy series of vivid 
 trivialities the author makes his stage setting so 
 real and his Sir Marcus so thoroughly human that 
 by sheer force of contrast he wins credence for 
 the young woman from the harem — and very 
 largely because, however extraordinary we find 
 her, we can never be any more astonished and be- 
 wildered by her peculiarities than is Sir Marcus 
 himself. The subsequent story, which is of the 
 kind that might easily be ruined by a clumsy touch,
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 163 
 
 and which in point of fact is delicately handled 
 almost to the last, pictures the serious havoc 
 wrought upon Sir Marcus after he has, out of 
 pure benevolence, installed this unsophisticated 
 and embarrassing young person in his bachelor 
 apartments. It seems a pity that a volume which 
 for the most part is written in a vein of indulgent 
 satire and tender humor should be marred by the 
 false touch of the harem girl's elopement with 
 another man. 
 
 With The Beloved Vagabond we come at last 
 into full sympathy with Mr. Locke's methods and 
 attitude toward life. In regard to his earlier 
 books the reader was apt to waste his energy in 
 trying to be sympathetic where Mr. Locke was se- 
 cretly derisive. But in this volume, which, quite 
 regardless of its ultimate worth, is without ques- 
 tion the biggest achievement of Mr. Locke's career, 
 reader and author are for the first time wholly in 
 accord. The truth is that no one really cares why 
 the Beloved Vagabond went into exile, why he be- 
 came a stranger to the life to which he was born 
 and dropped down to a shiftless, irresponsible 
 vagabondage. One is satisfied to know that the 
 metamorphosis was accomplished, for without it 
 we never should have had Berzelius Nibbidard 
 Paragot, slovenly and erudite, impecunious and 
 arrogant, disreputable and chivalrous, inherently 
 irresponsible and lovable always.
 
 164 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 But how is it possible, at second hand, to con- 
 vey an idea of the pervading charm of a book 
 whose very essence, like its title, involves a para- 
 dox — a book which forces us to find delight in the 
 very things which on all logical grounds of tradi- 
 tion and education and habit of thought should be 
 expected to disappoint and repel us? Paragot is 
 not merely a penniless wanderer, he is not merely 
 out-at-elbow, but he has lost much of the rudimen- 
 tary sense of decency. His hair is a stranger to the 
 barber, his hands are often in need not only of 
 manicuring, but of the more elementary attention 
 of soap and water; his predilection for absinthe 
 makes it a nightly problem whether he can find his 
 way unaided to bed. Nothing less than a tour de 
 force could make us not only overlook the short- 
 comings of such a hero, but love him in spite of 
 them — one might almost say love him the more on 
 account of them. If he were different from what 
 he is, he would cease to be the delightful, inim- 
 itable, big-hearted Paragot, sharing his poverty 
 with various stray waifs, male and female, that 
 come his way; accepting contentedly the chance 
 means of earning a meal that are offered from day 
 to day, whether it be fiddling at a village wedding 
 or weeding a market garden or aiding in the exca- 
 vations of the Roman Forum. And while we follow 
 him on his wanderings throughout the length and 
 breadth of Europe, with his two companions —
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 165 
 
 Asticot, the lad whom he adopts and who chronicles 
 his life for us, and Blanquette de Veau, the phe- 
 nomenally stupid and unattractive peasant girl, 
 who gives him the dumb devotion of an animal — 
 we lose sight of his failings and see him surrounded 
 by a halo of kindliness and chivalry ; in the midst 
 of his present sordidness we think of him in his 
 youth, the eager, handsome lover of the woman he 
 has lost, the woman with the petits pieds si adores. 
 At first we hope vaguely that the shadow will lift, 
 the mystery be cleared away, and Paragot be re- 
 stored to his rights, his fortune, the woman he 
 loves. But little by little, in proportion as it be- 
 comes clearer that this transformation sooner or 
 later is bound to take place, we grow apprehensive 
 for his sake, because the truth is borne in upon us 
 that the change will come too late — that he has 
 grown too accustomed to his vagabondage, too out 
 of touch with the conventions of life ever to find 
 happiness apart from Bohemia, even with the one 
 woman in the world. But our apprehension is mis- 
 placed; for when the crisis arises there is just one 
 course for a Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot to pur- 
 sue, and Mr. Locke with unerring instinct has 
 divined what that one thing would be. Nothing is 
 better in the whole extent of this rare and delight- 
 ful book than the unexpected and appropriate 
 whimsicality of its climax. 
 
 This brings us to Mr. Locke at the crossroads,
 
 166 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 with the alternative offered him of the commenda- 
 tion of the few on the one hand or the applause of 
 the multitude on the other. His first genuine suc- 
 cess, the sterling success of approval, by men of 
 his own class, by the aristocracy of letters, was 
 The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. He knew better 
 than to try to duplicate this success by anything 
 short of an absolute contrast. Two books more 
 dissimilar than Sir Marcus and The Beloved Vaga- 
 bond it would be hard to imagine. But at this 
 point Mr. Locke chose to change his policy and to 
 try deliberately to work over an old idea, as long 
 as it would give returns. As we have already seen, 
 Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot is a vagabond and 
 an exile, because he has taken upon his shoulders 
 the sins of some one else, some one closely related 
 to the woman he thought he loved, the woman with 
 the petits pieds si adores. And having assumed 
 this burden, he accepts with it all the consequences 
 it entails ; the necessity of playing the part con- 
 sistently before the eyes of the world, of cutting 
 himself off from all the old associations that had 
 formerly made up the joy of living; and, hardest 
 of all, silently accepting the scorn of the woman 
 who does not understand. And in the end, he 
 awakens to a knowledge that all the weary months 
 and years through which he has been mourning for 
 his lost happiness, a better and finer and more gen- 
 uine joy of life has been within easy arm's-length,
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 167 
 
 waiting for him to reach out and take it. This, in 
 brief, is the skeleton structure of The Beloved 
 Vagabond. And, like most skeleton structures, it 
 is of small value except for the flesh and blood 
 that it serves to sustain. For what Berzelius Nib- 
 bidard Paragot does is of infinitely less importance 
 than what Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot is. His 
 destiny is a diverting story, but his personality is 
 an abiding joy. 
 
 Now, with no intention of being unfair, the re- 
 viewer who attempts in like manner to epitomize 
 Septimus finds himself compelled by truth to do it 
 very much after this fashion ; to point out that 
 Septimus Ajax Dix, if not quite a vagabond and 
 exile, has at least cut himself off from his old 
 routine of life because he has taken upon his 
 shoulders the sins of some one else, some one 
 closely related to the woman he thinks he loves. 
 And having assumed this burden, he accepts with 
 it all the consequences it entails ; the necessity of 
 playing his part consistently, before the eyes of 
 the world, the necessity of cutting himself off 
 from certain old associations that had once made 
 up the joy of living; and hardest of all, silently 
 bearing the wondering contempt of the woman for 
 whom he has sacrificed himself, and who is in- 
 capable of understanding. And in the end, he 
 awakens to a knowledge that the weary months 
 through which he has bravely played his part have
 
 168 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 really been a blessing in disguise because they have 
 gradually been paving the way to a better and 
 finer and more genuine joy of life that has all the 
 time been within arm's-length, waiting only for 
 him to reach out and take it. Somehow, there 
 is a familiar ring about this. It almost sounds 
 like a twice-told tale. Of course, to those who dis- 
 sect plots with the elaborate care that a geologist 
 gives to the bones of a pterodactyl, it may seem a 
 vastly important point of difference that the sin- 
 ful relative of the lady aux chers petits pieds was 
 her bankrupt father, while in the case of the 
 woman whom Septimus Ajax Dix thought he loved 
 it happened to be a frail and erring sister. But 
 in either case, the articulation of the joints, the 
 action of the story, moves along in quite the same 
 fashion. The vital difference lies here: that in 
 The Beloved Vagabond we have a group of charac- 
 ters that refuse to be forgotten ; Asticot, Blan- 
 quette de Veau, the Vagabond himself, have taken 
 their places among those permanent friends in 
 the world of fiction without whom life would be just 
 so much the poorer. But in Septimus, however 
 much we may smile at the time, over whimsicalities 
 of speech and action, there is not a character for 
 whom we would feel a greater desire for another 
 meeting than for the fellow-travelers whom we 
 face for a brief ten minutes in a trolley car. Prob- 
 ably if we did meet them, we should not be aware of
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 169 
 
 it; but if ever we should meet Paragot, striding 
 joyously along some rural by-way of France, 
 even though he be no longer the Vagabond of old, 
 but Paragot, the reformed Benedict, the landed 
 proprietor, the father of a family, we should know 
 him on the instant and joyously hail him by name. 
 
 And in only slightly less measure this is also 
 true of The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. Less 
 human in its appeal, depending more upon little 
 flashes of irony than on the whimsical tenderness 
 that is Mr. Locke's most characteristic note, it 
 nevertheless leaves an impression that abides. 
 There is in it, more strongly than anywhere else, 
 a certain flavor that is more Gallic than British, 
 a sparkle that one must seek long to find in any 
 other English novelist of to-day. It bears well 
 the test of a second reading; not so well, to be 
 sure, as The Beloved Vagabond, but certainly 
 much better than such volumes as A White Dove, 
 Idols and Derelicts, — and emphatically better 
 than Septimus. 
 
 And the reason? Well, no one, not even the 
 author himself, can explain why one book has in 
 it the spark of genius and another has not. But 
 this at least can be said without fear of contra- 
 diction : that Septimus is curiously well adapted 
 to the purposes of a popular serial, and that 
 none of Mr. Locke's earlier volumes would have 
 been nearly so well suited to this purpose. And
 
 170 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 secondly, that if, for the sake of argument, we 
 should assume that Mr. Locke had set himself to 
 study over all of his other books ; to select from 
 them such incidents and situations, such epi- 
 grams and paradoxes as had apparently caught 
 the popular vote ; and then with deliberate in- 
 tention had built up a story that should embody 
 all of these popular qualities, we might have ex- 
 pected the resulting volume to be something not 
 greatly unlike Septimus. Not that Septimus is 
 undeserving of its popularity. On the contrary, 
 it is exactly the sort of book of which the crowd — 
 Mr. Ruskin's crowd — might be expected to 
 approve. 
 
 For the reasons above given there was good 
 reason to fear, on the evidence offered by Septi- 
 mus, that the peculiar vein of Mr. Locke's humor 
 was in danger of running out. Simon the Jester, 
 although by no means a book of importance, was 
 in a measure reassuring. And after all, when 
 one realizes the nature of Mr. Locke's literary 
 formula, it follows naturally that so long as 
 human nature exists there is no possibility of his 
 particular vein ever running dry. To word 
 it crudely, his trick seems to be to take life as 
 it is and then wilfully turn it topsy-turvy. He 
 peoples his mimic world with bizarre characters 
 verging on the grotesque, and then suddenly sur- 
 prises us by a sense of their kinship — the sheer
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 171 
 
 inborn humanity of them. " What do people 
 usually do, what do people usually think ? " He 
 seems all the time to be saying : " Well, my peo- 
 ple are going to do and to think not thus but far 
 otherwise. They shall do impossible, illogical 
 things ; they shall amaze and shock and irritate — 
 and nevertheless you shall love them in spite of 
 yourself, because in them you shall see the reflex 
 of your own hopes and fears ; your own strivings 
 and failures." 
 
 It would be venturesome to profess to analyze 
 the birth and origin of Simon the Jester. But 
 let us suppose, by way of illustration, that Mr. 
 Locke, in an idle hour, had been re-reading Pen- 
 dennis, that he had relished once again those won- 
 derful chapters recording the good Major's 
 manceuvers to rescue Pen from the wiles of Emily 
 Costigan. Supposing, as he closed the book, that 
 his inborn streak of perversity had flashed across 
 his mind the question, what would have happened 
 if the Major, after rescuing Pen, had himself 
 fallen victim to the charms of the Fotheringay? 
 Of course, the analogy must not be forced too far. 
 There is not one note in common between Mr. 
 Locke's group of characters and those of Thack- 
 eray, because his mind worked along an entirely 
 different groove. But the comparison serves to 
 illustrate his characteristic way of turning the 
 ordinary situations of life upside-down. Substi-
 
 172 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 tute for the punctilious and dignified Major a 
 man whom fate has picked out as a victim of its 
 grimmest humor — a man snatched from a proud 
 eminence of statesmanship and confronted with 
 the fact that a painful malady gives him less than 
 six months of remaining life. Substitute for the 
 placid and rather bovine Emily a wonderful, mag- 
 netic creature of slumbrous fire; a famous trainer 
 and exhibitor of wild beasts, with the lithe grace 
 of a panther in all her movements, and the yellow 
 glow of a cat's eyes in her glance. Substitute for 
 little Bows the equally devoted and far more gro- 
 tesque figure of a Greek dwarf rejoicing in the 
 name of Anastasius Papadopoulos, with his com- 
 pany of trained cats, his extraordinary jargon of 
 modern languages and his homicidal mania, riot- 
 ing through the book like a figure taken straight 
 out of an Offenbach libretto — and you have a fair 
 idea of the structure and material of Simon the 
 Jester. 
 
 To turn from the relative mediocrity of these 
 last two volumes to The Glory of Clementina, 
 which followed them rather closely in point of 
 of time, is to experience a genuine and unexpected 
 pleasure — and also to feel the comforting assur- 
 ance that, even if Mr. Locke's talent has in a meas- 
 ure been commercialized, he has his hours of inde- 
 pendence. Despite its title, The Glory of Clem- 
 entina is quite as much the story of a man as of a
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 173 
 
 woman ; and both the man and the woman have 
 reached that point in life which thoughtless young 
 people are apt to regard as middle age, but which 
 nevertheless still has many of the best years ahead 
 of it. The man is in certain respects a twentieth 
 century Job — the credit of this comparison is due, 
 not to the reviewer, but to Mr. Locke himself — 
 like Job, he has always prospered abundantly ; the 
 good things of life have come to him without effort, 
 and no disappointment or deception has ever 
 shaken his child-like faith in the fundamental kind- 
 liness and honesty of his fellow-men. At the open- 
 ing of the story he is a widower of some years' 
 standing and the nominal senior partner in an 
 old and highly respected law firm, the practical 
 management of which he has for years entrusted 
 to the junior member of the firm. His own time 
 is pleasantly filled in with archeological pur- 
 suits ; and a newly received case of flint arrow- 
 heads or some fragments of a cave-dweller's skull 
 afford him the keenest enjoyment that his placid 
 life has known. All of a sudden, as in the case 
 of Job, the even tenor of his life is interrupted. 
 His junior partner absconds, leaving a mountain 
 of debts, a stain of dishonor upon the old firm 
 name, and an unpleasant question whether he him- 
 self has not been guilty of criminal negligence. 
 The ungentle treatment that he receives in the 
 course of the inevitable prosecution that follows,
 
 174 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 the caustic personalities indulged in by the public 
 press, the cold reception that he meets from for- 
 mer friends, all play their part in undermining his 
 faith in human nature; and when, close upon the 
 heels of these misfortunes, there comes, first, the 
 news that a rich old uncle had disinherited him ; 
 and, secondly, the discovery of a letter which con- 
 vinces him of the faithlessness of the dead wife 
 around whose memory he has built a sort of shrine, 
 the critical point is reached, and a series of explo- 
 sions of considerable violence are bound to fol- 
 low. On the other hand, we have in Clementina 
 a woman whose illusions all died in early youth. 
 She has gone through the years which followed, 
 with no expectation of happiness, no belief that 
 the world has anything in store for her, excepting 
 such material gain as she can wrest from it with 
 the work of her own hands. By profession she is 
 a portrait painter, and is already recognized as 
 one of the most able and most popular artists in 
 all London. She can command her own price; 
 she has means to live where and how she pleases, 
 to robe herself regally, to be an important factor 
 in the social world. But she chooses, instead, to 
 remain in her old Bohemian surroundings, to wear 
 shabby, out-of-date clothes, to twist her hair into 
 any sort of a coil that will take the least possible 
 trouble, and altogether allow herself to grow old 
 before her time. These two human beings, the
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 175 
 
 man in whom pessimism is a newborn and abnormal 
 trait, and the woman who for half her life has not 
 known what it is to trust her fellow-men, are 
 thrown together by Mr. Locke, through a series of 
 characteristically whimsical associations, skilfully 
 calculated to bring to the surface whatever latent 
 tenderness may still be lurking in each of them ; 
 and any one familiar with Mr. Locke's methods 
 may make a fairly accurate guess as to the final 
 outcome. One cannot, however, resist the impulse 
 to add just this one last word: namely, that al- 
 though many another writer has depicted the re- 
 juvenating power of love, no one has ever done it 
 in a bolder or more brilliantly spectacular man- 
 ner than that of Mr. Locke, in the chapter show- 
 ing us Clementina in all her glory, presiding at a 
 banquet especially designed to enhance her own 
 charms and throw her one and only rival everlast- 
 ingly into the shade. 
 
 This is a propitious moment at which to take 
 temporary leave of Mr. Locke. With Septimus 
 he came to the parting of the ways, and quite ob- 
 viously took the wrong turning. It looks now as 
 though he had discovered his mistake in time and 
 had made haste to retrace his steps and get his feet 
 once more planted firmly on his one sure path. 
 An indulgent irony, a kindly and sympathetic un- 
 derstanding of the foibles and follies of his 
 brother men and sister women is the underlying
 
 176 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 note of all his books, the best and the worst alike. 
 " When the soul laughs, tears come into the eyes," 
 says Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot; and it is with 
 this same paradoxical mingling of emotions, with 
 a mist before the eyes and laughter in the soul, 
 that one reads the best pages of William John 
 Locke.

 
 JOHX GALSWORTHY
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 The obvious facts about Mr. John Galsworthy's 
 position in literature at the present hour may be 
 briefly summed up as follows : He is still, com- 
 paratively speaking, a young man, being yet in 
 the early forties ; he has produced six novels and a 
 couple of volumes of brief sketches which have 
 received much discriminating praise, and little, if 
 any, serious censure ; he has produced several 
 plays which have met with cordial approval on 
 both sides of the Atlantic ; and he has been hailed 
 in England as one of the foremost apostles of the 
 new school of fiction. It is interesting to inquire 
 to what extent this flatteringly high valuation is 
 deserved. 
 
 There are almost as many ways of measuring 
 the worth of a novel as there are critics. Yet, 
 whatever standard of criticism we may adopt, the 
 fact remains that at least three factors are essen- 
 tial to the production of fiction: First, the au- 
 thor's ability to see life as it is ; secondly, his pos- 
 session of certain definite ideas about what he 
 sees ; and lastly, a mastery of the technique requi- 
 site to convert these ideas into a piece of finished 
 
 177
 
 178 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 artistry. In other words, the importance of any 
 novelist may be fairly well determined by inquiring 
 as to his methods, his material and his philosophy 
 of life. Let us consider these three questions in 
 their relation to Mr. Galsworthy. 
 
 In the first place, it may be conceded that the 
 author of Fraternity has come to be a craftsman 
 of high order. His work, even that of his earlier 
 period in which the apprentice touch is still per- 
 ceptible, conveys an impression of unity, of ab- 
 solute singleness of purpose and of mood. He 
 seems to have known by instinct, from the begin- 
 ning, certain principles of good construction 
 which many another novelist of importance has 
 acquired slowly and gropingly, or perhaps has 
 never acquired at all. He has an admirable 
 sense of proportion; he never wastes time or 
 space on minor characters or unessential descrip- 
 tions. He possesses, beyond any other English 
 novelist of the younger generation, that invaluable 
 gift of making every little detail of character, 
 every separate brush-stroke of his minutely care- 
 ful backgrounds convey something essential to our 
 comprehension of his story as a whole. As an 
 observant critic recently pointed out in the West- 
 minster Review, Mr. Galsworthy shares with Dick- 
 ens a tendency to personify inanimate objects, to 
 describe, for instance, the physiognomy of a house, 
 as though it were possessed of human features —
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 179 
 
 but with this vital difference, that Dickens care- 
 lessly threw off such descriptions through a 
 whimsical love of them for their own sake, while 
 behind the similar passages in Mr. Galsworthy's 
 writings there always lies a definite purpose, the 
 purpose of showing how man and his environment 
 react upon each other — how, for instance, the 
 personality of a certain house reveals in a curi- 
 ously intimate way the character of its occupants. 
 Furthermore, Mr. Galsworthy started, not only 
 with a certain intuitive knowledge of technique, 
 but with what is still more valuable, an unusual 
 power of self-criticism. His published volumes, 
 taken in chronological order, disclose most sig- 
 nificantly his aptitude for learning, his ability to 
 see the weak points in his structure and to avoid 
 them in subsequent productions. Considered 
 purely from the point of technique, each novel 
 shows a successive forward stride, a realization 
 that such-and-such an error must not be commit- 
 ted again. Villa Rabein, published as early as 
 1900, is in this connection a negligible quantity; 
 it is a pleasant little story of a love match which 
 arouses family opposition because the man in 
 question is not merely a struggling painter, but 
 something of an anarchist besides. The handling 
 of the plot is adequate enough, considered as a 
 first attempt; yet the book contains scarcely a 
 hint of the really big and serious work which was
 
 180 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 to come later from the same hand. The Island 
 Pharisees, which followed after an interval of 
 four years, brought Mr. Galsworthy for the first 
 time into prominence and revealed his character- 
 istic outlook upon life. As is generally admitted, 
 it is, in point of construction, the weakest of all 
 his stories, the one with the thinnest plot. It is 
 merely the chronicle of the experiences of a man 
 who, because he has grown disgusted with the 
 smug self-complacency of the particular social 
 environment to which he was born, tries to escape 
 from it, and to this end moves successively through 
 the various other social circles of modern British 
 life ; and everywhere, in the higher strata, equally 
 with the lower, he encounters practically the same 
 smugness, the same Pharisaical thanking of God. 
 With all its structural weakness, The Island 
 Pharisees was a book that loomed up rather large 
 above the average shallowness of current fiction. 
 Yet Mr. Galsworthy learned from it the profitable 
 lesson that a picaresque string of episodes, with 
 a constant procession of new scenes and new peo- 
 ple, even when bound together by an unmistakable 
 singleness of purpose, falls short of the higher 
 standard of good construction. At all events, in 
 his following volume, The Man of Property, he 
 once and for all abandoned the picaresque method. 
 In spite of a certain rather formidable bulkiness 
 and an almost too obtrusive purpose, The Man
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 181 
 
 of Property is a strong candidate for first place 
 among Mr. Galsworthy's published novels. At 
 least, it is the one which most persistently refuses 
 to be forgotten, and for that reason demands a 
 somewhat extended consideration when we come 
 to take up his separate volumes. It is the chroni- 
 cle of an English family of the stolid upper mid- 
 dle class, a family whose numerous ramifications 
 leave the reader almost dizzy with their com- 
 plexity. It is as though Zola's Rougon-Macquart 
 cycle were condensed within the limits of a single 
 volume. No one can say that the task is not skil- 
 fully performed ; the intricate interlacings and 
 crossings of all these varied family interests are as 
 elaborately and as finely patterned as a piece of 
 hand-made lace — but, like fine lace, they need the 
 eye of a connoisseur to appreciate them. We all 
 know that in certain books, as in real life, it is im- 
 possible to see the woods because of the trees ; but 
 it does not help us to see clearly, if an author 
 takes, as Mr. Galsworthy has done, just one single 
 family tree, and then envelops us in the impene- 
 trable tangle of its prolific leafage. The Man of 
 Property taught Mr. Galsworthy two important 
 truths : first, that economy of means demands that 
 a novelist shall strive for a maximum of effect 
 with a minimum of characters ; and secondly, that 
 however keenly and vitally a novelist may be in- 
 terested in the doctrine that he advocates, he must
 
 182 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 not let it become more important to him than his 
 art, or he will inevitably tend more and more 
 towards writing sermons, instead of novels. 
 
 The Country House, which is admittedly the 
 most generally popular of all Mr. Galsworthy's 
 novels, represents his first attempt at strictly 
 economical construction, his first rigorous elimi- 
 nation of all incidents and characters not structur- 
 ally essential. It is a human drama concerning 
 just one small group of men and women, yet in- 
 volving principles of wide ethical import; the 
 stage setting is limited for the most part to the 
 happenings within the house and grounds of one 
 county family ; while the actual duration of time 
 in which the action takes place shows a similar 
 praiseworthy self-restraint. Having tested his 
 strength in the matter of close construction on a 
 comparatively modest theme — for The Country 
 House is essentially of lesser magnitude than its 
 predecessors — he now felt himself ready to at- 
 tempt what still remains his most ambitious effort, 
 Fraternity. Here is a book with a world-wide 
 theme, the Brotherhood of Man ; all London, with 
 its social pageantry, its jostling throngs, its teem- 
 ing, reeking slums, is mirrored back with an effect 
 of motley, crowded human life, a sense of sheer 
 weight of numbers, of humanity in the bulk, such 
 as very few other novelists have succeeded in giv- 
 ing within similar limits. For, when you analyze
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 183 
 
 it, this huge epic drama of modern British life re- 
 solves itself down to just fourteen characters 
 with what we may call speaking parts. It fur- 
 nishes an example of economy of construction 
 that closely approaches a sort of literary leger- 
 demain. 
 
 Passing over, for the moment, The Patrician, 
 which offers nothing salient in point of construc- 
 tion, we may take up the second of our three ques- 
 tions, namely, the nature of Mr. Galsworth's ma- 
 terial. In spite of his breadth of outlook upon life, 
 the substance of Mr. Galworthy's novels offers a 
 rather surprising sameness. The keynote first 
 struck in The Island PJiarisees, is the keynote of 
 each successive volume. British stolidity, British 
 insularity, British conservatism, the unvarying 
 fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of indi- 
 vidual needs and cravings to caste and precedent 
 and public opinion ; these are the themes which 
 Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with a 
 mordant irony. Usually, it is the solid upper mid- 
 dle class, the class that represents property, vested 
 interests, capital gained in trade or in clever specu- 
 lation in land. If The Man of Property were as 
 good a piece of work technically as it is ethically, 
 it would easily stand at the head of its author's 
 achievement. Nowhere else has he given us, with 
 such sustained and sardonic irony, a picture of 
 the monumental complacency of the man of money,
 
 184 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 blindly believing in his own supreme importance, 
 living in a narrow little world of his own making, 
 and unaware that there is anything higher in life 
 than the treadmill of his own daily routine, the 
 sum of his yearly dividends, the quality and vin- 
 tage of his nightly bottle. The Man of Property 
 is one of those complex, crowded books that cannot 
 be mentally assimilated at the first reading. Al- 
 though this is in a measure a fault, tending to 
 limit Mr. Galsworthy's audience, yet there is a 
 certain sophisticated enjoyment in the cumulative 
 effect of a second reading, the discovery of little 
 subtleties previously overlooked, mannerisms of 
 phrase and action which it is impossible to forget. 
 When the volume first appeared, at least one en- 
 thusiastic reviewer compared the pleasure he de- 
 rived from it to that of tasting rare and priceless 
 wine — and the praise was justified, both in its 
 generosity and in the implied limitation that, in 
 order to appreciate the volume, one must have 
 the trained palate of the literary connoisseur. To 
 many readers it gives an impression of dullness ; a 
 conscious effort is required to keep in mind the 
 many brothers and sisters, the aunts and uncles 
 and cousins who make up the doughty clan of 
 Forsytes — for, with just one exception, the 
 scheme of the book admits of no interloper from 
 outside the immediate family connections. Un- 
 deniably this in itself is an achievement of some
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 185 
 
 magnitude — this faithful portraiture of an entire 
 family group, so vividly and minutely differen- 
 tiated that we are conscious, at one and the same 
 time, of the strong family likeness and the equally 
 strong, one is tempted to say aggressive, individu- 
 ality of every one of its score or more members. 
 But Mr. Galsworthy is doing something a good 
 deal bigger than painting family portraits. That 
 the Forsytes, as the name implies, are symbolic of 
 the great conservative class in England, would be 
 self-evident, even if the author had not taken the 
 pains, through the lips of one of his characters, 
 Young Jolyon, to tell us quite precisely what a 
 Forsyte stands for. Young Jolyon, the one black 
 sheep of the family, the one who has belied the tra- 
 ditions of his house, by deserting his wife and 
 child and disappearing from social circles in com- 
 pany with a young woman of no importance, save 
 for the fact that he happened to love her and she 
 him — Young Jolyon, in after years, chances to 
 meet Bosinney, the gifted but penniless interloper 
 whom June Forsyte, Young Jolyon's daughter, is 
 soon to marry. The conversation turns, not un- 
 naturally, upon the peculiarities of the family 
 which Bosinney is about to enter: 
 
 " You talk about them," said Bosinney, " as if they 
 were half England." 
 
 " They are," retorted Young Jolyon, " half Eng-
 
 186 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 land, and the better half, too, the safe half, the three 
 per cent, half, the half that counts. It's their wealth 
 and security that makes everything possible; makes 
 your art possible, makes literature, science, even reli- 
 gion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none 
 of these things, but turn them all to use, where should 
 we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, 
 the commercials, the pillars of society, the cornerstones 
 of convention, everything that is admirable ! " 
 
 '" I don't know whether I catch your drift," said 
 Bosinney, " but I fancy there are plenty of Forsytes, 
 as you call them, in my profession." 
 
 " Certainly," replied Young Jolyon, " the great 
 majority of architects, painters or writers have no 
 principles, like any other Forsytes. Art, literature, 
 religion, survive by virtue of the few cranks who 
 really believe in such things, and the many Forsytes 
 who make a commercial use of them. At a low esti- 
 mate, three-fourths of our Royal Academicians are 
 Forsytes, seven-eighths of our novelists, a large pro- 
 portion of our press. Of science I won't speak. 
 They are magnificently represented in religion; in 
 the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than 
 anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I 
 am not laughing: it is dangerous to go against a ma- 
 jority, — and what a majority! " 
 
 Such, in Mr. Galsworthy's own phrasing, is the 
 symbolic meaning underlying the specific story of 
 Soames Forsyte, the Man of Property. Young 
 Jolyon is not laughing, neither is Mr. Galsworthy
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 187 
 
 — he is simply setting forth existing conditions as 
 he sees them, underscoring them here and there 
 a little grimly, yet, like the conscientious realist 
 that he is, leaving us to make what we will of 
 them. But whatever we do make of them — 
 whether we think them the backbone of society or 
 the chief drag upon the world's advance — he is 
 right in holding that there is no room for laughter. 
 They are too formidable. With their cumulative 
 weight of safe investments, their impregnable bul- 
 warks of landed property, they stand as exponents 
 of the great physical law of inertia, the force that 
 maintains the established order. Mr. Gals- 
 worthy's specific story concerns a crisis in the 
 House of Forsyte which shook its defenses but 
 failed to break them down. In the opening 
 chapter, we witness one of its rare family reunions, 
 such as mark the solemn occasions of birth, mar- 
 riage and death — for the Forsytes, while show- 
 ing a solid phalanx against the world at large, are 
 individually too self-centered, too fixed in their own 
 narrow orbits, to herd together without serious 
 motives. The purpose of the gathering in ques- 
 tion is to ratify, although grudgingly, June For- 
 syte's revolutionary act of engaging herself to an 
 impecunious, Bohemian architect, a " half-tamed 
 leopard," who is either ignorant or disdainful of 
 the smaller social conventions, and has actually 
 been guilty of paying a formal call upon June's
 
 188 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 maiden aunts arrayed in a strange, outlandish 
 slouch hat, redolent of the Latin Quarter. The 
 way in which this interloper reacts upon the clan 
 of Forsytes, who receive him with what grace they 
 can muster, is in itself good comedy, of the sort, 
 one likes to think, that might have won from the 
 author of Vanity Fair the indulgent approval of a 
 kindred spirit. 
 
 But the structural importance of this open- 
 ing scene is that it introduces Bosinney the 
 Bohemian to Soames Forsyte the Man of Prop- 
 erty and to his beautiful and secretly disillusioned 
 wife, Irene. In his stolid security of possession, 
 Soames has not a glimmer of suspicion of his wife's 
 growing physical aversion. Having at last, on 
 the threshold of middle age, found a woman whom 
 he wished to marry, he has won her, just as 
 throughout his life he has always won the things he 
 coveted, by slow, indomitable persistence. And, 
 after acquisition, it never once occurs to his monu- 
 mental self-complacence that her love has not 
 necessarily been included in the bargain. Up to 
 the meeting with Bosinney, his rights of possession 
 have suffered no encroachment. But shortly after- 
 wards, Soames makes a series of miscalculations, 
 due to the fact that he is dealing with tempera- 
 mental people, devoid of a fitting reverence for 
 property. He sees vaguely that something is 
 wrong with Irene ; he thinks that she needs a
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 189 
 
 change of scene and a new interest in life. A 
 country house and the novelty of planning and 
 building it seem to offer the required solution. 
 Furthermore, it will give Bosinney just the open- 
 ing that he needs, it will launch him upon a mount- 
 ing tide of prosperity ; it will please June, of 
 whom he is really fond, it will allow him to pose 
 as a benefactor, a patron of art — and, inciden- 
 tally, he expects to get Bosinney's services at bar- 
 gain rates in return for his condescension in em- 
 ploying him. 
 
 But matters work out far otherwise. Bos- 
 inney, instead of being grateful, seems to think 
 that it is he who is bestowing a favor ; he refuses to 
 brook any interference, the cost of the new house 
 augments day by day, and the result is, not an 
 open breach, a manly agreement to disagree and 
 end the contract, but a series of petty bickerings 
 and temporary truces. And all the while, June 
 sees her lover slowly slipping from her, and Bos- 
 inney and Irene find themselves gliding downgrade 
 at a momentum that has escaped their control. 
 Then comes the day when Soames's tardy jealousy 
 is awakened, and he retaliates in a way eminently 
 characteristic of a Man of Property: he sues 
 Bosinney for breach of contract for having ex- 
 ceeded the specified estimates. What follows 
 close upon this act of retaliation is too frank, too 
 audacious, too poignantly cruel to be openly dis-
 
 190 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 cussed, outside of a legal treatise upon the marital 
 relations. Even Mr. Galsworthy's carefully veiled 
 exposition of Soames's brief hour of madness 
 touches the limit of what is permissible in fiction. 
 Nevertheless, as the final word on that survival of 
 feudalism, the Englishman's claim of property 
 rights over his own wife, her possessions, her lib- 
 erty, her person, the chapter in question is unas- 
 sailable ; it is structurally perfect, like that of the 
 analogous scene in Maupassant's Une Vie, — with 
 this big difference in favor of Mr. Galsworthy, 
 that he gets full structural value out of the epi- 
 sode, and Maupassant did not. Certain reviewers 
 curiously misunderstood the concluding chapters, 
 and gravely explained that Bosinney, learning 
 that Soames Forsyte's suit against him has re- 
 sulted in a verdict that will leave him bankrupt, 
 deliberately commits suicide by walking in front 
 of an omnibus during a London fog, in spite of the 
 fact that he knows Irene has left her husband 
 and is awaiting him at his chambers. The key- 
 note to the real ending lies in the words with 
 which Soames tries to silence his clamorous sense 
 of shame, that "women never tell that sort of 
 thing." But in the next chapter we catch a 
 glimpse of Irene in what is destined to be her 
 last interview on earth with Bosinney; later we 
 see him striding blindly through the fog, con- 
 sumed with impotent anger and dreams of venge-
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 191 
 
 ancc — and then in the final picture, we see a 
 broken, miserable woman, who has crept back to 
 her husband's hearthstone, too numb with grief 
 from the news flung at her from newspaper head- 
 lines, to care what fate the future holds for her. 
 And we leave them together, the husband and wife, 
 the owner and his chattel — and for the first time 
 in his life, Soames Forsyte has become conscious 
 of the futility and the emptiness of such owner- 
 ship. He has defended his own, according to his 
 lights, and he has wrought nothing but devas- 
 tation. 
 
 In its narrowest sense the central situation of 
 A Man of Property is one of the commonplaces of 
 fiction : a woman with too much temperament in 
 bondage to the wrong man. The same is true of 
 The Country House, with this difference, that the 
 husband of the latter novel is a man of coarse na- 
 ture and dissolute habits. Then comes the inevita- 
 ble Other Man, sympathetic friendship drifting 
 steadily along the course of danger ; then the fore- 
 seen catastrophe, and the impending divorce. One 
 of the most hopeful things about Mr. Galsworthy, 
 however, is that he realizes that what happens, 
 in fact or in fiction, does not matter half so much 
 as the way in which people accept it — that there 
 may, perhaps, be literally nothing new under the 
 sun in the way of concrete facts, but that in the 
 reaction of these facts upon the minds of men and
 
 192 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 women there is something perennially new. If the 
 story of George Pendyce and Helen Bellew were 
 the only interest or even the central interest of 
 The Country House, there would have been small 
 purpose in writing it and even less purpose in dis- 
 cussing it. But what Mr. Galsworthy has done 
 is to use this episode of human frailty much as a 
 scientist uses a germ culture, to study its effects 
 upon others. The central interest is the little 
 world of English country life, within a few miles' 
 radius of the village of Worsted Skeynes, and 
 more especially the world which centers in the 
 ancient and honorable house of Pendyce. It is 
 a wonderfully vivid and detailed picture of stolid 
 and complacent British conservatism, a consist- 
 ent worship of the God of Things as They Are. 
 Mr. Horace Pendyce, the present head of the 
 house, is shown to us as a man whose daily prayer 
 is, " Make me such a man as my father was be- 
 fore me, and make my son after me such a man as I 
 am to-day." But it happens that his eldest son 
 George is not in the least such a man as his father, 
 or he never could have so far forgotten his duty 
 to the traditional honor of the name of Pendyce 
 as to bring upon it the stain of a divorce suit. 
 The episode of George's love for Helen Bellew is 
 sketched in between the lines, as it were, in some- 
 thing of the indirect, intangible fashion that Mr. 
 James adopted for showing us Chad Newsome's
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 193 
 
 similar experience in The Ambassadors. Mr. 
 Galsworthy has a trick of saying a great deal 
 very much to the point in just one illuminating 
 phrase, as where he makes another woman define 
 Helen Bellcw as " one of those women you never 
 can look at without seeing that she has a — a — 
 body." You catch fugitive glimpses of the lovers, 
 now in the gloom of a conservatory, now in the 
 tawdry seclusion of some isolated restaurant ; but 
 even these glimpses are not direct, they are re- 
 flected through the eyes of some third person, the 
 horrified gaze of the rector of Worsted Skeynes, or 
 the obsequious glance of the cross-eyed, consump- 
 tive waiter as he "lays her cloak upon her with 
 adoring hands." But what we do see, in the full, 
 clear light of day, is the consternation that over- 
 spreads the world of Worsted Skeynes ; the disar- 
 rangement of an intricate and delicately adjusted 
 social order ; the break in a family tradition ; the 
 wrong done by the future master of Worsted 
 Skeynes, not to the woman, not to himself, but 
 to the name he bears. That is the point of view 
 upon which Mr. Galsworthy turns the full, white 
 light of his vigorous style. The one thing that 
 the elder Pendyce fears more than all else at this 
 juncture is that " George may stand by her," 
 may even want eventually to marry her, and thus 
 bring an evil strain into the future generations of 
 Pendyce. But, like so many situations in real
 
 194 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 life, matters adjust themselves quite simply and a 
 great deal of anxiety has been expended for noth- 
 ing. The lady wearies of the attachment, the 
 divorce proceedings are dropped, the dignity of 
 the house of Pendyce is saved, and behind it all 
 we perceive Mr. Galsworthy's ironic smile at the 
 injustice and the follies of the Social Fabric. 
 
 Fraternity, which comes next in chronological 
 order, is in more respects than one a distinct ad- 
 vance upon its author's earlier work. It lacks, 
 to be sure, something of that delightful aggres- 
 siveness which one divines behind the satiric pose 
 in The Man of Property; it suggests that, if Mr. 
 Galsworthy's pulse has not grown calmer, he has 
 gained in self-restraint. Be this as it may, Frater- 
 nity still stands, both in method and in theme, the 
 most ambitious, the most serious, the most wide- 
 reaching of all his novels. In the London of to- 
 day it asks the world-old question, " Am I my 
 brother's keeper?" It takes up and develops 
 with an epic breadth of treatment the whole range 
 of human responsibility, the whole mooted prob- 
 lem of " Who is my neighbor ? " And it does all 
 this, not in the broad, flamboyant, Zolaesque man- 
 ner, but with a surprising economy of means in 
 stage-setting as well as in cast of characters. You 
 are made to feel that you have been looking out 
 over an immeasurable expanse of life and survey- 
 ing humanity in the mass through all the infinite
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 195 
 
 gradations of social strata. Yet when you stop 
 to consider, you realize that the whole story has 
 been limited to practically fourteen characters, 
 the whole range of scene to the interiors of two or 
 three English dwellings. In fact, the extreme 
 nicety of the technique, the rare art with which 
 the art is concealed, justifies a rather careful an- 
 alysis of the structure. The characters fall into 
 two groups : On the one hand, seven characters 
 who live in a sordid London tenement and typify 
 the " submerged tenth " ; on the other hand, a 
 second seven, a family of charming, highly culti- 
 vated people representing what Mr. Galsworthy 
 has somewhere in the book (if I do not misquote 
 him) called the "emerged fiftieth." The second 
 seven consists of two brothers, Hilary and Stephen 
 Dallison ; their wives, Bianca and Cecilia, who hap- 
 pen to be sisters ; the father of these two women, 
 Sylvanus Stone, a fine, visionary, symbolic figure, 
 but of unbalanced mind — one whom an earlier age 
 might have worshiped as a prophet, but whom 
 practical modernity frankly recognizes as half- 
 witted ; and lastly, two other young persons, 
 Stephen's daughter, Thyme, and a young physi- 
 cian, Martin, whose special hobby is relief of the 
 poor through improved sanitation. It would be 
 easy to spend many pages over the careful sym- 
 bolism in this group of seven. No two brothers 
 were ever more unlike than Hilary and Stephen;
 
 196 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 no two sisters ever had less in common than 
 Bianca and Cecilia. Plainly Mr. Galsworthy 
 would have us understand that brotherhood, the 
 sort of brotherhood he has in mind, has little to do 
 with consanguinity. And yet he does not expect 
 the world to accept the wider fraternity that his 
 title preaches ; for the character who serves as 
 mouthpiece to proclaim a doctrine of universal 
 brotherhood, and who pictures with impressive and 
 lyric mysticism the sordidness and self-seeking of 
 modern life, is Sylvanus Stone, the frail and 
 broken old man whom the world has long since 
 rejected and labeled imbecile. The other seven 
 characters, representing the " submerged tenth," 
 include an artist's model of the name of Barton; 
 a married couple named Hughes, the wife a seam- 
 stress, the husband a street sweeper; a newspaper 
 vendor, Creed, who, in better days, was a butler in 
 a family of social consequence ; and certain other 
 inmates of the same tenement whose names are not 
 material in a brief epitome of the story. Now it 
 happens that Hilary's wife, Bianca, has artistic 
 aspirations, and in the little model she finds pre- 
 cisely the type she needs for an ambitious symbolic 
 figure, to be called " The Shadow." It happens, 
 further, that Hilary, unlike the majority of his 
 class, sees in this poor girl not merely a 
 model, but a human being — a half-starved, deso- 
 late little waif, whom he cannot bear to allow to
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 197 
 
 drift away, without a proffer of help. But he 
 learns a little too late that because the world is 
 what it is, he is not quite a free agent in the be- 
 stowal of charities ; he cannot give this girl even 
 the most perfunctory sort of help without setting 
 in motion a long chain of catastrophes, such as 
 would be impossible in the world of mad Sylvanus 
 Stone's dreams — the world of universal brother- 
 hood. We are all galley-slaves to convention, 
 Mr. Galsworthy seems to say ; we are so bound 
 and hedged in by our self-made limitations that 
 we cannot break the established routine to help 
 Peter without robbing Paul ; we cannot, nine-tenths 
 of the time, obey the social edicts of our world, 
 and then for one-tenth disregard them, that good 
 may come of it. Hilary's interest in the girl is 
 quite harmless; but, on the one side his wife is 
 jealous, and there are plenty of friends to gossip 
 and sneer and believe the worst — and for a long 
 time there has been in his marriage one of those 
 little rifts that lead to discord. On the other 
 hand, there are plenty of people in the girl's own 
 class ready to misconstrue Hilary's motives; 
 among others, Hughes, the street cleaner, who has 
 already persecuted the girl with offensive atten- 
 tions. And because Hughes's jealousy drives him 
 into a drunken rage, he attempts one day to kill 
 his overworked drudge of a wife, is sentenced to a 
 month in jail, and through his absence is indi-
 
 198 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 rectly responsible for the death of his youngest 
 child. Now, because old Creed, the newspaper 
 vendor, was once a butler, he still belongs by in- 
 stinct and sympathies to a higher class than that 
 into which he has drifted ; so, when he learns that 
 Hughes, the street sweeper, has planned, as soon 
 as he is free from jail, to take vengeance on 
 Hilary, Creed goes to warn the latter that the 
 little model, who has meanwhile become the secre- 
 tary of the fanatical Sylvanus Stone, must be sent 
 away where Hilary will not see her any more. 
 And to this Hilary gives his consent, not because 
 he is afraid of Hughes, but because his wife, 
 Bianca, believes she has grounds for jealousy — 
 also, we are allowed to infer, because Hilary does 
 not wholly trust himself. This, in brief, is the 
 central pattern of a complex story woven out of 
 many threads, showing what a train of disasters 
 may be set in motion because a kind-hearted man 
 chooses to buy shoes, stockings and a new frock 
 for a forlorn and shivering girl ; and the perma- 
 nent estrangement of this man and his wife puts 
 the last touch of mordant irony to this strong and 
 earnest volume. And behind the individual trag- 
 edies of the story, the prophetic note of the half- 
 crazed fanatic, Sylvanus Stone, sounds insistently 
 as a leitmotiv, pointing out with the unfailing 
 optimism of a fixed idea the joys of the millennium 
 which is to come when the existing order of things
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 199 
 
 shall have passed away. This fine old symbolic 
 character lives wholly in a dream future ; the 
 present is to him always a part of the past; he 
 habitually refers to it as " In those days." Here, 
 for instance, is a characteristic utterance: 
 
 " They have been speaking to me of an execution. 
 To take life was the chief mark of the insensate bar- 
 barism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from 
 that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the perma- 
 nence of the individual ego after death. From the 
 worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows of 
 the human race. They did not stop to love each other 
 in this life; they were so sure they had all eternity 
 to do it in. The doctrine was an invention to enable 
 men to act like dogs with clear consciences." 
 
 In short, both by implication and directly 
 through his mouthpiece, Sylvanus Stone, Mr. 
 Galsworthy seems to be saying, with all the force 
 that there is in him, that Fraternity, in the 
 broader and higher sense, is even yet the vision of 
 an unbalanced brain, and that in this respect so- 
 ciety to-day has advanced but little beyond the 
 Cain-and-Abel conception of Brotherhood. 
 
 It does not fall within the scope of the present 
 article to examine the dramatic work of Mr. Gals- 
 worthy. Unquestionably, he has tried some in- 
 teresting experiments in that particular division 
 of literature, and has succeeded in gaining for his 
 cherished ideas a wider and more direct hearing
 
 200 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 than he can expect for his books. It may be that 
 he will tend more and more to choose the drama 
 as his vehicle of expression, and that books of 
 the magnitude, the crowded vitality, the super- 
 abundant suggestiveness of A Man of Property 
 and Fraternity are destined to stand for a long 
 time isolated on the library shelf. Aside from his 
 plays, Mr. Galsworthy has produced nothing for 
 the past three years save one novel, The Patrician, 
 for which no better summing-up could be found 
 than the familiar Tennysonian line, " icily regular, 
 splendidly null," and a collection of sketches so 
 fragile that one hesitates to dignify them with 
 the name of short stories. A Motley is the title 
 which he has chosen to designate what is really 
 nothing more nor less than a verbal sketch book, 
 wherein he has drawn with swift, sure strokes all 
 sorts of fugitive impressions made by people and 
 things glimpsed briefly during his daily comings 
 and goings. At one moment, it is an unforgettable 
 portrait of an aged crossing sweeper, twisted and 
 bowed with pain, whose indomitable pride alone 
 keeps him from the almshouse. Again, it is a sub- 
 tle presentment of a furtive rendezvous at an out- 
 of-door restaurant in Kensington Gardens — a ren- 
 dezvous that would have meant nothing to the ordi- 
 nary spectator, but from which Mr. Galsworthy's 
 keener eye interprets an abundance of the philos- 
 ophy of life. And still again, there is the flash-
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 201 
 
 light picture that he gives us of a young French 
 marine, seen for an hour in a railway carriage on 
 his way to join his ship, under orders to sail for 
 China. His father is dead, his mother is penni- 
 less ; and he himself, racked with a stubborn cough, 
 foresees dumbly that he is destined never to come 
 back alive from that deadly Chinese coast. The 
 monotony of his hopeless refrain haunts the 
 reader for days afterward : 
 
 Tell me — his eyes seem to ask — why are these 
 things so? Why have I a mother who depends on 
 me alone when I am being sent away to die? . . . 
 And presently, like a dumb, herded beast, patient, 
 mute, carrying his load, he left me at the terminus. 
 But it was long before I lost the memory of his face 
 and of that chant of his, "C'est me qui est seul a la 
 maison. . . . C'est me a une mere. C'est elle qui 
 n'a pas le sou! " 
 
 Slight as these sketches are, A Motley is a vol- 
 ume which might be profitably placed in the hands 
 of any young aspirant in the field of fiction, be- 
 cause it shows how much can be extracted in the 
 way of material from even the most trivial inci- 
 dents. And for an understanding of Mr. Gals- 
 worthy himself, of the things which interest him, 
 of the angle of vision from which he looks at life 
 it furnishes more than one indispensable keynote. 
 
 This brings us down to just one more volume 
 which needs separate mention, and a brief one,
 
 202 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 namely, The Patrician. There is nothing new 
 about its theme; the only difference is that this 
 time Mr. Galsworthy treats of a stratum some- 
 what higher than his favorite upper middle class. 
 He has nothing of importance to add to what he 
 has already said in his earlier books ; he simply 
 reiterates, under slightly different circumstances, 
 the injustice and unhappiness resulting from the 
 despotic force of conservatism, the heavy handi- 
 cap of those who live their lives not as they them- 
 selves would choose but as their rank dictates. In 
 the vital issues as well as in the little details of 
 daily intercourse, there is everywhere and all the 
 time the invincible power of precedent, the iron- 
 bound rule of prescribed conduct. The central 
 theme of The Patrician deals with a young states- 
 man whose misfortune it is to fall in love with one 
 of the tenants on the family estate — a beautiful 
 young woman living quite alone, whose isolated 
 life gives rise to unkind and unfounded conject- 
 ures. It turns out that she is eminently respecta- 
 ble, the wife of a narrow-minded curate from 
 whom she has separated and who refuses to help 
 her secure her freedom. Now, her titled lover 
 may make this woman his mistress, provided the 
 fact does not become public knowledge ; but by one 
 of the unwritten laws of his caste, he cannot openly 
 protect her, nor, in case she should obtain a 
 divorce, will public opinion allow him to marry
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 203 
 
 her. The story is worked out quietly to a logical 
 conclusion of gray and sombre tragedy. Mr. 
 Galsworthy has been reproached for ending the 
 book as he does and permitting both the man and 
 the woman to acquiesce without a struggle in the 
 decree of custom ; he has even been misunderstood 
 and accused of having changed his attitude 
 towards the established order of things, and to 
 have intended this book as a sort of recantation — 
 all of which means simply that Mr. Galsworthy's 
 art of self-effacement has become almost too per- 
 fect, his irony too subtle and elusive. Yet in this 
 book he could not well have written otherwise than 
 he has done. His purpose was not to preach indi- 
 vidual revolt, but simply to show the workings of 
 the existing system and the chaos that it wreaks in 
 the lives of those who acquiesce in its dictates. 
 
 In conclusion, there remain a few words to be 
 said about what, for lack of a less hackneyed term, 
 may be called Mr. Galsworthy's philosophy of 
 life. For practical purposes it is somewhat dif- 
 ficult to define a philosophy so largely negative 
 and destructive as is Mr. Galsworthy's, so far as it 
 may be read between the lines of his stories. 
 Since he is a good artist, he usually refrains in 
 his later books from openly expressing his personal 
 views ; and yet, the resultant impression that one 
 brings away from his books is, that if Mr. Gals- 
 worthy were to be asked, "What is the matter
 
 204 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 with the world?" he would answer sweepingly, 
 " Everything is the matter ! " What he inveighs 
 against is not specifically the injustice of existing 
 marriage and divorce laws, nor the British sports- 
 man's thoughtless cruelty to animals, nor the 
 sharp cleavage of class from class, nor any one of 
 a score of recurrent themes. It is the System, 
 with a capital S, upon which he is always harp- 
 ing; the immutable law and order of hereditary 
 customs and obligations, that leave no scope for 
 individual liberty, that grant no pardon for per- 
 sonal eccentricity, that make men and women so 
 many helpless, docile, self-complacent cogs in the 
 big machine of modern life. 
 
 Obviously, Mr. Galsworthy's interest in life is 
 general rather than special ; he is interested in 
 humanity, rather than in the individual man or 
 woman. In an essay already quoted in the chap- 
 ter on Joseph Conrad, he bestowed what he be- 
 lieved to be high praise on the author of Lord 
 Jim on the ground that " The Universe is always 
 saying: The little part called man is always 
 smaller than the whole," and that in Conrad's 
 novels " nature is first, man is second." Mr. Gals- 
 worthy does not himself place nature ahead of 
 man — nor as a matter of fact does Mr. Conrad — 
 but he does put ethics and sociology, manners and 
 customs, mankind in the aggregate, overwhelm- 
 ingly ahead of the individual — and this, too, not-
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 205 
 
 withstanding his almost inimitable gift of graphic 
 individualization. For these reasons he misses 
 almost as much as he gains. He seems to see little 
 beauty in the placid, tranquil lives of gentle old 
 ladies, absorbed in the daily happenings of their 
 intimate home circle, knowing and caring for 
 nothing beyond these limits, and realizing least of 
 all the narrowness of their lives. In a world 
 where the opportunities for activity are so many 
 and so big, what right, he seems to say, has any 
 human being to be insular and narrow and self- 
 satisfied? 
 
 It is too early to say with assurance whither 
 Mr. Galsworthy is tending. His latest novel, 
 The Patrician, lacks to some extent the vital grip 
 of his earlier work. My own personal experience 
 w r ith it was that, having occasion to read it for a 
 second time, after an interval of a few months, I 
 found that the impression left by the earlier read- 
 ing had faded out almost as completely as the 
 image of an unfixed photograph. The Athenceum, 
 in its review of The Patrician, said one rather un- 
 kind thing; it said that this was a book which 
 might have been written by Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward. And unfortunately the Athenceum told 
 the simple, undeniable truth. It does seem rather 
 a handicap for an apostle of the new school of fic- 
 tion to have his latest work already identified with 
 the materials and methods of the Victorian era.
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 In spite of the mild scorn of Mr. William Dean 
 Howells for that benighted portion of the reading 
 public whose first initiation to the writings of Mr. 
 Arnold Bennett came with the publication of 
 The Old Wives' 1 Tale in this country, the fact re- 
 mains that this particular bit of ignorance was 
 by no means confined to the unenlightened, and 
 that a good many critics of long standing made 
 the mistake of assuming that Mr. Bennett was a 
 newcomer in fiction and the novel in question a 
 marvel of precocious genius. Such a mistake was 
 not at all remarkable because, unlike a majority 
 of the novelists of his generation who have since 
 come into prominence, Mr. Bennett failed to pro- 
 duce any early volume that attracted the atten- 
 tion of American publishers. If one takes the 
 trouble to look over the catalogue of that admi- 
 rable and unfortunately defunct collection of fic- 
 tion known as the Town and Country Library, it is 
 surprising to see how many of the younger repu- 
 tations in English fiction are represented there 
 by volumes which to-day it would be difficult to 
 procure in any other form — Mr. J. C. Snaith, for 
 
 206
 
 Copyright. Pi r it- MacDonald, N. V 
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 207 
 
 instance, and Mr. Leonard Merrick. But Mr. Ben- 
 nett was not of this number; and since he is one 
 of those writers whose idiosyncrasies are largely to 
 be explained by certain facts in their personal his- 
 tories it seems well, before proceeding to an esti- 
 mation of his work, to recapitulate as briefly as 
 possible a few salient details of his life. As a 
 matter of fact, Mr. Bennett is a man of forty 
 years and upwards, with half of that period de- 
 voted to the pursuit of literature, and upward of a 
 score of published volumes of fiction to his account. 
 He was born in 1867, in the Pottery District of 
 North Staffordshire, England, the district that 
 he has painted in more than one of his volumes 
 under the caption of " The Five Towns" — the 
 smoke and gloom and narrow-minded conserva- 
 tism of which seem to have followed him to his 
 new home across the Channel, with the same haunt- 
 ing depression with which it follows his readers. 
 He was educated at Newcastle, and for a time took 
 up the study of law; but later abandoned it for 
 journalism, accepting in 1895 a position on a Lon- 
 don publication called Woman, first as assistant 
 editor, and three years later as editor-in-chief. 
 In the midst of these duties he found time to pub- 
 lish two volumes, A Man from the North (1898) 
 and Polite Farces (1899). In a little volume 
 which is largely autobiographical and which he 
 has entitled The Truth About an Author, Mr.
 
 208 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 Bennett has given us a rather graphic picture of 
 these early years in London. He began his career 
 as a free-lance in Fleet Street, with the belief that 
 he had entered upon a glorious calling. He soon 
 learned the grim reality. The free-lance he de- 
 scribes as 
 
 a tramp touting for odd jobs; a peddler crying stuff 
 which is bought usually in default of better; a pro- 
 ducer endeavoring to supply a market of whose con- 
 ditions he is in ignorance more or less complete; a 
 commercial traveler liable constantly to the insolence 
 of an elegant West End draper " buyer." 
 
 In substance, the Bohemia of Mr. Bennett's ex- 
 perience is essentially the same Bohemia which 
 George Gissing drew some years earlier in his 
 New Grub Street, and not essentially different 
 from the Bohemia depicted so vividly in Miss Sin- 
 clair's The Divine Fire. In Mr. Bennett's case, 
 however, free-lancing in time led to better things, 
 and he has recorded with evident satisfaction the 
 keen joy of the day when at last he sat down to 
 write his first novel, under what he called " the 
 sweet influences of the de Goncourts, Turgenev, 
 Flaubert and de Maupassant." The purpose up- 
 permost in Mr. Bennett's mind, so he tells us, was 
 to imitate the physical characteristics of the 
 French novel. There were to be no poetical quo- 
 tations, no titles to the chapters; the narrative
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 209 
 
 was to be divided irregularly by Roman numerals 
 only. In short, the book was to be a mosaic of 
 imitations of Flaubert and the de Goncourt 
 brothers. Life being gray, sinister and melan- 
 choly, his first book should similarly be melan- 
 choly, sinister and gray. And, to cap this confes- 
 sion neatly, Mr. Bennett adds the fact that at 
 this time he was twenty-seven, and the comment 
 that " at that age one is captious, and liable to 
 err in judgment." 
 
 This first book brought Mr. Bennett some 
 little reputation, a few favorable reviews — and a 
 number that were not so favorable, together with 
 a rather disheartening result in royalties. For 
 the mere sake of recording what the weightier sort 
 of contemporary criticism thought of A Man from 
 the North, it seems worth while to note that the 
 Academy pronounced it "the kind of worthlessly 
 clever book which neither touches nor moves the 
 reader," and that the Athenaeum defined its pre- 
 vailing spirit as "not the poetry of the common- 
 place, not the romance of the commonplace, but the 
 veriest commonplace of the commonplace." It 
 was not strange, under the circumstances, that 
 this first novel brought a certain amount of dis- 
 illusionment, and that Mr. Bennett temporarily 
 laid aside his theory of art for art's sake, and de- 
 termined to write a serial of the kind that yields a 
 revenue. He had had sufficient editorial expe-
 
 210 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 rience to know the qualities that a serial of this 
 sort must possess. His theme, to borrow his own 
 words, was not original, but " a brilliant imposture 
 of originality." The tale was divided into twelve 
 installments of five thousand words each, and he 
 composed it in twenty-four half days. Every 
 morning walking down the Thames Embankment 
 he contrived a chapter of two thousand five hun- 
 dred words, and every afternoon he wrote the 
 chapter. The result of this labor was sold to a 
 syndicate for the sum of seventy-five pounds, and 
 the author saw the gates of fortune opening. 
 There were still some remains of an artistic con- 
 science which prompted Bennett to sign his serial 
 with a pseudonym. Several aliases invented- by 
 himself proving unsatisfactory, a friend offered 
 him that of " Sampson Death." But the syndi- 
 cate met this suggestion by saying that such a 
 name would have the effect of depressing readers. 
 " Why not sign your own name? " " And," writes 
 Mr. Bennett, " I signed my own name. I, appren- 
 tice of Flaubert et Cie., stood forth to the universe 
 as a sensation-monger." 
 
 The immediate result of his profitable sensa- 
 tion-mongering was that it enabled him to resign 
 from the editorship of Woman and devote all his 
 time to the manufacturing of books. He chose 
 to make his home in France ; and in his new and 
 more congenial surroundings continued to turn
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 211 
 
 forth new volumes with a diligence and a speed 
 that would seem incompatible with careful work- 
 manship if it were not for the fact that his various 
 volumes are each in its own class of fairly uniform 
 quality. As to the ethics of debasing a talent 
 of high order to pander to the popular demand of 
 tawdry sensationalism, a good deal has already 
 been said, and a good deal yet remains to say. 
 Over and over again comments have been made, 
 with all the varying degrees of irony, upon Mr. 
 Bennett's versatility in appearing before the pub- 
 lic " in a dual capacity as a writer of lucrative 
 trash and as an artist"; but perhaps the matter 
 has never been more effectively worded than by 
 Mr. Howells when he wrote: 
 
 Apparently Mr. Bennett has found a comfort or 
 a relaxation or an indemnification in writing a bad 
 book after he has written a good one. It is very 
 curious; it cannot be from a wavering ideal; for no 
 man could have seen the truth about life so clearly 
 as Mr. Bennett, with any after doubts of its unique 
 value: and yet we have him from time to time indulg- 
 ing himself in the pleasure of painting it falsely. 
 
 In other words, gloss it over as we may, the 
 ugly fact remains that Mr. Bennett has for more 
 than a decade deliberately prostitued a talent that 
 approaches close to the border-line of genius for 
 the sake of cold pounds, shillings and pence. And
 
 212 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 he has not the saving grace of a sense of shame. 
 His critics, with many a sigh and shake of the 
 head, have reluctantly admitted that his " market- 
 able trash " has in no way injured in quality, al- 
 though it may have diminished in quantity, the 
 volumes in which he takes himself seriously. 
 Their attitude is amusingly like that of a phy- 
 sician who is forced to concede that an over-in- 
 dulgence in alcohol or opium has not impaired the 
 mental brilliance of a patient. But in Mr. Ar- 
 nold Bennett's case, I take the liberty of thinking 
 that the critics are wrong. I am a firm believer 
 in the doctrine that no man can serve two masters, 
 least of all where it is a case of simultaneously 
 worshiping at the altar of the Divine Fire and 
 the altar of Mammon. Mr. Bennett, in his dual 
 capacity, always suggests to me the two familiar 
 classical masks of Tragedy and Comedy, neither 
 of them seeing life as a whole, but each viewing the 
 outside world with its own characteristic grimace. 
 Now, it is a notorious commonplace that the man 
 who spends the better part of his life as a paid 
 buffoon, the court jester, the harlequin, the circus 
 clown, sees life through the eyes of a confirmed 
 misanthrope ; the merrier the jest that he cracks in 
 public, the more impossible it becomes in private to 
 stir the lips into the wraith of a smile. And that 
 is precisely what I think is the trouble with the 
 whole series of Mr. Arnold Bennett's stories of the
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 213 
 
 Five Towns. It is not that they are untrue; it 
 is simply that the joy of living has been sucked out 
 of them, as moisture is sucked up by a sheet of 
 blotting paper. Mr. Bennett has told us minutely 
 of his methods of work ; so many hours a day on 
 his " Modern Fantasias," so many hours on his 
 serious books, the books which presumably he 
 still writes under the " sweet influences " of his 
 chosen French and Russian models. But he is 
 trying to do something of which human nerves 
 and brain tissues are incapable. The world is re- 
 vealed to us in a certain number of primal colors. 
 And we all know that if we tire our eyes by look- 
 ing too steadily, for a time, at any one of these 
 colors, red, for instance, it grows dull to our 
 perception — and if we turn our gaze to some 
 other object in which the complementary color, 
 green, predominates, what little red may be pres- 
 ent is scarcely perceived, while the green flaunts 
 itself in our face with an unprecedented efful- 
 gence. That is precisely what happens to Mr. 
 Bennett ; he exhausts his power of perceiving the 
 reds and yellows, the joyous notes of life, in his 
 purely negligible productions, and the consequence 
 is that his mental faculties are too strained and 
 too weary to perceive, in Anna of the Five Towns, 
 in The Old Wives' Tale, in Clayh anger, any glint 
 of those brighter, warmer colors without which, 
 we all know, life would be too monochrome, too
 
 214 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 hopelessly gray for human endurance, even to 
 those inured to the smoke-laden atmosphere of 
 the Five Towns. 
 
 None the less, it is the inalienable right of every 
 artist to choose his own pigments. A painter may 
 limit himself to cold black and white v in painting a 
 sunset ; provided, of course, that he does not claim 
 that a sunset in nature has no other tones. Air. 
 Bennett is an unrivaled expert in mixing leaden 
 tints; his palette runs through the whole gamut 
 of drabs, and grays, and slates, tan, and dun, and 
 sepia. He makes us behold life, raw, anguished, 
 hopeless life, through glasses, smoked not so 
 deeply as to dull any of the poignancy, but suffi- 
 ciently to rob us of the symbolic blue of hope. He 
 is within his rights. He tells the truth about life 
 — only, it must be borne in mind that he does not 
 tell the whole truth. 
 
 It is difficult to master patience to speak even 
 perfunctorily of Mr. Bennett's purely commercial 
 productions, the series which he reels forth with 
 such amazing fertility and which some remnant 
 of artistic conscience compels him to label "Fan- 
 tasias." They are all built on much the same 
 formula; there is a taint of megalomania in their 
 conception and development, a hugeness of set- 
 ting and environment, an unparalleled and inex- 
 haustible opulence of color and light, of ostenta- 
 tion and gaiety, of thronging men and women,
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 215 
 
 and the glitter of jewels and the sheen of priceless 
 fabrics. The Grand Babylon Hotel, for instance, 
 which was the forerunner of the series, introduces 
 us to a vast fashionable caravansery in the West 
 End ; an American multi-millionaire, one Theodore 
 Racksole by name, and his fascinating and self- 
 willed daughter, Nella, happen to be dining there ; 
 and the young woman, out of sheer perversity, de- 
 sires, in preference to anything which the elabo- 
 rate menu offers, a simple beefsteak and a glass of 
 beer. When it develops that this homely fare is 
 not to be had, Mr. Theodore Racksole absents 
 himself from the dining-room for a few brief 
 minutes and returns as proprietor of the hotel, 
 having purchased it for a number of pounds which 
 probably looks quite imposing to the class of Eng- 
 lish readers who like this sort of trash. Now it 
 happens that the Grand Babylon Hotel is a hot- 
 bed of intrigue ; that Jules, the imperturbable 
 waiter, Rocco, the incomparable chef, and Felix 
 Babylon, late proprietor of the hotel, one and all 
 have their parts to play in an international in- 
 trigue involving the fate of the King of Bosnia. 
 And in sheer justice to Mr. Bennett, it must be 
 conceded that, if he cannot quite compete, on 
 their own ground, with writers of the class of 
 Max Pemberton and Phillips Oppenheim, he gives 
 them, in racing parlance, a pretty good run for 
 their money.
 
 216 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 Of the same general character are Teresa of 
 Watling Street, in which motor cars figure promi- 
 nently and which one outspoken reviewer tersely 
 dismissed as the work of " a literary trickster, a 
 juggler in fiction "; The Loot of Cities, in which 
 the underlying idea seems to be an appreciation of 
 the delicious absurdity of imagining a young and 
 genial plutocrat who, in search of diversion, hits 
 upon the expedient of planning a series of colos- 
 sal robberies, designed to cripple rival plutocrats 
 in a wholesale fashion ; Hugo, in which a story of 
 involved and startling intrigue takes place in a gi- 
 gantic shop situated in Sloane Street — the sort 
 of establishment that closely approaches the 
 American conception of a department store, save 
 that it outdoes it by being constructed on palatial 
 lines, surmounted by four or five stories of the 
 most expensive residential apartments in London, 
 and further equipped with roof-gardens, high- 
 class restaurants, and endless other forms of phys- 
 ical and mental entertainment; and The City of 
 Pleasure, a sort of metropolitan Luna Park, con- 
 ceived, in the same spirit of extravagance, as a 
 colossal popular pleasure ground yielding its pro- 
 prietors an income of ten thousand pounds a 
 week. In other words, Mr. Bennett's formula for 
 this class of work is, in terms of bookkeeping, the 
 formula of Brewster's Millions — only that it lacks 
 the cleverness of Mr. McCutcheon's central idea.
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 217 
 
 Between his riotous melodramatic " Fantasias " 
 and the Five Towns Series, on which his repu- 
 tation is solidly built, Mr. Bennett has produced a 
 miscellaneous lot of volumes ranging from serious 
 to farcical and difficult to classify otherwise than 
 by the unsatisfactory generalization that they are 
 not cheap enough to be profitable merchandise nor 
 fine enough to be literature. As specimens of this 
 intermediate class, it will be sufficient to comment 
 briefly on three volumes which happen to have been 
 reprinted in America, Buried Alive, Denry the Au- 
 dacious and The Glimpse. The first of these 
 three is a book towards which it is not difficult to 
 be indulgent, for it not only represents an honest 
 effort to be humorous, with the further merit of 
 succeeding, but it has an undercurrent of satire 
 regarding the vanity of pompous obsequies, the 
 elusiveness of fame. More specifically, Buried 
 Alive is simply the chronicle of a very shy man, 
 who for years has depended upon the services of 
 his valet to save him from contact with the world, 
 and when that valet suddenly dies the master in his 
 first hour of bewilderment seizes eagerly upon the 
 blunder of a strange doctor, who confuses master 
 and man, and allows himself to be declared dead. 
 Now the master happens to be a famous painter, 
 how famous even he has never guessed until he is 
 pronounced dead — and he has the dubious pleasure 
 of reading long obituaries about himself, of fol-
 
 218 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 lowing the stormy discussion that ensues as to 
 the proper manner of paying him honor, and 
 finally of attending his own funeral, when the 
 ashes of his valet are laid to rest in Westminster 
 Abbey. Such is the opening of an extravaganza 
 which is never tedious, never vulgar, but from 
 beginning to end permeated with that brand of 
 British humor already made familiar to us through 
 the Gilbert-and-Sullivan librettos. 
 
 Denry the Audacious is another name for a vol- 
 ume which appeared in England as The Card; and 
 it is a question which of the two titles is more in 
 need of explanation. A " card " is a person who 
 lives by his wits, who can turn his hand to all 
 sort of odd makeshifts, honorable or otherwise, 
 and justify them by making them successes. In 
 this sense, Denry certainly earns his right to the 
 appellation. The hero's extraordinary name, by 
 the way, which serves as the American title and 
 looks as though it were the result of careless proof- 
 reading, is briefly explained at the outset by the 
 simple fact that Denry's mother, " a somewhat 
 gloomy woman, thin, with a tongue ! " found that 
 she could save a certain amount of time every day 
 by addressing him as Denry instead of Edward 
 Henry. Of plot this volume is very nearly guilt- 
 less. In so far as it has any, it belongs to the 
 picaresco type. Denry's adventures are practi- 
 cally all of one kind and they might have been ex-
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 219 
 
 paneled and multiplied to fill a dozen volumes or 
 curtailed to the dimensions of a short story. His 
 audacity amounts to this : whenever he finds him- 
 self in a position menacing him with failure, social 
 or financial, instead of losing courage, temporising, 
 beating a retreat as sober common sense would 
 dictate, he drives boldly, even brazenly ahead and 
 wrenches a colossal triumph from the very jaws 
 of disaster. A quite simple formula, you see, and 
 one permitting of infinite variations. Add to this 
 the fact that Mr. Bennett has a genuine sense of 
 humor and the ability to make the most out of a 
 paradoxical situation and you have the whole ex- 
 planation why a book like this, which would have 
 been a flat failure at the hands of ninety-nine 
 writers out of a hundred, proves in this case to be 
 very good fun indeed. 
 
 The Glimpse, the third volume singled out for 
 separate comment, is evidently meant by Mr. Ben- 
 nett as a serious piece of work ; and while it is not 
 to be put for a moment in the same class with 
 Claylianger or The Old Wives' Tale, it is none the 
 less a work of distinct originalit} 7 . Whether it 
 was really worth doing is quite another question. 
 There is nothing striking about the opening chap- 
 ters ; simply the usual commonplace situation of 
 an unhappy marriage : a man and a woman, hope- 
 lessly incompatible, drifting steadily apart, he 
 finding solace in intellectual pursuits, she driven,
 
 220 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 through sheer restlessness, into more and more 
 venturesome companionship. Then comes a day 
 when, through a series of blunders that lead her 
 to believe that her husband has learned the truth, 
 she confesses her love for another man. The hus- 
 band's sudden anger, stoically controlled, throws 
 too great a strain upon his nervous system, brings 
 on serious heart trouble, and is followed by cata- 
 lepsy, and apparently death. Here begins the 
 second part of the story, highly imaginative, 
 strange to the point of uncanniness — the expe- 
 riences of a liberated soul in its first glimpse of life 
 beyond the grave. As a sheer bit of speculation, a 
 brilliant juggling with words, the episode refuses 
 to be forgotten. But sober second thought makes 
 it clear that all such speculation is quite futile. 
 The end of the story comes with a grim swiftness. 
 The man, as it happens, is not dead, merely in a 
 trance, and after a few hours he struggles back, 
 but the irrevocable has already happened. The 
 foolish, wayward wife, who through all her folly 
 has secretly loved her husband and no one else, is 
 overwhelmed with remorse, when she feels that it is 
 her confession that has killed him. And when he 
 opens his eyes on the world again, she has already 
 swallowed oxalic acid and is beyond medical aid. 
 Now, this is undeniably an unusual story, and 
 an uncomfortable one as well; but no one would 
 ever infer from it that the author had the power
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 221 
 
 to produce works of such real importance as Anna 
 of the Five Totems, Leonora, and the several sub- 
 sequent volumes that have for their setting a 
 string of ugly, busy manufacturing centers in the 
 pottery district of Staffordshire. In Anna of the 
 Five Towns Mr. Bennett for the first time set his 
 feet firmly on his rightful path. It has the same 
 pervading grayness, physically and morally, the 
 same overhanging veil of grimy smoke, the same 
 dull helplessness of lookout that characterize what 
 has come to be known as his distinctive work — 
 much as a certain kind of glaze, a certain charac- 
 teristic color come to be the hall-mark of a par- 
 ticular sort of pottery. Anna is the daughter of 
 a miser, a Wesleyan Methodist, who has made a 
 fortune as a potter's valuer and has retired, in 
 middle age, both from his business connection with 
 the potteries and from his former activity as a 
 pillar of the Church. He is a widower and his 
 eldest daughter Anna keeps house for him on one 
 pound sterling a week, despite the fact that the 
 miser is worth over sixty thousand pounds, and 
 Anna has almost as much in her own right, inher- 
 ited from her mother. Imagine a dingy little 
 house buried alive in a dingy little row, a house to 
 which no visitor is ever allowed ingress, and two 
 forlorn girls, lonely, half fed, miserably tyran- 
 nized over by a consistently brutal and morose old 
 man. It is not strange that when Henry Mynor,
 
 222 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 one of the few successful and eligible young men 
 of the neighborhood, proposes to Anna, she should 
 at once accept him in a maze of bewildered grati- 
 tude. And having given her word, Anna is of that 
 dutiful and conscientious type that will allow noth- 
 ing to prevent her from keeping it. But sense 
 of duty does not save Anna from learning from 
 another man what love really means, and in con- 
 sequence the grayness of life, which promised for a 
 time to lift, settles down upon her more hopelessly 
 and irrevocably than ever. 
 
 Leonora is another similar story of the same 
 sordid life, constructed with the same solid 
 and ambitious craftsmanship. The heroine has 
 reached the threshold of forty years. " She was 
 not too soon shocked nor too severe in her ver- 
 dicts, nor the victim of too many illusions." She 
 is the wife of an elderly manufacturer and the 
 mother of three grown daughters; yet neither 
 her years nor her responsibilities save her from 
 dreams of romance and illicit love. There is a 
 prosperous American whom chance brings to 
 break the dull monotony of the Five Towns, and it 
 is only the fortunate occurrence of the death of 
 Leonora's husband that saves her from any worse 
 indiscretion than a second marriage. 
 
 But it is with The Old Wives' Tale that Mr. 
 Bennett achieves for the first time a work that be- 
 yond all dispute or cavil is of the first magnitude.
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 223 
 
 This is the book of which Dr. Robertson Nicoll ex- 
 pressed himself, on its first appearance, in these 
 enthusiastic terms : " The story is a masterpiece, 
 and it lacks only a touch of poetry to put it in 
 the very front rank." And frankly it is a book 
 which deserves all that Dr. Nicoll said in its favor 
 and something more besides. It is only at long 
 intervals that a piece of fiction appears which 
 conveys an impression of such magnitude, such 
 finished workmanship and such a fund of reserve 
 power. There are many books which impress one 
 with a sense of amplitude, a sense of being spread 
 over a very broad canvas. It is much rarer to 
 find, as in the present case, a book which gives a 
 sense of depth as well as breadth, a book that has 
 a wonderful, far-reaching perspective, making you 
 feel that you are looking not merely upon the sur- 
 face of life, but through and beyond the surface 
 into the deep and hidden meanings of human ex- 
 istence. As in the case of all novels which really 
 deserve the attribute of bigness, The Old Wives' 
 Tale achieves its effects without the aid of a spec- 
 tacular background or of exceptional and exalted 
 characters. Indeed, it would be difficult to im- 
 agine anything more essentially mediocre and com- 
 monplace, more uniformly dull and gray than the 
 whole external atmosphere of this strong and 
 poignant story. A small manufacturing town of 
 middle England, with scant sunlight struggling
 
 224 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 vainly to pierce the veil of soft-coal smoke which 
 perpetually overhangs it ; a central square with its 
 five public houses, its bank, its two chemists, its 
 five drapers ; and on the floor above the most im- 
 posing of these drapers' shops living apartments 
 occupied by the family of this particular shop- 
 keeper. Narrow, hopelessly conservative, un- 
 speakably bourgeois in their attitude toward life, 
 the Baines family, nevertheless, stand out in this 
 story as fair average representatives of the human 
 race, sufficient exponents of the three great mys- 
 teries of life: birth, marriage and death. There 
 are, of course, exceptional people in the world, peo- 
 ple who achieve great things, and whose names 
 are enrolled permanently on the honor roll of 
 fate. But to the great majority the sum and 
 substance of life is, roughly speaking, somewhat 
 after this fashion : there is a brief period of youth- 
 ful illusion, when one forms brave plans for great 
 achievements, and the years which really count 
 all lie ahead in a glamour of rosy hope ; and then, 
 almost before one knows how it has come about, 
 one is old, and the years that count all lie behind 
 and the sum total of accomplishments, as one looks 
 back, seems insignificant, and one is glad to cher- 
 ish the memories of brief, fugitive happiness 
 snatched here and there by the way. This is not 
 an unfair picture of the average life of the great 
 struggling middle class in an overpopulated coun-
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 225 
 
 try of the Old World. And this is precisely what 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett has succeeded in giving us in 
 his Old Wives' Talc of the lives of Constance and 
 Sophia Baines, the two daughters of the bedridden 
 old draper, through fifty years of hopes and hard- 
 ships and disillusion. It would serve no useful pur- 
 pose to analyze the plot of this volume, for the pat- 
 tern is too intricate to be briefly summed up — it 
 has the multifold and wonderful intricacy of actual 
 life. It is enough to say that there are very few 
 books in English which mirror back so truly and 
 with such a fine sense of proportion the rela- 
 tive amounts of joy and sorrow that enter into 
 the average human life — the unconscious selfish- 
 ness of youth, the rash haste to reach forward and 
 grasp opportunities, the relentless encroachment 
 of disease, the loneliness of old age, the inevi- 
 tability of death. Naturally the book is, with 
 all its merits, a depressing one. It leaves be- 
 hind it a sense of grayness and loneliness and per- 
 sonal loss, and all the more so because it possesses 
 that rare power of making us feel the brotherhood 
 of these commonplace people that fill its pages, 
 and so rendering their successive passing away a 
 personal and intimate sorrow to each one of us. 
 Undoubtedly, a Touch of Poetry, that is to say, a 
 strain of romanticism, idealising the meaner traits 
 of character, the harsher blows of fate, would 
 lighten the gloom and relieve the tension, but in-
 
 226 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 evitably it would have shorn the book of its chief 
 strength, the incomparable strength of literal and 
 fearless truth. It stands out conspicuously as 
 the one volume in which Mr. Bennett has justified 
 his practice of painting in verbal grisaille. 
 
 When Clayhanger first appeared, it was an- 
 nounced as the first of a trilogy of novels dealing 
 with the Five Towns, the central theme of which 
 was to be the breaking down of the old spirit by 
 the new in the central provinces of England. The 
 first volume of this trilogy relates the history of a 
 certain Edward Clayhanger, a master printer and 
 son of a master printer before him, from the time 
 of his leaving school to his somewhat belated mar- 
 riage at the age of thirty-five. His state of subjec- 
 tion to his father, and the latter's justification of 
 his tyranny on the ground that eventually the son 
 will " come into everything," are only one part of 
 the old order of things which Mr. Bennett tries 
 to show in this trilogy to be slowly breaking up 
 and passing away. It is impossible to consider 
 Clayhanger in its relation to the rest of the trilogy 
 until we have both of the remaining volumes before 
 us ; structurally, if taken by itself, it is undeniably 
 an unwieldy, disproportioned piece of work, as 
 full of loose ends and projecting corners as a 
 chance fragment from a puzzle picture. Just how 
 Mr. Bennett proposes to fit in all these irregulari- 
 ties and round them out into a finished symmetry
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 227 
 
 by the completion of his trilogy — whether, indeed, 
 he can accomplish the task at all, or whether the 
 finished group will still have the same structural 
 defect, the same lack of proportion as the first of 
 its members, it would be unfair to judge in advance. 
 Hilda Less-ways, instead of helping the situation, 
 complicates it. Instead of sustaining the high 
 standard set by Clayhanger, as a human document, 
 it falls emphatically below the level of that volume ; 
 and instead of beginning the task of rounding out 
 and filling in, it simply adds just so many more 
 loose ends and projecting corners. In fact, to 
 discuss Hilda Lessways, at the present moment, 
 and before we know what miracle of ingenuity Mr. 
 Bennett may achieve with his concluding volume, 
 would be premature — as premature and as unfair 
 as it would be to analyze Clayhanger from the 
 viewpoint of construction. You cannot discuss 
 the principles of proportion in relation to an un- 
 finished building or a dismantled ruin ; you cannot 
 base an argument about the harmonic poise of the 
 human body on a mutilated masterpiece like the 
 Milo Venus. But, if we set aside completely the 
 question of construction, and consider Clayhanger 
 in just one aspect — the aspect in which, one sus- 
 pects, the author himself would prefer it to be con- 
 sidered — namely, as a study of the unfolding and 
 maturing of a single human character, it would 
 be rather difficult to overpraise it. But it is neces-
 
 228 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 sary, if I am to hope to find readers who agree 
 with me, that I should add one proviso: namely, 
 that they read Clayhanger intelligently, approach- 
 ing it in a spirit of seriousness, as a deep and 
 careful study of life deserves to be approached, 
 and not as one seeking an afternoon's entertain- 
 ment. We all of us have our instinctive upward 
 gropings in early childhood ; we all have dreams, 
 more or less definite, of the great things we pro- 
 pose to do some day or other, with our lives ; and 
 we all find that sooner or later, an iron-handed des- 
 tiny — predestination, if you like religious termi- 
 nology ; heredity and environment, if your leaning 
 is towards the sciences — has reached out to say 
 peremptorily, " so far you may go, and no further ; 
 you wish to do so-and-so, but instead you must do 
 something quite different." Such conditions are 
 quite independent of the place in the world to 
 . which we happen to be born, whether socially or 
 geographically; it is just as true of a small, mid- 
 dle-class English boy, looking out upon the 
 smoke-grimed horizon of the pottery district, as 
 it would be of some luckier brother in London or 
 New York. Almost any one can write local stories 
 that never for a moment get beyond the confines of 
 the native village. It is the prerogative of just a 
 few writers of Mr. Bennett's caliber to remain 
 within the limits of their native village and yet 
 at the same time to make their theme universal.
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 229 
 
 One can imagine, of course, some unsympathetic, 
 unenlightened reader flinging aside Clayhanger, at 
 the end of the first fifty pages, with the random 
 verdict, " Oh, this is a tiresome story about a 
 stupid old fogy who has a job-printing estab- 
 lishment in a stupid old town, and about his son, 
 who wants to be an architect and has not brains 
 enough or courage enough to go his own way ! " 
 and, so far as it goes, this is a true statement of 
 the book's substance. Its value as a human docu- 
 ment lies, first, in the untiring fidelity with which 
 Mr. Bennett convinces us that his people are so 
 constituted that they must inevitably have said 
 and done precisely what he records, and not other- 
 wise; and, secondly, making due allowance for 
 local differences, that his people are much the 
 same as people everywhere else, with the same 
 hopes and fears, the same futile efforts, the same 
 disappointments. 
 
 Clayhanger is a formidable task to undertake, 
 if you do not chance to be in the mood for it. It 
 lacks only two pages of a round seven hundred — 
 and it does not even lack those, if you count the 
 title-page and table of contents. But when you 
 have once gone to the end of that book, if you are 
 a reader of real discernment and broad sympa- 
 thies, you will have added one or two names to 
 your list of permanent friends in fiction ; you will 
 have been stimulated to the point of a few new
 
 230 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 thoughts, or at least a readjustment of several old 
 ones ; and besides this, you will have been filled 
 with amazement of a cumulative sort at certain 
 unexpected flashes of intuition that Mr. Bennett is 
 all the time exhibiting. You will find yourself 
 asking over and over again, when you are con- 
 fronted with one of these shrewd little observations 
 of life, these illuminating explanations of the why 
 and the wherefore : " How in the world did Arnold 
 Bennett come to know these things, and, knowing 
 them, succeed in expressing them in this inimitable 
 way? How has he caught so marvelously the 
 vagueness of mixed motives, that baffle all of us, 
 when we try to explain our own actions ? " For it 
 is a fact that Mr. Bennett quite frequently dissects 
 and analyzes human impulses and desires with the 
 subtlety of a Henry James — and yet without ob- 
 scurity. No writer is definitely placed during his 
 lifetime; but Mr. Bennett is, up to the present 
 time, peculiarly and exceptionally misjudged and 
 alternately overrated and underpraised. He cer- 
 tainly does not deserve one-half the censure that 
 you will find in the average estimate of his earlier 
 books ; but, on the other hand, there is an even 
 greater exaggeration implied in the recent tribute 
 by Mr. William Dean Howells, when he says, in 
 effect, that since Flaubert and the de Goncourts, 
 Maupassant and Zola have passed away, since 
 Tolstoy is no more, and Perez Galdos and Arman-
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 231 
 
 do Palacio Valdes are silent, Mr. Bennett is the 
 only living novelist he can confidently look to for 
 pleasure. If my own enjoyment were so curtailed, 
 I am afraid that I should find life overhung with 
 the same leaden pall of gloom as envelops the 
 Five Towns that Mr. Bennett has made famous. 
 As a matter of fact, I could name offhand at least 
 a score of novelists who may be trusted to provide 
 quite as much pleasure as Mr. Bennett, to be 
 equally true to the realities of life, and to be, in 
 some respects, better craftsmen, and possessed of 
 a higher ideal of art, a greater reluctance to pros- 
 titute it to the demands of expediency. But this 
 does not alter the fact that Mr. Bennett is an ex- 
 ceedingly interesting product of the modern tend- 
 encies in English fiction, as contrasted with the 
 American variety ; and one shrewdly suspects 
 that he has in him the capability of doing even 
 bigger things.
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 It is a sufficiently pleasant task to undertake to 
 write a brief appreciation of Mr. Anthony Hope. 
 The prevailing urbanity of his manner, the sus- 
 tained sparkle of his wit, the agreeable expectation 
 that he arouses of something stimulating about 
 to happen, largely disarm criticism. Besides, he 
 does not seem to demand to be taken too seriously ; 
 he is not a preacher or reformer, he is not trying to 
 revolutionize the world ; he is too well pleased with 
 men and women as they actually are, to desire to 
 make them something different. In short, he is 
 a suave and charming public entertainer, and like 
 all wise entertainers he alters the character of his 
 program in accordance with the fluctuations of 
 public taste. And being both versatile and far- 
 sighted he is usually in the van of each new move- 
 ment. The God in the Car, his story of gigantic 
 land speculations in South Africa, with the Her- 
 culean figure whom he chooses to disguise under 
 the name of " Juggernaut," appeared in 1894, thus 
 antedating by five years The Colossus, by Morley 
 Roberts. Phroso, with its romantic setting among 
 the islands of modern Greece, anticipated by a year 
 
 232
 
 ANTHONY HOPE
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 233 
 
 Mr. E. F. Benson's analogous attempts, The Vin- 
 tage and The Capsina. When the revival of the 
 English historical novel was at its height, he suc- 
 ceeded once more in coming in ahead of his com- 
 petitors, and Simon Dale, which appeared in 1898 
 and is a study of Restoration manners, with Nell 
 Gwynn for its central interest, led the way for 
 The Orange Girl by Sir Walter Besant, issued in 
 1899, and F. Frankfort Moore's Nell Gwynn, 
 Comedian, which was not published until 1900. 
 
 But although he so cleverly adapts himself to 
 the trend of public taste, Mr. Anthony Hope is not 
 an innovator ; he adapts but does not originate. 
 Yet it is no uncommon thing to hear him errone- 
 ously praised for having created two new and 
 widely popular types of fiction, the Zenda type 
 and that of The Dolly Dialogues. Now, The Pris- 
 oner of Zenda, as we remember at once when we 
 stop to think, is not the first up-to-date sword and 
 buckler story of an imaginary principality ; it was 
 preceded, by nearly a decade, by Stevenson's 
 Prince Otto; and the only reason that it so often 
 gets the credit of being the forerunner of its class 
 is simply because it was done with a defter, lighter 
 touch, a more spontaneous inspiration. Similarly, 
 The Dolly Dialogues are not the first attempt to 
 imitate in English the sparkle and the piquancy 
 of the Gallic dialogue in the form that " Gyp " and 
 Henri Lavedan have made familiar. Although it
 
 234 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 is quite likely that at that time Anthony Hope had 
 never even heard of it, The Story of the Gadsbys 
 had at least three years the start of The Dolly Dia- 
 logues, and even though it was done with a heavier 
 hand, it succeeded in getting a greater effective- 
 ness out of the type. 
 
 But, after all, statistics of this sort, while inter- 
 esting to a person of precise and inquiring mind, 
 have little or no bearing upon the sources of enjoy- 
 ment which a surprisingly large number of people 
 undoubtedly find in Mr. Hope!s writings. And 
 there is variety enough among them to suit all 
 tastes. He began in a spirit of blithe and irre- 
 sponsible romanticism; he has gradually come, in 
 his later years, to look upon life in a rather matter- 
 of-fact way and to picture, by choice, the more 
 serious problems of life in the social world to which 
 he belongs. Yet his novels, even the most am- 
 bitious of them, never suggest the ponderousness 
 of a novel-with-a-purpose ; he never forgets what 
 is expected from a conscientious entertainer. And 
 one reason why he so uniformly succeeds is that 
 he is an exceedingly good craftsman ; he has mas- 
 tered the sheer mechanics of his art. It is never 
 wise for a novelist, whatever his literary creed 
 may be, to be wantonly scornful of technique. 
 There are just a few erratic geniuses who, because 
 they have in them certain big thoughts that are 
 struggling for utterance and apparently cannot
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 235 
 
 be uttered in the simple usual way, boldly break 
 the established rules and make new ones to suit 
 their needs. To draw an offhand parallel, they 
 are somewhat in the position of a man who, al- 
 though untrained in public speaking, is listened 
 to indulgently because of the importance of what 
 he has to say. But your public entertainer enjoys 
 no such license ; and the lighter and more irre- 
 sponsible his theme the more perfect must be his 
 execution. And it is because Mr. Hope possesses 
 that magic touch of the born story teller, that such 
 delightful triflings as The Dolly Dialogues and The 
 Indiscretion of the Duchess seem to linger in the 
 memory with perennial youth, while many another 
 weightier volume has faded out with the passage 
 of years. 
 
 Accordingly, Mr. Hope belongs to that order of 
 novelists about whom it is not only more enjoy- 
 able but more profitable to gossip genially than 
 to weigh strictly in the balance. It is so easy 
 to become garrulous over volumes that have worn 
 well and afford many a pleasant hour of relaxa- 
 tion. It would be purposeless to take up serially 
 each one of his many volumes, analyze and pigeon- 
 hole it according to its relative value. The better 
 and the franker thing to do is to admit that there 
 are certain volumes by Mr. Hope which gave the 
 present writer genuine pleasure, and certain others 
 that gave him no pleasure at all, and that those
 
 236 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 falling under the first division are the only ones 
 which it seems worth while to discuss. In his ear- 
 lier period the mere mention of Anthony Hope con- 
 jured up scenes of spirited adventure, reckless dar- 
 ing, gallant heroes combining the good breeding, 
 the patrician ease, the assured manner of the bet- 
 ter class of young Englishmen possessing the 
 double advantage of birth and education, who, 
 nevertheless, despite their studied reserye and im- 
 maculateness of dress, are plunged by a whim 
 of fate into adventures of extraordinary daring 
 and sublime audacity, — adventures that would 
 have taxed the prowess of Dumas's Immortal 
 Three. It is a clever formula, this trick of tak- 
 ing certain types of familiar everyday people 
 straight out of prosaic actuality and compelling 
 them, whether they will or no, to perform romantic 
 deeds against a romantic background. This pecu- 
 liar combination was certainly a happy thought. 
 It appealed to that latent thirst for adventure 
 which we almost all possess ; it unconsciously flat- 
 tered the reader with a new sense of daring, a feel- 
 ing that he too, if thus suddenly and surprisingly 
 transported into Zendaland, might similarly rise 
 to the occasion and achieve great deeds. There is 
 no purpose served by analyzing once again the 
 story of The Prisoner of Zenda. It is one of those 
 stories the artificiality of which stands out glar- 
 ingly the moment one starts to lay its bones bare.
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 237 
 
 Any story which depends upon the chance resem- 
 blance of two human beings, a resemblance so close, 
 so misleading, that even the wife of one of the two 
 is at a loss to distinguish them, takes on, when 
 stated briefly, apart from the glamour of the tale 
 itself, an air of palpable falsity to life. And yet 
 the fact remains that tens of thousands of readers 
 have lost themselves, forgotten time and space, 
 in their utter absorption in the dilemma of the 
 Princess Flavia, who finds in Rudolph Rassendyl 
 all the qualities which might have made it possible 
 for her to love her husband, if only he had been 
 as close a replica of Rassendyl morally as he was 
 physically. 
 
 I do not mind admitting that personally I revert 
 more frequently to The Dolly Dialogues than to 
 any other volume by Mr. Hope. This is not merely 
 because of the delicate touch and epigrammatic 
 neatness for which they have been so universally 
 praised. Superficially considered they are a series 
 of encounters between a sparkling and fascinating 
 little lady and a sedate and nimble-witted gentle- 
 man, whom it is insinuated that the Lady Dolly has 
 jilted. Now, the real fascination about these bril- 
 liant exchanges of repartee lies chiefly in the subtle 
 and yet elusive implications that we are always on 
 the point of reading between the lines, and yet 
 never quite get in their entirety. That Mr. Carter 
 has long been a worshiper at the shrine of Lady
 
 238 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 Dolly, that he has many a time felt a pang of re- 
 gret that his fortune in life has made him ineligible, 
 that he considers her husband not half grateful 
 enough to Providence and that his own assumed 
 air of sentimental resignation has in it a little 
 touch of genuine regret, — all this we get pretty 
 clearly. And yet, we are well aware, all the time, 
 that Mr. Carter, in spite of an occasional twinge 
 of envy, would not change his condition if he 
 could ; that, although he may not be precisely 
 aware of it, he is already confirmed in his bachelor 
 habits ; that he likes his freedom from responsi- 
 bility, his harmless, unprofitable daily routine, his 
 favorite corner in his favorite club, his innocent 
 philandering with various young women, married 
 and unmarried. He may, at times, deceive the 
 Lady Dolly into commiserating him and blaming 
 herself as a thoughtless coquette, — but never 
 for very long at a time. The whole thing is a 
 sort of grown-up game of make-believe in which 
 the players get a curious transitory, almost il- 
 logical enjoyment in feigning broken hearts and 
 blighted lives. And yet there is just enough truth 
 underlying it all to suggest that Mr. Hope was 
 capable of more serious work than he had yet done. 
 There was, for instance, everywhere a pervading 
 suggestion of the infinite number of contradictory 
 motives and impulses that determine every human 
 action, and the impossibility which every man and
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 239 
 
 woman must admit to themselves of deciding just 
 how much gladness and how much regret is entailed 
 in every least little thing that they do. 
 
 Almost without warning Mr. Hope proved that 
 the vague promise of more serious work was well 
 founded, by producing what, I think, the sober 
 judgment of posterity will recognize as his most 
 ambitious and most enduring work, Quisante. 
 Alexander Quisante, from whom the volume takes 
 its name, is not an Englishman either by birth or 
 ancestry. He comes of antecedents almost un- 
 known beyond the fact that they are a mixture of 
 French and Spanish. With scanty means he 
 comes, an absolute outsider, preparing to lay 
 siege to the political and social world of London. 
 In every way he finds himself handicapped. The 
 foreordained course of education through which 
 the English ruling classes pass as a matter of 
 course and by which their prejudices and points 
 of view are determined, has not been his privilege. 
 In addition to this he lacks that inborn refinement 
 which sometimes makes up for good breding and so- 
 cial experience. His taste is often exceedingly bad ; 
 his manner is alternately too subservient and 
 too arrogant. Of the higher standards of morality 
 he has no perception ; he is the typical adventurer, 
 unscrupulous, insincere, monumentally selfish. 
 But, to offset all this, his intellect is quite extraor- 
 dinary; his brain is an instrument marvelously
 
 240 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 under control, and he uses it at his pleasure, to 
 bring the lesser intellects about him under his 
 dominion. Above all, he has the gift of eloquence ; 
 and when he chooses to give full rein to his rhetori- 
 cal powers, he can sway his audience at will, and 
 thrill and sweep them with him through the whole 
 gamut of human emotions. Of the men and women 
 whom he meets, fully one-half are antagonized and 
 repelled ; the others give him an unquestioning, al- 
 most slavish devotion. But he has a personality 
 which cannot leave negative results ; it must breed 
 love or hate. 
 
 The other character in the book who shares the 
 central interest is Lady May Gaston, a woman 
 who, by birth and training, participates in all those 
 special privileges of rank and caste, all the tradi- 
 tions of her order from which Quisante is shut 
 out. There is another man, one in her own class, 
 who would be glad to make her his wife. He is in 
 all respects the sort of man whom she is expected to 
 marry; and she is not wholly indifferent to him. 
 But she meets Quisante, and, from the first, comes 
 under the spell of his dominant personality. 
 There is much in him from which she shrinks. His 
 social ineptitude, his faculty for doing the wrong 
 thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, makes 
 her shudder. Although fascinated, she is not 
 blinded. She sees his vulgarities, she questions his 
 sincerity, she even doubts whether he is deserving
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 241 
 
 of her respect. Nevertheless, the spectacular, 
 flamboyant brilliancy of the man dominates her 
 better judgment, and in spite of her relatives' re- 
 monstrances, in spite of warnings from a member 
 of Quisante's own family, she marries him, unable 
 to resist the almost hypnotic spell cast over her 
 by this man, who is something of a charlatan and 
 something of a cad. The greater part of the book 
 concerns itself with the story of the married life 
 of this curiously ill-assorted couple ; of his success 
 in the public eye; of her gradual disillusionment, 
 which, bitter though it is in its completeness, finds 
 her somewhat apathetic, unable to feel the resent- 
 ment that she knows she ought, unable to acknowl- 
 edge that she regrets her choice. This, indeed, is 
 the most interesting aspect of the book, the domi- 
 nation, mentally and morally, of a woman of rare 
 sensitiveness and infinite possibilities by a man 
 ■with whom companionship inevitably means de- 
 terioration. 
 
 The next of Mr. Anthony Hope's volumes, which 
 personally appealed to the present writer, is en- 
 titled A Servant of the Public, and is enjoyable 
 chiefly because of the tantalizing witchery of its 
 heroine. Ora Pinsent is a young actress, who has 
 taken London by storm. She has a husband some- 
 where, it is said, " whose name does not matter " ; 
 indeed, it matters so little that it does not prevent 
 her from letting Ashley Mead make ardent love to
 
 242 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 her, one Sunday afternoon, though all the while 
 she " preserves wonderfully the air of not being 
 responsible for the thing, of neither accepting 
 nor rejecting, of being quite passive, of having it 
 just happen to her." Thus with a single penstroke 
 Mr. Hope has set the woman unmistakably before 
 us. Throughout the book she practises the art 
 of having things just happen to her, the art of 
 dodging responsibility. With Ashley she drifts, 
 dangerously one thinks, at first, until one sees how 
 easily she checks his ardor when she chooses, with 
 a nervous laugh, and a low whispered " Don't, 
 don't make love to me any more now." She talks 
 much solemn nonsense about her duty to the hus- 
 band whose name does not matter, and about her 
 intention to renounce Ashley, although one realizes 
 that there is really nothing to renounce, nor ever 
 will be. And when the time comes for her com- 
 pany to leave London and start on their American 
 tour, here also she plays the passive role, neither 
 accepting nor rejecting. It is only when the weary 
 months of her absence are over and she comes back 
 as the wife of her leading man, that Ashley begins 
 to see her as she really is ; only then that he feels 
 her power over him has ceased ; only then that he 
 can say, " I no longer love her, but I wish to God 
 I did ! " It is not easy to convey an impression 
 of a woman's charm, when it lies not in what she 
 says, but in the way she says it; not in what she
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 24-3 
 
 docs, but in the way she does it. But this is pre- 
 cisely what Anthony Hope has done triumphantly 
 in his portraiture of Ora Pinsent, — Ora, with her 
 upturned face, with its habitual expression of ex- 
 pecting to be kissed, is one of the heroines 
 in contemporary fiction that will not easily be for- 
 gotten. 
 
 Helena's Path deserves something more than a 
 passing word of commendation, for it is an ex- 
 cellent example of Mr. Hope's deftness in doing 
 a very slight thing extremely well. It has an 
 outward framework of actuality, the atmosphere 
 of present day English country life; yet into this 
 he has infused a certain spirit of old-time chiv- 
 alry and homage that gives to his whole picture 
 something of the grace and charm of a Watteau 
 landscape. The whole theme of the volume, which 
 is scarcely more than a novelette, concerns itself 
 with a right of way. The hero's estates lie some- 
 where on the east coast of England ; but between 
 his land and the strip of beach where he and his 
 fathers before him have for generations been in 
 the habit of bathing lies the property which the 
 heroine has recently purchased ; and, unaware of 
 any right of way, she closes up the gate through 
 which it is his habit to pass for his daily swim. He 
 writes courteously but firmly, insisting on his right. 
 She answers in the same spirit, emphatically 
 denying it. He refuses to be robbed of his legal
 
 244 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 rights, even by a pretty woman ; she refuses to 
 yield, at a command, what she would have gra- 
 ciously granted to a prayer. As neither side 
 chooses to adopt legal measures, a state of mimic 
 war ensues, in which he continues to invade the 
 enemy's territory, while she continues to barricade 
 and intrench. And all the while, although they 
 have not once met face to face, each is quietly 
 falling in love with the other, so that when finally 
 honorable terms of peace are concluded, it is al- 
 ready a foregone conclusion that the whole dainty 
 little comedy will end with oaths of fealty and 
 bestowal of favors worthy of a knight and a lady 
 of the olden times. 
 
 With the passage of years, however, the author 
 of The Dolly Dialogues has tended to give us fewer 
 and fewer of these dainty trifles and more and 
 more of his serious and careful social studies. In 
 this class belongs The Great Miss Driver, and 
 there is no exaggeration in saying that since the 
 publication of Quisante it is easily the biggest, 
 best-rounded, and altogether worthiest book he 
 has written. And yet, the first thing you are apt 
 to think of is that the germ idea of the story goes 
 straight back to The Dolly Dialogues; that in a 
 superficial way, yes, and perhaps in a deeper way, 
 too, there is a certain rather absurd similarity 
 between them; just as though the author, having 
 once made a pleasant little comedy out of a cer-
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 245 
 
 tain situation, had ever since been turning over in 
 his mind the possibility of using it in a bigger and 
 more serious way, until eventually he evolved the 
 present volume. Not that Jennie Driver, heiress 
 to Breysgate Priory, bears any close resemblance 
 to Lady Mickleham beyond the very feminine de- 
 sire for conquest, — any more than the Air. Austin 
 of the one story is a close relative of Mr. Carter 
 in the other. The resemblance lies in this, that 
 both stories are told in the first person by the 
 man who in his secret heart loves the woman of 
 whom he writes, but knows that because he is 
 poor, because he has the natural instinct of an old 
 bachelor, because, also, she has given her heart 
 elsewhere, he must remain content to look upon 
 her joys and sorrows in the capacity of a 
 friend, and not that of a lover. To this ex- 
 tent The Great Miss Driver may be defined 
 as The Dolly Dialogues rendered in a different 
 tempo. 
 
 Yet, such a definition gives no hint of the 
 strength, the variety, the vital interest of this 
 story. In the character of Jennie Driver Air. Hope 
 has given us a woman whose ruling passion is to 
 hold sway, to fascinate and bend to her will every 
 one who comes within her sphere. And because 
 of this desire she can never bear to lose the al- 
 legiance of any man, no matter how mean and 
 unworthy he has proved himself; and herein lies
 
 246 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 the source of her life's tragedy. She is not con- 
 tent to be merely the richest woman in the county, 
 to play the part of Lady Bountiful, and build 
 memorials and endow institutions with fabulous 
 sums ; she wants also to be a social leader with 
 undisputed right to take precedence over all the 
 other ladies of the community, — and this she could 
 do if she married Lord Fillingford, whom she re- 
 spects, and who badly needs her fortune ; but 
 not if she should marry Leonard Octon, big, 
 brusque, rather brutal, who is cut by the whole 
 county, and whom she happens to love. It is a 
 rather unique situation in fiction for a woman to 
 be forced into publicly slighting the one man on 
 earth that she cares for; still more unique for a 
 woman who is pledged to marry one man to be 
 secretly meeting the other man, and thus atoning 
 for deliberately cutting him whenever they meet in 
 public. And, surely, it was a rather audacious 
 thing for Mr. Hope to attempt to make us feel 
 that in spite of her double-dealing Jennie Driver 
 is a rather big and fine and splendid sort of 
 woman; that she would have kept faith with Fill- 
 ingford had he been big enough to trust her when 
 appearances were heavily against her ; and that in 
 defying convention and scandalizing the little 
 world she lives in by fleeing with Octon to Paris, 
 she is doing the one big, brave, inevitable act. 
 Yet, that is precisely what the author does sue-
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 247 
 
 ceed in making us feel ; and when because Fate in- 
 tervenes and wrecks the last chance of Jennie's 
 happiness through the death of Octon, we not 
 only sympathize with her bitterness toward the 
 narrow-minded social circle that had forced her 
 lover into exile, but we also glory with her in the 
 big, carefully planned and altogether adequate re- 
 venge by which she forces the county to pay tardy 
 homage to the name of Octon. 
 
 Notwithstanding the statement made at the be- 
 ginning of this chapter, to the effect that Mr. An- 
 thony Hope does not write problem novels, the 
 volume entitled Mrs. Maxon Protests comes 
 critically near the border-line. Mrs. Maxon is sim- 
 ply one more young woman who has discovered 
 marriage to be something vastly different from 
 what she had imagined ; and her difficulty is of the 
 variety which she regards as almost humiliatingly 
 commonplace — namely, incompatibility. Her hus- 
 band happens to be one of those narrow, self- 
 satisfied, dictatorial men, with old-fashioned ideas 
 about women in general and a rooted conviction 
 that a man has a high moral responsibility for his 
 wife's conduct and must mould her in all fashions 
 to his own way of thinking. Mrs. Maxon bears the 
 strain for five years ; then she consults a lawyer. 
 She learns that while she cannot get a divorce in 
 England, she can leave her husband and he cannot 
 force her to come back. At the time of their
 
 248 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 separation, or to be more accurate, her desertion 
 of him — for Maxon refuses to take the matter 
 seriously — there is no other man in her life; but 
 in the weeks that follow during which she stays at 
 the country home of some friends with lax ideas of 
 life and a houseful of curious and often irregular 
 people, she suddenly surprises herself by falling in 
 love with a certain Godfrey Ledstone and promptly 
 scandalizes society by eloping with him openly and 
 unashamed. The rest of the book traces, with a 
 clear-sightedness that Mr. Hope has not always 
 shown in his books, the subsequent career of a 
 woman who thinks that by the force of her own 
 example she can bring the whole world over to her 
 way of thinking. He does not spare us any of her 
 disillusions, her humiliations, her heartache and 
 loneliness. But through it all she is learning, 
 strangely and cruelly learning, much that is exceed- 
 ingly good for her. She is learning, for instance, 
 that charity and sympathy and understanding are 
 often found where least expected. She is learning, 
 too, that there are many other standards in this 
 world as well as her own and that they are just 
 as reasonable and perhaps nobler. She learns 
 that one of the best men she has ever had the 
 good fortune to meet, loving her, pitying her, 
 utterly disapproving of her, would nevertheless 
 have made her his wife in spite of the scandal that 
 had preceded and followed her divorce — but for
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 249 
 
 one reason: he is an army officer, and a woman 
 with a taint upon her name would lower the social 
 tone of his regiment and be in some degree a 
 menace to the moral tone of the younger set. It 
 is a temptation to analyze at some length the 
 separate episodes of this rather unusual book 
 throughout the years while Mrs. Maxon is slowly 
 finding her way out of the quagmire of her own 
 making into a belated peace and happiness. Yet, 
 after all, what the book stands for is so admirably 
 summed up in the concluding paragraph that one 
 cannot do it a greater service than to close with 
 one brief quotation. It is a satisfaction to find a 
 book written upon this theme which, while recog- 
 nizing that there is much to be said on both sides, 
 shows neither vindictiveness toward the woman nor 
 a misplaced championship that would exalt her 
 into a martyr. 
 
 In the small circle of those with whom she had 
 shared the issues of destiny she had unsettled much; 
 of a certainty she had settled nothing. Things were 
 just as much in solution as ever; the welter was not 
 abated. Man being imperfect, laws must be made. 
 Man being imperfect, laws must be broken or ever 
 new laws will be made. Winnie Maxon had broken 
 a law and asked a question. When thousands do the 
 like, the Giant, after giving the first comers a box 
 on the ear, may at last put his hand to his own and 
 ponderously consider.
 
 250 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 Such are the volumes chosen as a matter of per- 
 sonal preference, out of the generous series that 
 Mr. Hope has so industriously turned out, during 
 a score of years. Another reader's choice might 
 be different, and who shall say whether it would 
 not be as well justified? Because, the first duty of 
 a public entertainer is to entertain ; and, taking 
 this for a criterion, the most that any one can say 
 of his own knowledge is, such-and-such volumes 
 have entertained me. It is obvious that Mr. Hope's 
 own preference is for his more serious work, that 
 with the passage of years he has grown more will- 
 ing to allow the books of his romantic period to 
 fade from sight. Yet, by doing this, he challenges 
 a harder competition, a stricter measurement 
 against a host of rivals. There has been no one to 
 give us a second Prisoner of Zenda, excepting Mr. 
 Hope himself, — notwithstanding that many an- 
 other writer has tried his best. But it would be 
 easy to name a dozen contemporary novelists who 
 could give us the annals of another Servant of the 
 People, or chronicle some further Intrusions of 
 Peggy, — and one or two who, perhaps, could do it 
 better. Mr. Hope is not one of the great novelists 
 of his generation ; but he is never mediocre, and 
 even in his uninspired moments never dull. His 
 Prisoner of Zenda and his Dolly Dialogues were 
 both gems of the first water ; his Quisante certainly 
 suffers nothing by comparison with George Gis-
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 251 
 
 sing's Charlatan, separated from it by barely a 
 year. As a chronicler of English manners he is 
 certainly of rather more importance than Mr. E. 
 F. Benson or Mr. Maarten Maartens, although not 
 in the same class with Galsworthy, Bennett, or 
 W. H. Maxwell. He will be remembered, I think, 
 somewhat as William Black and Marion Crawford 
 are remembered, as having preserved a wholesome 
 optimism, an unshaken belief in human nature, and 
 as having done his part to keep the tone of the 
 modern novel clean and wholesome.
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 The difficulty which must be faced in attempting 
 to write a critical estimate of the work of May 
 Sinclair, considered as a whole, is that this is pre- 
 cisely the way in which it refuses to be considered. 
 Her novels are hopelessly, irremediably incom- 
 mensurate; they have no common denominator; 
 they reveal nothing in the way of a logical pro- 
 gression, of mental or spiritual growth from book 
 to book, from theme to theme ; The Tysons, The 
 Divine Fire, The Helpmate, the three conspicuous 
 volumes of three separate periods, might, so far 
 as any sequence in thought or method is concerned, 
 be the product of three different brains, striving 
 diversely towards three several artistic ideals. 
 The first is merely a clever character study of an 
 exceptional man and woman, whose union inevita- 
 bly leads to tragedy ; the second is a prose epic of 
 genius battling for recognition, a myriad-sided 
 picture of modern life, flung before us with spend- 
 thrift prodigality; the third is a deliberately cal- 
 culated problem novel, in which the finer realities 
 of speech and action are sacrificed at the shrine 
 of the author's purpose. In certain qualities of 
 
 252
 
 MAY SINCLAIR
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 253 
 
 style, no doubt, it would be easy, if such proof 
 were required, to show that as a matter of fact all 
 the volumes which bear the signature of May Sin- 
 clair actually have emanated from her pen. Cer- 
 tain felicitous phrasings of description, certain 
 luminous flashes of subtle understanding, leave the 
 imprint of a distinctive hall-mark on all her writ- 
 ings. It is not the faltering hand of the artist, 
 but the difference in the nature and magnitude of 
 the inspiration behind the work that has made her 
 successive volumes so astonishingly uneven, so im- 
 possible to measure one against another. 
 
 The plain and unwelcome truth which forces 
 itself home with obstinate persistence, in propor- 
 tion as one studies Miss Sinclair's literary produc- 
 tions, is that for the purposes of serious criticism, 
 she is the author of just one book. Her other 
 volumes are full of interesting promise ; The Di- 
 vine Fire is big with achievement; her other vol- 
 umes are written from her head ; but The Divine 
 Fire came at white heat from her very heart and 
 soul. The very qualities that stamp it as of the 
 first magnitude are many of them conspicuously 
 absent alike from her earlier and subsequent books. 
 In her recent work, especially, she tends more and 
 more to speak as one having authority, and her 
 theories of life persist in looming up larger than 
 the specific human tale she has to tell; while the 
 great triumph of The Divine Fire lies precisely in
 
 254 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 the absence of any such intrusion on the author's 
 part, in its splendid and unvarying impersonality. 
 It was really quite curious, this sudden and be- 
 wildering fruition of unsuspected genius. It came 
 absolutely unheralded. There was nothing in its 
 predecessors, nothing in the uneven ability of The 
 Tysons or the more finished art of a less pre- 
 tentious tale such as Superseded, that would give 
 even a hint of the cycloramic sweep of treatment, 
 the breadth of vision, the deep, comprehensive 
 human sympathy of The Divine Fire, — just as, 
 despite the lavish praise of her admirers, there is 
 no promise in anything she has since done that she 
 will ever again rise to similar heights, ever dupli- 
 cate her masterpiece. Nor is there anywhere a 
 hint that she has the ambition to attempt it. Hav- 
 ing once achieved a novel of the epic type, vibrant 
 with the surge of human passions, the turmoil of 
 civic life, she seems content to fling aside the 
 formula, reject the spacious canvas and bold, 
 virile brush-stroke, and content herself with the 
 subtler, more etching-like precision of intimate 
 home portraiture, the secret infelicities of married 
 life. Now in the treatment of these delicate prob- 
 lems of sex, it seems, as I have had occasion to say 
 elsewhere, in the chapter devoted to "Frank 
 Danby," almost impossible for a woman writer to 
 achieve the impersonal, scientific detachment of a 
 surgeon presiding at a clinic ; there is always
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 255 
 
 either a self-conscious reticence, or else, what is 
 worse, that courage of desperation which ends by 
 blurting out the reluctant words with needless and 
 startling frankness. In her ability to write of such 
 matters with virile unconcern, " Frank Danby " 
 stands unrivaled among the women writers of Eng- 
 land. To the normal and healthy mind, there 
 should be no more embarrassment in reading even 
 the most outspoken passages of Pigs in Clover 
 than there would be in reading, let us say, a stand- 
 ard treatise on obstetrics. And this is precisely 
 what Miss Sinclair, with far greater personal 
 delicacy, cannot achieve. There are pages in The 
 Tysons, The Helpmate and The Judgment of Eve 
 in which the veil of intimate mysteries is snatched 
 aside and human frailty so uncompromisingly 
 labeled that the reader instinctively casts a con- 
 scious glance around him, in order to be assured 
 that he is alone. This is a feeling that has come 
 to me a score of times in reading Miss Sinclair's 
 books ; and the oddest thing of all is that there is 
 just one volume that never for an instant casts 
 even a shadow of this sort of sense of trespass- 
 ing on forbidden ground, namely, The Divine Fire. 
 And this is not because of any lack of boldness in 
 theme, any cowardly closing of the eyes to the 
 actualities of life ; on the contrary, the book has 
 that full share of human error and weakness that 
 is inevitable in any cross-section of life, cut boldly
 
 25G MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 and on a large scale. But because the book is con- 
 ceived on so high a plane, because in fact it has 
 around it a halo of the sacred fire, the sins of the 
 flesh are dwarfed to their proper relative value as 
 factors having their significance in the develop- 
 ment of human destinies, not as something to be 
 whispered, with innuendoes, from behind a fan. 
 
 In order to see more plainly the gulf, both in 
 workmanship and in ideas, that lies between The 
 Divine Fire and all her other books, let us examine 
 certain representative volumes of Miss Sinclair's 
 earlier and later period somewhat briefly, reserv- 
 ing a more detailed analysis of her crowning work 
 for the last. Miss Sinclair's works have come to 
 us in America in such chronological confusion that 
 their proper sequence in time is still a matter of 
 considerable confusion, among a large proportion 
 of her readers. Audrey Craven, which, I under- 
 stand, is, with the exception of some Essays in 
 Verse, her earliest published volume, is also the 
 most easily negligible. It has cleverness and a 
 certain kind of humor ; and it relates, in a vein of 
 light satire, the history of a young woman whose 
 " long quest of the eminent and superlative " ends 
 in the anti-climax of marriage with a nonentity ; a 
 fundamentally insincere young woman, who misses 
 her last chance of attaining her heart's desire, be- 
 cause in a burst of frankness she confesses that 
 once she had a terrible temptation:
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 257 
 
 It came to me through some one whom I loved — 
 very dearly. I was ready to give up everything — 
 everything, you understand — for him ; and I would 
 have done it, only — God was good to me. He made 
 it impossible for me, and I was saved. But I am 
 just as bad, just as guilty, as if he had let it happen. 
 
 And because the man to whom she confesses 
 has the narrowness of a certain kind of religious 
 asceticism, and agrees with her that she is "just 
 as guilty," they pass out of each other's lives. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson, which in the Ameri- 
 can edition suffered an unfortunate abbreviation 
 of title, is, in spite of certain crudities, a book of 
 much more serious import. Nevill Tyson is of 
 plebeian birth, — his father kept a tailor shop at 
 an early stage in his career, — and a cosmopolitan 
 by education. He has lived largely by his wits, 
 and seen much service in peace and in war, always 
 just missing the achievement of fame or fortune. 
 Suddenly, fate plays upon him the curious prank 
 of forcing him into the position of country gentle- 
 man, a role difficult of fulfilment for a man who 
 has scant liking for the country and lacks certain 
 essentials of gentle breeding. Now, if Mr. Nevill 
 Tyson could have been content to do the expected 
 thing, — expected, that is, in the narrow social cir- 
 cles of Drayton Parva, — if he could have inter- 
 ested himself in the famous orchid collection of his 
 late uncle, old Tyson of Thorneytoft ; and if he
 
 258 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 could have brought himself to marry a clever 
 woman with an unassailable position, all might 
 have gone well. But instead he chose to marry 
 little Mollie Wilcox, a mere nobody with whom, 
 scandal-mongers insisted, he had struck up an ac- 
 quaintance in a public railway carriage, — but " an 
 adorable piece of folly," none the less, " an illusion 
 and a distraction from head to foot ; her beauty 
 made a promise to the senses and broke it to the 
 intellect." " My husband says I am the soul of in- 
 discretion," she confesses blithely, while he, with 
 more candor than good taste, says openly, " My 
 wife has about as much intellect as a guinea-pig, 
 and the consequence is that she is not only happy 
 herself, but the cause of happiness in others." 
 What neither Mr. Nevill Tyson, nor the narrow 
 souls of Drayton Parva society, nor even Nevill's 
 one intimate friend, Stanistreet, could understand, 
 was that little Mrs. Nevill loved her husband with 
 an all-consuming passion, that left no room for 
 other emotions. She was unaware that Stanistreet 
 was in love with her, unaware that Drayton Parva 
 was all agog with malevolent gossip connecting 
 their names. Stanistreet was to her simply her 
 husband's friend, some one with whom she could 
 talk of Nevill when he was absent, some one who 
 had known Nevill before she had, and could have 
 told her many episodes of his early life, — episodes 
 which the poor little lady was mercifully spared
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 259 
 
 from hearing. As for Nevill, a man who never in 
 his life before had known what it was to care for 
 a woman, he was for the time being curiously and 
 illogically happy, until after the birth of his son 
 and heir. And at this point in the story a para- 
 graph occurs which deserves to be quoted at 
 some length, because the subtle truth of it, the 
 understanding of a certain type of man by no 
 means uncommon, is almost uncanny on the part 
 of a young woman in the early course of her 
 second book. It brings back to mind analogous 
 pages in that quite remarkable volume by Edouard 
 Rod, he Sense de la Vie: 
 
 Tyson had not the least objection to Stanistreet 
 or Sir Peter and the rest of them, they were welcome 
 to stare at his wife as much as they pleased; but he 
 was insanely jealous of this minute masculine thing 
 that claimed so much of her attention. He began 
 to have a positive dislike to seeing her with the child. 
 There was a strain of morbid sensibility in his nature, 
 and what was beautiful to him in a Botticelli Ma- 
 donna, properly painted and framed, was not beauti- 
 ful — to him — in Mrs. Nevill Tyson. He had the 
 sentiment of the thing, as I said, but the thing itself, 
 the flesh and blood of it, was altogether too much for 
 his fastidious nerves. 
 
 So, in order to hold her husband's love, that she 
 feels is slipping from her, Mrs. Tyson sacrificed
 
 260 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 her child. Weaned too soon, and intrusted to an 
 incompetent nurse, it promptly and very naturally 
 died ; and when the mother reappeared in the 
 village, showing a " hard, tearless face," all Dray- 
 ton Parva " was alive to the fact that Mrs. Nevill 
 Tyson was an unnatural mother." Up to this 
 point, the book is an admirable little study of an 
 ill-assorted marriage, made hopeless from the start 
 by a man's monumental selfishness and the med- 
 dling of scandal-loving neighbors. But what fol- 
 lows is too violent, too extreme, too needlessly 
 cruel; it lacks the restraint that is the key-note 
 of good art. That Nevill is fundamentally in- 
 capable of remaining true to any woman is made 
 sufficiently obvious ; but that after the death of her 
 child he should take his wife to London and then 
 slip away, vanish from sight, leaving her alone and 
 friendless, in the midst of her grief, is a little 
 harder to accept. And when Stanistreet takes 
 advantage of her loneliness to ingratiate himself 
 by offerings of flowers, theater tickets, luncheons 
 and dinners, and she naively accepts them all, be- 
 cause so long as Stanistreet is with her, she feels 
 that she " has not quite lost Nevill," it seems in- 
 consistent with the husband's character and with 
 his deep understanding of women, that he should 
 suddenly return, and, finding his friend with her, 
 brutally accuse her of infidelity. Then comes the 
 night when Nevill, after drinking too freely, causes
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 261 
 
 a lamp to overturn, and his wife rescues him, at the 
 cost of scars which destroy her beauty forever. 
 There are a few brief weeks when the man thinks 
 that he can rise above himself and repay her sacri- 
 fice with a lasting devotion ; but the daily sight of 
 that disfigured face is more than his " fastidious 
 nerves " can bear ; so he raises a volunteer company 
 and sets off for the Soudan, where he dies a hero's 
 death, after having slain his wife by his desertion 
 as surely as though he had put a bullet through 
 her heart. The trouble with the book is that it is 
 overdrawn ; the woman is a little more than human, 
 the man a little less. The end is melodrama, the 
 " brutal, jubilant lust of battle," and a " wooden 
 cross in the shifting sands." It is amazing how 
 readily an obsequious bullet, at the author's beck 
 and nod, consents to cut short a misspent life at 
 the psychological moment. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn from the amateurishness 
 of The Tysons to a much more modest bit of work 
 which, nevertheless, in its own way is very nearly 
 flawless. There is so much simple pathos, so much 
 genuine human nature in Superseded that only a 
 writer of the first rank could have wrought such 
 deft effects of light and shade from such slight ma- 
 terial. It is merely the humble tragedy of a timid, 
 colorless, inefficient school-teacher whom Fate 
 originally thrust into a niche that she could never 
 adequately fill; and then, after she has spent her
 
 262 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 strength for years in the pitiful struggle to do 
 what is demanded of her, unexpectedly thrusts 
 her out to an old age of helplessness and want. 
 The humble little woman's unspoken romance, the 
 harmless dreams which she weaves around the 
 young physician who befriends her and who has 
 already given his heart to another and younger 
 teacher, — the one destined, as the irony of life wills 
 it, to supersede her, — is the most delicate part of a 
 story which eludes analysis, and gives it its chief 
 charm. It would be difficult to point out another 
 story in English which portrays with such quiet 
 strength the pathos of inefficient old age, the 
 anguish of discovering that one has outlived one's 
 usefulness. 
 
 Superseded originally appeared just three years 
 before The Divine Fire, the same interval of time 
 that intervened before the appearance of Miss 
 Sinclair's next novel, The Helpmate. Towards this 
 volume I must confess to an antagonism incom- 
 patible with the judicial impartiality of criticism. 
 It is a well-intentioned book, built upon an inter- 
 esting thesis ; but, because its chief characters are 
 faultily conceived, it is an offensive book as well as 
 an unconvincing one. With the central theme, that 
 the narrow-mindedness of the so-called good 
 woman has been the moral ruin of many a man, as 
 surely as though she were a bad woman, I have 
 no quarrel. I simply fail to see that in the present
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 263 
 
 volume Miss Sinclair has chosen a case that proves 
 her contention. Here very briefly are the salient 
 facts: Anne Fletcher has married Walter Ma- 
 jendie chiefly because she believes he is "good." 
 The fact that he is not " good," that, on the con- 
 trary, the episode of his entanglement with Lady 
 Cayley is still, after seven years, an unforgotten 
 local scandal, is a matter which Walter's invalid 
 sister, Edith, has promised to break to Anne be- 
 fore the wedding ; but Edith fails to keep her prom- 
 ise, and Anne's enlightenment comes with cruel 
 suddenness through a bit of gossip overheard on 
 her honeymoon. Now, Anne is a young woman who 
 is physically cold and unresponsive, but capable of 
 a religious exaltation that is almost sensual. 
 When her belief in Walter's " goodness " is shat- 
 tered, she seriously questions whether his lapse 
 from virtue, seven years ago, does not release her 
 from her obligations as a wife, but finally takes 
 great credit for deciding that although " things 
 can never be as they were between them," she will 
 nevertheless " try to be a good wife to him." Now, 
 up to this point, we have good material for an 
 interesting and not too unusual situation. The 
 woman with an exaggerated conscience and a dor- 
 mant temperament, the woman who, knowing noth- 
 ing about the masculine nature, demands that he 
 shall be judged and disciplined according to her 
 standards, is a sufficiently common type ; and when
 
 264 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 she does not happen to marry her rector, or the 
 curate or Sunday-school superintendent, it is more 
 than likely that, from sheer force of contrast, her 
 choice will be a man whose philosophy of life is 
 more indulgent than her own. The trouble with 
 Miss Sinclair is that she has very much overdrawn 
 her element of contrast. Walter Majendie is not 
 merely more indulgent toward himself and his fel- 
 low men, — and women, — but he is altogether of 
 coarser clay, a man lacking in the finer sense of 
 honor, a man who is not altogether a " bounder," 
 nor wholly a cad, yet possessing a kinship to both. 
 He has an ill-timed levity, — an " appalling flip- 
 pancy," is her name for it, — that leads him into 
 disastrous irreverence. When, on her birthday, he 
 offers her an antique silver crucifix, and she hesi- 
 tates to accept it, because " to accept that gift, of 
 all gifts, was to lay her spirit under obligation to 
 him," he is so lacking in intelligence, so hopelessly 
 out of touch with her mood, as to ask : 
 
 " Are you not going to take it, then ? " 
 
 " I don't know. Do you realize that you are giving 
 me a very sacred thing? " 
 
 "I do." 
 
 " And that I can't treat it as I would an ordinary 
 present? " 
 
 He lowered his eyes. " I didn't think you'd want 
 to wear it in your hair, dear."
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 265 
 
 When on another occasion, he accompanies her 
 to Lenten Service, he asks her, as they emerge 
 into the open air, " Did you like it? " 
 
 He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him 
 now to be. They had been playing together, pretend- 
 ing they were two pilgrims bound for the Heavenly 
 City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice 
 game. He nursed the exquisite illusion that this time 
 he had pleased her by playing too. 
 
 But his lack of reverence, his fundamental in- 
 ability to respect her mood, even if he could not 
 share her faith, is as nothing compared with his 
 extraordinary acceptance of social complications 
 that any man of refined perceptions would have 
 realized to be intolerable. It is his misfortune, if 
 not his fault, that his. chosen circle of friends is 
 a bit lower in the social scale than that of his 
 wife. To complicate matters further, one or two 
 of his closest friends are men whose past, and pres- 
 ent, too, are not beyond reproach. They are men 
 whom Anne's sanctimonious little circle rigorously 
 exclude. Yet, considering that one of them in par- 
 ticular, a certain Mr. Gorse, is the man whom her 
 sister-in-law, Edith Majendie, would have married, 
 but for the obscure spinal trouble that came upon 
 her ten years ago, that Edith knows Gorse's human 
 weaknesses, and, like the big-souled woman that 
 she is, understands and forgives them, and that
 
 266 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 the only real joy Gorse knows is his occasional 
 calls at the Majendie home, — considering all this, 
 it would have been more magnanimous if Anne 
 could have brought herself to extend a little Chris- 
 tian charity and show a simple civility to her hus- 
 band's friend. Instead, she refuses to receive 
 either Gorse or any of the circle to which he be- 
 longs ; and, as her husband sees nothing incon- 
 gruous in having them at the house for dinner on 
 an average of once a week, the wife finds herself 
 driven into begging the hospitality of one or an- 
 other of her own friends, in order to avoid meet- 
 ing her husband's guests. People simply do not 
 do such things ; and one does not know which to 
 wonder at the more, the husband who would thus 
 force his wife away from home, or the guests who 
 would accept invitations in her absence. But 
 stranger things are to come. Lady Cayley, the 
 woman who seven years ago almost wrecked Ma- 
 jendie's life, and was bought off at such a heavy 
 cost that Majendie has not yet been able to pay 
 back the friend from whom he borrowed it, unex- 
 pectedly returns to town, is forgiven and received 
 by her relatives, and actually encounters her for- 
 mer lover and his wife at an afternoon tea. A man 
 with decent instincts would have been keenly alive 
 to the humiliation such a meeting inflicted on his 
 wife, even though she was spared a personal intro- 
 duction. But Walter tactlessly allows himself to
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 26? 
 
 chat and laugh with Lady Cayley for some min- 
 utes ; and when he and his wife are home once more 
 and she very naturally demands that he shall give 
 up visiting at houses where he is likely to meet his 
 former mistress, he stares in amazement and re- 
 fuses : 
 
 " I can't promise anything of the sort. Heaven 
 knows how long she is going to stay." 
 
 " I ought not to have to explain that by counte- 
 nancing her you insult me. You should see it for 
 yourself." 
 
 " I can't see it. In the first place, with all due 
 regard to you, I don't insult you by countenancing 
 her, as you call it. In the second place, I don't 
 countenance her by going to other people's houses. 
 If I went to her house, you might complain. She 
 hasn't got a house, poor lady." 
 
 The man is hopeless. That is the book's chief 
 and pervading weakness. The author wants us to 
 espouse her hero's cause, and instead, with almost 
 everything he says or does, he alienates our sym- 
 pathy. Of course, a marriage so ill-assorted is 
 bound to turn out disastrously ; but the stumbling- 
 block will not be a youthful error long since ex- 
 piated ; it will be the intolerable contact with little 
 daily vulgarisms, the hourly verbal clumsiness, the 
 monumental incapacity to understand the finer and 
 subtler temperament of the woman. The under-
 
 268 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 lying idea of the book is undeniably big ; the situa- 
 tion at the end of ten years of marriage that has 
 been a mockery of the word is poignant with 
 tragedy. The inevitable has happened ; after the 
 birth of her child the wife has tacitly claimed her 
 freedom ; the husband has been patient, — but 
 patience has its limits, and for the last three of 
 these ten years there has been another woman, es- 
 tablished in a snug little country house, who does 
 her best to make up to him for the emptiness and 
 disillusion of his home life. Then comes a night 
 when his only child, a frail little creature with a 
 weak heart, awakes from a vivid dream, declaring 
 her father dead, and cries and sobs ceaselessly, re- 
 fusing to be comforted, — until the strain is too 
 much for the feeble heart, and she sobs herself 
 into her final rest. To the wife there comes, simul- 
 taneously with this loss, the knowledge of the other 
 woman, the knowledge that it was because he had 
 gone to see that other woman that he had been ab- 
 sent when his presence might have saved the child's 
 life, — in short, as her disordered fancy conceives 
 it, that he is virtually the child's murderer. And 
 this she tells him brutally, lashing him with her 
 scorn. Now, an absurd charge of this sort is not 
 in itself sufficient to bring on an attack of apo- 
 plexy; but the man has been under a strain for 
 years ; he is cut to the heart by the irremediable 
 naiure of the double loss. And as he lies hovering
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 269 
 
 between life and death, the woman has long hours 
 in which to learn her own narrowness, long hours 
 in which to repeat over and over the words of Lady 
 Cayley, whom she scorned and who has ventured to 
 tell her the truth: 
 
 " Look at it this way. He has kept all his mar- 
 riage vows — except one. You have broken all yours 
 — except one. None of your friends will tell you 
 that. That's why J tell you. Because I'm not a good 
 woman, and I don't count." 
 
 It is because this situation is so big in possi- 
 bilities, and the principle involved so vital an issue 
 in hundreds of marriages, that it is hard to pardon 
 Miss Sinclair her amazing lack of perception in 
 blurring the issue by the needless complications of 
 a special case, and narrowing down to a mere lack 
 of breeding a question that ought to have hinged 
 upon the relative magnitude of two souls. 
 
 The Immortal Moment, while far slighter in 
 scope and significance than The Helpmate, is 
 artistically a much finer piece of workmanship. It 
 is seldom that a story brings to the reviewer such 
 a sense of impotence to do it justice within the 
 space of a single paragraph. One can, of course, 
 assert its admirable technique, its rare truth of 
 characterization ; its logical analytical develop- 
 ment ; but mere assertion, no matter how emphatic,
 
 270 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 lacks convincing power. What Miss Sinclair's 
 book deserves is a detailed and painstaking anal- 
 ysis of the kind that takes much time and space. 
 For, after all, stripped to its bare skeleton, The 
 Immortal Moment seems a curiously inadequate 
 framework upon which to fashion a story of any 
 considerable magnitude. It amounts to little more 
 than this : Kitty Tailleur is a sort of English 
 Dame aux Cornelias, who is spending a few weeks 
 in a fashionable hotel at an English seaside resort. 
 Owing to the absence of the man whose pocket- 
 book pays her bills, it is not strange that a clean- 
 souled, big-hearted, honorable nature such as Rob- 
 ert Lucy, meeting her in the casual way in which 
 one meets fellow-guests at a hotel, should mistake 
 her for what she is not; and, supplementing his 
 mistake by a graver one, should fall in love with her 
 and ask her to be his wife and a second mother to 
 his orphan child. Kitty Tailleur is not in the least 
 an idealized character ; she is quite frankly pic- 
 tured with the faults and limitations of her class — 
 the love of show, the thirst for admiration, the 
 insincerity, the imperious craving for emotions. 
 But it happens that for the first time in her life 
 she has learned the meaning of an honest, disin- 
 terested love. Had she not loved Robert Lucy 
 she would have run the risk of future discovery ; 
 but because of this love she cannot bring herself 
 to conceal her unworthiness from him. And after
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 271 
 
 she has owned the truth and he has decided that 
 for his child's sake, if not for his own, marriage 
 between them is impossible, she not only acquiesces 
 in his verdict, but adds to it by the supreme sacri- 
 fice of her " immortal moment," the seal of finality 
 that comes with death. But the art of this story 
 depends far less upon the substance than upon the 
 manner of the telling. Throughout the greater 
 portion of it the reader knows no more than the 
 man who loves her what manner of woman she is. 
 We hear the current gossip of the hotel corridors, 
 the jealous slurs of women, the over-bold admira- 
 tion of men, the stanch support of the few who 
 really like her. In other words, the reader is 
 placed in a position to see Kitty Tailleur from the 
 standpoint of Robert Lucy and to hear and sur- 
 mise what Robert Lucy might have heard and sur- 
 mised — with this advantage, however, that the 
 average reader is somewhat more worldly-wise 
 than Mr. Lucy, and therefore in a position to dis- 
 cover for himself the truth which the lover scarcely 
 credits, even after hearing it with brutal frank- 
 ness from the woman's own lips. 
 
 Yet nothing that has been said in the preceding 
 pages alters the fact that Miss Sinclair first be- 
 came a figure of importance in contemporary fic- 
 tion upon the appearance of The Divine Fire, and 
 that without it her importance to-day would be, if 
 not negligible, at least greatly diminished. In that
 
 n% MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 one book at least she arose to rare heights. It is 
 one of those big, manj'-sided, kaleidoscopic books 
 which paint metropolitan life, the good and the 
 bad together, with bold, sweeping brush-strokes, — 
 the sort of book which it is almost as hard for a 
 woman to achieve as it is for a woman to compose 
 a symphony. The impression that you bring away 
 from The Divine Fire is, first of all, an impression 
 of a multitude of human beings, and at the same 
 time not an impression of a crowd, — because, in a 
 crowd, few faces stand out distinct from the rest, 
 while in The Divine Fire there is a host of faces, 
 every one of which you recognize because they are 
 so carefully and admirably individualized. The 
 picture is painted on a wide canvas ; and there is 
 no mistaking the assured touch with which the 
 seamy side of journalistic and Bohemian London 
 are flung before us. It is the London of Grub 
 Street and Torrington Square ; the London of 
 newspaper and magazine offices, of old bookshops 
 and second-rate lodging houses, of cheap theaters 
 and cheaper music halls. Back of this tawdry and 
 penurious under-world we glimpse, faintly at first, 
 then more and more clearly, paths leading upward 
 and onward, into the clearer, more spacious realm 
 of art and letters, fame and fortune. More spe- 
 cifically, the book is the life history of two men; 
 the one, an impeccable classicist, a stern, uncom- 
 promising censor of public taste in literature and
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 273 
 
 art ; the other, a man lacking in breeding, in 
 culture, in all the essentials of a gentleman and 
 a scholar, but endowed with one heaven-born gift, 
 the gift of poetry, — and the history of these two 
 lives is, on the one hand, the sale of a birthright 
 for a mess of pottage, and on the other, the 
 apotheosis of a poet. Savage Keith Rickman is a 
 true Cockney in every bone and fiber ; he was born 
 and bred amid the dust of old books ; and even the 
 classical course in the University of London could 
 not eradicate certain vulgarisms of habit and 
 speech and manner, could not make him certain of 
 putting his aitches unerringly in the right place. 
 Furthermore, he is handicapped by an instinct for 
 sharp bargains, inherited from his trickster father, 
 old Isaac Rickman. In short, he is not a gentle- 
 man, in the accepted meaning of the term, — but 
 whether he is something a little less than a gen- 
 tleman, or something a little more, is a question 
 which those who know him best are not in undue 
 haste to answer. Curiously enough, in the soul of 
 this apparently insignificant Cockney clerk a 
 spark of the divine flame is smoldering. It has al- 
 ready flared up once or twice, in a burst that is 
 almost genius in certain audacious Saturnalia, and 
 in the opening acts of a wonderful symbolic drama, 
 Helen in Leuce. Yet the flame, even at its bright- 
 est, has not as yet leaped very high above the 
 earth. His Cockney streak is still uppermost ; he
 
 274 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 looks upon the throngs of women, who nightly 
 frequent Piccadilly Circus, abstractedly as "a 
 luminous, passionate nocturne of the streets " ; his 
 ideal of womanhood has not risen above the level 
 of Poppy Grace, a very ordinary little variety 
 actress, who has sung her way into popular favor 
 with cheap music hall ditties, and twirls blithely 
 on twinkling toes. Young Rickman makes her 
 acquaintance through the informal medium of ad- 
 joining balconies; and the nature of their friend- 
 ship is conveyed in terms which, although euphe- 
 mistic, are unmistakable. But a momentous day 
 comes when Rickman is sent into the country to 
 catalogue and appraise a priceless old library, 
 which his father, through unscrupulous dealings, 
 is about to acquire for a mere song. Until he 
 arrives at the old hall, he has never heard of the 
 existence of Lucia Harden, whose father owns the 
 library; nor has he been aware of the peculiar 
 complication regarding the library itself. Lucia 
 is one of those rare women with a love for books, 
 and a passion for classic learning. It is her own 
 idea to have this library catalogued, and she 
 means to pay the cost out of certain private 
 funds, and have the catalogue ready as a surprise 
 for her father, when he returns from the Con- 
 tinent. But it happens that Sir Frederick Har- 
 den, unknown to his daughter, has lost a very 
 substantial part of his fortune at Monte Carlo,
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 275 
 
 and has mortgaged his library for less than quar- 
 ter its value, and old Isaac Rickman has secured 
 an option from the mortgagee. Now, Lucia Har- 
 den, beautiful, cultured, and of fine old race, is 
 the first good, pure woman that Keith Rickman 
 has ever known, and she dawns upon his bewildered 
 senses as a herald of a new life, an inspiration that 
 will lead him upward to heights unguessed. Had 
 he been a gentleman, instead of something less, — 
 or something more, — Rickman would have known 
 at once the impossibility of remaining at Harden 
 Hall, working day and night, side by side with 
 Lucia Harden, and aware all the time that he is 
 in a certain sense helping to defraud her. When 
 he finally does realize what his duty is, and pre- 
 pares to tell her the truth, he is too late ; her 
 father has died suddenly, at Cannes, the mortgage 
 has been foreclosed, and the Harden library has 
 passed into the greedy grasp of Rickman the elder. 
 This sequence of events, bringing with them a tem- 
 porary belief on the part of Lucia Harden that 
 Keith has been guilty of unpardonable duplicity, 
 although it causes a long estrangement between 
 them, is the beginning of the poet's regeneration, 
 his emancipation from his bondage, his gradual 
 conquest over heredity and environment and his 
 earlier self. The first step is his permanent break 
 with his father, his departure from the classical 
 section of the old book shop, where he has so long
 
 276 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 been a familiar figure, and his appraisal accepted 
 as the final word. Instead, he enters on the pre- 
 carious path of journalism, picking up a pittance 
 here and there for a sonnet, an editorial, a para- 
 graph of criticism, and emigrating from second 
 floor front to third floor back, thence to a garret, 
 and then back again to second, in accordance 
 with the weekly ebb and flow of fortune. 
 
 Meanwhile there is a second leading figure in 
 the book, who is glimpsed but seldom during the 
 earlier chapters, because his social position makes 
 him a stranger to the sphere in which Rickman has 
 hitherto moved. Horace Jewdwine is an Oxford 
 Don, developing into a London journalist. " You 
 divined that the process would be slow; there was 
 no unseemly haste about Jewdwine." Academic 
 is a pale, inefficient word to apply to Jewdwine, 
 to his critical taste, to his manner of speech, his 
 written prose. He exhales the higher culture as 
 he moves ; his conversation is as formally classic as 
 an Elgin marble. His highest ambition is to found 
 a review of literature and art that shall be im- 
 peccable, the recognized court of last resort in 
 criticism. Now, it happens that Jewdwine is own 
 cousin of Lucia Harden, that he dreams in a 
 vague, noncommittal way of one day marrying her, 
 provided he can bring himself to sacrifice his 
 bachelor freedom; and meanwhile, being aware of 
 Rickman's interest in Lucia and of their tern-
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 277 
 
 porary estrangement, it suits his purpose to 
 manoeuver to keep them apart and to salve his 
 own conscience by offering Rickman the position 
 of sub-editor on his newly founded review, The 
 Museion. To trace the subsequent steps by which 
 the Cockney poet climbs upward and onward, 
 sacrificing one worldly prospect after another, in 
 his one fixed purpose to refine the pure gold of 
 his own soul, to redeem his honor, and through 
 slaving drudgery, sickness and starvation, win 
 back the library he was instrumental in helping to 
 steal, and lay it at Lucia Harden's feet as a 
 tangible evidence of atonement, — to tell all this 
 in detail would mean to rewrite inadequately a 
 story already so superbly written that one reads 
 it with an eagerness that is almost pain, all uncon- 
 scious of its most unusual and formidable length. 
 And Jewdwine, too, and his slow but inevitable 
 degeneration, form a chapter too extensive to 
 epitomize in detail. Here again is a superb piece 
 of work, — merciless, too, in the incisive irony of 
 the picture it draws of a man's self-deception, his 
 almost unconscious yielding to the pressure of ex- 
 pediency, until he is almost the only person left 
 who is unaware that his review is hopelessly com- 
 mercialized and his own critical opinions a mar- 
 ketable commodity. And in the end, when he looks 
 into his own soul and awakes to a realization of 
 its pettiness, he has not manhood enough left to be
 
 278 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 generous and wish his rival god-speed in his wooing 
 of the woman Jewdwine has forever lost, — but in- 
 stead he must play a dog-in-the-manger's part, 
 and by a dastardly trick try to block the marriage 
 between Keith and Lucia, a trick that falls to the 
 ground and sputters out impotently, because the 
 poet's soul has reached that rare height in which 
 love is refined of all dross and self is obliterated. 
 These are some of the things that Miss Sinclair 
 has achieved in this rather wonderful book. And 
 she has done one thing more, — and as a sheer mat- 
 ter of craftsmanship, the most wonderful of all; 
 she has shown us a genius, one of the finest and 
 rarest sort, and she has convinced us that he is all 
 she claims for him ; she has succeeded in making 
 him plausible, she has even ventured upon the su- 
 preme audacity of showing us fugitive specimens 
 of his verse, and yet escapes an anti-climax. Sav- 
 age Keith Rickman lives so firmly in our memory 
 as an English poet of the first magnitude that it 
 would not be at all surprising, indeed, it would 
 seem in a way a merited tribute to the novelist's 
 genius, if more than one absent-minded reader 
 should search for the name of Rickman in anthol- 
 ogies of English verse. 
 
 These are the reasons why it is difficult to dis- 
 cuss Miss Sinclair's other volumes more than half- 
 heartedly, why it has seemed best to omit some of 
 them altogether from discussion. They suffer too
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 279 
 
 much from contrast. One by one, they add their 
 cumulative evidence to the growing conviction that 
 The Divine Fire is likely to enjoy permanently its 
 isolated splendor among Miss Sinclair's contribu- 
 tions to fiction.
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 With the single and obvious exception of Mr. 
 Kipling, it would be difficult to cite any other con- 
 temporary writer of English fiction who has at- 
 tained such striking success as that of Mr. Alfred 
 Ollivant in three forms of endeavor differing so 
 widely as those represented severally by Bob, Son 
 of Battle, Redcoat Captain and The Gentleman. 
 To the host of friends whom he won by his strong 
 and tender story of a dog who was a gentleman 
 if a dog ever was one, it began to seem, as the 
 years went by, that Mr. Ollivant was destined to be 
 numbered among the authors of a single book. 
 And when a few years later a second dog story, 
 Danny, was barely given to the public before being 
 withdrawn by the author as a piece of work to 
 which he could not give his sanction, the impres- 
 sion was strengthened that he was not likely again 
 to be heard from. Contrary to expectation, after 
 another lengthy silence, he surprised his public 
 by producing within the space of a single year two 
 volumes that, each in its own way, stand very 
 close to the elusive border-line of genius. One 
 other volume, The Taming of John Blunt, subse- 
 
 280
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 281 
 
 quently found its way into print, and there is still 
 another which, when the day of its publication 
 arrives, is likely to bring its author high com- 
 mendation as an interpreter of certain humble 
 Cockney types and to win him comparison with 
 analogous works from the pens of De Morgan and 
 Galsworthy. 
 
 There are some novelists, probably the majority 
 of those who really count, from whose blunders 
 almost as much may be learned as from their suc- 
 cesses. It is possible to look back over their record 
 and to see how, step by step, they learn to outgrow 
 certain failings, to avoid certain errors, to do a 
 particular kind of thing over again, and to do it 
 better. Mr. Ollivant is not one of this class. He 
 can do only the thing which, for the time being, 
 holds him, heart and soul. When he blunders there 
 is no such thing as going back and doing it over. 
 He discards that particular type once for all, and 
 passes on to something new, something in which 
 his past achievements and failures have scant in- 
 fluence one way or the other. For this reason 
 there would be small profit in spending time or 
 space upon the two volumes which are admittedly 
 inferior work. The primary purpose of the pres- 
 ent study is to justify the contention that Mr. 
 Ollivant is one of the most original writers of his 
 generation ; and the best proof of this lies in the 
 three volumes which are now to be successively ex-
 
 282 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 amined and among which it is difficult to award the 
 palm for uniqueness. 
 
 Of Bob, Son of Battle, very nearly the last word 
 has been said, not once, but many times, by other 
 critics ; it is one of those rarely fortunate books re- 
 garding which the verdict of criticism and of the 
 general public coincided in giving it very nearly its 
 just due. The animal story, if we include within 
 this term the Beast Fable, is a type of fiction which 
 has come down from the unrecorded darkness of 
 antiquity ; and through the skilled magic of Mr. 
 Kipling, the type has taken a new lease of life in 
 the Jungle Books and the Just-So Stories. But 
 in these coldly practical days, when science is ruth- 
 lessly elbowing the classics out of our universities, 
 we have learned to make even our animal stories 
 scientific ; and we have as a result the tales of Mr. 
 Thompson-Seton, the best of which are zoological 
 monographs, and the worst, good examples of that 
 type of pseudo-psychology popularly known as the 
 nature fake. Besides these two main divisions 
 there is a wide-spread class of novel and short 
 story, in which the chief character is a dog or a 
 horse through whose eyes a certain series of human 
 episodes are witnessed and a certain effect of 
 irony, a certain criticism of life, is gained by ac- 
 cepting the canine or equine point of view. Such 
 books are of all periods and of all degrees of merit, 
 from The Golden Ass of Apuleius to Ouida's Puck,
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 283 
 
 from that widely popular piece of sentimentality, 
 Black Beauty, to Richard Harding Davis's bit of 
 real artistry, The Bar Sinister. And, of course, 
 any one whose reading in fiction has been at all 
 liberal will be able to cite many a story in which 
 some dumb animal has played a more or less sig- 
 nificant part. They range all the way from a 
 casual intrusion such as that of Binkie, who was 
 " an omen," in The Light That Failed, to Buck, 
 who pretty nearly fills the whole canvas, in The 
 Call of the Wild. But even with all these different 
 types clearly in mind, there need be no hesitation 
 in affirming that Mr. Ollivant's Bob, Son of Battle, 
 is not merely the best realistic story of animal life, 
 but the only one. While we read it, all others 
 simply do not exist. 
 
 The specific story of Owd Bob, the last of the 
 Grey Dogs of Kenmure, and his life-long feud with 
 Red Wullic, the Tailless Tyke, does not lend itself 
 well to a brief retelling. So much of its strength 
 lies in the careful etching-like detail, the soft grays 
 and browns of lowering sky and far-stretching 
 moor ; much, also, in the slow, persistent accumula- 
 tion of traits of character, little miracles of ob- 
 servation that by their progressive upbuilding give 
 birth to a little group of dogs and of men that are 
 perhaps more alive in their material existence of 
 ink and paper, and more likely to go on living, 
 than many another who actually moves and
 
 284 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 breathes. Of James Moore, the big, brawny, phleg- 
 matic and long-suffering master of Bob, and of 
 Adam M'Adam, the undersized, shrunken wisp of 
 humanity, with the disposition of a devil in whom 
 there still smolders a spark of tenderness, there is 
 no purpose in speaking here at any length. The 
 whole plot of the book is too thin, too skeleton- 
 like to be set forth at second hand without danger 
 of ruthlessly spoiling it. Viewed dispassionately, 
 apart from the contagious magic of Alfred Olli- 
 vant's matchless narrative, the whole thing nar- 
 rows down to this : We have two sheep-dogs, each 
 a prize-winner because of his peculiar prowess in 
 driving his flock ; each hating the other with a 
 hatred controlled only by the respective attitudes 
 of their masters ; and little by little the convic- 
 tion spreads that one of these two dogs has been 
 guilty of the one unpardonable crime a sheep-dog 
 may commit, — that of killing sheep. A matter, 
 you see, of a few throats opened, a few pounds of 
 mutton spoiled for the market in a little jumpjng- 
 off place on the world's surface ; a few farmers 
 out of pocket, and, in the end, a village well rid of 
 a bad dog. But, what Mr. Ollivant has actually 
 done is so vastly different from all this : under his 
 touch the outside world drops away and the 
 spreading acres of farm and pasture under the 
 shadow of the Muir Pike dominate the whole pic- 
 ture. In the personalities of two dogs he has
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 285 
 
 worked out certain eternal verities; has pictured 
 over again the unending battle between good and 
 evil, fought out in the blackness of night between 
 the immensities of earth and sky. The big scene 
 of the book, in which at last Red Wullie is caught, 
 vampire-like, at his hideous feast, with the shud- 
 dering, cowering flock standing as dumb witnesses, 
 and Owd Bob looming up beside him like an aveng- 
 ing fate, is beyond all praise in its tragic sim- 
 plicity, superbly elemental, almost Homeric. It is 
 no small task to take a couple of dogs and make 
 them stand as symbols for the passions and aspira- 
 tions of humanity; it is an even greater achieve- 
 ment to take an isolated corner of Christendom, a 
 gray, fog-haunted bit of moorland, and make it 
 the center of the Universe, blotting out the rest, — 
 and these things Mr. Ollivant has achieved with 
 an almost epic dignity. 
 
 Of the two books which equally with Bob, Son 
 of Battle, merit detailed notice, Redcoat Captain, 
 although one of the few really unique volumes 
 which any one decade gives us, is perhaps the less 
 apt to have its singular quality recognized. In- 
 deed, to the indifferent glance of the average 
 reader, the big print of its wide pages, the one- 
 syllable flavor of its dialect, the Mother Goose at- 
 mosphere of its illustrations, betokened merely one 
 more attempt to meet the demand for holiday 
 books for children, — and a none too successful at-
 
 286 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 tempt it turned out to be, according to the ex- 
 perience of numerous misguided purchasers who 
 found that somehow it failed to reach the intelli- 
 gence of the kindergarten age. Of course, as a 
 matter of fact, whether Mr. Ollivant himself was 
 precisely aware of it or not, Redcoat Captain is 
 not a book for children, but a sort of epitomized 
 philosophy of life, deliberately written in the man- 
 ner of Alice in Wonderland or the Just-So Stories; 
 or, to say the same thing in another way, it con- 
 tains the essence of the wisdom of childhood put up 
 in portable doses for the adult. It is the uni- 
 versal and perennial love story, told with the joy- 
 ous irresponsibility of Grimm 's Fairy Tales. It re- 
 minds you, as above suggested, of the Just-So 
 Stories and the next moment of Mr. Barrie's 
 Little White Bird, and then again of no one in the 
 world but Mr. Ollivant himself. A good many 
 readers will doubtless frankly take issue with 
 this opinion and lay the book aside in hopeless be- 
 wilderment. Yet the effort to understand its ten- 
 der symbolism is eminently worth while, not merely 
 because the inherent romance of love and youth 
 has seldom been treated with such freedom from 
 all that is conventional, but because it contains 
 the key to the right of entry into " That Country," 
 the country of those who have learned to remain 
 young in heart and to look upon life with the frank 
 serenity of little children. The book merits a little
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 287 
 
 patient effort to understand it, and I urgently 
 recommend some effort in its behalf. You will un- 
 doubtedly read it at first in a state of dazed in- 
 comprehension, telling yourself that if this is a 
 book attuned to the understanding of childhood, 
 you must suddenly have grown very old indeed. 
 You read it a second time, and here and there you 
 catch sudden sunlight flashes of meaning through 
 the prevailing fog of shorthand phrasing; but it 
 takes at least three readings before you fully catch 
 the spirit of it, and realize with a growing delight 
 that Mr. Ollivant has succeeded in saying almost 
 the last word on many of the deepest and tenderest 
 relations of life, and, what is more, saying it in 
 long primer type and a special nursery syntax in- 
 vented for the occasion. 
 
 Who else ever conceived of the possibility of 
 breaking into a love story with the following ab- 
 ruptness : " So, after waiting faithfully for days 
 and days and days, they agreed they could 
 wait no longer " ? And who else would ever 
 have had the delicious impudence of summing 
 up the essential details in tins stenographic 
 fashion : 
 
 She was between ten and twenty; He was a little 
 more. 
 
 He was so tall that the Fellows called him Tiny; 
 her name was Mabel, so they called her Baby.
 
 288 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 At this point a reviewer suddenly realizes once 
 again the impossibility of measuring Mr. Ollivant's 
 books after the ordinary standard. It is easy, 
 no doubt, to point out many hidden meanings in 
 Redcoat Captain, to show that it is an elaborate 
 political satire, a verbal caricature of the British 
 army. But its widest appeal will be exerted as an 
 allegory of the first year of married life. Baby is 
 by no means the first young wife who has tried 
 to " teach-by-tease " ; Tiny is by no means the 
 first newly-made husband who has slammed the 
 door and " gone j oggle- j oggle down the path," 
 and furthermore has added insult to injury by pre- 
 tending " don't-care-damb." The specimen quar- 
 rel which follows in Redcoat Captain deserves to 
 be quoted in extenso: 
 
 Then Baby peeped; and her handkerchief was at 
 her mouth; and she said in a wee voice, 
 
 "Back for tea, Tiny?" 
 
 So Tiny answered, 
 
 " Dunno," and joggled down the path. 
 
 Then Baby gasped, 
 
 " Hope you will, Tiny-boy ! " And she shut the 
 door and ran, because she was taken blubby bad. 
 
 And when Tiny heard that, he could not bear it 
 any more, for you can't if they keep on at it; and he 
 thought, 
 
 " You are a darling! I am a cad." 
 
 And he stopped, and turned, and went back to
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 289 
 
 the door as though he had his seven league boots on, 
 to say sorry I'm a cad, which he truly was. 
 
 But the door was shut. 
 
 Then Tiny ran up and down on his feet, and cried 
 at the key-hole, 
 
 " Lemme in ! lemme in ! lemme in ! O Baby ! I do 
 love you ! Truly sorry ! lemme in ! " 
 
 But it was too late then. 
 
 So Tiny stood outside the door and wished he 
 hadn't. And that is what Adam spent his time doing 
 outside the Gates of Eden. And it is what most of 
 us spend a lot of time doing when it's too late. And 
 it very often isn't till you stand outside and wish 
 you hadn't, that you know how jolly it was inside, 
 before you had. 
 
 There you have a characteristic quotation, — it 
 might have been any one of a score of others 
 equally incisive, equally human. For, after all, 
 the quality through which Redcoat Captain is 
 destined to live is not that of satire, but rather the 
 whimsical lightness of phrase that veils a deep, 
 underlying seriousness, and makes the mythical 
 kingdom of " That Country " a goal within the 
 reach of all of us, if only we can remember to 
 live with the wise straightforwardness and sim- 
 plicity of little children. 
 
 To a casual glance, it would seem as though no 
 book could be found presenting a greater contrast 
 than Mr. Ollivant's new volume, The Gentleman.
 
 290 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 Yet, if you study the style, you see very quickly 
 the same tendency toward a sort of literary short- 
 hand, an almost algebraic brevity of word and 
 phrase, which in the hands of this one man is at 
 times startlingly effective, and which at the same 
 time defies imitation, and would become exas- 
 perating if clumsily plagiarized. This one point 
 of similarity in style is worth dwelling upon, be- 
 cause there is always a certain interest in tracing 
 the kinship between an author's works ; and in 
 this particular case, the kinship lies in style alone, 
 — otherwise, The Gentleman stands by itself, a dis- 
 tinctly bigger achievement than either of its 
 author's earlier books ; and, one is tempted to add, 
 the book best entitled of any story written in Eng- 
 lish since the days of Robert Louis Stevenson to 
 trace its ancestry straight back to the purest 
 strain of the romantic novel. 
 
 Had he chosen, Mr. Ollivant might have in- 
 scribed as sub-title to The Gentleman " A Novel 
 Without a Heroine." The shadow of a woman's 
 influence in moulding the destinies of England lies 
 heavily across its canvas, but only men enter into 
 the action of it. It is difficult to recall for the 
 moment any recent volume of importance since 
 Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus from 
 which the feminine element is so completely elim- 
 inated. A two-page preface, in its opening lines,
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 291 
 
 gives the date, July, 1805, as well as the historical 
 background to the story. 
 
 " Succeed, and you command the Irish expedition," 
 said the squat fellow. 
 
 " My Emperor ! " replied the tall cavalryman, 
 saluted, and clanked away in the gloom. 
 
 Regarding the element of true history in this 
 book, it is very doubtful whether any one qualified 
 to appreciate the finest qualities of it will care to 
 raise a question. At least some such thought must 
 have been in Mr. Ollivant's mind when for his clos- 
 ing word he penned, with characteristic brevity, " I 
 will answer no questions about this book." His 
 instinct must have told him that only those prosaic 
 souls who are blind to the spirit of true romance 
 would want to measure him by the dry-as-dust 
 standards of recorded history. It is the hall-mark 
 of the best historical romance, whether it be Ivan- 
 hoe or Les Trois Mousquet aires, Richard Yea-and- 
 Nay or The Gentleman, that one cares not in the 
 least whether the historic personages within their 
 pages ever had a separate existence in the real 
 world. They exist for this once at least, more 
 vivid, more genuine, more convincingly human 
 than any historic record could ever make them. 
 And whatever statistical history may have to say 
 of Richard I., of Richelieu, of " the man of
 
 292 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 Aboukir Bay," — there are those of us who will still 
 treasure the pictures drawn by the masters of 
 romance, among whom Mr. Ollivant seems destined 
 to find an abiding place. 
 
 Of the details of plot in The Gentleman it is 
 not necessary to know more than this : that it 
 concerns an attempt to entrap and capture no less 
 a personage than Nelson himself, through the 
 agency of the woman whom Nelson loves ; the dis- 
 covery of that attempt through a message, hidden 
 in a woman's scent-bottle that is found in a dead 
 man's mouth ; and the frustration of the whole 
 scheme at the cost of many valiant lives. What 
 you bring away from the book is not so much a 
 detailed impression of a carefully worked-out plan 
 of campaign by the " Squat Fellow " across the 
 channel, as it is a series of tense, grim, masterful 
 pictures of heroes, indomitably fighting and dying 
 gloriously for a great cause. As an example of 
 literary shorthand, — for there is really no other 
 phrase that serves to define his peculiar power of 
 verbal condensation, his remarkable trick of nar- 
 rative foreshortening, — The Gentleman is quite 
 inimitable. The scenes shift before your eyes with 
 the rapidity of a moving picture ; you catch light- 
 ning flashes of battle scenes glimpsed through a 
 murk of smoke and fire ; a dozen words, the stroke 
 of a pen and the impression has been given. An- 
 other penstroke, and you perceive succinct and un-
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 293 
 
 forgettable the picture of nature's peace, follow- 
 ing upon the discord of man : " All was silence 
 and a few pale stars." 
 
 But the only adequate way in which to give an 
 impression of the true flavor of the book is by 
 letting it speak for itself in a few rather extended 
 quotations. No one who has described warfare on 
 land or sea, from Smollett, Marryat and Hugo to 
 Tolstoy and Zola, has been free from scenes of hor- 
 ror. Alfred Ollivant is no exception to the rule; 
 there are many pages in The Gentleman that set 
 you shuddering. But study the sheer, grim power 
 of a passage like the following, which describes a 
 boy's first impression of what is happening below 
 decks, among the guns of a battleship in action : 
 
 The boy dropped into Hell. 
 
 Down there was no order. All was howling chaos. 
 Each gun-captain fought his own gun, regardless of 
 the rest. Billows of smoke drifted to and fro; shad- 
 owy forms flitted; guns bounded and bellowed; here 
 and there a red glare lit the fog. 
 
 Through the shattering roar of the guns, the rend- 
 ing of planks, the scream of round-shot, came the 
 voices of men, dim-seen. Jokes, blasphemies, pray- 
 ers, groans, issued in nightmare medley from that 
 death- fog. . . . 
 
 On mid-deck a shadow was pirouetting madly. 
 Suddenly, it collapsed; and the boy saw it ended at 
 the neck.
 
 294* ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 A dim figure lolled against an overturned gun. As 
 the lad gazed, it pointed to a puddle beside it. 
 
 " That's me/' it said with slow and solemn in- 
 terest. 
 
 The boy trod on something in the smoke. A 
 bloody wraith, spread-eagled upon the deck, raised 
 tired eyes to his. 
 
 " That's all right, sir," came a whisper. " Don't 
 make no odds. I got all 1 want." . . . 
 
 A shot, screeching past the boy's nose, took his 
 breath away. He staggered back, and brought up 
 against a gun-captain, his shoulders to the breech of 
 the gun. 
 
 The man turned with a grin. It was the Gunner, 
 naked to the waist, and smoke-grimed. 
 
 "Sweet mess, ain't it?" he coughed. "How d'ye 
 like your first smell o' powder, sir? " 
 
 And as a companion picture to this, here is a 
 glimpse of the boy's condition of mind when he 
 first catches the contagion of conflict from his 
 battle-fellows : 
 
 Uplifted as a lover, the wine of War drowned his 
 senses. In the glory of doing, he had no thought 
 for the thing done. His was the midsummer mad- 
 ness of slaying. In that singing moment how should 
 he remember the bleak and shuddering autumn of 
 pain, inevitably to follow? — the winter of clammy 
 death? — the March-wind voices of distant women, 
 wailing their mates ?
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 295 
 
 And in contrast with these scenes of carnage, 
 here is one more episode printed as a complete sub- 
 chapter, which will serve the double purpose of 
 illustrating the author's power of pathetic tender- 
 ness, as well as his ability to say a wondrous deal 
 in the fewest and simplest words : 
 
 The Parson bent. 
 
 " Piper! " he called low. " Piper! " 
 
 The old man stirred. 
 
 " D'you know who I am? " 
 
 One great forefinger uplifted and fell. 
 
 " We won through," choked the Parson, " Nelson's 
 safe." 
 
 The old man's lips parted. 
 
 " Mr. Caryll's brought a message for you from Nel- 
 son," continued the Parson. "Kit!" 
 
 The boy bent his lips to the ear of the dying sailor. 
 
 " Piper! " he cried, his pure boy's voice ringing 
 out fearlessly. " Nelson — sent — his — love — to — you 
 — his — love." 
 
 " He can't hear," choked the Parson, " it's no 
 good." 
 
 " Hush," said the boy. 
 
 He knew the message would take minutes traveling 
 along the dying passages to the brain. 
 
 At last, at last it reached. 
 
 The old man's face broke into a smile, fair as a 
 winter sunset. 
 
 " Love," he whispered, nodded deliberately, and 
 died.
 
 296 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 But in attempting to find adequate quotations, 
 one runs up against the very unusual difficulty of 
 choice, because almost every paragraph strikes 
 one on a second reading as almost equally good. 
 Indeed, the more one studies The Gentleman, the 
 more the conviction grows that it is one of the very 
 few novels of the first magnitude that the past 
 decade has produced. 
 
 In conclusion, a few words seem to be demanded 
 regarding Mr. Ollivant's place in contemporary 
 fiction. It is obvious that he stands outside the 
 current movement, that he has not seriously in- 
 fluenced its trend nor been influenced by it. All 
 that he does bears the unmistakable stamp of origi- 
 nality, — not that commoner, more obvious original- 
 ity that lies in a clever plot, a new type of char- 
 acter, but that far rarer sort which suggests a 
 personality behind the book bigger and finer than 
 the book itself. It is this pervading sense, as one 
 reads the pages of Mr. Ollivant, of enjoying an 
 hour's intercourse with a man who has thought 
 deeply on many subjects and has reached an ab- 
 solute independence of view through his own line 
 of reasoning, that gives his books a breadth and 
 depth out of all proportion to their immediate 
 scope and interest. They are not local or 
 ephemeral in their appeal; they have a touch of 
 universality that is the hall-mark of books likely 
 to endure.
 
 MRS. II EX It Y DUDENKY
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 The difficulty that presents itself at the out- 
 set of a critical study of Mrs. Henry Dudeney's 
 novels is the simple fact that the majority of them 
 are not of sufficient importance to merit such 
 analysis. The Mrs. Dudeney of recent years, the 
 author of Robin Brilliant and Rachel Lorian, of 
 The Orchard Thief and The Shoulder-Knot, might 
 properly be dismissed with a brief paragraph giv- 
 ing her credit for a pleasant style, a pervading 
 readableness, and a keen eye for the importance of 
 seeming trivialities. But it happens that Mrs. 
 Dudeney has had two periods ; and in the earlier 
 of the two she produced at least three volumes of 
 very unusual quality, volumes which it is difficult 
 for any one, on whom they have once cast their 
 spell, to appraise in terms of sober moderation. 
 These volumes are Folly Corner, Men of Marlowe's 
 and Spindle and Plough, — and it is to these three 
 books that the present study will be mainly limited. 
 
 It is well to bear in mind that whatever is here 
 said by way of generalization regarding Mrs. 
 Dudeney's literary creed and methods of work re- 
 fers to her earlier period, the period when her 
 
 297
 
 298 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 powers of observation were wonderfully alert and 
 her intuitions of character and temperament aston- 
 ishingly keen. As a novelist she has two claims to 
 consideration. One is her marvelous skill in the 
 presentment of petty details ; the other is her in- 
 sight into the complexities of some of the more 
 uncommon types of feminine nature. In her com- 
 prehensive view of life nothing seems to be too 
 obvious or too trivial for mention. She delights 
 in emphasizing the sharp contrast offered every- 
 where and at all times around us between the things 
 of the spirit and the things of the flesh, — the gro- 
 tesque incongruity between the stress and stonn 
 of inner emotions and the untroubled tenor of the 
 outside physical world. Throughout the crises in 
 her stories she insists upon keeping clearly be- 
 fore us the petty happenings of everyday life, — 
 the distant ring of the blacksmith's hammer, the 
 trivial, empty gossip of good-natured but hope- 
 lessly limited village folk, a stranger's chance ut- 
 terance overheard in a crowd and freighted with 
 unguessed significance, the meaningless words 
 which wink out, letter by letter, in lines of fire as 
 glimpsed from a London 'bus, and serve to sym- 
 bolize " the weird, the threatening, the unknown." 
 Regarding Mrs. Dudeney's second claim to at- 
 tention, it is somewhat difficult to say precisely 
 what one has in mind because of the danger of con- 
 veying some subtle half-tone of meaning which may
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 299 
 
 not be quite the meaning the writer sought to con- 
 vey. In view of the stigma which seems to attach 
 to the term " sex-problem novel," one hesitates to 
 apply it to such eminently sane, clear-sighted pic- 
 tures of life as Folly Comer and Spindle and 
 Plough. Yet the vital and dominant note in both 
 these books, the note which differentiates them 
 sharply from the work of many another careful 
 and able writer, is their delicate yet pervading 
 consciousness of sex. Mrs. Dudeney's literary 
 creed may best be defined as a wholesome realism, 
 the sort of realism which does not go out of its way 
 to search for the unpleasant side of life, but does 
 not ignore or shrink from what it finds in the 
 natural and ordinary course. With the morbid 
 curiosity of certain psychological writers of the 
 Continental school for what is abnormal and per- 
 verted, she has nothing in common. She sim- 
 ply recognizes quite frankly the existence of 
 certain basic, elemental facts, and handles them 
 with a fearlessness characteristic of those who live 
 their lives close to nature, who have grown up in 
 the atmosphere of field and farm and delight in the 
 study of nature's methods of growth and of 
 fruition. 
 
 In treating the sex element, it is quite unneces- 
 sary for a novelist to go to the length of a Zola 
 or a d'Annunzio in order to make us recognize 
 that it is an ever-present factor in the social life
 
 300 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 of all times and countries ; and that no amount of 
 conventional ignoring or glossing over will alter 
 the fact that it is often a paramount influence in 
 the history of many a normal man or woman ; that 
 below an apparently tranquil surface, an unspoken 
 and inexplicable partiality or aversion contains the 
 key to many a life which otherwise would have been 
 lived differently. The great distinction of Mrs. 
 Dudeney's book is her marvelous subtlety in un- 
 derstanding and expounding just such cases of 
 personal attraction and repulsion. Her characters 
 stand forth from the printed page endowed with 
 the breath of life, not because they are better in- 
 dividualized, clearer portraitures, with all their 
 little idiosyncrasies of manner and of taste, but 
 because of their frank consciousness of sex, be- 
 cause she has made them normal, healthy men and 
 women, tingling with vitality, and the joy of liv- 
 ing. Her men, at least the men for whom she be- 
 trays a personal predilection, are for the most 
 part stalwart, hard-working farmers, of the more 
 prosperous sort, with an atmosphere of the glebe 
 about them ; her women are large and built on 
 strong lines, and, if not actually beautiful, are 
 at least good to look upon, and with a suggestion 
 of physical well-being about them. They are none 
 of them of the neurotic, anemic type of Con- 
 tinental fiction. There is not a Magda nor a 
 Hedda Gabler nor a Madame de Burne among
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 301 
 
 them. They are as far from being spoiled by 
 modern higher education as they are from sink- 
 ing to the level of mere household drudgery. In 
 short, they are simply types of the average middle- 
 class Englishwoman, with all her qualities and her 
 limitations. 
 
 It is in her searching studies of women that Mrs. 
 Dudeney has revealed powers that approach 
 closely to the border-line of genius. Her chief pre- 
 occupation seems to be the conflict which goes on 
 in the heart of a certain type of woman between 
 two opposing instincts, — that of independence and 
 freedom and physical comfort on the one hand, 
 and on the other that of sex and sacrifice and self- 
 surrender. For the most part the type which 
 seems to have interested Mrs. Dudeney, to the ex- 
 clusion of all others, is that in which the second 
 of these impulses is paramount. Harriott Wicken 
 is a case in point. From the moment that she first 
 met Daniel Darnell, casually met him in a 'bus and 
 scraped an acquaintance as a housemaid might 
 have done, he was the one dominant influence in her 
 life. Here is the way that Mrs. Dudeney gives us 
 a glimpse into the girl's heart in the midst of the 
 honeymoon, multiplying and piling up her luminous 
 little details until we could not help seeing, even 
 against our will: 
 
 Her eyes, through the zigzag veil, were fixed hun- 
 grily on her husband. She was so happy. There
 
 302 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 would no longer be any wrong settings to life. Peo- 
 ple would be harmonious. She was already begin- 
 ning to find out that this was only another word for 
 well-bred. Dandie was the keystone of her life. 
 She was unconscious of the thick streak of prig in 
 him. He was so handsome, so well-dressed, so ele- 
 gant. She loved his drawling, haughty voice. She 
 loved to see him take out his lizard-skin cigar case 
 bound in silver, or his equally dainty and effeminate 
 pocket-book. She used to finger the bottles and cas- 
 kets in his dressing-bag; she had never come into 
 actual contact with such daintiness before. His trim, 
 golden mustache, well-kept nails, and expression of 
 gentle boredom fascinated and rather awed her. 
 Sometimes she fancied herself quite uncouth and loud 
 by contrast. He was faintly stupid too. She found 
 that restful. She was so full of moods that his even 
 temper and indolent, everyday way of taking life 
 refreshed her. Once she had longed to be clever, to 
 distinguish herself in some way, but now she had 
 learned wisdom; clever people were a great nuisance 
 to every one, and most of all to themselves. 
 
 The central interest, however, in The Maternity 
 of Harriott Wicken, is less the relations between 
 a particular man and woman than it is a grim 
 problem in heredity, the shadow of retribution 
 which nature exacts from those who break her 
 laws. For generations there has been a taint in 
 the family of Wicken. Intemperance, epilepsy, 
 insanity and crime are some of the forms in which
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 303 
 
 the taint manifests itself. When Harriott Wicken 
 herself is ushered into the world it is under cir- 
 cumstances as hideous as any author has ever 
 ventured to imagine. The mother, knowing her 
 hour has almost come, has tried to distract her 
 troubled thoughts by reading the columns of a 
 local paper in which are printed the ghastly de- 
 tails of a brutal murder, a young girl of the neigh- 
 borhood found in a swamp where her assailant had 
 hidden the body after cutting her throat. The ex- 
 perienced old woman who is in attendance upon 
 Mrs. Wicken and has helped to bring more than 
 one child of that name into the world, tries to 
 draw her thoughts away from these morbid hor- 
 rors, but at this critical moment the husband's 
 heavy, shuffling tread is heard and he lurches into 
 the room and stumbles in a drunken stupor into a 
 chair. It is better to leave Mrs. Dudeney to tell 
 what follows in her own words: 
 
 The newspaper which his wife had let slip to the 
 floor attracted his attention. He pounced on it with 
 an uncanny air of glee, turned to the report of the 
 tragedy, stared at it with a wide, vacant smile for a 
 moment, and then, throwing it down, thrust his face 
 forward and gave a laugh. . . . They saw him draw 
 his forefinger across his throat in a curved clean 
 sweep, and then he laughed again. 
 
 "Charming girl! Neat job! The fools! They 
 little think that I — how she tore and struggled — like
 
 304 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 a tiger ! Heavy to drag into cover. My knife — 
 Rosalie ! " 
 
 And at the end of the chapter Mrs. Dudeney 
 laconically sums up the net results of the tragedy 
 with the brief statement that " upstairs, Mrs. Gat- 
 ley was giving a new Wicken, in spite of itself, its 
 first toilette," and that Rosalie " was growing cold 
 in her bed, her sharp-pointed nose severely out- 
 lined, and her eyes — the horror had never gone out 
 of them — closed on an unsatisfactory world." 
 Harriott is adopted by her mother's sister and 
 grows up in ignorance of the fact that her father 
 committed suicide on the same night that he was 
 responsible for her mother's death. It is made 
 very clear that, with the curse of the house of 
 Wicken hanging over her, Harriott has no moral 
 right to marry ; but, unfortunately for her, the 
 poor girl is not warned in time. Her child, when 
 born, is outwardly like other children, and as the 
 months go by she is far too engrossed in Dandie, 
 and also too jealous of his pride in the child to be 
 as observant of it as a mother should. It is only 
 when the child is over a year old and is still hair- 
 less and toothless, unable to creep or to lisp a 
 syllable and gazes on the world with eyes of dull 
 vacancy, that a chance bit of servants' gossip en- 
 lightens her and reveals the horror she must face. 
 Dandie has meanwhile been called to South
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 305 
 
 America on business, and is gone altogether 
 eighteen months. Week after week, during his ab- 
 sence, he receives long letters relating in detail 
 the clever sayings and doings of his child; every 
 chance phrase overheard by Harriott from the 
 children in the London streets contributes to the 
 weekly bulletin. And when he returns at last, 
 somewhat unexpectedly, he is a little puzzled to 
 find that his wife has given up their former home, 
 removed to new quarters and dismissed all the old 
 staff of servants. But he quickly forgets his as- 
 tonishment in delight at the bright, sunny-faced, 
 beautiful little child that calls him " papa " and 
 dances gaily around him. And all the time Har- 
 riott is haunted by the last glimpse she had of the 
 pitiful little monstrosity which was none the less 
 her own flesh and blood, and which she had left to 
 the untender ministration of an old hag in a dis- 
 tant country town. Of course, a piece of decep- 
 tion of this sort sooner or later works its own 
 retribution. From the hour when she gave up her 
 child Harriott's torture of defrauded motherhood 
 begins. She hates the innocent usurper with an 
 augmenting hatred, a hatred that she cannot dis- 
 guise; and she sees that because of it, her hus- 
 band's love is slipping from her. And then a few 
 crucial events happen in swift succession. The 
 young physician who was an early suitor in the 
 days before she met Dandie and who helped her in
 
 306 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 the substitution of the child, sends her a pre- 
 arranged signal; she must come at once if she 
 wishes to see it alive. Throughout the night she 
 and the doctor are together in a lonely cottage 
 waging a winning battle against pneumonia, and 
 by morning the useless little life is saved. But 
 gossip travels quickly, and Dandie learns that his 
 wife and the doctor have met clandestinely. It 
 would have been interesting to learn what, in Mrs. 
 Dudeney's opinion, would have been the attitude 
 of a man like Dandie if he had learned of the de- 
 ception practised on him by his wife. But this he 
 was destined not to do. It was easier for Harriott 
 to let him believe the worst about her, to pass out 
 of his life, to bury herself and her idiot child in the 
 isolation of the old country house which had wit- 
 nessed her own birth and shared so many grim 
 family secrets ; and later, when the cold, gray 
 horror of her exile became unbearable, to end it 
 all by aiding nature to shorten the child's life 
 and promptly follow it herself into the final mys- 
 tery. 
 
 Folly Corner, although it has its grim episodes, 
 is by contrast a blithe and cheerful book. Further- 
 more, it is easily Mrs. Dudeney's masterpiece. The 
 character of Pamela Crisp, which constitutes the 
 vital interest of the book, is one of which, it may 
 be said, with some confidence, that not one woman 
 in ten will recognize the absolute truth, for she
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 307 
 
 stands outside the circle of their experience. The 
 casual man is far more likely to recognize the type, 
 while a small masculine minority will inevitably 
 find her fascinating. And yet Pamela is not a 
 girl who may justly be called abnormal. On the 
 surface, she even impresses one as a trifle common- 
 place. She is a big girl, we are told casually, of 
 twenty-five or less, with gray eyes and fair hair, 
 " a handsome girl in the elementary way which 
 satisfies most men " ; she is, moreover, of mercurial 
 temperament, and quick to register slight fluctua- 
 tions in the emotional barometer, a girl who " can 
 be made happy by a bar of French chocolate and 
 miserable by a shabby bonnet." She is a curious 
 blending of snob and Cockney, with just such a 
 smattering of culture as to take herself and her 
 opinions very seriously; above all, a thoroughly 
 feminine, yet thoroughly cat-like young person, 
 with all a cat's love of a sleek coat and a cozy cor- 
 ner by the fire — and, like a cat, quite guiltless of 
 any sense of gratitude. Such is the obvious, every- 
 day Pamela, the Pamela who was known to the 
 placid, commonplace ladies of Liddleshorn. But, 
 unfortunately for Pamela's peace of mind, there 
 was another side to her nature, an emotional side, 
 which had long lain dormant, and which, when 
 awakened, was a revelation to herself. There were 
 in her nature certain imperious claims of sex, — 
 certain chords of passion ready to respond to the
 
 308 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 right man ; and the right man had touched them. 
 It makes no difference in the story that Pamela's 
 romance had been an utterly commonplace affair — ■ 
 a mere boarding-house courtship, interrupted by 
 the vulgar accident of her lover's arrest and im- 
 prisonment for swindling; the real point of inter- 
 est lies in the influence exerted over her by this 
 one man — an influence so great that the mere 
 pressure of his hand, the sound of his voice when 
 he called her " Pam," the sight of his name in the 
 daily papers, any material evidence, in short, of 
 his existence, was sufficient to destroy her will 
 power and render her his abject slave. At the 
 opening of the story, however, the prison doors, 
 shutting him from her sight, have partly broken 
 the spell, and her normal love of ease and com- 
 fort begins to reassert itself. But the slanting 
 shadow of those prison walls stretches coldly 
 across every page of the book. 
 
 Folly Corner has been the abode of the Jaynes 
 ever since the time of the Commonwealth, and every 
 male Jayne has been a Jethro. Mrs. Dudeney 
 evidently believes that destinies are largely de- 
 cided by the trivialities of life. It was just because 
 the present Jethro Jayne had taken an extra glass 
 of cider on market day, perhaps also because he 
 let his thoughts linger too long upon the demure 
 little ringlets on the waitress's pretty forehead, 
 that he was prompted to indulge in the joke of
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 309 
 
 advertising for a wife in the Liddleshorn Herald. 
 It was equally by chance that a stray copy of this 
 paper found its way to London and fell beneath 
 the eye of Pamela ; and because she remembered in 
 a vague way having seen the sheet before, in child- 
 hood, her glance strayed down the column of ad- 
 vertisements. Coinciding as it did with her long- 
 ing to escape from the haunting shadow of the 
 prison, the temptation was too strong, and 
 Pamela answered. The effect of the cider had 
 meanwhile worn off, and Jethro would probably 
 have carried his matrimonial joke no further; but 
 the name Pamela Crisp appealed to him ; his 
 mother had been a Crisp; Pamela's father, he 
 learned later, had been called John, the name of 
 his uncle who had run away to sea when a boy. 
 He and Pamela might be cousins; indeed, they 
 must be; and in that way he settled it. It is as 
 Jethro's cousin that Pamela is introduced to all 
 the relatives, at Liddleshorn, and to Jethro's grim 
 old housekeeper, Gainah Toat, who for a score of 
 years has locked in her heart the secret knowledge 
 that had Jethro's father lived but a few weeks 
 longer she would have been mistress and not serv- 
 ant at Folly Corner, and who now sees herself 
 about to be supplanted and shoved aside. The 
 vigor with which Mrs. Dudeney has drawn this 
 character of Gainah is masterly and second only 
 to that of Pamela in interest.
 
 310 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 She had a white face; there was a general appear- 
 ance of wasting about her. Her body was flat and 
 square; her faded gown made no pretense of show- 
 ing the defect; it went straight from her stringy 
 throat to her hardly perceptible lips without a break, 
 without a kindly fold or tuck of the stuff. 
 
 Gainah is a woman whose life " had been one 
 long flurry of immaculate housekeeping"; whose 
 naturally fierce passions had found their only out- 
 let in feverish activity, and now that she finds her- 
 self superseded, the transformation which goes on 
 in her dull mind is admirably developed, although 
 quite subservient to the central theme of the story. 
 
 So Pamela comes to be installed at Folly Cor- 
 ner ; and fits into the niche offered her, with all the 
 complacency of a homeless cat. The weeks slip 
 by, Jethro's matter-of-fact courtship progresses, 
 the wedding day is set, — apparently nothing 
 stands in the way of their happiness. Suddenly 
 her lover, Edred, reappears, having been let out 
 before his time on a ticket-of-leave. At the sound 
 of his voice Pamela becomes like wax ; he is intro- 
 duced to Jethro as her brother, and in the end 
 manages to extort from the latter enough money 
 to take him to London and start him on a new 
 series of swindling schemes. 
 
 From this point begins the real interest of the 
 story,— Pamela's intense and prolonged struggle 
 between her miserable passion for Edred and the
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 311 
 
 life of respectable tranquillity which she sacri- 
 fices for him. The end is inevitable, — she follows 
 him to London, and after some demurring on his 
 part they are married. Yet it is all in vain that 
 Mrs. Dudeney assures us that Pamela was 
 ; ' fiercely respectable " ; we know well enough that 
 even if Edred had insisted upon dispensing with 
 the ceremony, Pamela would nevertheless have re- 
 mained with him ; all that he needed to do was call 
 her "Pam," or "good little girl," in his half- 
 sneering, half-caressing voice. Under any and all 
 conditions she would have taken her chances of 
 "periodic joy and black misery " with Edred. 
 
 About those marvelous chapters regarding Pam- 
 ela's life with Edred, after she learns that there 
 is another woman in his life, and before she learns 
 that this other woman has a prior claim upon him, 
 it is not necessary to say much here; they should 
 be read rather than discussed. But here, as else- 
 where, the point of interest is Pamela's struggle 
 against her own passion, and she is ready to wel- 
 come any avenue of release. For a while she thinks 
 that proof of Edred's infidelity would cure her, 
 and she throws herself into the task of proving it 
 with feverish anxiety, but when she is at last con- 
 vinced he is untrue her condition is more hopeless 
 than ever: 
 
 She despaired of herself, she hadn't any shame, 
 any self-respect, any modesty, — any of those cold,
 
 312 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 praiseworthy qualities which romance has for cen- 
 turies built up and labeled female character. 
 
 In the end Edred dies, and the spell is broken. 
 Pamela marries Jethro, — slow, patient, prosaic 
 Jethro, — and we leave them to the tranquil joys 
 of rural life. Whether Pamela will remain con- 
 tented with the humdrum round of domesticity is 
 a problem which Mrs. Dudeney wisely left un- 
 solved. Liddleshorn is a remote village, and it is 
 not likely a second Edred will find his way thither 
 to touch the chords of passion. And, even if he 
 should, Mrs. Dudeney wishes us to understand that 
 Pamela is of the type of woman who vibrates in 
 response to just one man and, he being dead, no re- 
 awakening is possible for her. And to take issue 
 with Mrs. Dudeney on this point would lead us 
 too far afield from our subject. But it is perhaps 
 worth while to suggest that in this one particular 
 even so subtle a psychologist as she still has some- 
 thing to learn. 
 
 Men of Marlowe's is a collection of miscellaneous 
 short stories, many of them bearing internal evi- 
 dence of having been written prior to Folly Cor- 
 ner; and, in point of fact, they are isolated, unre- 
 lated stories, in spite of the pseudo-continuity 
 which their author has sought to give by taking 
 for her setting one of the typical London Inns of 
 Court, like the famous Temple Inn, whose inmates
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 313 
 
 lead a more or — sometimes — less bachelor life, be- 
 hind their heavy oaken doors. 
 
 A man's oak guards faithfully the story of his 
 life, [she says in a prefatory passage] generations 
 of secrets, of sins, of sorrows, are held by these stout 
 doors, — black and inscrutable, two by two on every 
 landing. The stories those black doors could tell! 
 I wonder they never crack, — with laughter or great, 
 splitting sobs. 
 
 There is a good deal of variety in these stories 
 of commonplace people, a good deal of love and 
 jealousy, a crime or two, and a taint of mysticism 
 here and there, as in " Beyond the Gray Gate." 
 The opening tale, " The One in Red," is just the 
 sort of tale which might be expected from a 
 writer who has given us the grim episode of Gainah 
 Toat in Folly Corner. Orion was a mean, weak- 
 minded, thoroughly uninteresting sort of person, 
 possessed of neither debts, compromising visitors, 
 nor delicate difficulties ; " a mean, drab life," com- 
 ments Mrs. Dudeney. But he finally puts plenty 
 of color into it, by murdering his aunt, the " one 
 in red," because he was tired of waiting for her 
 fortune, — quite a fruitless crime, as it turns out, 
 because, aside from the confession which conscience 
 and too much whisky lead him to make, — he never 
 would have inherited the money in any case, since 
 she had willed it to some one else.
 
 314 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 But the really significant stories in this collec- 
 tion are the ones in which Mrs. Dudeney studies 
 her own sex, — stories like " Why? " or " An Inter- 
 lude," or even " Arnold's Laundress." Unpleasant 
 they undoubtedly are, even repellent, some readers 
 may think them ; for the author has painted her 
 sex in very unflattering colors, and quite un- 
 shrinkingly strips off the veil of conventionalities ; 
 and all the while we feel their obvious, undeniable 
 truth. Different as they are, her types of women, 
 dark and fair, good and bad, all have this in com- 
 mon ; they are all introspective, emotional women, 
 mere bundles of nerves, moods and mutability. 
 For instance, there is Adeline Pray in "Why?" 
 who had married Pray because her first lover could 
 not marry her, and who wore herself out in a few 
 years with remorse and a broken heart, and on 
 her death-bed dictated what her husband thought 
 was her death notice, when it was really meant as a 
 sort of farewell message to her lover. " The dead 
 face tantalized him. The eternal, remorseful ten- 
 derness was strong on her lips of steel. There had 
 always been a sprig of rue in her love. Why? 
 that maddening why, never to be answered," — 
 never, at any rate, by the husband, though there 
 was one room in Marlowe's whose paneled 
 walls might have told him, if they could have 
 spoken. 
 
 After all, however, " An Interlude " is the story
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 315 
 
 which will best bear a second reading, not only for 
 its own sake, but because it contains, so to speak, 
 the seed thought of Folly Corner, — the idea of a 
 young woman who, while knowing all the value of 
 home, tranquillity and the love of an honorable 
 man, is compelled to jeopardize it all for the sake 
 of another man whom she cannot respect, but who 
 possesses that peculiar compelling influence which 
 certain men have over this kind of woman. It 
 may be that the resemblance between the novel and 
 the short story will not strike the average reader ; 
 the plot, as a whole, is quite different, and the out- 
 ward contrast is sharp between Pamela Crisp and 
 dainty, " dressy " little Mrs. Conifer. But the 
 more you study the central theme, the more the 
 resemblance impresses you. The story of " An In- 
 terlude " is worth while outlining briefly. Conifer 
 was a stockbroker, whose absorption in his busi- 
 ness left him little time to spare for his wife, and 
 she, finding the hours hanging on her hands, fell 
 into the pernicious habit of paying surreptitious 
 visits to Kinsman's artistic chambers in Marlowe's, 
 and partaking of the dainty tea which he had 
 ready in her honor. But one evening, by one of 
 those accidents which will happen sooner or later, 
 she encounters at Kinsman's door Sophia Dominy, 
 the big, flashy brunette from the neighboring man- 
 tle shop, who makes clear her own prior claim to 
 Kinsman and sets forth their relative positions in
 
 316 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 such very blunt phrases as to bring up before Mrs. 
 Conifer terrifying visions of the divorce court and 
 make an episode which hitherto had been only 
 " delicious, piquant, dangerous, — like a leaf torn 
 out of the Decameron," seem both vulgar and 
 wicked. " Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, 
 in every thought, directly she looked into those 
 blazing black eyes and understood." For the next 
 four years, Mrs. Conifer is a model of discre- 
 tion in every thought and deed, but at last 
 nemesis overtakes her, in the shape of Kinsman, 
 whom the world has meanwhile treated rather 
 roughly, and who, having retained possession of 
 her letters, proceeds systematically to black- 
 mail her. Finally, having bled the woman quite 
 dry, he calls to show the letters to her hus- 
 band, but is followed and shot on the steps by 
 Sophia Dominy, who has cherished an unreasoning 
 jealousy towards Mrs. Conifer, and who kills her- 
 self immediately afterwards. It is some time be- 
 fore Mrs. Conifer can grasp the significance of this 
 event, or realize that she is at last safe, — safe, ex- 
 cept for the package of letters in the breast pocket 
 of the dead man lying stretched out on the table 
 downstairs ; and the manner in which she nerves 
 herself to creep downstairs, slippers in hand, peel 
 the sheet from Kinsman's face, thrust her hand 
 " heavy with Conifer's jewels," into the dead man's 
 coat and steal her letters, is a bit of description
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 317 
 
 surpassed only by that of her reaction when she 
 once more gains her own room : 
 
 She crept in, looking furtively round the firelit 
 walls. She went over to the hearth, dug the unclean 
 letters fiercely in, and watched them burn. There 
 was a little white frock airing on the guard. She 
 took it up in her hot hands and kissed it. Toys 
 were all over the floor; one, a fur monkey with one 
 eye missing and the other fiery-red, seemed to blink 
 up malignantly — and as if it knew and would one 
 day tell her children. . . . Heavy with shame, think- 
 ing of those two — things — below, she slipped to the 
 floor and tried to pray — for the souls of the dead 
 and the peace of the living. But her knees stiffened. 
 She stumbled to her feet, moaning. A grotesque 
 memory beat in on her. She remembered the old 
 superstition — that no witch could shed a tear; that 
 this was the witches' most bitter punishment. Well, 
 here was hers. She could not pray. She had sinned, 
 but she had come through the fire. She was faithful 
 to Conifer with a double fervor. She had a high 
 constancy and love which the mere faithful wife, who 
 has never been tempted, cannot attain. Still — she 
 must bear the burden — of an interlude — all her days. 
 
 This type of woman, which Mrs. Dudeney has 
 drawn repeatedly with a master touch, — the type 
 of the weak, yielding woman who furtively steals 
 back to the scene of former rendezvous simply be- 
 cause the old, compelling power of a burnt-out
 
 318 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 passion is still too strong to be combated, — raises 
 in the mind an insistent question ; namely, whether 
 Mrs. Dudeney herself intended it to represent the 
 average normal woman, — whether, in short, she 
 believes that for every woman there exists some- 
 where in the world a man whose voice possesses that 
 mysterious, compelling power that will make her 
 almost hypnotically do his will. Spindle and 
 Plough is an interesting answer to this question 
 and it is emphatically in the negative. In this 
 story Mrs. Dudeney has portrayed the opposite 
 type, the woman largely lacking in what the 
 French conveniently term temperament; the 
 woman with a deep-rooted contempt for love and 
 marriage and the male sex in general — a contempt 
 usually based upon ignorance and immaturity. 
 
 Shalisha Pilgrim is a big, broad-shouldered, 
 somewhat masculine girl with an innate spirit of 
 freedom and independence, — a girl to whom fresh 
 air and outdoor life are essential and who would 
 stifle in the artificial atmosphere of a London 
 drawing-room. As a child, her ugliness was her 
 mother's despair; as a woman, she has just fallen 
 short of beauty, in spite of her dark, arching 
 brows and her heavy rope of red-gold hair ; but she 
 has that rarer charm of expression, which is better 
 and more lasting than any physical loveliness. In- 
 tolerant of love and sentiment, Shalisha is by 
 nature qualified for deep devotion. The maternal
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 319 
 
 instinct, the spirit of self-sacrifice, is highly de- 
 veloped, and she is impelled to lavish it upon some- 
 thing or somebody. So long as her father, an im- 
 poverished and invalid artist, was alive, she 
 lavished it on him. After his death she trans- 
 fers it to her mother, a silly, flighty, Dresden- 
 china little woman, whose mature years in no way 
 interfere with endless flirtations, and whom 
 Shalisha guards jealously from a second mar- 
 riage, looking with youthful austerity upon the 
 bare possibility as a profanation of her father's 
 memory. Shalisha, driven by her spirit of inde- 
 pendence, has undergone the full training course 
 for landscape gardening, and at the opening of 
 the story she has just obtained an excellent situa- 
 tion in the country, through the good offices of her 
 " Godmother Bloss," — a piece of good fortune 
 which she welcomes chiefly as an opportunity to 
 break off her mother's latest matrimonial entangle- 
 ment with portly, pompous Mr. Poundsberry, a 
 well-to-do auctioneer, who confuses his aspirates 
 and drinks his tea from the saucer. 
 
 At Bramble Bye, Mr. Boylett's estate, Shalisha 
 comes in close personal contact, for the first time 
 in her life, with men, — two men in particular, her 
 employer and Felix Rule, the sheriff. Both of 
 these men, attracted by the novel charm of the 
 girl's freedom, her masculine independence, her 
 unconventionality, soon seek to win her, each in
 
 320 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 his own way ; and their attentions vaguely trouble 
 her, although the trouble is not wholly unpleasant 
 to her. Yet so little does she know of matters of 
 the heart that Boylett's proposal takes her un- 
 awares, and what Felix says to her on the eve of 
 his departure for America is said and answered, 
 and he is well on his journey before she grasps the 
 fact that he has offered himself and she has re- 
 fused him. Bojdett she refuses with her eyes wide 
 open. His offer means much to her ; it means a 
 life-long home in the place where she has labored 
 so lovingly ; it means the care of Boylett's or- 
 phaned daughter whom Shalisha longs to take 
 under her maternal wing. But the price is too 
 high, because it means also the sacrifice of her 
 freedom, the abandonment of her outdoor life, the 
 necessity of fulfilling a wife's obligations to Boy- 
 lett, — a man who " is guilty of the effeminacy of a 
 Pullman car " and " talks about the beauties of 
 nature instead of feeling and living them." Be- 
 sides, deep down in her heart, under the austerity 
 of her unawakened senses, she already knows that, 
 sooner or later, Felix, sensible, plodding English 
 farmer though he is, will return and claim her in 
 spite of herself. 
 
 In point of fact, Felix does return, — a trans- 
 formed Felix, in all the opulence of new raiment, 
 heavy watch-chain and blazing pin, and with the 
 comfortable assurance of a neat little fortune
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 321 
 
 amassed by honest toil. He makes the mistake of 
 taking Shalisha's consent almost for granted and 
 blurts out his plans to take her away from Bram- 
 ble Bye, to lavish jewels on her, to transport her 
 to the very life which she has always held in con- 
 tempt. In his eagerness and impetuosity he gives 
 her no time to collect herself: 
 
 He frightened and chilled her. The old disquieting 
 thrill which she had felt before under his touch con- 
 vulsed her now. She distrusted this joy. It opened 
 the flood-gates of emotion. She didn't want to be 
 stirred. She wanted to lead her celibate, calm life. 
 She wanted nothing tangible. He might love and 
 admire and serve and guard — no more. She experi- 
 enced an old maid's prudery and cautious retreat. 
 She tried to put a greater distance between them. 
 His eyes, his hands, ardent; his mouth so near that 
 she could feel the hot breath of his hurried breathing 
 — alarmed her. She felt herself to be in a vague 
 way sullied. 
 
 He retreated farther than she wished. He seemed 
 to divine the distaste she felt; perhaps it was written 
 on her twitching, averted face. 
 
 " What do you want? " he asked, in a voice like a 
 whip. 
 
 " I don't know," she returned brokenly. 
 
 " Is it possible that a woman can be such a fool? " 
 
 This is the way in which Felix came and went a 
 second time ; because Shalisha, unlike Pamela, was
 
 322 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 
 
 not one of those women who sacrifice everything 
 and come at the first careless word of the man they 
 love. She is capable of self-surrender to a high 
 degree ; but it must be on her own terms and in her 
 own good time. And when Felix at last comes for 
 a third time, stripped of his fortune and his finery, 
 hungry and in rags, and she takes him in and 
 gives him a prodigal's welcome, one feels that the 
 great devotion of which she is capable and which 
 has at last found a permanent object upon which 
 to spend itself has even now far more of the ma- 
 ternal in its nature than it has of the compelling 
 force of true passion. 
 
 That there are volumes among Mrs. Dudeney's 
 later works that are not devoid of interest, it 
 would be foolish to deny. There is The Battle of 
 the Weak, telling how a young woman keeps her 
 promise to marry a staid country doctor, although 
 her heart is full of love for another man, a wild, 
 reckless sailor ; how the sailor goes to sea, and the 
 years pass, and a child is born to her, which, al- 
 though its features are those of its father, yet in 
 voice and a hundred tricks of manner day by day 
 recalls to all who see it the untamed, roving sailor 
 who had filled its mother's thoughts. Then there 
 is Rachel Lorian, the tragedy of a young woman, 
 whose husband, on the first day of their honey- 
 moon, is dragged from under the crumpled wreck- 
 age of a railway carriage, hopelessly paralyzed,
 
 MRS. HENRY DUDENEY 323 
 
 yet likely to live out the average allotted span of 
 years. And still again, there is The Wise Woods, 
 with its half-civilized, half-gipsy heroine, and the 
 ineffectual, dilettante hero, with whom she is mis- 
 mated, and its pervading scent of growing things, 
 and the music of nature. Undoubtedly, Mrs. Dude- 
 ney has become a trained story teller of the 
 second-class, and can be trusted to maintain a fair 
 average quality. But there was once a brief period 
 when she was more than a story teller; when cer- 
 tain aspects of life gripped her with an almost 
 fierce interest ; when certain ideas clamored for ut- 
 terance, and in just two or three books found 
 utterance, — books throbbing with the poignancy 
 of life, that deserve to be saved from the forgotten- 
 ness towards which they are drifting. They were 
 obviously the product of young years, when phys- 
 ical perceptions were keener, when joys and sor- 
 rows loomed up bigger, when every budding leaf 
 and opening flower were fraught with momentous 
 possibilities. It is given to comparatively few 
 writers, even for a few short years, to sense life so 
 deeply and so understandingly. And that is why 
 Mrs. Dudeney's name is not out of place in a 
 volume on the modern story tellers of England.
 
 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 This is an unpropltious hour in which to take 
 a comprehensive view of the past achievements and 
 future promise of the author of Furze the Cruel. 
 From his first book he revealed himself as one of 
 those favored writers who are sure of themselves, 
 of their powers, of their goal, and move steadily 
 forward, each new volume adding another mile- 
 stone on the road to fame. But suddenly he seems 
 to have lost his path, to have taken the wrong 
 turning, like a traveler lured to disaster by the 
 lying glamour of a mirage. His latest volume, 
 Bracken, suggests nothing so much as the futile 
 violence of nightmare-ridden sleep. What it may 
 lead to when the sleeper wakes, what new forms of 
 symmetry and beauty lurk in the chaos of his 
 present mood, it is idle to speculate. But the net 
 impression left by the volume's mad mysticism is 
 that John Trevena has, like his own creation, Pen- 
 doggat, forced his way into so dense and im- 
 penetrable a tangle that to return to his former 
 road or struggle through to a new one is equally 
 impracticable. And this is really a pity, because 
 his earlier volumes, few as they are, have won him 
 
 324
 
 JOHN TREVEXA
 
 JOHN TREVENA 325 
 
 a merited recognition as one of that younger group 
 of English novelists who can hardly be omitted 
 when mention is made of Galsworthy and Bennett, 
 Locke and Snaith and Leonard Merrick, — one, it 
 may be added, who has brought a new spirit and a 
 new strength into the literature of Dartmoor. 
 
 Concerning the life history and the personality 
 of this writer, who chooses to sign himself " John 
 Trevena," only a few scant details have passed 
 into general knowledge ; but these few constitute 
 all that is really essential to an understanding of 
 his work. We need only to remember that he is a 
 bachelor, somewhat under forty years of age, that 
 ill-health has been his lot for the greater part of 
 this period, and that he finally learned that the 
 smoky, tainted air of English towns acted upon 
 him as a slow poison. Dartmoor, with its high 
 altitudes, its level, wind-swept stretches, offered a 
 chance for recovery; and there, for several years, 
 John Trevena has been living in voluntary exile in 
 a little isolated cabin, doing all of the manual 
 work, unaided, drawing in, day by day, deep 
 draughts of health, in his endless wanderings over 
 the moors, and finding an inexhaustible source of 
 entertainment in studying the curiously warped 
 and stunted types of humanity produced by 
 nature's struggle for survival. Quite naturally, 
 he has come to love each aspect of the land which 
 has given him back his health, each varying phase
 
 326 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 of its rugged scenery, each change of tone and 
 color from season to season, in sunshine and in 
 rain. And it is not surprising that this love of the 
 land should be mirrored back in his books, with an 
 artist's enthusiasm, an artist's sureness of brush- 
 stroke and truth of color. And it was also to be 
 foreseen that the people of the moors would go into 
 his books just as he sees them, with an uncompro- 
 mising literalness of detail that might well give 
 offense — and that, as a matter of fact, has once 
 at least so far antagonized his neighbors that he 
 was forced to change his residence with undignified 
 haste, and find lodgment in a new and distant 
 locality. 
 
 All this is of genuine interest, not as personal 
 gossip, but as the underlying explanation of his 
 novels in substance, in spirit and in technique. It 
 is only natural that he should challenge compari- 
 son with Mr. Eden Phillpotts, since their fields of 
 activity so largely intersect. There is in each 
 that same artistic sense of landscape beauty, of 
 the wonderful softness of nature, seen through a 
 shimmering haze of English sunshine, or a slant- 
 ing veil of English rain. But when it comes to the 
 human life in the stories, one feels at once how 
 radically far apart these two authors really are. 
 Both of them picture a phase of the English 
 peasantry, a people who live their lives in closest 
 touch with the soil to which they were born, be-
 
 JOHN TREVENA 327 
 
 cause they do not know, and never can know, any 
 other life. And both Mr. Phillpotts and Mr. Tre- 
 vena have studied their people closely and faith- 
 fully, without delusion and without malice ; the 
 portraiture of each is a fine example of honest and 
 unsparing realism. And yet the difference between 
 these two authors is fundamental, because it is the 
 difference of their point of view. Mr. Phillpotts 
 identifies himself with the people of whom he writes. 
 He and his characters and his readers are all held 
 together in one big, universal bond of understand- 
 ing and pity. His very titles symbolize his in- 
 dulgent attitude. The people to him are Children 
 of the Mist — not abnormal, not wicked, but simply 
 immature ; the very land on which they toil out 
 their narrow lives is The Good Red Earth. John 
 Trevena, on the contrary, remains always an alien. 
 The natives are always to him objects of special 
 study, but rather in the spirit with which a bot- 
 anist studies a new species of lichen than with 
 any sense of the brotherhood of man. This is not 
 intended to imply that Mr. Trevena's people are 
 lacking in individuality. On the contrary, they 
 are intensely, often painfully, alive. It is not too 
 much to say that one actually suffers more over 
 the unconscious cruelty of nature and the inhu- 
 manity of man in Mr. Trevena's pages than in any 
 of the more sympathetic pictures of life that Mr. 
 Phillpotts has given us. But this does not alter
 
 328 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 the fact that Mr. Trevena's attitude is quite in- 
 differently objective; he is not the compassionate 
 Samaritan, but the vivisectionist, finding an ab- 
 sorbing interest even in suffering and disease and 
 death. His whole attitude toward the people of 
 the moors is well summed up in a single paragraph 
 from the strongest and best of his four books, 
 Furze the Cruel: 
 
 There is not a person living who has not done an 
 act of cruelty. It is impossible to refrain from it. 
 . . . Upon a wild upland passions are fiercer, just 
 as physical strength is greater. Tender lilies would 
 not live upon the moor, and there is no use looking 
 for them. They are down in the valleys. Upon the 
 moor, there is the granite, the spiny gorse, the rugged 
 heather. It is no use looking for the qualities of the 
 lily in those men who are made of the granite, the 
 gorse and the heather. 
 
 It is not surprising, in view of this confessed 
 attitude, that there is a vein of cruelty running 
 through all of Mr. Trevena's books ; characters 
 grown inhuman from greed, like Pendoggat in 
 Furze the Cruel, inhuman from fanaticism like 
 Uncle Gifford in Heather. One recalls a long 
 haunting sequence of pitiful figures, derelicts of 
 humanity, misshapen and stunted, eking out starv- 
 ing lives with the toil of raw and bleeding fingers. 
 And yet, the net impression left behind by John
 
 JOHN TREVENA 329 
 
 Trevena's books is that of high ideals, fine, clean 
 living and the wholesome tonic of pure air and 
 heaven-sent sunshine. And one naturally asks by 
 what means he achieves this paradox. 
 
 The answer is quite simple. Mr. Trevena in 
 writing his books is like a gardener who, having 
 found a fair and sunny garden, elects to raise in it 
 certain rare blossoms, refusing to be troubled by 
 the unsightliness of mold and compost, of grubs 
 and earthworms in the soil. It may be said, 
 without unfairness, that his separate volumes 
 practically all conform to a certain simple for- 
 mula. There is always a man from the outside 
 world, an alien like the author himself; and there 
 is always some woman who, if not actually from 
 the outside world, is by birth or training not wholly 
 of the moor. Sometimes the man is a transient 
 visitor like Aubrey Bellamy, in Furze the Cruel, 
 who loves and wins Boodles, the beautiful, name- 
 less waif of unknown parentage ; or Brian Challa- 
 combe, in Arminel of the West, who follows the 
 line of least resistance, and thinks lightly of 
 woman's honor until he meets Arminel Zaple, 
 strong and pure as the moorland wind, and wise 
 with some years of outside schooling. Or again, 
 the man is living in self-imposed exile, after the 
 fashion of Mr. Trevena, himself, like John Bur- 
 rough in A Pixy in Petticoats, companionless save 
 for Peter, Prince o' Cats, until Beatrice Pentreath
 
 330 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 comes elusively and tantalizingly into his life; or 
 George Brunacombe, in Heather, with only Bubo, 
 the owl, to share his loneliness, until he brings home 
 Winnie Shazell to nurse her back to health and give 
 the lie to the physician's pronouncement that she 
 is doomed. In all four novels, what one lingers 
 over while reading and is glad to evoke afterwards 
 in memory is the series of pictures of a man and a 
 woman glad because they are young, because they 
 are together, because they are drinking in new 
 health and new hope, far away from the grime and 
 smoke of towns, the physical and moral unclean- 
 ness of crowded humanity, and enjoying the splen- 
 did freedom of spacious reaches of rugged land 
 and open sky. 
 
 It would be unjust to imply that these four vol- 
 umes are of uniform merit. On the contrary, John 
 Trevena showed in them a steady growth which 
 promised well for his future work. With each 
 volume, he became a little closer in touch with 
 his materials, a little more conscious of the impor- 
 tance of careful construction and technique. A 
 Pixy in Petticoats is easily the most haphazard 
 of his volumes, the one that shifts its key most 
 unexpectedly, the one that depends most largely 
 upon the element of chance. For three-quarters 
 of its length it is a mere light and elusive love 
 tale; then suddenly comes calamity out of a clear 
 sky, and a painful psychological problem is thrust
 
 JOHN TREVENA - 331 
 
 forward ; — what effect will the discovery that a 
 man is hideously disfigured for life have upon a 
 woman whose love for him began largely in ad- 
 miration of his good looks? And, after all, this 
 problem is not solved because chance again inter- 
 venes to end it brutally with the man's death. 
 
 Arminel of the West shows already an advance, 
 a growing interest in more serious and widespread 
 problems. The central idea is the fallacy of the 
 sheltered life form of education. More spe- 
 cifically, the theme of Arminel of the West is 
 the entanglement of a certain Brian Challa- 
 combe, a stranger who comes to the moors for his 
 health, in the lives of two girls of the district — 
 Nona Wistman, the daughter of a highly culti- 
 vated but fanatical preacher ; and Arminel, the il- 
 legitimate child of a certain Dartmoor John, a 
 peddler of oil, with a small holding of land on 
 the moors that he has acquired, not by ancestral 
 right, as other commoners do, but by craft and 
 guile. By birth and breeding and opportunities in 
 life, Nona should have been a fine, clean-souled, 
 cultured type of girl, and Arminel an underbred, 
 bold-mannered upstart. Mr. Trevena, however, 
 evidently has his own very excellent theories about 
 the evils of the " sheltered life " method of educa- 
 tion. The fanatical Mr. Wistman has chosen to 
 bring up his daughter in fundamental ignorance 
 of the primary physiological facts of life; with-
 
 332 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 out consulting her wishes, her temperament, her 
 mental and physical needs, he predestines her to a 
 life in the cloister; and when she comes to him, 
 full of the irrepressible enthusiasms of youth, the 
 tumultuous joy of living, to ask him questions that 
 arise naturally and spontaneously to her lips, and 
 to demand some share of the freedom and priv- 
 ileges that are freely accorded to other girls, he 
 puts her off with subterfuges and lies. Arminel, 
 on the other hand, growing up haphazard to run 
 wild like the Dartmoor furze and glean a knowl- 
 edge of life as she will, develops, like the furze, 
 strong and sturdy, with an inborn power of self- 
 protection, a sharpness of tongue and prickliness 
 of manner that will keep off an unwelcome touch. 
 Yet, because of this free untrammeled life, she 
 has grown up brave and true and tender-hearted 
 within, a creature whom people come to love in 
 spite of prejudice. While Nona, on the other 
 hand, because of her repressed life, is full of a 
 spirit of revolt, ready at a touch to blaze out into 
 defiance of all laws, human and divine. These are 
 the reasons why, when Brian Challacombe comes 
 to Dartmoor, he can win Nona without the asking 
 and with no saving ceremony of the church, while 
 Arminel he can hardly win at all, though he asks 
 in all humbleness and with every honorable intent. 
 But Challacombe is a weakling, morally as well as 
 physically ; and, although Arminel has flourished
 
 JOHN TREVENA 333 
 
 under adversity, growing stronger and sweeter, 
 like the heather itself under the storm and stress 
 of sweeping winds, not even her hardly won love 
 can inspire him to a true manliness. We leave him 
 wavering, temporizing, impotently seeking, when 
 too late, to do what is fair and right, and con- 
 fronted on the one hand by an angry father, de- 
 manding that he shall make the daughter the tardy 
 reparation of marriage, and on the other by the 
 lawful claims of the other girl, whom he has 
 secretly wedded yet does not dare openly to ac- 
 knowledge, because of her lowly origin. In spite 
 of its big advance upon A Pixy in Petticoats, there 
 is about Arminel of the West a certain incon- 
 clusiveness which shows the apprentice hand, the 
 failure of the young artist to take his own full 
 measure. 
 
 In Furze the Cruel and in Heather and Granite 
 which followed it, we find the author deliberately 
 undertaking a task of far bigger magnitude, a 
 trilogy of epic sweep in its conception, with a wise 
 and easily comprehended symbolism underlying it. 
 As Mr. Trevena himself explains it, "Almost 
 everywhere on Dartmoor are Furze, Heather and 
 Granite. The Furze seems to suggest Cruelty, 
 the Heather Endurance, and the Granite Strength. 
 The Furze is destroyed by fire, but grows again; 
 the Heather is torn by winds, but blossoms again ; 
 the Granite is worn away imperceptibly by the
 
 334 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 rain." In these three symbols, he finds typified the 
 dominant traits of the Dartmoor folk, as he has 
 come to know them, — perhaps, also, in a broader 
 way, the traits which everywhere, and at all times, 
 have had the largest share in the molding of so- 
 ciety and of nations. And in making a trilogy of 
 these three symbols, he seems to be trying to say 
 that the world is not wholly cruel, nor is the vic- 
 tory always to the strong, nor always to patience 
 and long suffering. But from the blending of 
 these three things, we get a pretty good present- 
 ment of real life. In other words, for the purpose 
 of his art, he has chosen to present three con- 
 trasted aspects of life, each, taken by itself, a little 
 extreme, a little violent in its effects, — much after 
 the fashion that experimenters in color photogra- 
 phy make three separate transparencies, in red, 
 green and violet, neither of them claiming to be 
 quite true to life, but all three producing, when 
 blended, a faithful reproduction of each delicate 
 tint and shadow. 
 
 Furze the Cruel, considered in this light, simply 
 as one of a succession of screens through which the 
 finished picture is to be viewed, is not merely a 
 piece of clear-sighted, virile realism ; it is in many 
 ways an astonishing book ; one may even say, with- 
 out fear of contradiction, that no other book has 
 succeeded in symbolizing the cruelty of life with 
 such poignant and convincing power, since Frank
 
 JOHN TREVENA 335 
 
 Norris first burst upon the world with the crude 
 genius of McTeague. Furze the Cruel is not a 
 book which profits by a minute analysis of plot. 
 There are a score of tangled threads of destiny, 
 crossing and recrossing, as the threads of destiny 
 always do cross and recross in real life. It is one 
 of those books that are spread over a wide canvas, 
 and give you a sense of crowds and multitudes and 
 clashing interests ; there is no one man or woman 
 in it whom you may single out as the central figure ; 
 indeed, if half a dozen different readers should 
 make the attempt, they would probably hit upon 
 half a dozen different heroes or heroines, and not 
 be quite satisfied with any one of them. The truth 
 is that the real protagonist of the book is the 
 Furze itself, the incarnate symbol of the spirit of 
 cruelty in nature and in man — it is the Furze that 
 you must think of, first, last and all the time, as 
 you read — the Furze that defies extermination ; 
 that, no matter how you hack and dig and burn its 
 roots, springs up again, grim and indomitable ; 
 and if the chief characters in the book are morally 
 warped and misshapen, it is because they, too, 
 have sprung from the soil which gives birth to the 
 Furze ; and when, in the end, Pendoggat, the cruel- 
 est, thorniest man of them all, meets a hideous 
 fate, it is no small tribute to the crude force of 
 the story to say that one feels there is a certain 
 symbolic justice that he should receive his pun-
 
 336 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 ishment through the instrumentality of the Furze 
 itself. If for no other reason than for the 
 episode of the fate of Pendoggat, it should take a 
 permanent place in any treatise on the technique of 
 fiction, as an almost unique illustration of the art 
 of making the punishment fit the crime. The 
 hideous picture of Pendoggat, miser, coward, thief, 
 without one tender, redeeming trait, one vestige of 
 a moral sense, caught at last in the very center of 
 a huge clump of burning furze, struggling and 
 writhing in its tangles like a wild beast, torn and 
 scarred by its briars, and finally feeling the blast- 
 ing breath of the flames roll past to leave him a 
 quivering, blackened, blinded thing, still grasping 
 in his helpless fingers the ashes of the fortune for 
 which he had sinned — this picture in its relentless 
 grimness recalls only one parallel in our recent 
 fiction ; that of the death of S. Behrman in The 
 Octopus, by Frank Norris, in which the man who 
 for years has robbed others of their rightful profit 
 in wheat, robbed them of land and money and of 
 hope, at last pays a righteous penalty in the 
 black depths of the hold of a freight steamer, slip- 
 ping and scrambling and writhing through the lin- 
 gering agony of strangulation under the steady, 
 relentless downpour of unnumbered tons of wheat. 
 Undoubtedly, Furze the Cruel still stands as its 
 author's biggest achievement, just as the first 
 volume in the Epic of the Wheat was the biggest
 
 JOHN TREVENA 337 
 
 book of Norris, the man with whom it seems in- 
 evitable to compare him. They have in common a 
 love of big ideas, recurrent symbols, a dogged in- 
 sistence that drives home a meaning by suggest- 
 ing the same thought in many different forms. 
 Also they have in common a soaring fancy, the 
 gift of seeing visions beyond their power to repro- 
 duce. Already in Heather there is a sense of some- 
 thing wanting; the brutal strength of Furze the 
 Cruel would have been out of place, but another 
 kind of strength was needed, and it is not there. 
 Heather has a number of commendable qualities, 
 but it is not a strong book. In fact, of all his 
 volumes it is the one which has faded out most 
 rapidly, leaving only the faintest of blurs upon 
 the memory of the present writer. Curiously 
 enough, it called forth, at the time of its appear- 
 ance, more favorable comment than its predecessor. 
 A possible explanation of this is that in Heather 
 we have, in addition to the Dartmoor folk, — who, 
 as a steady diet, eventually weary the mental 
 palate, — the inmates of a sanitarium, people of 
 various grades of society and coming from widely 
 separated corners of England, but all having in 
 common the quality of representing the outside 
 point of view, of making the reader feel that even 
 on the wind-swept moors he is still in touch with 
 the world at large. But to one who reads be- 
 tween the lines, it looks as though the Dartmoor
 
 338 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 folk had by this time begun to pall upon Mr. Tre- 
 vena himself, — and you cannot write entertain- 
 ingly of what has ceased to interest you. 
 
 Granite, the third volume in the trilogy, has not 
 been published in America, and I have not had 
 access to the English edition. It is, of course, not 
 only uncritical but unfair to draw conclusions 
 from so arbitrary and erratic a criterion as the 
 non-placing of American book-rights to an English 
 novel. Yet the failure to publish the third volume 
 of a series, thus leaving the trilogy a dismembered 
 torso, suggests a suspicion that the falling off 
 already apparent in Heather, may have been 
 cumulative in Granite. 
 
 There remains only Bracken, which, if it came 
 from an unknown writer, would call for no men- 
 tion at all, but which, because it represents a 
 strange and regrettable aberration on the part of 
 a man of serious promise, seems to demand a vigor- 
 ous protest. It possesses the dubious distinction 
 of being the most repulsive book that I have read in 
 many years. In Furze the Cruel, Mr. Trevena 
 first gave evidence of a tendency to see and picture 
 life symbolically. But Bracken is symbolism run- 
 ning amuck, a weird, creepy, madhouse symbolism, 
 suggestive of things in heaven and earth of which 
 it is not good to dream in any man's philosophy. 
 That the book has a morbid, unclean, uncanny sort 
 of strength it would be idle to deny. There are
 
 JOHN TREVENA 339 
 
 single sentences in it that send little shuddering 
 waves of revulsion and dread up and down the 
 spinal column ; there are chapters that do not con- 
 duce to sleep. Now, the only excuse a writer can 
 offer for inflicting upon his readers a succession of 
 ugly pictures of mental and moral depravity, hyp- 
 notic powers abused to evil ends, a whole gamut of 
 sin and sensuality, is that he has some criticism 
 upon life which he can express in this way and in 
 no other, — and furthermore, he must succeed in 
 expressing it clearly. The great and unpardon- 
 able fault of Bracken is, not that it is unpleasant, 
 but that it fails to be intelligible. The symbolism 
 of the title is simple enough, the trouble does not 
 begin there. Bracken, the rank, riotous, rapid- 
 growing fern-plant, sole survivor in England of 
 the carboniferous period, stands as a link with the 
 past, a symbol of the primordial, a reminder of 
 the stability of life on earth, and of the compara- 
 tively narrow space that separates the cave man 
 from his brother of to-day. But it is when we 
 penetrate a little beyond the opening chapter, 
 heavy-laden with its title of " Cryptogamous," and 
 try to follow the mental processes of Jasper Ram- 
 ridge, staid man of letters who turns astrologer; 
 of Cuthbert Orton, who, from sullen schoolboy, un- 
 naturally wise, becomes materialist, sensualist, 
 whose one cult is himself; of Claud Yalland, con- 
 tented to live in squalor, so that he may be a
 
 340 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 poet; of Theodore Vipont, the simple, rabbit-like 
 little antiquary, with his passion for old pewter 
 and his passion for his only child, Margaret; — 
 that we find ourselves losing our bearings in a fog 
 of words. From a long series of repellent scenes, 
 just a few facts stand out clear: That Margaret 
 Vipont is a sort of female Dr. Jekyll, with three 
 personalities instead of two; that originally the 
 spiritual side of her nature is uppermost, that she 
 is a sensitive, tremulous, frail little creature, 
 moved to emotions that are almost pain, by the 
 song of a bird, the fragrance of a flower ; that un- 
 der the malignant spell of Cuthbert Orton, the 
 spirit vanishes and the flesh awakens, and without 
 warning she becomes a foul-mouthed, vulgar 
 termagant, utterly unmoral, an offense against 
 decency; and that when Jasper Ramridge's 
 stronger influence overmasters that of Cuthbert, 
 both spirit and flesh make way for mind, and Mar- 
 garet becomes a sexless, soulless thinking machine, 
 without emotion and without mercy, and avenges 
 herself for a ruined life in a way that leaves no 
 record beyond a few transient bubbles in a lonely 
 swamp. 
 
 Such are the impressions left by this huge, 
 unwieldy product of misdirected effort. It leaves 
 one asking impotently under what spell Mr. 
 Trevena can have fallen that he should forswear 
 his old creed and fall to worshipping at the
 
 JOHN TREVENA 341 
 
 shrines of false gods. It is to be fervently hoped 
 that this is only a temporary aberration. But at 
 least he once gave us Furze the Cruel, and he can- 
 not take it from us, even though he should write 
 a score of Brackens.
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 It is almost a score of years since Mr. Robert 
 Hichens first sprang into local notoriety through 
 The Green Carnation, which set all London buzzing 
 hotly anent the identity of its bold literary and 
 social lampoons. It was just ten years later that 
 he obtained at last an international recognition, 
 with The Garden of Allah, in which for the first 
 time, and perhaps for the last, the inherent big- 
 ness of his theme and the titanic majesty of his 
 setting shook him out of his studied pose of aloof- 
 ness and sardonic cynicism, and raised him to un- 
 expected heights. And almost at the close of a 
 second decade, Mr. Hichens visited America, to 
 find himself, for the passing hour, one of the most 
 widely discussed of modern novelists, with his latest 
 novel giving promise of becoming a " best seller," 
 his earlier triumph, The Garden of Allah, demand- 
 ing a second recognition in dramatic form, and he 
 himself receiving the doubtful tribute of full-page 
 interviews in the Sunday supplements. Accord- 
 ingly, Mr. Hichens seems to be one of the contem- 
 porary British story tellers about whom it is dis- 
 tinctly worth while to ask: How much of this 
 
 342
 
 ROBERT HICHKXS
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 343 
 
 popular acclaim is merited on sound literary 
 grounds, and how much of it is not? 
 
 Before attempting to answer specifically this 
 natural and legitimate question, it seems profitable 
 to call attention to the treatment which Mr. Hich- 
 ens has received at the hands of his critics during 
 the past eighteen years as an illuminating example 
 of the average professional reviewer's shortness of 
 memory and lack of prophetic intuition. A glance 
 over the files of the leading English literary re- 
 views leaves the reader amazed at the suavity with 
 which the critics of Mr. Hichens's more recent 
 popular triumphs ignore the many harsh asper- 
 sions they cast upon his earlier volumes, and the 
 completeness with which most of them seem to have 
 forgotten their one-time aversion to certain salient 
 features of his style, his technique and his attitude 
 towards life, all of which are just as marked and 
 most of them just as offensive to-day as in the 
 days when he was trying to startle a sated public 
 into attention, by eccentricities like Flames, The 
 Londoners and The Slave. 
 
 For, if we examine Mr. Hichens with dispas- 
 sionate frankness, refusing to be dazzled by those 
 physical and moral mirages of the desert, of which 
 he possesses the incomparable and magic trick, we 
 must realize that, although he has gained im- 
 mensely in sheer craftsmanship, and although his 
 instinct for the unerring right word has become
 
 344 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 surer with practice, his verbal color more bril- 
 liantly lavish, his style more fluent and less epi- 
 grammatically crystalline, his development has 
 nevertheless been peculiarly homogeneous and con- 
 sistent. That he has grown, it would be idle to 
 deny ; but the growth has been logical, and on cer- 
 tain definite and predestined lines. His gifts, and 
 some of his faults as well, have attained ampler 
 dimensions with the passage of years ; but gifts 
 and faults alike, there is scarcely one of them, the 
 seeds of which might not have been found already 
 germinating and taking vigorous root in the now 
 almost forgotten Green Carnation. It is worth 
 while, as a bit of pertinent literary history, to call 
 to mind the terms in which Mr. Arthur Waugh 
 first brought this volume to the attention of Ameri- 
 can readers, in his monthly London letter to the 
 New York Critic: 
 
 At last London has a sensation. The quiet of the 
 early autumn is broken by the explosion of a genuine 
 bombshell, and every one is rushing to read The 
 Green Carnation. ... It is a satire, brilliant and 
 scintillating, upon the literary and social affectations 
 of the hour; and a more daring, impertinent and al- 
 together clever piece of work has not been produced 
 for many years. . . . The writer remains anonymous 
 and his preference for secrecy is not surprising, for 
 if it is possible for good-humored satire to make 
 enemies, he would scarcely find a friend left. No-
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 345 
 
 body is spared. Mr. Oscar Wilde is, as the title im- 
 plies, the principal butt of the brochure, but almost 
 every conspicuous writer and personage is touched to 
 the quick. 
 
 From the very nature of its naked and un- 
 ashamed personalities, this first volume was 
 handled rather gingerly by the reviewers, most of 
 whom were fain to dismiss it, after the euphemistic 
 manner of the Academy, as a mere " caricature of 
 an affectation in life and literature, an abnormal- 
 ity, a worship of abstract and scarlet sin, which 
 must by its very nature pass away with the per- 
 sonality that first flaunted it before a wondering, 
 half-attracted, half-revolted world." To-day the 
 unwholesome interest of its theme has passed away 
 like a whiff of foul gas ; and in its place remains 
 the interest of the human document, for it shows 
 that the author was even then, just as he is to-day, 
 concerned primarily with the abnormalities of life, 
 seeking by preference the tainted mind, the 
 stunted soul, the pathological body. In spite of 
 a life-long straining after startling effects, Mr. 
 Hichens has no great and original fertility of 
 plot. Many another novelist before him has built 
 stories upon the themes of metempsychosis ; of a 
 woman's slavery to the glitter of jewels or to the 
 fool's paradise of opium ; of hereditary fires of 
 passion, that betray a bridegroom on his honey- 
 moon into forgetting the marriage service, or a
 
 346 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 renegade monk into breaking his vows. Mr. Hich- 
 ens's distinction lies rather in his special gift for 
 taking world-old problems and modernizing them, 
 warming them over to suit a jaded palate, with a 
 dash of the decadent spirit and a garniture of 
 Fleurs de Mai. Any one who has read Henry 
 James's Ambassadors must remember the sensa- 
 tions of the mild and scholarly Mr. Strethers dur- 
 ing his first afternoon in Chad Newsome's Paris 
 apartment, while he listens to the conversation 
 going on blithely and carelessly around him, and 
 wonders helplessly whether all those well-dressed, 
 well-mannered guests really mean all the unspeak- 
 able things that they seem to be uttering, or 
 whether his own mind has suddenly become 
 strangely perverted and is playing him tricks. 
 The episode inevitably comes to mind in connec- 
 tion with Mr. Hichens's novels, for it precisely 
 portrays the impression that, with malice afore- 
 thought, he contrives to leave upon the mind of his 
 readers. He seems to delight in bringing them to 
 a sudden full stop, with a gasping protest, 
 " Surely, he never could mean that ! " — and then, 
 at the turn of the page, leaving them with a be- 
 wildered and shamefaced wonderment how they 
 could have entertained, even for a moment, such 
 outrageously indecent thoughts ! 
 
 That this is no arbitrary and one-sided view of 
 Robert Hichens, any one may readily convince
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 347 
 
 himself by merely taking the trouble to glance over 
 the contemporary reviews of his several books. 
 These reviews, with few exceptions, and quite re- 
 gardless of their favorable or unfavorable tone, 
 form a rich thesaurus of the various English 
 synonyms, — and sometimes the French synonyms 
 as well, when Anglo-Saxon resources run low, — 
 of such words as morbid, neurotic, pathological, 
 decadent, salacious and unclean. It is true that 
 since the appearance of The Garden of Allah, less 
 emphasis has been laid upon the unwholesomeness 
 of Mr. Hichens's themes, and more upon the vivid 
 color and scintillating brilliance of his style. It 
 may even be conceded that there is justice in this 
 change, and that, on the whole, his later books are 
 more normal, more human, than his earlier. 
 Nevertheless, the taint persists. There is no es- 
 caping the obvious fact that his interest is always 
 in the exceptional, rather than in the average, 
 type. Strange people, bizarre customs, alien skies, 
 men and women vainly struggling against some 
 overmastering obsession, physical disability or 
 mental lesion, a long nightmare procession of the 
 socially and morally unfit, — such, as they mentally 
 file before us, is the impression left by the leading 
 characters of Mr. Hichens's novels. 
 
 Now the fault with Mr. Hichcns is not too great 
 a frankness about life. It is not that he looks 
 upon the world without illusions, recognizing the
 
 348 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 plague-spots of human nature and ruthlessly 
 stripping them bare. A bold, uncompromising 
 handling of hypocrisy and avarice, frailty and vice 
 is one of the canons of the realistic creed. There 
 is more disease and degradation in Zola's Lourdes 
 than in all the pages ever penned by the author of 
 The Black Spaniel. And the reason why The 
 Black Spaniel is an unwholesome book, while 
 Lourdes is not, is simply this : That when he has 
 occasion to expose the ugliness of life, Mr. Hich- 
 ens, unlike Zola, either cannot or will not emulate 
 the purely scientific zeal of the surgeon, dissecting 
 away a diseased tissue. Underneath the surface 
 impersonality of the realist, one discerns a spirit of 
 prying and unwholesome curiosity, gloating over 
 the forbidden and the unclean. " When I am 
 what is called wicked, it is my mood to be evil," 
 are the words that Mr. Hichens puts into the 
 mouth of Reggie Hastings, in The Green Carna- 
 tion. " I must drink absinthe, and hang the night 
 hours with scarlet embroideries ; I must have music 
 and the sins that march to music." And, if we are 
 content not to stretch the comparison unduly, 
 these phrases are not a bad characterization of the 
 salient qualities of much of Mr. Hichens's fiction. 
 He, too, is fond of hanging the night hours with 
 scarlet embroideries, of showing us sins that keep 
 pace to sensuous rhythms. Like the French artist, 
 Fromentin, one of Mr. Hichens's forerunners in
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 349 
 
 discovering and interpreting Algeria, he has suf- 
 fered from an innate tendency to see what is pic- 
 turesque, spectacular, even pretty, rather than 
 what is truly great ; and, as with Fromentin, Al- 
 geria taught him how to do the bigger thing. It 
 was not until he replaced his " scarlet embroid- 
 eries " with the vast monochrome of the African 
 sky, the tinkle of drawing-room music with the 
 sublimity of desert silence and solitude, that he 
 attained, for once at least, an epic amplitude of 
 canvas and of theme. 
 
 As a bold and effective colorist, Mr. Hichens 
 deserves cordial commendation. His skill in vivid 
 pictorial description is beyond dispute. Whether 
 it be a glimpse of a crowded London street, the 
 turquoise blue of Italian sea and sky, or the burn- 
 ing reach of sun-ravished desert, his printed words 
 seem to open up a vista of light and warmth, a mov- 
 ing picture wrought of dissolving and opalescent 
 hues. His colors lack the riotous romanticism of a 
 Theophile Gautier, the wistful melancholy of a 
 Pierre Loti, the frankly pagan sensuousness of a 
 d'Annunzio, — yet he owes something of its varied 
 richness to each of these. It is obvious that he loves 
 color for its own sake, — much as his heroine in 
 The Slave loves the gleam of jewels, — and flings 
 it on lavishly, just as he flings on other forms of 
 ornamentation, purely decorative in purpose, with 
 the result that his backgrounds are often crowded
 
 350 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 with superfluous and confusing detail. This tend- 
 ency has grown upon him year by year ; it is only 
 in his shorter stories that he has learned the value 
 of restraint. The Garden of Allah, Bella Donna, 
 The Fruitful Vine, one and all would have gained 
 much by a well-advised and ruthless pruning. 
 
 There is a popular impression that Mr. Hichens 
 is a writer of uncommon versatility ; and when we 
 consider that his themes range from the morphine 
 habit to the transmigration of souls, and his stage 
 settings from a London drawing-room to the Sa- 
 hara desert, and from the Nile to the Italian lakes, 
 this impression seems at least superficially justi- 
 fied. But when we begin carefully to sift them 
 over and mentally slip each plot into its respective 
 pigeon-hole, we find that, underneath all his shift- 
 ing scenes and varied topics, Mr. Hichens's inter- 
 est in life narrows down to just one form of 
 obsession, namely, the study of human imperfec- 
 tion, the analysis of those various lesions in body, 
 mind or soul which, like a flaw in the heart of a 
 gem, brand certain men and women as unfit, — 
 at best, to be classed as eccentrics, and at worst 
 as monstrosities. Viewed from this point, his 
 themes fall naturally under three heads: first, his 
 social satires, or studies of the passing fads, 
 foibles, petty vices and hypocrisies on which the 
 world of fashion smiles indulgently ; secondly, cer- 
 tain mental delusions, occult phenomena, psycho-
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 351 
 
 pathic hallucinations, such as form the underly- 
 ing idea of stories of The Black Spaniel type, — in 
 which each reader must decide for himself whether 
 he is reading an allegory, a diagnosis of a curious 
 form of insanity, or a report to the Society for 
 Psychical Research; and, thirdly, — and to this 
 class belong practically all of Mr. Hichens's later 
 serious novels, — studies in moral depravity, 
 chronic and often incurable maladies of the human 
 soul. 
 
 Because of this threefold classification of his 
 stories, it is impracticable to survey Mr. Hichens's 
 writings in anything approaching chronological 
 order. His sardonic enjoyment of the social ex- 
 travagance of the passing hour is more or less ap- 
 parent in every book that he writes, and lends 
 sharp characterization to many an unforgettable 
 minor character. Yet the only volume since The 
 Green Carnation in which it would be fair to say 
 that social satire is, first, last and all the time, the 
 main issue, is The Londoners, in which the pre- 
 tensions of smart society, the pomps and vanities 
 of Mayfair, are, as Mr. Hichens's own sub-title 
 implies, reduced to an absurdity. Of the second 
 class of plots, or those dealing with occultism and 
 pseudo-psychic phenomena of the Jekyll-Hyde or- 
 der, we have, besides The Black Spaniel, a number 
 of weird and fantastic short tales and two novels, 
 Flames: A London Phantasy, one of his earliest
 
 352 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 efforts, and The Dweller on the Threshold, which 
 is one of his most recent. This group of stories 
 represent various degrees of cleverness ; but they 
 one and all leave the impression that the author 
 has not put the best of himself into them. They 
 simply are the embodiment of certain fantastic 
 ideas which in hours of perversity happened to riot 
 through his brain, and which later he could not 
 bring himself wholly to reject. There is a loath- 
 some and uncanny horror about a theme like that 
 of The Black Spaniel, that obviously fastened 
 leech-like upon the abnormal side of Mr. Hichens's 
 nature and refused to let go its hold. Yet, even 
 in this instance, the strongest of all his occult hor- 
 ror tales, the thing is not quite achieved. By 
 over-insistence upon obvious details, by under- 
 estimating the intelligence of his readers and ex- 
 plaining his meaning in words of one syllable, as 
 though to an audience of little children, he defeats 
 his purpose, and destroys the last vestige of 
 plausibility. Mr. Hichens is too much of the 
 earth, earthy ; he is far too interested in the frail- 
 ties and perversions of the flesh, to gain credence 
 when writing of the transmigration of souls or the 
 vagaries of disembodied spirits. Consequently, it 
 is with his third class of stories, serious studies of 
 human delinquency, that we must mainly concern 
 ourselves, in order to take a fair measure of Mr. 
 Hichens, as artist and as student of human nature.
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 353 
 
 Neither is it worth while to linger over his 
 shorter stories, in any of the three subdivisions. 
 What has so often been said in regard to the 
 collection of Egyptian and Algerian tales that 
 swell the volume containing The Black Spaniel to 
 its required three hundred and odd pages, namely, 
 that they were fugitive pages from his note-book 
 for The Garden of Allah, applies in the main to 
 most of his shorter efforts. He is essentially a 
 writer of the sustained effort type ; and it is con- 
 sequently only fair to judge him by his full-length 
 volumes. If evidence were needed to support the 
 contention that, other things being equal, he min- 
 isters by preference to a mind diseased, then such 
 a collection of tales as Tongues of Conscience 
 would furnish fertile illustrations. There is, for 
 instance, the story of the famous painter whose 
 peace of mind is destroyed because he holds him- 
 self responsible for having inspired a street urchin 
 with a passion for the sea, and the boy subse- 
 quently was drowned ; or again, in " The Cry of 
 the Child," we have a young doctor, in whose ears 
 there rings ceaselessly the dying cry of his own 
 child, whom he had cruelly neglected in its last 
 hours ; and still again, in " How Love Came to 
 Professor Guildea," we are told how a materialistic 
 man of science becomes subject to the obsession of 
 a degraded spirit, — a hideous bit of morbidity, 
 which might pass for a study in insanity, if the
 
 354 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 author had not precluded that explanation by 
 showing us the Professor's parrot offering its crest 
 to the caresses of unseen fingers, and mimicking 
 the endearments of the invisible and loathsome 
 visitant. 
 
 But, as it happens, the longer stories are even 
 more to our purpose than the short tales. Al- 
 ready in 1895, his second published volume, An 
 Imaginative Man, clearly reveals the author's nat- 
 ural bent. Briefly, it is the story of an intel- 
 lectual and highly cultivated man who is destitute 
 of natural affections : 
 
 He (Denison) had never loved his kind, and never 
 even followed the humane fashion of pretending to 
 love them. ... It amused him to observe them under 
 circumstances of excitement, terror or pain, in a climax 
 of passion or despair. . . . He liked people when 
 they lost their heads, when they became abnormal. 
 Anything bizarre attracted him abnormally. 
 
 This curiously unnatural personage marries a 
 charming and devoted wife, because he chooses to 
 suspect something enigmatic about her. Later, 
 when he is forced to recognize that she is normal 
 and simple and true-hearted, his interest turns to 
 a dislike akin to hatred. Accordingly, he leaves 
 her, and, after amusing himself for a time in 
 Egypt, watching the impotent rebellion of a boy
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 355 
 
 in the last stages of consumption, he ends his use- 
 less career by dashing out his brains against the 
 Sphinx, with which he has perversely become 
 enamored. Among the press-clippings of that 
 period there is one opinion upon which it would 
 be presumptuous to try to improve: 
 
 It is a story to remain a splendid monument to un- 
 wholesome fancy, a thesaurus of morbid suggestion, 
 which exalts mere vulgar suicide into an intellectual 
 resource of the weary-minded, and degrades the hu- 
 manity of virtue into mere animal instinct. 
 
 As a companion picture to this unnatural man, 
 Mr. Hichens shortly afterwards gave us an equally 
 unnatural woman, in the person of Lady Caryll 
 Allabruth, the heroine of The Slave. Lady Caryll 
 is obsessed by one consuming passion, jewels, — 
 by which, of course, Mr. Hichens wishes to sym- 
 bolize all the futile luxuries for which women, from 
 time immemorial, have sold themselves. She is for- 
 tunate in meeting, while still quite young, an 
 Anglicized Oriental of great wealth, who can lav- 
 ish upon her diamonds, pearls and rubies, who 
 understands her through and through, without one 
 remnant of flattering illusion, and who actually 
 wins her by the dazzling splendor of one huge and 
 matchless emerald. It is her own husband who, in 
 the course of the story, sums her up as follows :
 
 356 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 She was born to live in a harem, petted, as an 
 animal is petted, adorned with jewels as a sultan's 
 favorite is adorned. Such a life would have satisfied 
 her nature. Her soul shines like a jewel and is as 
 hard. ... A certain class of women has breathed 
 through so long a chain of years a fetid at- 
 mosphere, of intellectual selfishness, has sold itself, 
 body, mind and soul, so repeatedly for hard things 
 that glitter, for gold, for diamonds, for the petted 
 slave-girl's joys, that humanity has absolutely dwin- 
 dled in the race, just as size might dwindle in a race 
 breeding in and in with dwarfs. In Caryll, that 
 dwindling light of humanity has gone out. My wife 
 is not human." 
 
 Now, it is extremely convenient for a woman 
 who happens not to be human to have a husband 
 who, although aware of the fact, does not seem to 
 mind ; so it was rather unfortunate for Caryll 
 Allabruth that her husband died, ruined by her 
 monomania for jewels. In her poverty, however, 
 Lady Caryll managed to retain the one matchless 
 emerald with which he had won her. This emer- 
 ald is subsequently stolen ; and, since it is the one 
 thing left in life for which she cares, and all other 
 means of recovering it fail, Lady Caryll consents 
 to become the burglar's bride, in order that the 
 emerald's green fires may once more burn upon her 
 breast. All of which, in spite of its melodramatic 
 extravagance, rests upon a foundation of per-
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 357 
 
 verse and sardonic logic that is eminently char- 
 acteristic. 
 
 The next two volumes, in point of time, while 
 unmistakably expressing the same outlook upon 
 life, show a distinct gain in the direction of so- 
 briety and self-restraint. Felix and The Woman 
 •with the Fan, although neither of them a book 
 of real importance in itself, at least revealed 
 Mr. Hichens as a novelist worth watching for bet- 
 ter reasons than merely because he could attract 
 attention with a flow of epigram, as insistent as 
 the cracking of a whip. Moreover, although he 
 had not learned to draw sympathetic characters, — 
 and it is seriously to be questioned whether he ever 
 will learn, — he at least began to get rather nearer 
 the average human level of understanding than in 
 the case of Denison or Lady Caryll. The heroine 
 of Felix is not naturally inhuman ; she is simply a 
 victim of the drug habit, an unfortunately com- 
 mon and pitiable human weakness, although re- 
 pulsive and rather nauseating when forced in inti- 
 mate detail upon our notice. If Mr. Hichens's 
 purpose was to do for the opium habit what Zola 
 did for alcohol in V Assommoir, it is a pity that his 
 misunderstanding of the realistic method has re- 
 sulted in defeating his object. Zola got his ef- 
 fects by tireless and uncompromising accumula- 
 tion of facts, flung at us almost defiantly, with 
 no attempt to palliate or to obscure. What his
 
 358 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 characters made of these facts, whether they un- 
 derstood them, believed them, acted upon them or 
 not, was all of secondary importance ; facts, as 
 nearly as he could get them, were the be-all and 
 the end-all of his novels, their excuse and apology 
 for existence. Mr. Hichens, on the contrary, can- 
 not be frank, even if he wants to be; he always 
 proceeds by indirection. It is so much easier to 
 suggest than to tell plainly an unsavory fact, and 
 then trust the reader's mind to go to greater 
 lengths than the printed page would dare to go! 
 In Felix we have probably the best and most ex- 
 treme case of this method to be found in the whole 
 range of its author's writings. Felix himself is in 
 no wise abnormal; on the contrary, he is just the 
 plain, ordinary variety of young fool, the Kipling 
 type of fool, whose rag and bone happens, to his 
 more complete undoing, to be further complicated 
 with a hypodermic needle. Felix pays a brief visit 
 to Paris, where fate wills it that he shall meet a 
 certain little tailor who in youth had the honor to 
 make Balzac a " pair of trousers without feet," 
 and who initiates Felix into the endless delights 
 of the Comedie Humaine. This whole episode of 
 the little tailor stands out luminously against a 
 background of human slime. It is the sort of thing 
 that Mr. W. J. Locke can do so supremely well, 
 a page that might have fluttered loose from The 
 Beloved Vagabond. When the final reckoning of
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 359 
 
 Mr. Hichens's achievements is to be cast up, this 
 little masterpiece of Balzac's tailor ought to count 
 heavily on the credit side. 
 
 As for the story of Felix as a whole, it is un- 
 deniably strong, — as strong as escaping sewer gas. 
 Having read the Come die Hummne, Felix flatters 
 himself that human nature holds no secrets from 
 him ; he plunges, hot-headed, into the turbulence of 
 London's fast set, men drugged with ambition, 
 women drugged with vanity, with avarice, with 
 opium. There is an all-pervading sense of some- 
 thing unexplained and inexplicable. Felix's inex- 
 perience hangs like a heavy veil before our eyes, 
 and we are forced to grope with him, to piece 
 fragments of evidence together, just as he does, 
 and, like him, often to piece them wrong. Espe- 
 cially, out of the other loathsome and unclean 
 horrors, there looms up, as nauseously offensive as 
 some putrescent fungoid growth, a certain corpu- 
 lent, bloated, blear-eyed little dog, symbolic of 
 human bestiality. The present writer can recall 
 no episode in modern fiction, not even in the au- 
 dacities of Catulle Mendes, which, after a lapse 
 of some years, still brings back the same sickening 
 qualm of physical illness. 
 
 The Woman with the Fan, although not by any 
 means lacking in audacities, came as a welcome 
 contrast to its predecessor. In addition to its odd 
 title, it had a somewhat startling cover design, the
 
 360 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 nude figure of a woman apparently going through 
 some sort of a drill with an open fan. This figure, 
 which proves to be a marble statuette known as 
 Une Danseuse de Tunisie, plays a rather im- 
 portant part in the development of the story. It 
 is the fan which makes the statuette wicked, one 
 of the characters repeatedly insists ; and the 
 thought which is symbolized by the statue is that 
 of the Eternal Feminine degraded by the artificial 
 and the tarnish of mundane life. In applying the 
 symbolism of this statuette to his heroine, Lady 
 Holme, Mr. Hichens seems to have taken a per- 
 verse pleasure in confusing right and wrong, ideal- 
 ism and sensuality. Lady Holme's friends con- 
 stantly identify her with the statuette, and beg 
 her to " throw away her fan," meaning that there 
 is a taint of wickedness about her, and that she is 
 capable of higher things. The facts in the case, 
 however, hardly fit in with this theory. Stripped 
 of its symbolism, the book is a study of the two 
 elements which go to make up human love, the 
 physical attraction and the psychological. Viola 
 Holme is a woman in whom the finer elements of 
 character lie dormant. She is married to a man 
 of the big, athletic, primitive sort, " a slave to 
 every impulse born of passing physical sensa- 
 tions." She knows that of poetry, music, and all 
 the finer things of life he has not, and never will 
 have, the slightest comprehension. She knows, too,
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 361 
 
 that he loves her only for the surface beauty of 
 her hair, her eyes, her symmetry of face and form, 
 and that if she lost that beauty on the morrow, 
 his love would go with it. And yet she loves him, 
 in spite of his crudeness and his many infidelities, 
 because he satisfies the demands of that side of her 
 nature which is the strongest, — the side which 
 " holds the fan." Other men, the men who urge 
 her to " throw the fan away," offer her a different 
 kind of love, because there are times when they 
 see in her eyes and hear in her voice, when she 
 sings morbid little verses from d'Annunzio, the 
 promise of deeper emotions than her husband ever 
 dreamed her capable of. Now, a woman of Viola 
 Holme's temperament would never voluntarily 
 " throw aside her fan," and Mr. Hichens is a 
 sufficiently keen judge of women to be aware of it. 
 Nothing short of an accident in which the statuette 
 is broken will accomplish this miracle. So fate 
 is invoked, in the shape of an overturned automo- 
 bile, and Lady Holme struggles back to conscious- 
 ness, to find her famous beauty gone forever. In 
 its place is a mere caricature of a human face, a 
 spectacle so repellent that, of all the men who 
 formerly professed to worship the " inner beauty 
 of her soul," only one has the courage to renew 
 his vows, and he a poor, broken-down inebriate, as 
 sad a wreck as herself. Such, in bare outline, is 
 the story of The Lady with the Fan, and each
 
 362 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 reader may apply the symbolism to suit himself. 
 A hasty, snap-shot interpretation would be that 
 Lady Holme would have become a better woman, 
 mentally and morally, if she had discarded her 
 coarse-minded husband and replaced him with a 
 lover of more artistic temperament. But such an 
 interpretation would do scant justice to Mr. Hich- 
 ens's subtlety. The physical and spiritual ele- 
 ments of love, he seems to say, are too curiously 
 intermeshed to be readily separated; there is no 
 love so earthly that it does not get a glimmer of 
 higher things, no love so pure and idyllic that it 
 does not crave some slight concession to the flesh. 
 If she would hold love, the modern woman must 
 be content to remain a little lower than the angels, 
 she must hold to her fan. 
 
 In spite of the implied confession of weakness 
 in solving a rather big problem with the unsatis- 
 factory makeshift of an accident, The Woman 
 with a Fan is obviously, even now as we look at it 
 in the light of his later achievements, so much big- 
 ger and stronger and more vital than all that went 
 before it, that The Garden of Allah, when it fol- 
 lowed shortly afterwards, ought not to have been the 
 surprise that it actually was. Of this book, the 
 one really big and enduring contribution that Mr. 
 Hichens has made to modern fiction, there is really 
 absurdly little to say. It is so simple, so elemental, 
 so inevitable in all its parts. It may be epitomized
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 363 
 
 with more brevity than many a short story. There 
 is a certain Trappist monk, Androvsky, who, after 
 twenty years of silent obedience to his order % 
 breaks his vows, escapes from bondage, and, meet- 
 ing Domini Enfilden, an independent English gir] 
 with a lawless strain of gipsy blood in her veins, 
 woes her with a gauche and timid ardor, and car- 
 ries her off for a mad, fantastic honeymoon into 
 the heart of the African desert. The desert, so 
 says a Moorish proverb, is the Garden of Allah; 
 and here the renegade monk, fleeing from his con- 
 science, with confession ever hovering on his lips, 
 and doubly punished through dread of the anguish 
 awaiting his innocent bride when enlightenment 
 comes to her, finds the solitude too vast, the isola- 
 tion too terrifying, the imminence of divine wrath 
 too overwhelming to be borne. It drives him back 
 to the haunts of men, even in the face of a pre- 
 monition that amounts to certainty, that his secret 
 must be laid bare and his short-lived and forbidden 
 joy be ended. Now the theme of a man breaking 
 the holiest vows for the unlawful love of a woman 
 is one of the commonplaces in the history of fic- 
 tion. It is the majestic simplicity of his materials, 
 the isolation of his man and his woman, the sublim- 
 ity of his remote, unfathomable background, that 
 combine to raise this exceptional book almost to 
 the epic dignity of the First Fall of Man. As has 
 already been insisted, in connection with each sue-
 
 364, ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 ceeding book, Mr. Hichens does not possess the 
 faculty of frankness. That Boris Androvsky is a 
 sinner, bearing the burden of an unpardonable and 
 nameless misdeed, is a fact that we grasp almost 
 at the outset; but Mr. Hichens would have been 
 false to his own nature, if he had not, before re- 
 vealing the secret, forced us to suspect his hero 
 of every known crime against man, nature and 
 God. But suddenly his theme seems to have taken 
 possession of him, to have raised him against his 
 will, perhaps without his knowledge, out of the 
 pettiness and subterfuge that have dwarfed so 
 much of his work, into the full light of truth and 
 sympathy and understanding. In a certain sense, 
 the book seems to have written itself; it is a fan- 
 tastic piece of word-painting, done with a trop- 
 ical luxuriance of color, a carnival of Algerian 
 pageantry and African sunshine ; and everywhere 
 and all the time, is an all-pervading sense of the 
 mystery, the languor, the thousand blending sights 
 and sounds and scents of the Orient. Long after 
 the final page is turned, you cannot shut out from 
 your eyes the memory of the desert, " with its 
 pale sands and desolate cities, its ethereal mys- 
 teries of mirage, its tragic splendors of color, of 
 tempest and of heat " ; you cannot forget the 
 throbbing pulsations of burning air, the vast end- 
 less monochrome of earth and sky, the primeval 
 tragedy of an erring man and woman, helpless
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 365 
 
 motes in the glare of universal sunshine, impo- 
 tently fleeing from an avenging God. It is this one 
 book which entitles Mr. Hichcns to a serious con- 
 sideration among the novelists of to-day. Without 
 it, he could have safely been passed over in silence. 
 It follows that, in various degrees, all the books 
 that Mr. Hichcns has given us since The Garden 
 of Allah are in the nature of an anti-climax; and 
 for that reason they may be somewhat briefly and 
 summarily dismissed. One recalls with a certain 
 amount of cordial appreciation another and 
 briefer story of Algeria called Barbary Sheep, — 
 a book that owes its charm chiefly to its delicate 
 and almost flawless artistry, and its lack of any 
 pretension to be more than it actually is. Just a 
 bit of idle playing with fire, a young English 
 couple gaining their first glimpse of African life 
 and African temperament ; and while the husband 
 spends his days, and sometimes the nights, tire- 
 lessly hunting Barbary Sheep, the young wife, 
 restless, unsatisfied, craving excitement, is drifting 
 rashly into an extremely dangerous intimacy with 
 a cultured and suave young Arab, an officer in one 
 of the native regiments. What might so easily 
 have become a tragedy is brought to a safe and 
 final solution by the removal of the Arab from 
 further participation, through his death at the 
 hands of a fanatical dervish. And to the end we 
 have the delicious irony of the utter unconscious-
 
 366 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 ness of the phlegmatic English husband, so intent 
 on Barbary Sheep that he passes his wife, where 
 she crouches among the rocks, in the desert moon- 
 light, equally unsuspecting, as he passes, the 
 menace of her Arab lover, and the death-blow that 
 an instant later removes that menace. 
 
 Then we have the much overpraised Sicilian 
 story, The Call of the Blood, and its stronger and 
 more sanely appraised sequel, A Spirit in Prison. 
 Aside from an almost pagan frankness in their 
 unashamed recognition of physical passion, these 
 are conspicuously clean volumes, with little if any- 
 thing of the author's earlier perversity. The 
 chief weakness in The Call of the Blood lies in the 
 unconvincing character of the leading episode, the 
 one upon which the whole structure of the story 
 hinges : namely, the fact that Hermione, the young 
 English wife of Maurice Delarey, feels herself com- 
 pelled to leave him before their honeymoon in 
 Sicily is half over, in order to hasten to the bed- 
 side of Emile Artois, the Frenchman who has long 
 been in love with her, and who is said to be dying. 
 During the brief weeks of her absence, her hus- 
 band, who has inherited through his grandmother 
 a strain of Sicilian blood, yields to the call of this 
 remote strain and falls under the spell of a young 
 peasant girl's transient beauty, promptly paying 
 the penalty of death at the hands of the peasant 
 girl's kinsmen. Of the true facts of this tragedy
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 367 
 
 Hermione is never told; she knows only that her 
 husband was drowned, and that she lost some 
 precious weeks of happiness by her absence at 
 the bedside of the Frenchman whom she did not 
 love and who has lived, while the Englishman whom 
 she did love has died. So, believing him to be the 
 perfect type of honor and fidelity, she consecrates 
 herself to lifelong widowhood. 
 
 It is at this point that The Call of the Blood 
 breaks off, with a young and still beautiful woman 
 wasting her best years in mourning for an un- 
 worthy man, while the right man, who knows the 
 truth and might easily win her if he chose to speak, 
 feels that his lips are sealed by his unwillingness 
 to destroy her ideal. A Spirit in Prison takes up 
 the story some seventeen years later. The scene 
 is no longer Sicily, but a tiny island in the Bay of 
 Naples, to which the widowed bride retired at the 
 time of her bereavement, to await the birth of her 
 child, and in which she and Vere, the daughter, 
 now a girl of sixteen, still have their home. The 
 Sicilian peasant girl, for whom Hermione's hus- 
 band proved false to her, also had a child, who is 
 now a sturdy young fisher lad, with eyes that are 
 strangely reminiscent of some one whom Hermione 
 has known, some one in the distant past whom she 
 either cannot or will not name even to herself. Her 
 attention is first called to the fisher lad by the in- 
 terest that he awakens in her daughter, Vere ; for
 
 368 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 the girl, by some curious instinct, has recognized 
 the ties of kinship and has made the boy her 
 protege and comrade. It takes very little time for 
 Artois, who still loves Hermione with patient hope- 
 lessness, and for Gaspare, her faithful old servant, 
 to learn the truth about the boy's parentage ; and 
 these two men instinctively conspire to keep Her- 
 mione in ignorance. But by doing so they uncon- 
 sciously prolong her suffering; because her spirit 
 is struggling in the prison of delusion, and can win 
 freedom, and with it love and happiness, only 
 through full knowledge of the truth. Altogether, 
 these two volumes make up a strong, clean, tender 
 human story, admirably handled to bring out all 
 the values that the plot contains. It revealed Mr. 
 Hichens as an interpreter of Italian life somewhere 
 midway between Richard Bagot and Marion Craw- 
 ford, less pedantic than the former, yet lacking the 
 geniality of the creator of Saracinesca. 
 
 Mr. Hichens might, had he chosen, have gone on 
 indefinitely from this point, doing the fairly in- 
 nocuous, fairly entertaining sort of story, and let- 
 ting us little by little forget the days when a new 
 volume from his pen meant an alternate gasp and 
 shudder at the turn of each page. But it is not 
 in his nature to be content with doing the innoc- 
 uous thing. He insists upon being conspicuous; 
 and if the only way of being conspicuous is to 
 shock a startled world into attention, he stands
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 369 
 
 ready to do so. Just two more novels demand 
 a passing word: Bella Donna and The Fruitful 
 Vine. Of these two, the former is of no special 
 importance, either in theme or in detail, — although 
 in its heroine he has created one more unwhole- 
 some and abnormal type that lingers in the 
 memory. At the opening of the story, Mrs. Chep- 
 stow is summed up as " a great beauty in de- 
 cline ": 
 
 Her day of glory had been fairly long, but now 
 it seemed to be over. She was past forty. She said 
 she was thirty-eight, but she was over forty. Good- 
 ness, some say, keeps women fresh. Mrs. Chepstow 
 had tried a great many means of keeping fresh, but 
 she had omitted that. 
 
 The facts about Mrs. Chepstow, which Mr. 
 Hichens regards as of moment, are that in the 
 zenith of her youth and beauty she was divorced 
 by her husband ; that, having made a failure of 
 one life, she resolved that she would make a suc- 
 cess of another ; that for a long time she kept men 
 at her feet, ministering to her desires, — and then 
 suddenly, as she approached forty, " the roseate 
 hue faded from her life, and a grayness began to 
 fall over it." In other words, to catalogue the 
 book roughly, it is one more of the many studies 
 devoted to L'Automne d'une Femme. And so, at 
 the opening of the volume, we meet Mrs. Chepstow,
 
 370 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 in the consulting-room of a famous specialist, Dr. 
 Meyer Isaacson, confiding to him certain facts 
 about herself, physical, mental and moral facts, 
 which the reader is not allowed to overhear, which 
 the woman herself never alludes to again, but 
 which Mr. Hichens has no intention of allowing the 
 reader to cease for one moment to ponder over, 
 with a more or less prurient curiosity. Inci- 
 dentally, — and to this extent alone is her con- 
 fession justified structurally, — it is the memory 
 of what she confided to him that at a crucial hour 
 hurries Dr. Isaacson on a desperate, headlong 
 Odyssey to the Nile, in order to save a friend and 
 keep Mrs. Chepstow from the sin of murder. But 
 all of this is, frankly, rather cheap stuff, and quite 
 unworthy of the author of The Garden of Allah. 
 It makes a normal-minded reader somewhat exas- 
 perated to see a rather rare talent deliberately 
 misused. 
 
 Only one other volume, The Fruitful Vine, re- 
 mains for discussion. The setting is modern 
 Rome, the leading characters two married couple, 
 both English, Sir Theodore Cannynge and his 
 wife, Dolores, Sir Theodore's closest friend, 
 Francis Denzil and his wife Edna — and just one 
 Italian, Cesare Carelli. Cannynge, having lost his 
 first love in a painful tragedy years before, re- 
 mained unmarried almost until middle age. At 
 the opening of the story Dolores has for ten years
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 371 
 
 been his wife, but no children have come to them. 
 Whatever regrets he may have felt have remained 
 unspoken ; until within a year his whole interest 
 seemed to center in his diplomatic career, first in 
 one European capital, then in another. But when 
 the inheritance of an independent fortune came 
 almost simultaneously with the loss of his great 
 ambition, the Austrian Embassy, in a moment of 
 pique he resigned, and from that time on had 
 more time for thought than was good for him. 
 Finally comes the day when, fresh from a visit to 
 Denzil's home, full of the merriment of children's 
 voices, he catches up his wife's Chinese poodle by 
 the throat and, while the miserable little beast 
 writhes and coughs and blinks, tells her violently : 
 " Look at it ! This is all we've got, you and I, to 
 make a home — after ten years ! " Dolores is not 
 surprised ; she has felt instinctively that sooner or 
 later this outbreak was bound to come. None the 
 less it hurts her — just as every one of his almost 
 daily visits to Denzil's home, blessed with a fruit- 
 ful vine in place of a barren one, has hurt her. 
 She is not jealous of Edna, Denzil's wife, al- 
 though she knows that the idle gossip of Rome has 
 settled their relations for them. The Roman 
 world would be incapable of understanding that 
 the attraction might be the children and not the 
 woman. Dolores's troubles, however, are only just 
 beginning. Francis Denzil, husband of " the hap-
 
 372 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 piest woman in Rome," is suddenly stricken down 
 with cancer of the larynx, is operated upon and 
 never rallies. His last request is that Sir Theo- 
 dore will be a second father to his little son — and 
 Sir Theodore promises. From this time onward, 
 Dolores sees less and less of her husband; a vi- 
 carious fatherhood has taken possession of him, 
 absorbed him, made him a new man. When the 
 summer comes, he disappoints her regarding her 
 long-cherished plan to visit London, and insists 
 upon taking a villa at Frascati, so as to be near 
 the Denzil children. Then comes a day when Do- 
 lores rebels, packs her belongings and goes by her- 
 self to Lake Como, to escape the torture of neg- 
 lect. Meanwhile Roman gossip has been busy in 
 coupling her name with that of another man, that 
 of Cesare Carelli. Since he was a mere boy, Carelli 
 has been faithful to just one woman, the Mancini. 
 But suddenly and quite recently it has become 
 common knowledge that he has definitely broken 
 with her. Why ? asks Rome insistently ; Romans 
 do not do such things; a man may be untrue to 
 his wife, but a lover remains faithful. There must 
 be some other woman — and Rome is quick to find 
 her in Dolores. As the Countess Boccara tells 
 Dolores to her face, with a malicious little stress 
 on the pronoun : " The rupture happened in the 
 summer, very soon after you left Rome, cara. 
 Now it is while Dolores is in hiding at Como, and
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 373 
 
 just at the crucial moment when the insistent 
 thought has first taken possession of her, " If I 
 could only give Theodore a child ! " that Carelli 
 tracks her down — and this is the beginning of the 
 tragedy that the reader at once foresees is in- 
 evitable. What actually follows may be put into 
 a dozen words. Dolores does give a child to Sir 
 Theodore — a child of alien parentage — but she 
 never reaps the harvest that she has hoped for, the 
 harvest of reawakened love ; because the child costs 
 the mother her life, or rather, not the child, but 
 her own loosened hold upon life itself, due to a 
 loathing of her own deed. As for Carelli, he is 
 truly Italian in his inability to conceive of Do- 
 lores's real motive. For love, yes, that he could 
 understand ; but for motherhood, never ! And 
 when the woman is dead, and the stricken husband 
 is just awakening to his loss, the Italian thinks 
 to square accounts by claiming his child. But 
 his revenge misses fire. His revelation simply re- 
 sults in quickening Sir Theodore's own self- 
 knowledge, and he says at last in all humility: 
 " She was better than I, better than I ! " 
 
 Such is the story of The Fruitful Vine, analyzed 
 as generously and as sympathetically as possible. 
 It is written with extraordinary power, and it is 
 thrown into strong relief against a background of 
 rare richness, the vari-colored background of the 
 Roman world. Of the inherent bigness of his
 
 374 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 theme, the pathos of barrenness, the tragedy of a 
 woman who sees her husband's love alienated be- 
 cause she fails to give him sons and daughters, 
 there can be no question: — just as there can be 
 no question that Mr. Hichens has, perhaps unwit- 
 tingly, done his utmost to debase it. He has 
 given his theme certain perverse twists that put it 
 on a level even lower than that of Elinor Glyn's 
 much-discussed Three Weeks. It was cheap work- 
 manship, and not an unworthy plot, that made 
 Three Weeks the ephemeral, negligible book that it 
 was. But in The Fruitful Vine we are asked to be- 
 lieve that a delicately nurtured, refined and culti- 
 vated Englishwoman, who worships her husband, 
 is willing to do him the ultimate, crowning wrong 
 that any wife can do, and foist upon him, as his 
 son and heir, an interloper that has not even the 
 redeeming grace of being a child of love, but one 
 more basely begotten, more purely meretricious 
 than half the nameless waifs that crowd the 
 asylums ! And in asking this, he simply insults 
 our intelligence. All his finished craftsmanship 
 cannot make the volume otherwise than futile. 
 
 To sum him up in a few words, we have in Mr. 
 Hichens a story teller of much brilliance who has 
 deliberately chosen to prostitute his gifts to the 
 gratification of unhealthy tastes. He has pre- 
 ferred the sensational notoriety of the passing 
 hour to the less flamboyant successes of enduring
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 375 
 
 worth. He has given us a few books that are 
 fairly innocuous and just one book that deserves 
 to live. And the danger of according the full 
 measure of praise to The Garden of Allah lies in 
 this : that by granting its greatness, we may seem 
 by implication to put the stamp of approval on 
 the author's other works, so many of which, unfor- 
 tunately, are mentally and morally unclean.
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 
 
 The critical comment, both in this country and 
 in England, that has greeted the novels which from 
 time to time have appeared over the signature of 
 " Frank Danby," has so often been tinged by a 
 prejudiced and illiberal spirit that it seems worth 
 while before proceeding to a detailed examination 
 of her place in fiction, to comment briefly on a 
 form of inconsistency that is only too prevalent 
 among present-day reviewers. A critic, of course, 
 has an inalienable right to choose his own stand- 
 ard, provided he makes that standard clear and 
 adheres to it ; he is free to pose as a self-appointed 
 censor of public morals, or he may champion the 
 cause of art for art's sake, denying the right of 
 morality to intervene. But he must not follow one 
 standard to-day and a different one to-morrow, or 
 he will be as futile as a double-pointed compass. 
 Thanks to the modern spread of cosmopolitanism 
 in letters, there has been a notable diminution of 
 what the author of Pigs in Clover calls the " pru- 
 rient purity of the provincial mind " in the Anglo- 
 Saxon attitude towards the realism of the Con- 
 tinental school. Zola and Maupassant, Suder- 
 
 376
 
 FRANK DAN BY
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 377 
 
 mann and Strindberg and d'Annunzio arc ac- 
 cepted very nearly at the valuation of their own 
 countrymen. Yet the same critic who has trained 
 himself to speak glibly of the admirable technique 
 of La Maison Tellier, and the powerful symbolism 
 of the Trionfo della Morte, suddenly lapses back 
 into the old-time prudery the instant he is con- 
 fronted with an attempt in English, no matter how 
 well done, to imitate the Continental school. And 
 this is palpably unjust. No one is under any 
 obligation to feign a liking for Flaubert and the 
 Goncourts, Daudet, Huysmans and the various 
 other influences under which such a writer as, let 
 us say, George Moore, acquired his technique and 
 developed his art. But no one has the right to 
 profess admiration for Sapho and Nana and La 
 Fille Elisa, and condemn The Mummer's Wife as 
 sordid and unclean. 
 
 Mrs. Julia Frankau, who has chosen to dif- 
 ferentiate between her various art monographs and 
 her contributions to fiction by publishing the for- 
 mer over her own name and signing the latter with 
 the pseudonym of " Frank Danby," is emphatically 
 one of the writers who in fairness should be judged 
 by Continental standards. In spirit and in method, 
 the best and biggest of her novels show a breadth 
 of canvas, a sweeping, Zolaesque audacity of theme 
 and phrase, an uncompromising honesty that 
 shock and offend the conventional Anglo-Saxon
 
 378 "FRANK DANBY » 
 
 mind. In her ability to handle the unsavory facts 
 with an utter absence of self-consciousness, a 
 purely detached and scientific interest in her facts, 
 akin to that of a surgeon at a clinic, she is to be 
 classed, not with the women novelists of England 
 or America, but with that small and widely scat- 
 tered group of robust and valiant spirits, such as 
 Matilde Serao in Italy, Emilia Pardo Bazan in 
 Spain, the late Amalie Skram in the Far North, 
 Helene Bohlau and Margarete Bohme in Germany, 
 — the last named just beginning to gain the recog- 
 nition that she so richly deserves. If there is any 
 other woman in England whose work gives prom- 
 ise of similar virile strength and fearlessness, it is 
 the writer who elects to be known to the public 
 as " Richard Dehan," whose South African novel, 
 The Dop Doctor, in spite of many crudities, was 
 full of brilliant promise, and whose new volume, 
 Between Two Thieves, is one of the biggest his- 
 torical novels of the present decade. 
 
 But while granting freely to " Frank Danby ' : 
 her unflinching courage, her clear-eyed under- 
 standing of life, her relentless probing after the 
 truth, even though in doing so she opens up the 
 fester-spots of society, one must also admit that 
 she is a sadly uneven craftsman, often handi- 
 capped by her lack of self-criticism, and driven to 
 unwise lengths by the violence of her prejudices 
 and a goading impatience at narrow-minded mis-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 379 
 
 comprehension. Her scathing contempt of certain 
 classes and racial types, her unsoftened utterances 
 on politics, religion, heredity and the problems of 
 sex abundantly account for the unjust neglect and 
 condemnation that were so largely the portion of 
 her earlier novels. Yet the volumes which show 
 most markedly this spirit of revolt, this deter- 
 mination to speak the truth, regardless of whom it 
 offends, are precisely the volumes that make her 
 an interesting figure in contemporary fiction. 
 They include, notably, Dr. Phillips, which created 
 no small sensation in London, upward of twenty 
 years ago, Pigs in Clover, which in spite of a faulty 
 structure remains to this day its author's biggest 
 novel, and The Sphinx's Lawyer, her most flagrant 
 defiance of public opinion, which nevertheless pro- 
 pounds certain weighty questions that compel 
 thoughtful attention. Since the publication of 
 The Sphinx's Lawyer " Frank Danby's " manner 
 has undergone a change. Her later volumes, 
 The Heart of a Child, An Incompleat Etonian, — 
 known in America under the title of Sebastian, 
 even Joseph in Jeopardy, which here and there has 
 a flash of the old-time daring, show a spirit of con- 
 cession. Of these later books, the author might 
 have written what she actually did write of her 
 biography of Lady Hamilton, that " much has been 
 omitted that might offend the susceptibilities of 
 those to whom the truth is less grateful than
 
 380 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 delicacy." They are carefully written books, 
 showing her customary wise understanding of hu- 
 man nature, together with a distinct gain in the 
 mechanics of construction ; and they are books 
 which are not likely to call forth hostile comments. 
 They may be safely put into the hands of the aver- 
 age reader without fear of ruffling too harshly any 
 pet prejudice, — unless, perhaps, here and there 
 some champion of the suffragette movement may 
 resent the wholesome indorsement of the old- 
 fashioned domestic type of woman, in Joseph in 
 Jeopardy. But they lack that ample largeness of 
 view, that forceful singleness of purpose, that ex- 
 uberant vitality, which, in the case of her earlier 
 books, compelled recognition, even in the face of a 
 storm of protests, as novels of serious importance 
 and big promise. 
 
 What has happened to " Frank Danby " is not 
 unlike what happens to a large proportion of suc- 
 cessful novelists ; yet, because of her peculiar gifts, 
 it is a little more noticeable and a good deal more 
 regrettable. It is only young authors, in the first 
 flush of enthusiasm, who dare fully to defy conven- 
 tion. With each successive year they find them- 
 selves, almost unconsciously perhaps, a little more 
 narrowed down, a little more hampered both in 
 form and in subject, by what is expected of them, 
 by what is demanded by the generation in which 
 they live. In France, the conventional limitations
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 381 
 
 show themselves a little more obviously than in our 
 country, thanks to that ultra-conservative institu- 
 tion, the French Academy. It is an interesting 
 and enlightening study to compare the youthful 
 and exuberant independence to be found in the 
 earlier work of many a staid academician, with 
 the admirably correct but colorless productions 
 which only too often follow their election. Of 
 course, if an author in the beginning is not vio- 
 lently independent or startlingly iconoclastic ; if 
 his departures either from the prescribed technique 
 of fiction or the conventional range of subjects has 
 not behind it that spark of genius which provokes 
 antagonism, then he may very easily and with no 
 great loss to the world settle down to the usual 
 beaten path of the English novelist, happy in the 
 conviction that he is showing a steady upward 
 growth that keeps pace with his gain in popular- 
 ity. But now and then one comes across a pe- 
 culiarly flagrant and exasperating case of a big, 
 erratic, undisciplined genius that, with proper en- 
 couragement, might in time achieve great things ; 
 but, because of the world's slowness to understand 
 and to accept that which is new, especially when 
 it runs counter to deep-rooted prejudice, the 
 genius finds itself broken to harness, like a clipped- 
 winged Pegasus, and compelled to pace along with 
 due decorum. 
 
 It would be unfair to Mrs. Frankau to suggest
 
 382 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 her as an example of such broken-spirited genius. 
 In the face of much discouragement, she has ended 
 by conquering her public, without any really 
 humiliating sacrifice of her ideals. What has un- 
 doubtedly reacted in her favor is a solid reputation 
 that she has simultaneously been building up in 
 another department of letters, with a series of 
 biographies and art monographs whose solid worth 
 has from the first been unquestioned. Thus, her 
 Eighteenth Century Colored Prints has been for 
 ten years the recognized authority on the subject, 
 and has given this special branch of the art a new 
 valuation ; her Life of James and William Ward 
 complements and rounds out the earlier volume, 
 and stands as a classic of its kind ; while the Lon- 
 don Academy, which only a few years ago was 
 quite ruthless in its denunciations of her novels, 
 does not hesitate to proclaim her biography of 
 Lady Hamilton " the ripest and best work of the 
 greatest woman writer now living in England." 
 And yet it is undoubtedly true that the cumula- 
 tion of unintelligent and misdirected criticism has 
 had upon " Frank Danby " an effect identical in 
 kind with that above suggested, and differing solely 
 in the degree of its consequences. Current book 
 reviews are proclaiming Joseph in Jeopardy Mrs. 
 Frankau's finest effort, just as they previously 
 passed a like verdict upon The Heart of a Child 
 and An Incompleat Etonian. But to the reader
 
 "FRANK DAN BY" 383 
 
 who happens to have read Pigs in Clover when it 
 first appeared and to have been swept off' his feet 
 by the tremendous truth and unashamed human 
 passion of it, these later more controlled, more 
 carefully wrought pictures of English life suggest 
 that unmistakable bluish pallor which comes from 
 too much skimming and too much water. 
 
 Now, just why these later volumes of " Frank 
 Danby's " leave an indefinable impression of a low- 
 ered vitality, a lack of riotous, red blood, an ab- 
 sence of the old-time storm and stress of primitive 
 emotions, is at first a little puzzling to explain. 
 Her characters are still etched in with the same 
 unfaltering, sharply burined lines as of old, the 
 individual situations are as poignantly and arrest- 
 ingly real, the central themes as profoundly and 
 broadly human. The ability of an unprotected 
 girl to guard herself from the world, the pros- 
 pects of a boy handicapped by unfortunate hered- 
 ity, the fidelity of a husband to his marriage vows, 
 are one and all subjects of as wide and vital inter- 
 est as the injustice of our penal system, the elusive, 
 insistent attraction of sex, or the social eligibility 
 of the modern Jew. The essential difference, when 
 we come to examine these volumes a little closer, 
 lies, not in " Frank Danby's " art, but in her 
 craftsmanship, in the mechanical framework on 
 which she builds. Reviewers insist that she has 
 gained in technical skill ; and, in point of symmetry
 
 384 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 of structure, an elimination of all superfluous mat- 
 ter, an ending that carries with it a certain super- 
 ficial logic and satisfies the popular demand for a 
 happy solution, she undoubtedly has learned her 
 lesson. But in her earlier books she was content to 
 carry her theme straight to its foreordained conse- 
 quences, whether it left a pleasant taste on the 
 mental palate or not, and even though all estab- 
 lished rules of structure were shattered in the 
 process. Without intending to minimize the impor- 
 tance of technique, we may nevertheless point out 
 that the more rigid we make its rules, the more 
 they partake of the nature of ready-made gar- 
 ments, which run in certain stock sizes and fit best 
 when tried upon the average commonplace indi- 
 vidual, and which fit grotesquely or not at all upon 
 the shoulders of a giant. Pigs in Clover, dispro- 
 portioned and unsymmetrical though it is, belongs 
 nevertheless to the order of giants. It might ad- 
 vantageously have been lopped off a few chapters 
 sooner ; it simply did not know where to stop grow- 
 ing. But no enlightened reader should be seriously 
 annoyed by its structural eccentricities ; the thing 
 is too big for that. Beginning, however, with The 
 Heart of a Child, there is a radical difference. 
 We are keenly conscious, underneath the surface 
 flesh-and-blood of these later stories, of a manu- 
 factured skeleton, which is palpably not bone and 
 sinew, and we resent the artificiality of it. Meta-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 385 
 
 phorically speaking, it is the difference between 
 creation and taxidermy. It is usually the closing 
 chapter where the internal string and wire pro- 
 trude. There is a lack of finality about them, 
 an impression that they have dodged the real point 
 at issue, have failed to solve the problem pro- 
 pounded. " Frank Danby " is not the first novel- 
 ist who has found certain knots so intricate that, 
 instead of untying them, it seemed simpler to cut 
 them with a knife. 
 
 There is yet another reason which strikes closer 
 to the root of the difference between " Frank 
 Danby's " earlier and later method than any mere 
 question of technique. It is her deliberate change 
 of attitude towards life. From the first her real 
 strength lay in her ability to look unflinchingly 
 on the cruelty and injustice of the world at large, 
 to picture without compromise the net results of 
 human frailty and selfishness and sin. In all her 
 books, she chose instinctively characters and sit- 
 uations that made for tragedy, — and she does so 
 still. Life's handicaps, the snares that heredity 
 and environment so abundantly provide, enter into 
 the very warp of her plots, the later and earlier 
 alike. Yet, while the nature of her material has 
 not changed, she has begun to cultivate a vein of 
 optimism, to refuse to credit the evidence of her 
 own experience, to insist upon hoping against logic 
 for a happy outcome. Formerly, she had the air
 
 386 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 of saying, authoritatively, " Here is a situation 
 which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is 
 bound to end in disaster." In her later books, 
 she says, on the contrary, " Here is the hundredth 
 case, the great exception," — and, in spite of all 
 her native talent and her acquired art, she does 
 not quite succeed in carrying conviction. 
 
 There are some authors whose successive vol- 
 umes seem to fit together with the same nicety 
 as the carefully chiseled stones in the span 
 of an arch, so that if a single volume were omitted 
 from mention, the whole structure of a critical 
 article would be in danger of toppling down. 
 " Frank Danby " is not one of these. No chron- 
 ological study of her works would help to explain 
 why some of them loom up so large and others are 
 so easily negligible. Accordingly, it seems more 
 profitable to pass over her ineffectual volumes 
 with little or no mention, — her almost forgotten 
 Copper Crash and A Babe in Bohemia, the faulty 
 workmanship of Baccarat, the futile unpleasant- 
 ness of Let the Roof Fall In, — and dwell mainly 
 upon the high lights, the few vitally significant 
 volumes. 
 
 And, unquestionably, if " Frank Danby's " 
 claim to a prominent place among contemporary 
 story tellers is to be vindicated, the one book to 
 single out for detailed analysis is Pigs in Clover.
 
 " FRANK DANBY " 387 
 
 It is not the first story in which she vivisected the 
 baffling and mysterious attraction of sex and at the 
 same time analyzed the English Jew with a merci- 
 less frankness verging upon malice. Both these 
 elements also underlie the story of Dr. Phillips, in 
 which a man of high attainment, erudite, wealthy 
 and widely honored, falls a victim to the compel- 
 ling lure of sex, and for the sake of a shallow, 
 selfish, mercenary little woman, who does not even 
 love him, sacrifices himself utterly, stoops to the 
 basest of dishonor and uses the cloak of his pro- 
 fession to commit a cowardly murder. There are 
 few scenes in modern fiction more remorselessly 
 cruel than that in which Dr. Phillips, obsess-ed with 
 his infatuation for another woman, stands by the 
 bedside of his faithful, middle-aged, unlovely wife, 
 who has just undergone a serious operation, and 
 is now sleeping the unnatural sleep induced by the 
 lingering effects of the anesthetic supplemented by 
 a hypodermic injection of morphine. The chance 
 is so opportune, the danger of detection so slight ; 
 the dose given by the other doctor might have 
 been too strong for her weakened vitality ; a sec- 
 ond dose, inserted in the same puncture, leaves no 
 trace, and the poor, faithful old wife breathes 
 slowly and painlessly into oblivion. 
 
 Dr. Phillips, however, in spite of its unsparing 
 satire of certain Jewish types, is really little more
 
 388 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 than the story of a specific and peculiarly cruel 
 crime. Pigs in Clover is a book of altogether dif- 
 ferent magnitude. It is obvious that one of the 
 main arguments of the story, the one in which she 
 herself seems to be most keenly interested, is a 
 broad racial problem, the eligibility of the modern 
 Jew to be received on a footing of social equality. 
 At least, she proclaims this purpose in her title, 
 suggesting, as it does, the pushing droves of un- 
 savory and unwelcome intruders, eager for a feast 
 upon the forbidden social clover. Incidentally, 
 she theorizes a good deal about the modern Jew. 
 As a matter of fact, her story contains just two 
 types, the full-blooded Hebrew, self-made mil- 
 lionaire, proud of his success, conscious of his 
 social shortcomings and good-naturedly amused 
 at the pointed snubs that he receives ; and the 
 mongrel type, the " veneered cad in a golden 
 frame," who almost passes for a gentleman, who 
 betrays his origin to the casual stranger only by 
 the slight burr of his " r," and who keeps the 
 full extent of his social and moral obliquity con- 
 cealed from those nearest and dearest to him, al- 
 most until the end. The way in which we are first 
 introduced to Karl Althaus, South-African mil- 
 lionaire, and his adopted brother, Louis, in the 
 full noontide of their prosperity, and then are per- 
 mitted to catch just one fleeting glimpse of their 
 origin, is a stroke of genius. It is as though a cur-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 389 
 
 tain were drawn aside for an instant from some 
 grim, ghastly, lurid picture, and then were allowed 
 to fall back into place, almost before the spectator 
 realizes the significance of what he has seen. One 
 remembers only the squalid chamber in the 
 wretched kosher provision shop in Houndsditch ; 
 the fat, repulsive Jewess with a greasy black fringe 
 above her forehead, lying paralyzed and helpless 
 on her bed, dead already save for the haunting 
 pathos of her questioning eyes ; the miserable Pol- 
 ish Jew, her husband, not satisfied with having 
 drained her like a human leech, of her last penny 
 and her last ounce of strength, but heaping upon 
 her the ultimate insult of bringing in another 
 woman, a girl from the London streets, to share 
 their poverty and degradation. And finally, that 
 crowning, indescribable scene with its haunting at- 
 mosphere of death: a dying Jewess, a dying Eng- 
 lish girl, a new-born child, and Karl Althaus, a 
 lad of twelve, swearing to be a brother and a pro- 
 tector to that child throughout its life. And in 
 this fugitive glimpse of their origin we get the 
 secret of the life-long difference between these two. 
 Karl, coarse, vulgar, unscrupulous, nevertheless 
 has his own definite moral standard. Even as a 
 boy, he might steal, but never beg; he might lie, 
 but never break his promise. Louis is first, last 
 and always a cad ; and the chief distinguishing 
 feature of a cad is, not that he has a lower stand-
 
 390 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 ard than other men, but that in certain directions 
 he has no moral standard at all. 
 
 There is a good deal of matter in Pigs in Clover 
 which strikes the average reader as mere surplus- 
 age, — questions of racial antagonism, imperialism 
 in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes and his Cape-to- 
 Cairo schemes. The vital interest of the book is 
 centered in the life history of just one man and 
 one woman ; in other words, it is a psychological 
 problem, — and theoretically, the psychological 
 writer who contents himself with a smaller canvas 
 will do a proportionately stronger piece of work. 
 The realist, the man who intentionally touches 
 upon the material surface of things, may make his 
 picture as broad as he pleases, may crowd it with 
 figures from all paths of life, may present humanity 
 in battalions and in regiments. But the author 
 whose special province is to probe down into the 
 mysteries of the human heart, and the interest of 
 whose picture centers in the dingy back parlor of a 
 London lodging-house, gains nothing, it would 
 seem, from sketching a map of the entire British 
 Empire over the margins of his canvas. And yet 
 one hesitates to dogmatize upon a point like this. 
 As already said, the book is rugged, unsym- 
 metrical, almost crude ; and yet, without that back- 
 ground of intrigue, and imperialism and national 
 unrest, the destinies of the two or three central 
 figures might not have loomed up so big and so
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 391 
 
 momentous. It is as if we saw them isolated on a 
 height, silhouetted against the blackness of a 
 storm-cloud. 
 
 Be this as it may, the essential details of the 
 story are as follows: In all South Africa, there 
 is no richer vein of ore than that known as the 
 " Geldenrief," and in it centers Karl Althaus's 
 scheme for a colossal fortune. But the richest 
 part of the vein dips down under the farm of one 
 Piet de Groot, a pig-headed old Boer, who cares 
 nothing for gold mines and will not sell. This 
 farm is his home, also his family burial lot ; his 
 father and grandfather lie beneath its sod, and no 
 Englishman shall own a foot of it. But Piet is old 
 and ill. His wife, Joan, is a young Englishwoman, 
 with a clear, vivid brain, and an essentially fem- 
 inine temperament. She lives estranged from him, 
 but sooner or later she will inherit the farm. All 
 these facts are well known to Karl. Furthermore, 
 he knows that a crisis is imminent, that any day a 
 political bombshell, like the Jameson Raid, may 
 bring the Transvaal, and the " Geldenrief " with 
 it, under English control. Meanwhile, there are 
 two things which an unscrupulous man might do. 
 If he were a man possessed of that rare and in- 
 definable compelling power, he might exert it to 
 reduce Piet de Groot's English wife to a willing 
 submission. If, like Karl, he happened to have in 
 England a powerful friend, such as Lord Heyward,
 
 392 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 — and especially if he was in possession of a 
 shameful secret about Lord Heyward's daughter, — ■ 
 he might, through Parliament, exert a subtle in- 
 fluence upon England's foreign policy. Karl Alt- 
 haus, being neither a blackmailer nor a seducer 
 of women, misses both opportunities. His half- 
 brother, Louis, being an adept in these arts, misses 
 neither. 
 
 Many other novelists, both before and since 
 Pigs in Clover, have written of the mysterious at- 
 traction of sex, that indefinable spell which a par- 
 ticular man may exert over a particular woman. 
 The idea, however, has been elaborated and anal- 
 yzed by " Frank Danby " in a way that seems to 
 leave nothing further to be added : 
 
 There is a mystery known to all who know men 
 and women, to all who have insight into, sympathy 
 with, or understanding of their fellow travelers, but 
 it is blank and incomprehensible to the Pharisees, 
 and to all who read and run at the same time. This 
 is the mystery that fills the divorce courts, mocks the 
 incredulous and sets at naught all creeds and condi- 
 tions. It is a certain something, subtle, sweet and rare, 
 not a perfume, not a touch, but an echo of both, light, 
 elusive and pervading, that is the special property of 
 some loose-living men, a property that is be3 r ond the 
 reach of analysis, but recognizable in the free-masonry 
 of the passions by all who have realized its existence. 
 It is as the candle to the moth, as the rose to the but-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 393 
 
 terfly, as the magnet to the steel. It is the surface lure 
 of sex, it is the all-compelling whisper, almost it seems 
 that to hear it is to obey. But some ears are deaf 
 to it, some few dull ears. 
 
 This is the paragraph that serves as an intro- 
 duction to the chapters detailing the conquest of 
 Joan de Groot by Louis Althaus, — chapters won- 
 derful in their discernment and merciless frank- 
 ness, chapters which probably portray more 
 nearly than any other contemporary novel the 
 English equivalent of a Bel-Ami. To Louis, 
 Joan's attraction was largely, but not wholly, a 
 matter of self-interest. It was not merely that 
 she was a means to an end, a stepping-stone to 
 the possession of the " Geldenrief," thereby en- 
 abling him to steal a march upon his brother, Karl. 
 He had not been ten minutes in her presence before 
 he realized that " her bright, elusive womanhood 
 was shy and wild, and he wanted it, as men always 
 want to bring down wild things." And as for 
 Joan, in spite of her clear, level little brain, the 
 virile brain that had made her a personage of some 
 consequence in South Africa, and had produced one 
 much discussed novel, called The Kaffir and His 
 Keeper, — she knew within those same ten minutes, 
 " that she was lonely, and that love, the love of 
 which she read and of which she wrote, had been 
 nothing but a pulseless world, colder than print.
 
 394 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 Her loneliness shuddered through her and then was 
 gone, and the low voice with its burred ' r's ' filled 
 its place." 
 
 The elaboration of this drama is a bit of rare 
 narrative art. The history of Louis's conquest, 
 the deliberate, remorseless effort to bring down a 
 " wild thing," is narrated with a probing insist- 
 ence, a consummate knowledge, in which not a word 
 rings false. " He blotted out thought and gave 
 her sensation in its stead ; she vibrated at his touch 
 as violin strings at the hand of a musician," and 
 again, " Always he met her moods half-way. If 
 she did not care for him in every way, if she was 
 not as sure as he was, that life meant nothing for 
 either of them apart, then she was right. He 
 would not take her in a mood. She must come to 
 him because she wanted him as he wanted her. He 
 was an artist in his role." The best test of the 
 convincing truth of this picture is that it makes 
 one foresee so clearly just what the inevitable out- 
 come will be. A " dream voyage " to England, a 
 brief month or two of paradise in a cottage near 
 Bushey, and then the true character of Louis 
 gradually betrays itself, the smallness of his moral 
 stature, his abysmal selfishness. Joan remains the 
 woman of moods that she has always been, and he 
 wearies of meeting these moods half-way. She is 
 a woman who will delay dinner for half an hour in 
 order to gaze at a sunset, oblivious of his im-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 395 
 
 patience and his hunger. She lacks the tact to 
 guard against the inevitable steak coming on 
 burned, cold and utterly unpalatable. Manlike, 
 Louis ceases to come to Bushey, even on Sunday. 
 
 Instead Joan went to him in London. She had to 
 meet him in unfrequented eating-houses, at small 
 hotels, where in private rooms, stiff with obtrusive 
 velvet furniture, horrible with long pauses between 
 the courses, with the leering waiter knocking ostenta- 
 tiously before he entered, the glamour of love began to 
 fall before her blue eyes, and the reality of it to lurk 
 hideously in the back of her drugged mind. 
 
 Then comes the memorable scene, on the night 
 when the two come together, each in possession of a 
 momentous secret, she with the knowledge of a 
 strange and wonderful prospect that for the first 
 time seems to justify her prayers that Piet de 
 Groot may die, — and, woman-like, she fancies that 
 Louis will understand and share her joy. The 
 secret that Louis carries with him is the news that 
 Piet de Groot is already dead, — but it is news 
 which he has no intention of sharing with Joan, at 
 least not yet, not until he has secured her signa- 
 ture to a full and absolute release of her interest 
 in the " Geldenrief." But in thinking that he can 
 obtain this, he shows how little be understands 
 Joan's character. Temperamentally, she may be 
 frail, but in money dealings she is scrupulously 
 honest. She has wronged her husband enough al-
 
 396 " FRANK DANBY " 
 
 ready ; never through act of hers shall his wishes 
 in regard to the property be disregarded. So, in 
 spite of her bitter dread of the inevitable " scene," 
 she has the strength to deny him, to argue with 
 him, to hold him off. As fate wills it, within an 
 hour after he has left her, planning to renew the 
 attack, she learns the truth ; that her husband is 
 dead, that Louis knows it, that he has not and 
 never has had any idea of marrying her ; in short, 
 that his interest in her, first, last and always, has 
 centered in the " Geldenrief." She knows her own 
 pitiful weakness, she foresees that if not to-day, 
 then to-morrow or the day after, at a pleading 
 word from him, at the beloved sound of those 
 softly burred " r's," she will sign the paper as he 
 asks. So she burns her ships behind her. She 
 seeks a lawyer, executes a paper relinquishing all 
 rights in her dead husband's property, posts it to 
 South Africa, and disappears into the obscurity 
 of the East End of London. 
 
 It is here, some months later, that Karl Alt- 
 haus finds her, destitute, a pitiful wreck of her 
 former self, with too frail a grip on life even to 
 mourn the child that was born dead. It is from 
 her lips that Karl learns of the share that Louis 
 has had in her misery. 
 
 " I left him. He didn't leave me, he didn't desert 
 me, don't think it, Karl. He was disappointed in
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 397 
 
 me. I didn't want to be a drag on him. I knew he 
 was dependent upon you. I knew he wasn't rich " 
 
 " What! " he shouted, screamed it almost. No one 
 had ever seen Karl like this before. He had risen 
 from his seat, his face was purple; but still he saw 
 her, terrified, white. 
 
 " Go on ! Go on ! He wasn't rich " 
 
 "Karl!" 
 
 " I'm beside myself. Don't mind me, — he wasn't 
 rich, you say. For God's sake, go on ! Oh, my God, 
 don't tell me he left you without money ! Oh, my 
 God, the thing I've reared! " 
 
 Karl marries her. That is to say, he gives her 
 the shelter of his name, demanding nothing, ac- 
 cepting nothing beyond the privilege of reinstating 
 her in the world's esteem and her own self-respect. 
 Yet his very generosity, his unvarying considera- 
 tion, his careful attempt at concealment of his 
 own feelings, make her life a daily punishment. 
 " Karl's eyes, which seemed to her pleading eyes, 
 Karl's wishes, when she thought she read them, 
 Karl's hand on her shoulder, all outraged her ; for 
 in her life there was, there could be, but one man." 
 There is the keynote : she is the type of woman in 
 whose life there could be but one man. The author 
 might have written finis after that word, instead of 
 forcing us to follow the story to the bitterness of 
 its inevitable end. The world is never smaller than 
 when it contains two people who by all the laws of
 
 398 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 justice and honor ought never to meet again. It 
 is a foregone conclusion that sooner or later Joan 
 and Louis will meet, and that when they do, he 
 will try to lure her back to him, if only to gratify 
 a contemptible vanity in his own power of pleas- 
 ing. And if Joan once hears the soft tones of his 
 voice, with that unforgettable foreign burr, she 
 will have no power to deny. But once already 
 Joan has had the strength of weakness, she has 
 burned her bridges. That time what Louis cov- 
 eted was money, and she placed it beyond his de- 
 sire and her weakness b} f relinquishing her own 
 hold upon it. This time it is something more 
 precious, it is life itself that she must relinquish, 
 in order to thwart him ; and so the curtain falls 
 as the last flicker of sensation in Joan's dying 
 brain translates the futile knocking at her locked 
 door into the hammer-strokes driving home the 
 nails into her coffin. 
 
 It is a pity that the subject-matter in The 
 Sphinx, artistically the second in importance 
 among " Frank Danby's " novels, makes it inex- 
 pedient to analyze it at similar length. Frankly, 
 its theme is The Ballad of Reading Gaol, played 
 with variations. As an experiment in construc- 
 tion, it has an almost unique interest. Very sel- 
 dom has a novelist ventured to take for the central 
 figure a dead man, — no, not even a dead man, but 
 the mere wraith of a man's memory, the imaginary
 
 " FRANK DANBY " 399 
 
 ideal which the man's own actions shattered before 
 his death. There is undeniably something in- 
 finitely pathetic in the figure of a beautiful and 
 much-courted woman, stricken down by some ob- 
 scure spinal trouble, at the very hour of her hus- 
 band's need, and doomed to linger on through years 
 of helpless martyrdom, branded and pilloried by 
 the infamy of the name she bears : 
 
 Sybil Heseltine, whom her friends called the 
 Sphinx, was a hedonist, with level brows and a dead- 
 white skin, who wore Egyptian designs on her Greek 
 tea-gowns and talked of superabundant health and 
 vigor while she lay perpetually on her sofa, propped 
 up by silken cushions, vital only in her wonderful 
 eyes. 
 
 There is something almost uncanny in the spell 
 which the author has succeeded in casting around 
 this woman, whose part is so strange and dark a 
 riddle, and who is striving so pitifully to hold to- 
 gether a little coterie of the faithful, and to pre- 
 serve a halo around the memory of the man who 
 has dragged her in the mire. But the fact re- 
 mains that, from first to last, the atmosphere of 
 the book is pathological. To discuss it frankly 
 and fully would be possible only to the pages of a 
 law report or a medical journal. Consequently, 
 in spite of the book's undeniable power, its sin- 
 cerity, its pervading quality of mercy, one feels
 
 400 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 that it belongs to the order of books which were 
 better not to have been written at all. 
 
 Baccarat may be dismissed even more sum- 
 marily. It may be compared to that mongrel 
 product of modern architectural economy, the 
 two-family house. Originally the first half of it 
 was detached and rented out separately, as a 
 magazine novelette ; and the second half of it 
 might conceivably have likewise been offered for 
 separate consumption. The theme of the first half 
 was a blind instinct for gambling which, like a 
 craving for a deadly drug, sometimes seizes upon 
 a man or a woman, blunts their faculties, drags 
 them down from one ignominy to another. The 
 second half has no further structural connection 
 with the first than merely that it is the working 
 out of one particular problem resulting from one 
 particular infamy into which a woman has been 
 dragged by her gambling passion. She might 
 have stooped in the same manner from any one of 
 a dozen other motives. Gambling, in the second 
 half, ceases to be of structural importance. The 
 point of view has shifted from the wife to the hus- 
 band ; the central theme is no longer the wife's 
 frailty, but the husband's strength, — his ability 
 to face the problem of granting pardon to in- 
 fidelity, the problem so boldly and truthfully 
 worked out in a score of Continental novels, from 
 Margueritte's Le Pardon to d'Annunzio's VInno-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 401 
 
 cente. Because this theme has been supremely 
 handled by other writers, and also, one suspects, 
 because " Frank Danby " herself was conscious of 
 having made a false start and was committed to a 
 solution that lacks the ring of truth, the book 
 suffers sadly by way of contrast. It stands as a 
 frail, abortive attempt, interesting chiefly as a 
 conspicuous instance of a gifted author's lack of 
 self-criticism. 
 
 This brings us down to the works in " Frank 
 Danby's " new manner, beginning with The Heart 
 of a Child. The central theme of this book is the 
 vexed question whether a young girl born in the 
 slums, bred in the gutter, flung at the most critical 
 years of her life into the noisome atmosphere of 
 cheap dancing halls, may from an inborn instinct 
 succeed in protecting herself and maintaining her 
 own and the world's respect. That is a theme 
 which one would gladly have seen developed with 
 the boldness of the earlier " Frank Danby," the 
 " Frank Danby " of a decade ago. The volume 
 that she has actually written is handicapped by 
 its neat and careful structure, its preordained 
 plan of ending with a triumphant social rise and a 
 marriage to a peer of the realm. It is true that 
 she has handicapped herself by making her spe- 
 cific case a peculiarly difficult one ; that she has 
 taken her future Gaiety Girl, Sally Snape, from 
 the most dilapidated and depraved rookery to be
 
 402 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 found in the London slums ; that she shows her to 
 us as being peculiarly friendless and unguarded, 
 and almost incredibly unaware of the dangers that 
 beset her; that she brings her repeatedly in con- 
 tact with the sort of people most likely to do her 
 harm, and in every way seems to have tried de- 
 liberately to make the conditions so extreme as to 
 force us to say, " If there is an avenue of escape 
 for Sally Snape, then no young woman's case is 
 hopeless." Now, considered as a specific story 
 of a single human life, The Heart of a Child is an 
 uncommon piece of sheer narrative dexterity ; it 
 convinces us, against our better judgment, that 
 the girl escapes unscathed, and not merely escapes, 
 but each time achieves an advantage from the very 
 circumstances that wrought her danger. Not un- 
 til her marriage with young Lord Kidderminster, 
 does a doubt insinuate itself that the career of 
 Sally Snape was not likely to have been quite so 
 unspotted as " Frank Danby v has so engross- 
 ingly depicted it. But if we regard it, not as a 
 specific story, but as the solution of a general 
 thesis, her answer must be epitomized somewhat 
 after this fashion : that a young woman who goes 
 upon the stage, unless surrounded by special safe- 
 guards of money and influence, finds herself beset 
 by such a host of insidious dangers that she simply 
 has not a ghost of a chance, unless a series of 
 small miracles arc wrought for her exclusive bene-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 403 
 
 fit. This is probably not at all the impression 
 that Mrs. Frankau wished to convey ; yet she had 
 no right to expect any other result from her per- 
 sistent use of that most tricky and least justifiable 
 device known to novelists, the Intervention of 
 Fate. And, of course, by doing so, instead of 
 solving her problem, she simply begs the question. 
 It is all very well, we tell ourselves, for the Sally 
 Snapes of real life to have the safeguard of un- 
 awakened desires, the innocent heart of a child, 
 the instinctive aversion of being touched, — it will 
 all count for nothing, unless fate is kind enough 
 to intercede for her over and over again, as it does 
 in the case of this particular Sally Snape. 
 " Frank Danby " starts her in life with prac- 
 tically no chance, until fate removes her patient 
 drudge of a mother, her drunken brute of a father. 
 She might then have been driven onto the streets, 
 had not two immature boys out of pure good com- 
 radeship offered to share their room with her. 
 And when in the course of months this innocent 
 propinquity becomes ill-advised, fate again inter- 
 venes by ejecting them from a tenement which the 
 city has condemned. And in the same way, all 
 through her upward course, from helper in a jam 
 factory to cloak model in Madame Violette's West 
 End establishment, frcm cloak model to Gaiety 
 Girl, she is saved — not by her inborn distaste for 
 men's society and men's ways, her ignorance of
 
 404 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 what their attentions mean, but by wholly ex- 
 traneous circumstances; the wrecking of Charlie 
 Peastone's dogcart, the illness of Joe Aaron's wife, 
 the hundred and one events, large or small, that 
 cause a different ending to the day from that 
 which the men had planned. Yet in simple jus- 
 tice to the author, it should be added that while 
 reading The Heart of a Child, we forget for the 
 time being that there are such things as theses 
 and technique and the law of probabilities. We 
 think of it simply as the life-story of one frail 
 young woman, drifting as helplessly as a cork 
 along the conflicting currents of London life; we 
 are caught, just as the various characters in the 
 story are caught, with the magic of her personal- 
 ity, the intangible, elusive quality that refuses to 
 be analyzed, but that Mrs. Frankau has neverthe- 
 less seized and flung before us in her pages with 
 such poignancy and power that we feel we are 
 being allowed to probe a girl's inmost soul. Al- 
 though it is infected with the taint of romanticism 
 and is separated by an incalculable distance from 
 the rugged sincerity of Pigs in Clover, it must be 
 admitted that The Heart of a Child contains some 
 character study that ranks with the best of its 
 author's earlier period. 
 
 Sebastian, although structurally a better book 
 than The Heart of a Child, has analogous faults, 
 and a like failure to carry her theme to its logical
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 405 
 
 and tragic conclusion. The inferiority of the half- 
 breed is one of the admitted commonplaces of 
 biology. The fact that a human mongrel usually 
 possesses all the vices and few of the virtues of 
 the two parent races has formed the basis of many 
 a tragedy, both in fact and in fiction. This is a 
 problem which, as we have already seen, has oc- 
 cupied " Frank Danby " in at least one of her 
 books. In Pigs in Clover the plot hinges mainly 
 upon the mental and moral gulf between a fine, 
 large-hearted Hebrew gentleman, full of high 
 aspirations and pride of race, and a currish, 
 cowardly mongrel, who has added to the worst 
 qualities of his father's people the additional 
 viciousness acquired from his mother, a girl of the 
 streets. But in Sebastian, Mrs. Frankau has 
 studied a problem which, while analogous to this, 
 is really quite new in fiction, namely, the problem 
 whether the offspring of two people who, although 
 of the same blood, are mentally so out of sym- 
 pathy as to be of practically a different race, will 
 not, like the physical half-breed, inherit the weak- 
 nesses of both parents and the strength of neither. 
 Sebastian is precisely such a mental and moral 
 half-breed. 
 
 Sebastian's father is a London merchant, the 
 head of a proud old firm of paper manufacturers. 
 Although he has married into a social stratum 
 much above him, and understands quite well his
 
 406 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 wife's contempt for a mere money-maker like 
 himself, he remains to the last as proud of his 
 business on the one hand as he is, on the other, of 
 his wife and son. The wife, sprung from a long 
 line of literary and artistic folk, considers herself 
 splendidly tolerant of her husband's inferiority. 
 She is quite content to accept the money he lav- 
 ishes upon her, but can give him scarcely any of 
 her time because she herself is an author whose 
 novels have attained quite a succes d'estime. Inci- 
 cidentally, they bring her in a not inconsiderable 
 revenue, which characteristically she immediately 
 converts from the vulgar form of money into the 
 nobler but quite useless shape of rare bric-a-brac. 
 The fact that her husband is rapidly killing him- 
 self by overwork and that she might have light- 
 ened his burden is a detail which never pierces 
 through the self-absorption of her artistic tem- 
 perament. Sebastian, the product of this ill- 
 assorted union, is from early childhood admittedly 
 his mother's child, the heir to her hereditary gifts. 
 It never occurs to his father, save as a foolish and 
 unattainable longing, that he might follow in the 
 footsteps of trade and carry on the firm name 
 which otherwise must perish. It is an understood 
 thing that Sebastian is to be a literary genius, 
 that he is to go through Eton and Cambridge, 
 and whatever further training is needed, regard- 
 less of time or cost. But somehow matters do not
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 407 
 
 work out quite in the prescribed way. In school, 
 his masters recognize him as a precocious genius 
 — only they discover more precosity than genius. 
 His verse is good, but not quite good enough ; and 
 somehow the prizes always just escape him. To 
 the real artistic temperament, such as that of his 
 mother, the consciousness of good work, sincerely 
 done, would have been reward enough. Sebastian, 
 however, must have the acclaim of public recogni- 
 tion, the substantial reward of a money prize. 
 The business instinct inherited from the father 
 demands an equivalent for value received. This is 
 why, to his mother's distress, he turns his back on 
 Eton and Cambridge. 
 
 But another motive, born of the shrewd observa- 
 tion that is not a heritage from his mother, leads 
 him definitely to abandon literature and go into 
 business, the paper business of his father and his 
 uncles — and this impulse is simply and solely the 
 discovery that his father is a desperately sick man, 
 who may at any day or hour be stricken with 
 death. Curiously enough, he discovers that while 
 he had always loved languages and hated mathe- 
 matics, the rudiments of business and the mere 
 mechanical task of casting up columns come to him 
 with amazing facility. He also has the inborn gift 
 of affability and persuasiveness ; boy though he 
 is, the business grows under his aid and guidance 
 with remarkable strides. And so, when in a few
 
 408 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 brief years the father does suddenly die, and Se- 
 bastian acquires full control, he launches forth 
 upon a scale that amazes his competitors, frightens 
 some of them, and secretly amuses others who fore- 
 see the inevitable end. For, of course, Sebastian 
 as a business man is no more sterling coin than 
 he was as a man of letters. His material demand 
 for payment spoiled him as a poet, his visionary 
 temperament spoils him for a merchant. In short, 
 he is an intellectual half-breed, with all the weak- 
 nesses of the business man and the man of letters, 
 and with the saving qualities of neither. Had Mrs. 
 Frankau been quite honest in her treatment of this 
 problem it must have ended in failure — the blotting 
 out of the unfit. But her careful and circumscribed 
 little scaffolding demanded a happy ending, and 
 she must build accordingly. So she brings to the 
 rescue a very rich and very generous man who 
 happens to love Sebastian's widowed mother, and 
 for her sake is willing to sink a few millions in 
 Sebastian's crippled business — with the intention, 
 however, of keeping a strong guiding hand on the 
 lad's future movements. Here, as in The Heart 
 of a Child, Mrs. Frankau has begged the issue ; 
 but one does not seriously mind it because the real 
 solution is sufficiently obvious. 
 
 This brings us down to " Frank Danby's " latest 
 volume, with the self-explanatory title, Joseph in 
 Jeopardy. Now, partly because of the title, partly
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 409 
 
 also because this modern Joseph and his still more 
 modern Delilah loom up rather large in the book, 
 it is quite natural for the average reader to make 
 the mistake of regarding their relationship and 
 its outcome as the crucial interest of the volume, 
 and be disappointed in the ending which, from 
 the point of view of the lady in question, is un- 
 deniably an anti-climax. But it happens that to 
 " Frank Danby " the interest centers in a third 
 character, namely, Joseph's wife. In this dis- 
 quieting and subversive era of the suffragette, it 
 is pleasant to find that " Frank Danby " retains 
 a sane and wholesome belief in the old-fashioned 
 domestic virtues and the courage to make a timid, 
 unattractive little woman win a difficult victory 
 solely by force of them. But the book well de- 
 serves to be examined somewhat more in detail. 
 It opens with the ostentatious marriage of Den- 
 nis Passiful, the new owner of Abinger's famous 
 art gallery in Bond Street, to Mabel, only daugh- 
 ter of Amos Juxton, millionaire founder of " Jux- 
 ton's Limited," which, with its battle-cries of 
 " Emancipation for Women at Last," and 
 " Pure Food served hot and hot," contracts for a 
 small annual subscription to serve three substan- 
 tial meals a day, delivered to the home. Dennis 
 was left an orphan in early childhood and edu- 
 cated, — although this he does not know until later, 
 — on a fund raised by voluntary contributions.
 
 410 "FRANK DANBY" 
 
 Among the contributors, the three who gave most 
 generously were the good Vicar who adopted him, 
 old Abe Abinger, expert art dealer, whose art 
 gallery he inherited, and Juxton, whose house was 
 a second home, and whose daughter, Mabel, a 
 kindly fate seemed to have destined for his wife. 
 As a matter of fact, Dennis married her, not for 
 love, but out of pity, and with never one thought 
 of the Juxton millions. He had supposed that 
 Mabel was in love with Roddy Ainsworth; but 
 when Roddy went off to the colonies with a musical 
 comedy company, and Dennis found Mabel in 
 tears, he helped to dry her eyes, and promptly 
 stepped into the breach, reminding her that there 
 was " another fellow besides Roddy." To the 
 casual beholder, Mabel seemed scarcely the fitting 
 mate for such a fine specimen of English manhood 
 as Dennis. " Even in her wedding dress, and 
 through the filmy lace that softened and en- 
 shrouded her, one could sec that she was lean, and 
 her back a little rounded; that her face and hair 
 matched in a dead level of dun ; that she had 
 neither style, presence, nor beauty ; that she looked 
 every day of her six-and-twenty years, and had 
 no grace nor compensating charm." Furthermore, 
 she had no conversation, beyond a fund of incon- 
 sequential details about household affairs, the 
 servants, the marketing, the weekly wash :
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 411 
 
 " Dennis, do you remember if you have had five 
 clean shirts since Saturday? I've counted them over 
 three times, but I can't make them any less. And 
 did I tell you those new socks of yours are going into 
 holes so fast? I wish I could get better darning 
 thread here, but the shops are really very poor. 
 They've torn quite a hole out of one of your pyjamas 
 at the laundry. I believe it's a steam laundry, al- 
 though they assured me it was all done by hand." 
 
 In fact, it is not surprising that Dennis should 
 have soon come to feel that " his whole life was 
 permeated with soiled linen," to take his wife more 
 and more for granted and see less and less of her; 
 so that, by the end of five years, while there had 
 been no outward break, they were practically liv- 
 ing separate lives. It was during the fifth year 
 that he first beheld Lady Diana Wayne. It was 
 at a theater and " his eyes, before they had time 
 to reach the stage, were arrested by the most per- 
 fect back he had ever seen; he did not know a 
 living woman's back could be so beautiful." 
 
 The back and arm absorbed him during the first 
 act. It was only toward the end of it that he was 
 seized by an overmastering desire to see the face that 
 surmounted this wonderful torso. He gratified this 
 desire by going to the end of the stalls in the interval 
 during the first and second act. The dark hair, 
 parted in the middle, waved loosely into that roll of 
 hair that left the back part of her neck visible.
 
 412 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 The profile, the short nose, the square chin, were pure 
 Greek. She turned to speak to the man by her side. 
 The movement of the slender neck was like music. 
 Dennis could see the penciled brows under her dark 
 hair and the iridescent green of her eyes. 
 
 On the part of Lady Diana, as well as Dennis, 
 it was a case of love at first sight. But with him, 
 although he was slow to realize it, it was a strong 
 man's violent passion for the first and only really 
 beautiful woman he had ever taken in his arms. 
 To epitomize the history of their playing with fire, 
 the subtlety of Lady Diana's temptations, the in- 
 nate decency that saves Dennis from himself, 
 would be to no purpose. It is all done with ad- 
 mirable art and subtle understanding of men and 
 women. But just a few further details must be 
 given, in order to make the end intelligible. Mabel 
 has a brother, Ted, whose wife, Fanny, is a ven- 
 omous, unprincipled little wretch, whose heartless- 
 ness is the chief factor in causing her husband's 
 early death. Incidentally, it should be said that 
 the chapters recording Ted Juxton's last illness 
 stand out as some of the best work " Frank 
 Danby " ever did. Now Fanny, among her other 
 misdeeds, is carrying on an intrigue with Cosmo 
 Mcrritt, the brother of Lady Diana. There is no 
 good reason why Fanny should wish to hurt Mabel, 
 but she is the type of woman who cannot bear the 
 thought that another woman is better than her-
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 413 
 
 self; so she tells Cosmo that Roddy Ainsworth, 
 who is back in England and has seen a good deal 
 of the Passifuls, is Mabel's lover. Lady Diana, 
 seizing eagerly upon this news, makes her big 
 blunder ; she tells Dennis what she has heard 
 about his wife, urges him to seek a divorce, and 
 suggests that, even if the scandal is groundless, it 
 is still possible to doctor up the evidence so as 
 to win ; she is sure there is enough to convince a 
 jury! 
 
 There was a flush upon his forehead, and every 
 thought of Diana and her loveliness left his mind. 
 Mabel — that Mabel's name should be used in this 
 way, her reputation threatened ! The heat in his 
 blood was different now and more generous. He was 
 overwhelmed with sudden anger or shame. That he 
 should have to defend his wife to Diana ! . . . You 
 must understand how impossible this story is about 
 my wife; I must make you understand. My wife! '' 
 he said the words again and was conscious of the 
 tenderness in his heart: " My wife is the most loyal, 
 gentle, faithful ..." He could not go on. 
 
 From this hour, Lady Diana's hold upon this 
 modern Joseph is at an end. It remains only to 
 indicate that there is one other scene, far too inti- 
 mate to be clumsily retold, but infinitely pathetic 
 and strangely wise, in which Mabel, all uncon- 
 scious of the powers that have warred against her
 
 414 "FRANK DANBY " 
 
 happiness, in her utter unselfishness does the act 
 and speaks the words that inexpressibly touch her 
 husband and eventually bring her to her woman's 
 kingdom, " the kingdom which Juxton's Limited 
 and the Woman's Suffrage League are trying so 
 hard and so successfully to demolish." 
 
 Yet, in spite of much fine artistry and wise un- 
 derstanding of human nature, which makes it diffi- 
 cult to discuss this latest story by " Frank 
 Danby " otherwise than indulgently, it is obvious 
 that its value is impaired by a pervading strain 
 of sentimentalism. On sober second thought, we 
 are no more convinced of Dennis's fidelity than we 
 previously were of Sally Snape's innocence and 
 Sebastian's rehabilitation as a man of business. 
 Mrs. Frankau still remains an artist of the first 
 rank ; she has mellowed with years and, because 
 of her broader charity, her greater faith in human 
 nature, she in a measure disarms criticism. Yet 
 in the course of the evolution she has undergone, 
 she has sacrificed rather more than she has gained. 
 She no longer offends fastidious, sensitive souls 
 with sordid, unclean environments, shameless and 
 vicious lives. But in painting men and women, 
 not as they are, but as she likes to believe that 
 they might be, she has lost that sterling mark 
 which makes Pigs in Clover, with all its faults, a 
 work of genius, — the mark of fearless and absolute 
 truth.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide. London 
 and New York: John Lane, 1898. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 53, 518; Critic, 33, 201. 
 
 A Man from the North. London and New York: 
 John Lane, 1898. Reviewed: Academy, 53, 348; 
 Athenceum, '98, 1, 370; Bookman, '07, 355. 
 
 Polite Farces for the Drawing Room. London: Lam- 
 bey, 1899. 
 
 The Grand Babylon Hotel. London: Chatto, 1902. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 62, 54; Athenceum, '02, 1, 332; 
 Spectator, 88, 146. 
 
 Anna of the Five Towns. London: Chatto, 1902. 
 New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 63, 256; ib. 287; Athenceum, '02, 2, 446; 
 Critic, 42, 563; Spectator, 89, 407. 
 
 The Gates of Wrath. A Melodrama. London: 
 Chatto, 1903. Reviewed: Academy, 64, 106; ib. 
 129; Athenceum, '03, 1, 269- 
 
 How to Become an Author. London: Pearson, 1903. 
 
 Leonora. London: Chatto, 1903. Reviewed: Acad- 
 emy, 65, 508; Athen&um, '03, 2, 578; Spectator, 
 91, 873. 
 
 A Great Man. London: Chatto, 1904. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 66, 656; Athenceum, '04, 1, 717; Spec- 
 tator, 93, 58. 
 
 Ballads of the Briny and Other Verses. London: 
 Gay & R., 1904. 
 
 417
 
 418 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Teresa of Walling Street. London: Chatto, 1904. 
 Reviewed: Athenceum, '04, 2, 586. 
 
 Tales of the Five Towns. London: Chatto, 1905. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 68, 83; Athenceum, '05, 1, 
 174; Spectator, 94, 221. 
 
 Loot of Cities. London: Alston Rivers, 1905. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 69, 1009. 
 
 Sacred and Profane Love. London: Chatto, 1905. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 69, 1032; Athenceum, '05, 2, 
 539- 
 
 Hugo, a Fantasia on Modern Themes. London: 
 Chatto, 1906; New York: Buckles, 1906. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 70, 92; Athenceum, '06, 1, 131; 
 Nation, 84, 61 ; New York Times, 12, 11; Spec- 
 tator, 96, 152. 
 
 Whom God Hath Joined. London: Nutt, 1906. Re- 
 viewed: Athenceum, '06, 2, 731. 
 
 The Ghost. A Fantasia, etc. London: Chatto, 1907. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 72, 143; Bookman (London), 
 32, 214; New York Times, 12, 378; Sat. Rev., 
 103, 274. 
 
 The Reasonable Life. Essays. London: Fifield, 
 1907; New York: Doran, 1910. 
 
 The Grim Smile of the Five Towns. Short Stories. 
 London: Chapman, 1907- Reviewed: Academy, 
 73, 731; Bookman (London), 32, 178; Spectator, 
 99, 169- 
 
 The City of Pleasure. A Fantasia, etc. London: 
 Chatto, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 73, 42; Athe- 
 nceum, '07, 2, 579. 
 
 Buried Alive. London: Chapman, 1908; New York: 
 Brentano's, 1910. Reviewed: Academy, 75, 19; 
 Bookman, 31, 642; Nation, 91, 365; Spectator, 
 101, 25. 
 
 How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day. Lon- 
 don: New Age Press, 1908; New York: Doran, 
 1910.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 419 
 
 The Old Wives' Tale. London: Chapman, 1908; New 
 York: Doran, 1Q09. Reviewed: Nation (London), 
 5, 314; Nation (N. Y.), 89, 356; Independent, 67, 
 547; Spectator, 101, 950. 
 
 The Human Machine. London: New Age Press, 
 1908; New York, Doran, 1910. 
 
 Cupid and Commons ens e. London: New Age Press, 
 1909. 
 
 Literary Taste and How to Form It. London: New 
 Age Press, 1909; New York: Doran, 1910. 
 
 The Glimpse. London: Chapman, 1909; New York: 
 Appleton, 1909. Reviewed: Athenceum, '09, 2, 
 1522; Nation (London), 6, 133; Spectator, 103, 
 851. 
 
 Helen with the High Hand. London: Chapman, 
 1910 ; New York: Doran, 1910. Reviewed: Athe- 
 nceum, '10, 1, 455; Dial, 49, 382; Nation, 91, 472; 
 Sat. Rev., 109, 469; Spectator, 104, 548. 
 
 What the Public Wants. A Play in Four Acts. Lon- 
 don: F. Palmer, 1910; New York: Doran, 1910. 
 Reviewed: Athenceum, '09, 1, 683. 
 
 Clayhanger. London: Methuen, 1910; New York: 
 Dutton, 1910. Reviewed: Athenceum, '10, 2, 453; 
 Bookman (London), 39, 45; Bookman (N. Y.), 32, 
 434; Cur. Lit., 50, 107; Dial, 49, 381; Indep., 69, 
 928; Nation (London), 7, 920; Nation (N. Y.), 
 91, 472; New York Times, 15, 599; Nth. Amer. 
 Rev., 192, 849; Outlook, 96, 668; Rev. of Rev., 
 4>3, 117; Sat. Rev., 110, 554; Spectator, 105, 
 654. 
 
 Fame and Fiction: An Inquiry into Certain Reputa- 
 tions. London: Grant Richards, 1910. 
 
 The Card. London: Methuen, 1911; New York (un- 
 der title, Denry the Audacious): Dutton, 1911. 
 Reviewed: Indep., 70, 619; Spectator, 106, 451. 
 
 Hilda Lessways. London: Methuen, 191 1 ; New 
 York: Dutton, 1911.
 
 420 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 In collaboration with Eden Phillpotts: 
 
 Sinews of War. London: Werner Laurie, 1905. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 71, 503; Athenceum, '06, 2, 687. 
 
 The Statue. London: Cassel, 1908; New York: 
 Moffat, Yard, 1908. Reviewed: Athenceum, '08, 1, 
 476. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Beerbohm, Max. Article based on What the Public 
 Wants. Sat. Rev., 107, 591. 
 
 Bettany, F. C, "Arnold Bennett: An Appreciation," 
 Bookman (London), 39, 265. Same article, Liv. 
 Age, 369, 181. 
 
 Bookman, "Arnold Bennett" (Chronicle), 32, 3-4. 
 
 Church Quarterly , " Democracy in English Fiction," 
 April, 19H; Liv. Age, 269, 7. 
 
 Current Literature, " Arnold Bennett, the Novelist 
 of the Five Towns," 50, 553. 
 
 Current Literature, " Bennett on the Art of Living," 
 51, 59. 
 
 Dawson, Corningsby W., " Arnold Bennett, the Brit- 
 ish Balzac," Book News Monthly, 29, 567. 
 
 Harper's Weekly, " A Tribute to Arnold Bennett," 
 55, 35. 
 
 Harris, G. W., " Arnold Bennett, a New Master in 
 English Fiction," Rev. of Rev., 43, 506. 
 
 Howells, W. D., " Speaking of Mr. Bennett," Har- 
 per's, 122, 633. 
 
 Nicoll, Dr. Robertson, Article based on The Old 
 Wives' Tale. British Weekly, 1908. 
 
 JOSEPH CONRAD 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River. Lon- 
 don: Unwin, 1895; pop. ed., Nash, 1904; New
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 421 
 
 York: Macmillan, 1895. Reviewed: Academy, 47, 
 502; Athenaeum, '95, 1, 671; Bookman, 2, 39. 
 
 An Outcast of the Islands. London: Unwin, 1896; 
 New York: Appleton (Town and Country Libr. 
 No. 198), 1896. Reviewed: Academy, 49, 525, and 
 73, 194; Athenaeum, '96, 2, 91 ; Bookman, 4, 166; 
 N. Y. Times, '96, Sept. 25, 10; Sat. Rev., 81, 509. 
 
 The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea. 
 London: Heinemann, 1897; New York (under the 
 title of The Children of the Sea), Dodd, Mead, 
 1894; new ed. (Phoenix Series), 1904. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 53, suppl. Jan. 1, 1 and 53 and 163; 
 Bookman, 8, 91 ; Book Buyer (T. R. Sullivan), 16, 
 350; III. London News (James Payne), 112, 50, 
 and 172; Nation, 67, 53; N. Y. Times, '98, May 21, 
 344; Pall Mall Mag., 14, 428; Speaker, 17, 83. 
 
 Tales of Unrest. London: Unwin, 1898; new ed., 
 1909; New York: Scribner, 1898. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 53, 417, and 56, 66; Athenaum, '98, 1, 
 564; Book Buyer, 16, 350; Lit. World (London), 
 57, 534; Nation, 67, 53. 
 
 Lord Jim: A Tale. London: Blackwood & S., 1900; 
 New York: Doubleday, McCl., 1900. Serialized 
 in Blackwood's, 1900. Reviewed: Academy, 59, 
 443; Athenceum, '00, 2, 576; Bookman, 13, 187; 
 N. Y. Times, '00, Nov. 10, 770, and Dec. 1, 836 
 and 839; Outlook, 66, 711; Speaker, N.S., 3, 215; 
 Spectator, 85, 753. 
 
 Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Tales. London: 
 Blackwood, 1902; New York: McClure, Phillips 1 , 
 1903. Reviewed: Academy, 63, 606; Athenceum, 
 '02, 2, 824; Indep., 55, 801; Nation, 76, 478; 
 N. Y. Times (Alden), '02, Dec. 13, 898, and '03, 
 Apr. 4, 224; Speaker, N.S. (Masefield), 7, 442. 
 
 Typhoon and Other Stories. London: Heinemann, 
 1903; New York Typhoon (published separately), 
 illus., Putnam, 1902; Falk, Amy Foster, To-mor-
 
 422 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 row: Three Stories, McClure, Phillips, 1903. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 64, 463; Athenaeum, '03, 1, 558; 
 Bookman, 18, 310; Forum, 34, 400; Harper's 
 Weekly, 46, 1412; N. Y. Times, '02, Sept. 20, 626, 
 and '03, Oct. 24, 756; Reader, 1, 101. 
 
 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. London and New 
 York: Harper, 1904. Reviewed: Athenceum, '04, 
 2, 619; Bookman, 20, 217; Critic, 46, 377; Dial, 
 38, 126; Indep., 58, 557; N. Y. Times, '04, Oct. 29, 
 735, and Dec. 31, 944; Spectator, 93, 800. 
 
 The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions. 
 London: Methuen, 1906; New York: Harper, 1906, 
 Reviewed: Academy, 71, 393; Athenaeum, '06, 2, 
 513; Outlook (London), 18, 480; Spectator, 97, 
 888. 
 
 The Secret Agent. London: Methuen, 1907; New 
 York: Harper, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 74, 
 413; Athenceum, '07, 2, 361; Bookman (Stewart 
 Edward White), 21, 531, and 669; Cur. Lit., 4>4<, 
 223; Dial, 43, 252; Indep., 64, 105; Outlook (Lon- 
 don), 20, 652; Outlook (New York), 87, 309; 
 Spectator, 99, 400. 
 
 A Set of Six. London: Methuen, 1908. Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '08, 2, 237; Outlook (London), 22, 246; 
 Spectator, 101, 237. 
 
 A Point of Honor: A Military Tale. (Being the 
 fifth tale in the preceding volume.) New York: 
 McClure, Phillips, 1908. Serialized in Forum, 
 1908. Reviewed: Dial, 46, 263; Indep., 65, 1066; 
 Nation, 87, 364; N. Y. Times, 13, 612, and 
 616. 
 
 Under Western Eyes. London: Methuen, 1911; New 
 York: Harper, 19H- Reviewed: Academy, 81, 
 699; Athenceum, '11, 2, 483; Bookman, 34, 440; 
 Cur. Lit., 52, 236; Nation (London), 10, 140; N. 
 Y. Times, 16, 818; Nth. Amer., 194, 935; Sat. Rev., 
 112, 495.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 423 
 
 A Personal Record. London: Methuen, 1912; New 
 York: Harper, 1912. 
 
 In Collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer: 
 
 The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. London: 
 Heinemann, 1901; New York: McClure, Phillips, 
 1901. Reviewed: Academy, 60, 554, and 61, 93; 
 Athetueum, '01, 2, 151; N. Y. Times, '01, July 13, 
 499, and Aug. 24, 603 ; Outlook, 68, 458; Spectator, 
 87, 61. 
 
 Romance: A Novel. London: Smith, Elder, 1903; 
 Nelson, 1909; New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 65, 469; Athenwum, '03, 2, 
 10; Bookman, 20, 544; Dial, 37, 37; N. Y. Times, 
 '04, May 14, 325; Outlook, 77, 424. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Academy, " Mr. Conrad's Way," 64, 463; references, 
 55, 82, and 66, 198. 
 
 Alden, W. L., References in " London Letter," N. Y. 
 Times Sup., '99, May 6, 304, and '04, Feb. 13, 109. 
 
 Bjorkman, E., "A Master of Literary Color," Rev. 
 of Rev., 45, 557. 
 
 Bookman, " Joseph Conrad's Home," with illustra- 
 tion (Chronicle), 19, 449. 
 
 Book Buyer, " Joseph Conrad," 16, 389. 
 
 Clifford, H, " The Art of Joseph Conrad," Spectator, 
 89, 827; same article, Living Age, 236, 120; " The 
 Genius of Joseph Conrad," Nth. Am. Review, 178, 
 842 and reference, Harper's Weekly, 49, 59. 
 
 Conrad, Joseph, " The Inheritors," author's letter to 
 N. Y. Times Sup., '01, Aug. 24, 603. 
 
 Curran, E. F., "Joseph Conrad: a Master of Lan- 
 guage," Catholic World, 92, 796. 
 
 Current Literature, Reference, 30, 222.
 
 424. BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Galsworthy, John, " Joseph Conrad," Fortnightly Re- 
 view, 89, 627; same article, Living Age, 257, 416. 
 
 Gibbon, Percival, " Critical Sketch of Conrad," Book- 
 man (London), 39, 177. 
 
 Macy, John Albert, " The Writings of Joseph Con- 
 rad," Atlantic Monthly, 98, 697, and " Joseph 
 Conrad— A Unique Writer of the Sea " (based on 
 the preceding), Current Literature, 42, 58. 
 
 Portraits of Conrad, Academy, 55, 82; Independent, 
 65, 1066, and Review of Reviews, 27, 630. 
 
 Vorse, M. H., "A Writer Who Knows the Sea," 
 Critic, 43, 280. 
 
 "FRANK DANBY" 
 
 (Mrs. Julia Frankau) 
 i. published volumes, with reviews 
 
 a. Published under Pseudonym: 
 
 Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll. London: Vizetelly, 
 1887; Chicago: Laird (Pastime Series No. 16), 
 1895. 
 
 A Babe in Bohemia. London: Blackett, 1889; 3d 
 ed., 1890; New York: Ogilvie (Fireside Series No. 
 92), 1889- 
 
 A Copper Crash: Founded on Fact. London: Tri- 
 scheler, 1889. 
 
 Pigs in Clover. London: Heinemann, 1903; Phila- 
 delphia: Lippincott, 1903. Reviewed: Academy, 
 64, 462 and 509; Athenaeum, '03, 1, 334; Book- 
 man, 17, 509; Critic, 43, 374; Dial, 35, 64; Lamp, 
 27, 160. 
 
 Baccarat: A Novel. London: Heinemann, 1904; pop. 
 ed., 1911; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1904. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '04, 2, 870.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 425 
 
 The Sphinx's Lawyer. London: Hcincmann, 1906; 
 pop. ed., 1909; New York: Stokes, 1906. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 70, 383; Athenaeum, '06, 1, 512. 
 
 A Coquette in Crape: A Tragedy of Circumstance. 
 London: Chatto, 1907; new ed./l910. 
 
 The Heart of a Child. Being Passages from the 
 Early Life of Sally Snape, Lady Kidderminster. 
 London: Hutchinson, 1908; pop. cd., 1909; New 
 York: Macmillan Co., 1908. Reviewed: Athenaeum, 
 '08, 1, 349; Bookman, 27, 303; Dial (W. M. 
 Payne), 44, 352; Independent, 6*5, 551 ; Nation, 86, 
 333; N. Y. Times, 13, 182, and 337; Outlook, 89, 
 39; Putnam's, 4, 241; Rev. of Rev., 37, 765; Sat. 
 Rev., 105, 442; Spectator, 100, 582. 
 
 An Incompleat Etonian. London: Heinemann, 1909; 
 New York: (under title of Sebastian) Macmillan 
 Co., 1909. Reviewed: Atlantic, 104, 684; Forum, 
 41, 482; Indep., 66, 1343; Lit. Dig., 39, 441; N. 
 Y. Times, 14, 270; Outlook, 92, 290; Sat. Rev., 
 107, 529; Spectator, 102, 671. 
 
 Let the Roof Fall In. London: Hutchinson, 1910; 
 New York: Appleton, 1910. Reviewed: Athenaeum, 
 '10, 2, 517; Bookman, 32, 424. 
 
 Joseph in Jeopardy. London: Hutchinson, 1912; 
 New York: Macmillan Co., 1912. 
 
 b. Published under name of Mrs. Julia Frankau: 
 
 Eighteenth Century Artists and Engravers : William 
 Ward, A.R.A., and James Ward, R.A.: Their Lives 
 and Works. London: Macmillan, 1904; New York: 
 The Macmillan Company, 1904. Reviewed: Na- 
 tion, 79, 464. 
 
 Eighteenth Century Colour Prints. Essay on Cer- 
 tain Stipple Engravers and Their Work in Colour. 
 London: Macmillan, 1901; New York: Macmillan 
 Co., 1901. Reviewed: Nation, 72, 115.
 
 426 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The Story of Emma, Lady Hamilton. London: Mac- 
 millan, 1911; New York: Macmillan Co., 1911. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Bookman, The, " The Literary Work of Frank 
 
 Danby," 27, 7. 
 Harris, Frank, Article based on The Story of Emma, 
 
 Lady Hamilton. Academy, 81, 788 and 818. 
 Marsh, E. C, "The Novels of Frank Danby," 
 
 Forum, 39, 538. 
 Peck, H. T., Article based on Pigs in Clover. Cos- 
 
 mopolitan, 36, 251. 
 
 WILLIAM FREND DE MORGAN 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 Joseph Vance. London: Heinemann, 1906; New 
 York: Henry Holt, 1906. Reviewed: Academy, 71, 
 112; Athenaeum, '06, 2, 97; Bookman (Mary Moss), 
 24, 277; Cur. Lit., 42, 344; Dial (W. M. Payne), 
 42, 13; Independent, 61, 1161; Nation, 83,*287; 
 N. Y. Times, 11, 620, and 12, 395; North Amer. 
 Rev. (O. H. Dunbar), 183, 1187; Outlook, 84, 582 
 and 711; Putnam's, 3, 112; Sat. Rev., 102, 117; 
 Spectator, 97, 172. 
 
 Alice-f or- Short. London: Heinemann, 1907; New 
 York: Henry Holt, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 
 13, 658; Athenaeum, '97, 2, 10; Bookman (Mary 
 Moss), 25, 519; Dial (W. M. Payne), 42, 375; 
 Independent, 63, 397 and 1228; Lit. Digest, 35, 
 272; Nation, 84, 522; N. Y. Times, 12, 363 and 
 380; North Amer. Rev. (O. H. Dunbar), 186, 449; 
 Outlook, 86, 475; Putnam's, 3, 112; Sat. Rev., 104, 
 54; Spectator, 99, 96. 
 
 Somehow Good. London: Heinemann, 1908; New
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 427 
 
 York: Henry Holt, 1908. Reviewed: Athenaeum, 
 '08, 1, 252; Bookman (H. W. Boynton), 27, 17(5; 
 Dial (W. M. Payne), 44, 132; independent, 64, 
 369; Nation (N. Y.), 86, 152; N. Y. Times, 13, 67 
 and 337; Outlook, 38, 511 ; Putnam's (E. L. Cary), 
 4, 617; Rev. of Rev., 37, 767; Sat. Rev., 105, 241 ; 
 Spectator, 110, 230. 
 
 It Never Can Happen Again. London: Heinemann, 
 1909; New York: Henry Holt, 1909- Reviewed: 
 Athena-urn, '09, 2, 691; Dial (W. M. Payne), 47, 
 384; Nation (London), 6, 414; Nation (N. Y.), 
 89, 532; N. Y. Times, 14, 779; Outlook, 93, 829; 
 Spectator, 103, 953. 
 
 An Affair of Dishonor. London: Heinemann, 1910; 
 New York: Henry Holt, 1910. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '10, 2, 415; Bookman, 32, 432; Dial (W. M. 
 Payne), 49, 286; Independent, 69, 1217; Nation 
 (N. Y.), 91, 264; A 7 . Y. Times, 15, 520; Outlook, 
 96, 331; Sat. Rev., 110, 364; Spectator, 105, 804. 
 
 A Likely Story. London: Heinemann, 1911; New 
 York: Henry Holt, 1911. Reviewed: Athenaeum, 
 '11, 2, 621. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Adcock, A. St. John, " William de Morgan," Book- 
 man (London), 38, 195. 
 
 Boynton, H. W., " The Literary Work of de Mor- 
 gan," Nation (N. Y.), 89, 532. 
 
 Cecil, Eleanor, article based on Somehow Good, Liv. 
 Age, 257, 567 (reprinted from Cornhill Magazine). 
 
 Hardin, C. P., " A Letter to William de Morgan," 
 Atlantic, 106, 249- 
 
 Harris, S. W., " A Master Novelist," Rev. of Rev., 
 42, 252. 
 
 Living Age, " The Victorian English in Joseph 
 Vance," 255, 811.
 
 428 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Lucas, E. V., " William de Morgan, Artist, Potter, 
 and Novelist," Outlook, 90, 711. 
 
 Outlook, " De Morgan's Confession," 96, 375. 
 
 Phelps, W. L., " William de Morgan," in Essays on 
 Modern Novelists, New York: 1910. 
 
 Sparrow, W. S., " William de Morgan and his Pot- 
 tery," Studio (London), 17, 222. 
 
 Stoker, Brain, " William de Morgan's Habits of 
 Work," World's Work, 16, 10,337. 
 
 MRS. HENRY E. DUDENEY 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 A Man with a Maid. London: Heinemann (Pioneer 
 Series), 1898. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '98, 1, 565; 
 Academy, 53 (Suppl. Feb. 19), 202. 
 
 Hagar of Hamerton. London: Pearson, 1898. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '98, 1, 786. 
 
 The Maternity of Harriott Wicken. London: Heine- 
 mann, 1899; pop. ed., 1910 ; New York: Macmillan 
 Co., 1899- Reviewed: Athenaeum, '99, 1, 527; Dial, 
 27, 74. 
 
 Folly Corner. London: Heinemann, 1900; pop. ed., 
 1909; New York: Holt, 1900. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '00, 1, 142; Bookman, 11, 342; Dial (W. 
 M. Payne), 29, 12; Sat. Rev., 89, 368; Spectator, 
 84, 176. 
 
 Men of Marlowe's. London: Long, 1900; New York: 
 Holt, 1900. Reviewed: Academy, 59, 383; Book 
 Buyer, 21, 300; Bookman (H. f. Peck), 12, 506; 
 Outlook, 66, 517. 
 
 The Third Floor. London: Methuen, 1901. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 60, 248; Athenaium, '01, 1, 495; 
 Spectator, 86, 574. 
 
 Spindle and Plough. London: Heinemann, 1901; 
 New York: Dodd, 1902. Reviewed: Academy, 61,
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 429 
 
 634; Dial, 33, 61; Indep., 54, 1373; Spectator, 87, 
 
 287. 
 
 Robin Brilliant. London: Hodder & S., 1902; New 
 York: Dodd, 1903. Reviewed, Lamp, 26, 254; 
 Spectator, 89, 839- 
 
 The Story of Susan. London: Heinemann, 1903; 
 New York: Dodd, 1904. Reviewed: Academy, 65, 
 504; Athenaeum, '03, 2, 424; Independ., 56, 1087; 
 Sat. Rev., 90, 592; Spectator, 91, 814. 
 
 The Wise Woods. London: Heinemann, 1905. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 68, 592; Athenaeum, '05, 1, 
 561. 
 
 A Country Bunch. London: Hurst & B., 1905. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 69, 809; Athenaeum, '05, 2, 240; 
 Spectator, 95, 125. 
 
 Gossips Green. London: Cassell, 1906; new ed., 
 1909. Reviewed: Academy, 71, 286; Athenaeum, 
 '06, 2, 362 ; Spectator, 97, 579- 
 
 The Orchard Thief. London: Heinemann, 1907; 
 Boston (under the title of Trespass) : Small, May- 
 nard, 1909- Reviewed: Athenaeum, '07, 2, 650; 
 N. Y. Times, 14, 584; Outlook, 93, 276; Sat. Rev., 
 104, 732; Spectator, 99, 993. 
 
 Rachel Lorian. London: Heinemann, 1909; New 
 York: Duffield, 1909- Reviewed: Athenaeum, '09, 
 
 1, 127; Bookman, 29, 187; Nation, 88, 255; N. Y. 
 Times, 14, 118; Nth. Amer., 190, 268; Sat. Rev., 
 107, 146; Spectator, 102, 310. 
 
 All Times Pass Over. London: J. Ouseley, 1909- 
 The Shoulder Knot. London: Cassell, 1909; New 
 York: Cassell, 1910. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '09, 
 
 2, 422; Bookman, 31, 208; Nation, 90, 318; N. Y. 
 Times, 15, 105; Nth. Amer., 192, 139- 
 
 A Sense of Scarlet: and Other Stories. London: 
 Heinemann, 1909- Reviewed: Athenaeum, '09, 2, 
 727; Spectator, 103, 1003. 
 
 Married When Suited. London: S. Paul, 1911. Re-
 
 430 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 viewed: Athenceum, '11, 2, 215; Nation (London), 
 10, 32. 
 
 A Large Room. London: Heinemann, 1910. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 80, 43; Athenceum, '10, 2, 621. 
 
 Maids' Money. London: Heinemann, 1911; New 
 York: Duftield, 1912. Reviewed: Athenceum, '11, 
 2, 729. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Bookman, The, " The Home of Mrs. Dudeney," 16, 
 
 533. 
 Bookman, The (London), Sketch, with Portrait, 40, 
 
 266. 
 Independent, The, " Mrs. Dudeney," 54, 2770. 
 
 JOHN GALSWORTHY 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 From the Four Winds. (By " John Sinjohn.") 
 London: Unwin, 1897. Reviewed: Academy, 52, 
 Suppl. July 17, p. 35; Lit. World, N.S., 56, 33. 
 
 Jocelyn: A Tale. (By " John Sinjohn.") London: 
 Duckworth, 1898. 
 
 Villa Rubein: A Novel. (By "John Sinjohn.") 
 London: Duckworth, 1900; New York: Putnam, 
 1908. New Edit, Villa Rubein and Other Stories. 
 London: Duckworth, 1909- Reviewed: Academy, 
 59, 420; Bookman, 28, 47; Lit. World, N.S., 62, 
 458; Nation, 87, 119 J N. Y. Times, 13, 338 and 
 
 427. 
 A Man of Devon. (By "John Sinjohn.") London: 
 
 Blackwood, 1901. Reviewed: Academy, 61, 386; 
 
 Athenceum, '01, 2, 697. 
 The Island Pharisees. London: Heinemann, 1904; 
 
 new ed., revised and re-writtcn: Heinemann, 1908;
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 431 
 
 New York: Putnam, 1904; new ed., Putnam, 1908. 
 Reviewed: Atheneeum, '04, 1, 394; Lit. World, N.S., 
 
 69, 219; Nation, 78, 501, and 87, 120; Spectator, 
 92, 608. 
 
 The Man of Property. London: Heinemann, 1906 
 New York: Putnam, 1906. Reviewed: Academy 
 
 70, 309; Atheneeum, '06, 1, 446; Outlook, 84, 941 
 JV. Y. Times, 12, 394; Putnam's (C. A. Pratt), 2 
 185; Times (London), 5, 116; Spectator, 96 
 587. 
 
 The Country House. London: Heinemann, 1907 
 New York: Putnam, 1907- Reviewed : Academy 
 72, 251 ; Atheneeum, '07, 1, 348; Bookman, 25, 497 
 Cath. World, 85, 680; Dial (W. M. Payne), 43 
 62; Forum, 39, 114; Independent, 63, 96; Nation 
 84, 414; N. Y. Times (Lewis Melville), 12, 394 
 Nth. Amer. (O. H. Dunbar), 185, 777; Outlook 
 86, 254; Putnam's (C. A. Pratt), 2, 186; Sat. Rev. 
 103, 433; Times (London), 6, 77. 
 
 A Commentary. London: Richards, 1908; Duck- 
 worth, 1910 ; New York: Putnam, 1908. Reviewed: 
 Atheneeum, '08, 1, 126; Nation, 87, 317; Sat. Rev., 
 105, 826. 
 
 Fraternity. London: Heinemann, 1909; New York: 
 Putnam, 1909. Reviewed: Atheneeum, '09, 1, 312; 
 Atlantic, 103, 706; Dial, 46, 369; Forum, 41; Lit. 
 Digest, 38, 764; Nation, 88, 466; N. Y. Times, 14, 
 160, and 14, 374; Outlook, 92, 19; Putnam's (H. 
 W. Boynton), 6, 495; Sat. Rev., 107, 341. 
 
 Plays: The Silver Box. Joy. Strife. London: 
 Duckworth, 1909; New York: Putnam, 1909- Re- 
 viewed: Nation, 89, 498; N. Y. Tunes, 14, 477; 
 Spectator, 102, 498. 
 
 The Silver Box: A Comedy in Three Acts. London: 
 Duckworth, 1910. 
 
 Joy: A Play on the letter " I " in Three Acts. Lon- 
 don: Duckworth, 1910.
 
 432 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Strife: A Drama in Three Acts. London: Duck- 
 worth, 1910. Reviewed: Athenceum, '09, 1, 327. 
 
 Justice: A Tragedy in Four Acts. London: Duck- 
 worth, 1910 ; New York: Scribner, 1910. Re- 
 viewed: Athenceum, '80, 2, 136; Independent, 69, 
 931; Nation, 91, 398; N. Y. Times, 15, 582. 
 
 A Motley. London: Heinemann, 1910; New York: 
 Scribner, 1910. Reviewed: Bookman, 31, 642; 
 Dial, 49, 70; Nation, 91, 15; Spectator, 105, 63. 
 
 The Patricians. London: Heinemann, 191 1; New 
 York: Scribner, 19H. Serialized in the Atlantic, 
 Oct., 1910 — May, 1911. Reviewed: Academy, 80, 
 554; Athenceum, '11, 1, 440; Atlantic (Margaret 
 Sherwood), 108, 559; Bellman (R. Burton), 10, 
 562 ; Bookman, 33, 318 ; Cath. World, 93, 393 ; Dial, 
 (W. M. Payne), 50, 442; Independent, 70, 1372; 
 Lit. Digest, 42, 634 ; Nation, 92, 399 5 N. Y. Times, 
 16, 154 and 222; Nth. Amer., 194, 154; Outlook, 
 97, 629; Sat. Rev., Ill, 337; Spectator, 106, 408. 
 
 Little Dream: An Allegory in Six Scenes. London: 
 Duckworth, ipi 1 ; New York: Scribner, 19H- Re- 
 viewed: Independent, 71, 46; Nation, 93, 270; N. 
 Y. Times, 16, 704; Sat. Rev., 112, 88. 
 
 The Eldest Son: A Play. London: Duckworth, 1912. 
 
 The Pigeon: A Fantasy in Three Acts. London: 
 Duckworth, 1912. 
 
 Plays. Second Series: Justice, The Little Dream, 
 The Eldest Son. London: Duckworth, 1912. 
 
 Wild Oats: Moods, Songs, and Doggerels. London: 
 Heinemann, 1912; New York: Scribner, 1912. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Baugham, E. A., " Galsworthy as Dramatist," Fort- 
 nightly, 91, 971. 
 
 Bjorkman, E., "Galsworthy: an Interpreter of Mo- 
 dernity," Rev . of Rev., 43, 634.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 433 
 
 Current Literature, " The Dual Genius of Gals- 
 worthy," 48, 81. 
 
 Current Literature, " The Vital Literary Art of 
 Galsworthy," 45, 408. 
 
 Dukes, A., " Study of Galsworthy," Modern Dram- 
 atists, 141. 
 
 Findlater, J. H., " Social Problems in Fraternity," 
 Liv. Age, 264, 607. 
 
 Kellogg, P. U., " Strife: a Drama of the Politics of 
 Industry," Survey, 23, 705. 
 
 Macartney, M. H. H., " The Novels of Galsworthy," 
 Westminster Rev., 171, 682. 
 
 Outlook, The, " Galsworthy, A Writer of Distinc- 
 tion," 100, 608. 
 
 Skelton, I., "Galsworthy: an Appreciation," The 
 World To-day, 21, 995. 
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 Earthwork out of Tuscany: Impressions and Trans- 
 lations. London: Dent, 1895; revised ed., illus. by 
 J. Kerr-Lanson, Dent, 1899; 3d ed., Macmillan, 
 1901; New York: Putnam, 1895; rev. ed., 1899. 
 Reviewed: Athenaeum, '95, 1, 771; Indep., 52, 781. 
 
 Masques of Dead Florentines, Death's Choicest 
 Pieces, and The Great Game. London: Dent, 
 1895; new ed., 1903. 
 
 Songs and Meditations. London: Constable, 1896; 
 New York: Macmillan, 1898. Reviewed: Athe- 
 nceum, '97, 2, 288. 
 
 The Forest Lovers. London: Macmillan, 1898; New 
 York: Macmillan Co., 1898. Reviewed: Academy, 
 54, 57, and 56, 66; Book Buyer (M. Merrington), 
 17, 58. 
 
 Pan and the Young Shepherd: A Pastoral in Two
 
 434 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Acts. London and New York: Lane, 1898; Lon- 
 don: Heinemann, 1906; New York: Macmillan Co., 
 1901. Reviewed: Academy, 55, 281. 
 
 Little Novels of Italy. London: Chapman, 1899; 
 New York: Macmillan Co., 1899. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 57, 371; Athenaeum, '99, 2, 523. 
 
 Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay. London: 
 Macmillan, 1900; New York: Macmillan Co., 1900. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 59, 491 ; Book Buyer, 22, 144; 
 Cath. World, 72, 807; Dial (W. M. Payne), 30, 
 110; Fortnightly, 75, 61; Indep., 53, 44; Nation, 
 72, 76; Spectator, 85, 753. 
 
 New Canterbury Tales. London: Constable, 1901; 
 New York: Macmillan Co., 1901. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 61, 287; Athenceum, '01, 2, 516; Atlantic 
 (F. J. Mather, Jr.), 89, 130; Bookman, 14, 503; 
 Critic, 40, 65; Indep., 53, 2652; Outlook, 69, 423; 
 Spectator, 87, 486. 
 
 The Queen's Quair: or, Six Years' Tragedy. Lon- 
 don: Macmillan, 1904; New York: Macmillan Co., 
 
 1904. Reviewed: Academy, 66, 684; Athenceum, 
 '04, 2, 72; Cur. Lit., 37, 82; Indep., 56, 1502; 
 Lamp, 28, 428; Nation (A. M. Logan), 79, 14; 
 Outlook, 77, 421; Sat. Rev., 98, 53; Spectator, 
 93, 21. 
 
 The Road in Tuscany; A Commentary. Two vols. 
 London: Macmillan, 1904; new ed., illus. by Joseph 
 Pennell, 1906; New York: Macmillan Co., 1904. 
 
 Fond Adventures : Tales of the Youth of the World. 
 London: Macmillan, 1905; New York: Harper, 
 
 1905. Reviewed: Academy, 68, 419; Athenamm, 
 '05, 1, 716; Indep., 58, 130*9; Spectator, 94, 680. 
 
 The Fool Errant: Memoirs of Francis- Anthony 
 Strelley, Esq., Citizen of Lucca. London: Heine- 
 mann, 1905; Newnes, 1907; New York: Macmillan, 
 1905. Reviewed: Indep., 59, 519 and 1151. 
 
 The Stooping Lady. London: Macmillan, 1907; New
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 435 
 
 York: Macmillan Co., 1907. Serialized in Fort- 
 nightly and Bookman, Jan. -Dec., 1907. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 73, 115; Athenceum, '07, 2, 475; Spec- 
 tator, 99, 574. 
 
 The Spanish Jade. London: Cassell, 1908; New 
 York: Doubleday, Page, 1908. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '08, 1, 633; Indep., 65, 555; Spectator, 101, 
 64. 
 
 Halfway House: A Comedy of Degrees. London: 
 Chapman & H., 1908; New York: Scribner, 1908. 
 Reviewed: Indep., 65, 555; Sat. Rev., 106, 487; 
 Spectator, 101, 1061. 
 
 Artemision: Idylls and Songs. London: E. Mathews, 
 1909; New York: Scribner, 1909- Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '09, 1, 670; Bookman, 29, 366; Dial 
 (W. M. Payne), 47, 98; Indep., 67, 658; Nation 
 (London), 5, 613; Nation (New York), 89, 55; 
 N. Y. Times, 14, 300; Nth. Amer., 190, 704; Rev. 
 of Rev., 40, 123; Spectator, 103, 19. 
 
 Open Country: A Comedy with a Sting. London: 
 Macmillan, 1909; New York: Scribner, 1909. Re- 
 viewed: Athenceum, '09, 2, 325; Bookman, 30, 263; 
 Dial, 47, 237; Indep., 68, 152; Nation, 89, 305; 
 N. Y. Times, 14, 565; Nth. Amer., 190, 838; Out- 
 look, 93, 276; Sat. Rev., 108, 320. 
 
 Ruinous Face. New York: Harper, 1909- Re- 
 viewed: Dial, 47, 464; Outlook, 93, 559- 
 
 Letters to Sanchia upon Things as They Are: Ex- 
 tracted from the Correspondence of Mr. John 
 Maxwell Senhouse. London: Macmillan, 1910; 
 New York: Scribner, 1910. Serialized in Fort- 
 nightly and Putnam's, July-Sept., 1909. Reviewed: 
 Indep., 69, 652; Nation, 90, 610; N. Y. Times, 15, 
 431; Outlook, 96, 302. 
 
 Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution. London: 
 Macmillan, 1910; New York: Scribner, 1910. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '10, 2, 353; Bookman, 32, 171;
 
 436 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Dial, 49, 287; Indep., 69, 651 ; Lit. Dig., 41, 819 
 Nation (London), 8, 136; N. Y. Times, 15, 491 
 Outlook, 96, 302; Sat. Rev., 110, 427; Spectator 
 105, 611. 
 Brazenhead the Great. London: Smith, E., 191 1 
 New York: Scribner, 191 1. Reviewed: Academy 
 
 80, 456; Athenoeum, '11, 1, 473; Bookman, 33, 415 
 Indep., 71, 206; Lit. Dig., 42, 895; Nation, 92 
 1476; N. Y. Times, 16, 222 and 303; Outlook, 98 
 11 ; Rev. of Rev., 43, 760. 
 
 The Agonists: A Trilogy of God and Man. London 
 Macmillan, 1911; New York: Scribner, 1911. Re 
 viewed: Academy, 80, 679; Athenceum, '11, 1, 622 
 Bookman, 33, 632; Sat. Rev., Ill, 617. 
 
 The Song of Renny. London: Macmillan, 1911 
 New York: Scribner, 1911. Reviewed: Academy 
 
 81, 507; Athenceum, '11, 2, 385; Bookman, 34 
 303; Lit. Dig., 43, 807; Nation, 93, 468; N. Y 
 Times, 16, 624; Outlook, 99, 404. 
 
 Mrs. Launcelot, Serialized, Metropolitan Mag., 
 1911-12. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Academy, The, " Maurice Hewlett," 55, 429- 
 Beerbohm, Max, " Hewlett at the Court Theater," 
 
 Sat. Rev., 101, 294. 
 Book News Monthly, The, " Maurice Hewlett, the 
 
 Man and his Career," 29, 147. 
 Book News Monthly, The, " Hewlett in Politics," 29, 
 
 150. 
 Bronner, Milton, Maurice Hewlett: Being a Critical 
 
 Study of his Prose and Poetry. Boston: J. W. 
 
 Luce, 1910. 
 Bronner, Milton, " Maurice Hewlett," Indep., 69, 652. 
 Bronner, Milton, " Hewlett as a Poet," Critic, 42, 169- 
 Current Literature, Sketch of Hewlett, 30, 553.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 437 
 
 Current Literature, " Hewlett, Phraseur," 32, 108. 
 
 English Illustrated Magazine, " Maurice Hewlett," 
 with Bibliography, 50, 426. 
 
 Conrad, Hermann, " Maurice Hewlett," Preuss. Jahr- 
 buch, 105, 266. 
 
 Hale, Louise Closser, " Hewlett's Italy," Bookman, 
 16, 134. 
 
 Hancock, A. E., " The Style of Maurice Hewlett," 
 Era, 12, 32. 
 
 Harris, G. W., "The Work of Maurice Hewlett," 
 Rev. of Rev., 40, 251. 
 
 Harrison, Frederic, " Maurice Hewlett," Fortnightly, 
 75, 61. 
 
 Hartman, " Hewlett's Literary Style," Harper's W., 
 49, 577. 
 
 Holbrook, R., " Probable Sources of the Fool Er- 
 rant," Bookman, 23, 447. 
 
 Mabie, Hamilton Wright, " An Appreciation of 
 Maurice Hewlett," Bookman, 26, 360. 
 
 Macdonell, H, " Maurice Hewlett," Bookman (Lon- 
 don), 38, 185. 
 
 Marsh, Edward Clark, " Hewlett and his Work," 
 Forum, 29, 39. 
 
 Marsh, Edward Clark, " Hewlett, Meredithian," 
 Bookman, 26, 361. 
 
 Outlook, The, " Literary Personalities: Maurice Hew- 
 lett," 81, 724. 
 
 Outlook, The, " Maurice Hewlett: A Significant 
 Writer," 66, 877. 
 
 Parrott, T. M., " Maurice Hewlett," Booklover's 
 Magazine, 4s, 693. 
 
 ROBERT HICHENS 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 The Green Carnation. London: Heinemann (pub- 
 lished anonymously in Pioneer Series), 1894; New
 
 438 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 York: Appleton, 1894; reissue, Kennerley, 1908. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 46, 348; Athenaeum, '94, 2, 
 419 and 496; Critic, 25, 228 and 255; Lit. World, 
 N.S., 50, 277. 
 
 An Imaginative Man. London: Heinemann, 1895; 
 Newnes, 1906; New York: Appleton, 1895. Re- 
 viewed: Athenceum, '92, 2, 219; Critic, 27, 440; 
 Dial, 19, 255; Lit. World, N.S., 52, 50; Spectator, 
 75, 153. 
 
 The Folly of Eustace and Other Stories. London: 
 Heinemann, 1896; New York: Appleton, 1896. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 49, 445; Critic, 29, 172; Dial, 
 21, 289; Lit. World, N.S., 53, 431. 
 
 Flames: A London Phantasy. London: Heinemann, 
 1897; Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1897. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 51, 376; Critic, 30, 421; Dial, 22, 308; 
 Lit. World, N.S., 55, 410. 
 
 Byeways. London: Methuen, 1897; Collins, 1907; 
 New York: Dodd, Mead, 1897. Reviewed: Acad- 
 emy, 53, 2 (Suppl. Jan. 1) ; Athenceum, '98, 1, 49; 
 Critic, 32, 230; Lit. World, N.S., 57, 9- 
 
 The Londoners : An Absurdity. London: Heinemann, 
 1898; Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1898. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 53, 548 (Suppl. May 21); Athenceum, 
 '98, 1, 530; Critic, 33, 300; Bookman, 7, 526; Dial 
 (W. M. Payne), 25, 21; Lit. World, N.S., 259; 
 Spectator, 80, 630. 
 
 Daughters of Babylon. (In collaboration with Wil- 
 liam Barrett.) London: Macqueen, 1899; Phila- 
 delphia: Lippincott, 1899- Reviewed: Athenceum, 
 '99, 1, 368; Lit. World, N.S., 59, 217. 
 
 The Slave: A Romance. London: Heinemann, 1899; 
 Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1899- Reviewed: Academy, 
 51, 601 ; Athenceum, '99, 2, 683; Bookman, 11, 284; 
 Lit. World, N.S., 60, 397; Spectator, 83, 662. 
 
 Tongues of Conscience. London: Methuen, 1900; 
 Collins, 1908; New York: Stokes, 1900. Re-
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 439 
 
 viewed: Academy, 59, 282 and 383; Athenaeum, 
 '00, 2, 478; Lit. World, N.S., 62, 346; Spectator, 
 85, 531. 
 
 The Prophet of Berkeley Square. London: Methuen, 
 1901; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901. Reviewed: 
 Athenaeum, '01, 2, 695; Lit. World, N.S., 64, 455. 
 
 Felix: Three Years of Life. London: Methuen, 1902; 
 Amalgamated Press, 1908; New York: Stokes, 
 
 1903. Reviewed: Athenatum, '02, 2, 516; Dial (W. 
 M. Payne), 35, 63; Lit. World, N.S., 66, 336; In- 
 dependent, 55, 1994. 
 
 The Woman with a Fan. London: Methuen, 1904; 
 Amalgamated Press, 1907; New York: Stokes, 
 
 1904. Reviewed: Cur. Lit. (K. D. Sweetser), 37, 
 430; Dial (W. M. Payne), 37, 38; Lit. World, N.S., 
 69, 312. 
 
 The Garden of Allah. London: Methuen, 1904; New 
 York: Stokes, 1905; illustrated edition, 1907 
 Biskra edition, 1911. Reviewed: Academy, 67 
 424; Ainslee's, July, 1905; Athenaeum, '04, 585 
 Atlantic, 95, 697; Bookman (D. Osborne), 24, 378 
 Book News (Norma K. Bright), March, 1905 
 Cath. World, 81, 545; Collier's, June 11, 1905 
 Critic (C. H. Dunbar), 46, 474; Dial, 38, 388 
 Edinburgh Rev., 203, 79 (reprinted, Liv. Age, 248 
 736); Independent, 56, 787; 59, 1153; Lit. Digest 
 March 4, 1905; Lit. World, N.S., 70, 383; N. Y 
 Times, 10, 394; Outlook, 79, 502; Pub. Opin., 38 
 214; Rev. of Rev., 32, 759; Speaker, Dec. 24, 1904 
 Spectator, 93, 643. 
 
 The Black Spaniel and Other Stories. London 
 Methuen, 1905; New York: Stokes, 1905. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '05, 2, 608; Academy, 69, 1079 
 Sat. Rev., 100, 600; Spectator, 95, 658. 
 
 The Call of the Blood. London: Methuen, 1906 
 Amalgamated Press, 1907; New York: Harper 
 1906. Reviewed: Academy, 71, 266; Athenaeum
 
 440 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 '06, 2, 362; Atlantic (H. J. Smith), 100, 129; 
 Bookman, 24, 377; Cur. Lit., 41, 699; Dial (W. M. 
 Payne), 42, 143; Independent, 61, 1229; Lit. Dig., 
 33, 727 and 858; London Times, 5, 305; Nation, 
 83, 396; N. Y. Times, 11, 719 and 796; North 
 Amer. (Edith B. Brown), 183, 923; Outlook, 84, 
 581; Rev. of Rev., 35, 120; Sat. Rev., 102, 401; 
 Spectator, 97, 404. 
 
 Barbary Sheep. New York: Harper, 1907; London: 
 Methuen, 1909- Reviewed: Athenceum, '09, 1, 641 ; 
 Bookman (E. C. Marsh), 26, 167; Independent, 
 63, 939; Nation, 85, 211; 2V. Y. Times, 12, 535; 
 Outlook, 87, 45. 
 
 .4 Spirit in Prison. London: Hutchinson, 1908; New 
 York: Harper, 1908; Burt, 19U; serialized in 
 Harper's Weekly, March- Aug., 1908. Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '08, 2, 398; Bookman, 28, 262; Inde- 
 pendent, 65, 947; Nation, 87, 340; N. Y. Times, 
 13, 506, 615 and 743; Spectator, 101, 636. 
 
 Egypt and her Monuments. Illustrations by Jules 
 Guerin. London: Hodder & S., 1908; New York: 
 Century Co., 1908 ; serialized, Century Mag., Feb.- 
 Aug., 1908. Reviewed: Dial, 4<5, 409; Internat. 
 Studio, 36, Suppl. 58; Lit. Dig., 37, 901; N. Y. 
 Times, 13, 751 and 773; Rev. of Rev., 38, 757; 
 Spectator, 101, Suppl., 813. 
 
 Bella Donna: A Novel. London: Heinemann, 1908; 
 Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1908. Reviewed: Athe- 
 nceum, '09, 2, 522; Bookman, 30, 387; Spectator, 
 103, 795. 
 
 The Spell of Egypt. (Cheaper Reissue of Egypt and 
 Its Monuments.} London: Hodder & S., 1910; 
 New York: Century, 1911. 
 
 The Holy Land. Illustrations by Jules Guerin. Lon- 
 don: Hodder & S., 1910; New York: Century, 1910. 
 Reviewed: Bookman, 32, 387; Cath. World, 92, 
 400; Dial, 49, 469; Independent, 69, 1250; Int.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 441 
 
 Studio, 42, Suppl., 50; Lit. Dig., 41, 1101 ; Nation, 
 91, 558; North Amer., 192, 841; Rev. of Rev., 42, 
 
 759- 
 
 The Dweller on the Threshold. London: Methuen, 
 1911 ; New York: Century Co., 1911; serialized in 
 Century Mag., Nov., 1910-April, 1911. Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '11, 1, 597; Atlantic, 108, 566; Book- 
 man, 33, 316; Cath. World, 93, 535; Cur. Lit., 50, 
 563; Independent, 70, 671 ; Lit. Dig., 42, 636; Na- 
 tion, 92, 603; N. Y. Times, 16, 184; Sat. Rev., 
 Ill, 590 ; Spectator, 106, 893. 
 
 The Fruitful Vine. London: Unwin, 1911; New 
 York: Stokes, 191L Reviewed: Academy, 81, 827; 
 Athenceum, '11, 2, 518; Bookman, 34, 308; Cur. 
 Lit., March, 1912; Dial, 51, 470; Independent, 
 71, 987; Lit. Dig., 43, 690; Nation, 93, 419; N. Y. 
 Times, 16, 602; Outlook, 99, 405; Sat. Rev., 112, 
 679; Spectator, 107, 862. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Academy, " Robert Hichens," 52, 493. 
 
 Bookman, " Hichens at Taormina," 29, 13. 
 
 Gaines, C. H, "Hichens: An Appreciation," Har- 
 per's Weekly, 51, 1206. 
 
 Marshall, Edward, " Robert Hichens Talks of the 
 Battle of the Sexes," N. Y. Times, Oct. 1, 1911. 
 
 Nation, " The Production of The Garden of Allah," 
 93,401. 
 
 Outlook, " Hichens' Opinions," 99, 304. 
 
 Outlook, " A Successful Novel and an Unsuccessful 
 Play," 99, 699- 
 
 Warren, Garnet, " A Good-by Interview with Robert 
 Hichens," N. Y. Herald, Nov. 12, 1911. 
 
 Waugh, Arthur, " London Letter," Critic, 27, 47.
 
 44£ BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 ANTHONY HOPE 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 A Man of Mark. London: Methuen, 1890; Nelson, 
 1911; New York: Holt (Buckram Ser.), 1895; 
 Chicago: Rand, McNally (Globe Library), 1895; 
 new ed. (Enterprise Series, No. 37), Weeks, 1895. 
 
 Father Stafford: A Novel. London: Cassell, 1891; 
 pop. ed., 1900; New York: Cassell (Sunshine 
 Series No. 87), 1891; Holt, new ed., 1901. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 40, 500. 
 
 Mr. Witt's Widow: A Frivolous Tale. London: Innes, 
 1892; pop. ed., Ward, Locke, 1911; New York: 
 U. S. Book Co., 1892. Reviewed: Academy, 41, 
 515; Athenaeum, '90, 1, 562. 
 
 Sport Royal and Other Stories. London: Innes, 1893; 
 New York: Holt (Buckram Series), 1895; holiday 
 ed., Harper, 1897. Reviewed: Academy, 43, 415. 
 
 A Change of Air. London: Methuen, 1893; New 
 York: Holt (Buckram Series), 1894. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 44, 88. 
 
 Half a Hero. London: Innes, 1893; New York: 
 Harper (Franklin Sq. Lib.), 1893; new ed., 1895. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 44, 389. 
 
 The Prisoner of Zenda. London: Arrowsmith, 1894; 
 new ed., illus. by C. D. Gibson, Arrowsmith, 
 1898; Nelson, 191 1; New York: Holt, 1904; 
 (People's Library), Amer. News, 1899. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 45, 454. 
 
 Dolly Dialogues. London: (Westminster Gazette Li- 
 brary) Office, 1894; new ed., reprinted from West. 
 Gaz., West. Gaz. Office, 1896; Nelson, 1911; New 
 York: (Summer Series, No. 13), Fenno, 1895; 
 (Cambridge Classics, No. 34), Hurst, 1896; (in 
 one volume with Sport Royal, Superb Series, No.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 443 
 
 23), Caldwell, 1896; Russell, 1901; new ed., Holt, 
 1902. Reviewed: Bookman, 14, 504. 
 
 The God in the Car. London: Methuen, 1894; New 
 York: Appleton (Town & C. Lib., No. 154), 1894. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 46, 443. 
 
 The Indiscretion of the Duchess: A Story. London: 
 Simpkin, 1894. 
 
 The Secret of Wardale Court, and Other Stories. 
 London: Wilson & M., 1894. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '95, 1, 215. 
 
 Chronicles of Count Antonio. London: Methuen, 
 1895; New York: Appleton, 1895. Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '95, 2, 639. 
 
 Comedies of Courtship. London: Innes, 1896; pop. 
 ed., Ward, Locke, 191 1; New York: Scribner, 
 1896. Reviewed: Academy, 49, 173; Athenceum, 
 '96, 1, 215. 
 
 The Heart of the Princess Osra. London: Long- 
 mans, 1896; new ed., illus. by John Williamson, 
 1900; New York: Stokes, 1896; (People's Library, 
 No. 12), Amer. News, 1900. 
 
 Phroso. London: Methuen, 1897; New York: 
 Stokes, 1896; (People's Library, No. 4), Amer. 
 News, 1899. Reviewed: Academy, 51, 231; Athe- 
 nceum, '97, 1, 343. 
 
 Simon Dale. London: Illus. by W. St. J. Hufer, 
 Methuen, 1898; New York: Stokes, 1898. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 53, Suppl., Feb. 26, 229; Athe- 
 nceum, '98, 1, 217. 
 
 Rupert of Hentzau. London: Illus. by C. D. Gibson, 
 Arrowsmith, 1898; New York: Holt, 1898. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 54, 125; Athenceum, '98, 2, 187. 
 
 The King's Mirror. London: Methuen, 1899; New 
 York: Appleton, 1899; pop. ed., Appleton, 1905. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 57, 429; Athenceum, '99, 2, 
 382. 
 
 Quisante. London: Methuen, 1900; New York:
 
 444 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Stokes, 1900 ; (People's Library, No. 37), Amer. 
 News, 1903. Reviewed: Academy, 59, 409; Athe- 
 naeum, '00, 2, 475; Bookman, 12, 231; Edinburgh 
 Rev., 193, 158; Sat. Rev., 90, 559; Spectator, 85, 
 494. 
 
 Tristram of Blent. London: Murray, 1901; New 
 York: McClure, Phillips, 1901. Reviewed: Acad- 
 emy, 61, 133; Athenaeum, '10, 2, 516; Book Buyer, 
 23, 237; Bookman, 14, 256; Indep., 53, 2844; Out- 
 look, 69, 239 and 430; Westminster Rev. (E. 
 Gerard), 156, 651. 
 
 The Intrusions of Peggy. London: Smith, Elder, 
 1902; New York: Harper, 1902. Reviewed: Acad- 
 emy, 63, 441; Independent, 54, 2598; Reader, 1, 
 205; Spectator, 89, 613. 
 
 Double Harness. London: Hutchinson, 1904; New 
 York: McClure, Phillips, 1904. Reviewed: Acad- 
 emy, 67, 180; Athenceum, '04, 2, 344. 
 
 A Servant of the People. London: Methuen, 1905; 
 New York: Stokes, 1905. Reviewed: Academy, 69, 
 1025; Athenaeum, '05, 2, 368; Indep., 59, 1045 and 
 1051. 
 
 Sophy of Krasnovia. London: Arrowsmith, 1906; 
 New York: Harper, 1906. Reviewed: Athenceum, 
 '06, 2, 508. 
 
 Tales of Two People. London: Methuen, 1907; New 
 York: separate publication of one tale, Helena's 
 Path, McClure, 1907. Remaining tales published 
 under title of Love's Logic, and Other Stories. 
 New York: McClure, 1908. Reviewed: A cademy, 13, 
 117; Athenaeum, '07, 2, 440; Spectator, 99, 437. 
 
 The Great Miss Driver. London: Methuen, 1908; 
 New York: McClure, 1908. Reviewed: Athenceum, 
 '08, 2, 397; Indep., 65, 1002; Spectator, 101, 
 636. 
 
 Second String. London: Nelson, 1910; New York: 
 Doubleday, Page, 1910. Reviewed: Nation (Lon-
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 445 
 
 don), 7, 252; Sat. Rev., 109, 532; Spectator, 104, 
 734. 
 Mrs. Maxon Protests. London: Methuen, 1911 ; New 
 York: Harper; serialized in Metropol. Mag., Oct., 
 1910, and following issues. Reviewed: Academy, 
 81, 412; Athenceum, '11, 2, 293; Bookman, 33, 
 532; Indep., 71, 547; Lit. Dig., 43, 214; N. Y. 
 Times, 16, 372 and 407; Sat. Rev., 112, 337. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL, ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Academy, The, " Anthony Hope," 52, 489- 
 Beerbohm, Max, " Captain Dieppe, by Anthony Hope 
 
 and Harrison Rhodes," Sat. Rev., 97, 264. 
 Beerbohm, Max, "The Talent of Anthony Hope," 
 
 Sat. Rev., 89, 169- 
 Book Buyer, The, Article on Anthony Hope, 12, 489- 
 Book News Monthly, The, Article on Anthony Hope, 
 
 13, 8, and 16, 702. 
 Critic, The, " Anthony Hope as Lecturer," 31, 252. 
 Lamp, The, Article on Anthony Hope, 26, 187. 
 Living Age, The, " The Method of Anthony Hope," 
 
 255, 689. 
 McCarthy, Justin Huntley, " The Prisoner of Zenda 
 
 on the Stage," Gentleman's Mag., N.S., 56, 315. 
 Saturday Review, The, " The Works of Anthony 
 
 Hope," 8, 145. 
 Sherard, R. H, " Anthony Hope," Idler, 8, 24. 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING* 
 
 The various editions and reprints of Mr. Kipling's 
 works, and the Kiplingiana of all sorts that has 
 
 * The Kipling Index : being a Guide to authorized American 
 Trade Editions maybe had free from Messrs. Doubleday, Page 
 & Co., Garden City, L. I., N. Y., upon receipt of five cents for 
 postage.
 
 446 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 accumulated around them have already been made 
 the subject of bibliographical industry so often that 
 no useful purpose would be served by doing over 
 again here in a necessarily condensed form what 
 has already been done thoroughly elsewhere. More- 
 over, as most of this author's work consists of short 
 stories and short poems, an adequate bibliography 
 would constitute a small volume in itself. It seems 
 sufficient to refer to a few of the best sources, from 
 which complete lists of bibliographies will be readily 
 obtainable. 
 Clemens, Will M., A Ken of Kipling, Toronto: 
 
 Murray, 1899- 
 Robertson, W., The Kipling Guide Book, London: 
 
 Holland Book Co., 1899- 
 Knowles, F. L., A Kipling Primer, London: Chatto, 
 
 1900. 
 Monkshood, G. F., Rudyard Kipling, the Man and 
 
 His Work, London: Greening, 1902. 
 Notes and Queries, Long list of American editions, 
 in issue of Jan. 1, 1902, p. 4; list supplemented 
 by Col. Pridieux in issue of Feb. 1, 1902, and 
 subsequent numbers, giving list of Allahabad books. 
 Powell, F. York, Article in English Illustrated Maga- 
 zine, Vol. SO, 1903-4. 
 Young, W. Arthur, A Kipling Dictionary, London: 
 Routledge, 1911; New York: Dutton, 1912. 
 
 WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 At the Gates of Samaria: A Novel. London: Heine- 
 mann, 1894; Lane, 1905; pop. ed., 1910. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 46, 553. 
 
 The Demagogue and Lady Phayre. London: Heine- 
 mann (Pioneer Series), 1895; London and New
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 447 
 
 York: Lane, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 49, 218; 
 Athenceum, '96, 1, 248. 
 
 A Study in Shadows. London: Ward & D., 1896; 
 London and New York: Lane, 1898. Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '96, 1, 710. 
 
 Derelicts. London and New York: Lane, 1897; Lon- 
 don: Newnes, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 53, 
 Suppl., Jan. 22, 94; Athenceum, '97, 2, 487. 
 
 Idols. London and New York: Lane, 1898-99; Lon- 
 don: Newnes, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 66, 18; 
 Athenceum, '98, 2, 925. 
 
 The White Dove. London and New York: Lane, 
 1899; pop. ed., 1911. Reviewed: Athenceum, '00, 
 1, 111; Dial (W. M. Payne), 29, 24; Sat. Rev., 
 89, 467; Spectator, 84, 94. 
 
 The Usurper. London and New York: Lane, 1901; 
 pop. ed., 1911- Reviewed: Academy, 61, 462; 
 Athenaeum, '01, 2, 808; Spectator, 87, 907. 
 
 Where Love Is. London and New York: Lane, 1903; 
 London: Newnes, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 65, 
 328; Athenceum, '03, 2, 647; Independent, 55, 
 2936. 
 
 The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. London and New 
 York: Lane, 1905; pop. ed., 1910. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 68, 664; Athenceum, '05, 1, 587; In- 
 depen., 59, 335. 
 
 The Beloved Vagabond. London and New York: 
 Lane, 1906. Reviewed: Academy, 71, 445; Athe- 
 naeum, '06, 2, 989; Spectator, 97, 989- 
 
 Septimus. London: Murray, 1909; New York: Lane, 
 1909; serialized (under title of Simple Septimus) 
 in American Mag., May, '08- Jan., '09. Reviewed: 
 Athenceum, '09, 1, 193; Atlantic, 103, 711; Book- 
 man, 28, 594; Dial (W. M. Payne), 46, 263; 
 Forum, 41, 180; Indep., 66, 699; Nation, 88, 117; 
 N. Y. Times, 14, 36 and 376; Nth. Amer., 189, 
 783; Outlook, 91, 107; Spectator, 102, 135.
 
 448 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Simon the Jester. London and New York: Lane, 
 1910 ; serialized, Amer. Mag., Nov., 1909-10. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '10, 1, 288 and 670; Atlantic, 
 106, 810; Bookman, 31, 507; Cath. World, 91, 
 692; Dial (W. M. Payne), 49, 41 ; Indep., 69, 771 ; 
 Nation, 90, 607; N. Y. Times, 15, 347; Outlook, 
 95, 370; Rev. of Rev., 42, 124; Sat. Rev., 109, 
 698; Spectator, 104, 1023. 
 
 A Christmas Mystery: The Story of Three Wise 
 Men. New York: Lane, 1910. Reviewed: Cath. 
 World, 92, 387; Dial, 49, 530; Indep., 69, 1241; 
 Nation, 91, 577; N. Y. Times, 15, 701. 
 
 The Glory of Clementina Wing. London: Lane, 
 1911 ; New York (under title of The Glory of 
 Clementina): Lane, 191L Reviewed: Academy, 
 81, 113; Atlantic, 108, 567; Bellman, 11, 338; 
 Bookman, 34, 76; Cath. World, 94, 105; Dial, 51, 
 202; Indep., 71, 317; Lit. Dig., 43, 567; Nation, 
 93, 143; N. Y. Times, 16, 481; Outlook, 99, 259; 
 Rev. of Rev., 44, 382; Sat. Rev., 112, 146; Spec- 
 tator, 107, 424. 
 
 The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol. London 
 and New York: Lane, 1912. 
 
 Stella Maris. Serialized in Century Mag., Jan., 1912, 
 and subsequent issues. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Bookman, The, " The Personal Locke," 28, 424. 
 Burton, Richard, " Locke and His Literary Labors," 
 
 Book News, 29, 369- 
 Forman, H. J., Sketch of W. J. Locke, Book News, 
 
 29, 373. 
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 Owd Bob, the Grey Dog of Kenmuir. London: 
 Methuen, 1898; New York (under the title of
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 449 
 
 Bob, Son of Battle): Doubleday, Page, 1898. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '98, 2, 605; Academy, 55, 291. 
 
 Danny: The Story of a Dandie Dinmont. London: 
 Murray, 1903; New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 64, 178 and 205; Athenaeum, 
 '03, 1, 334; Indep., 55, 506. 
 
 Redcoat Captain: A Story of That Country. Lon- 
 don: Murray, 1907; New York: Macmillan Co., 
 1907. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '07, 2, 515. 
 
 The Gentleman: A Romance of the Sea. London: 
 Murray, 1908; New York: Macmillan Co., 1908. 
 Reviewed, Athenaeum, '08, 2, 676. 
 
 The Taming of John Blunt. London: Methuen, 1911 ; 
 New York: Doubleday, Page, 1911. Reviewed: 
 Bookman, 34, 435; Spectator, 107, 907. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Bookman, The, " Concerning Alfred Ollivant," 28, 
 311. 
 
 Phelps, William Lyon, "The Novels of Alfred Ol- 
 livant," Modern Novelists, 159; reprinted from In- 
 dep., 67, 470. 
 
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 The End of a Life. London: Simpkin, 1891- 
 
 Folly and Fresh Air. London: Trischeler, 1891; rev. 
 
 ed., illus. by J. Ley Pethridge, Hurst, 1899; new 
 
 ed., Hurst & B., 1907. 
 Tiger's Cub. London: Simpkin, 1892; Arrowsmith, 
 
 1904. Reviewed: Academy, 42, 68. 
 Summer Clouds and Other Stories. London: Tuck, 
 
 1893.
 
 450 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Some Every-Day Folk. London: Osgood, 1894. 
 
 A Deal with the Devil. London: Bliss, 1895; 
 Newnes, 1905. Reviewed: Academy, 47, 376. 
 
 Down Dartmoor Way. London: Osgood, 1895. Re- 
 viewed: Athenaum, '95, 2, 868. 
 
 My Laughing Philosopher. London: Innes, 1896; 
 Everett, 1909. Reviewed: Academy, 49, 444; 
 Athenaeum, '96, 1, 412; Sat. Rev., 82, 68. 
 
 Lying Prophets. London: Innes, 1897; New York: 
 Stokes, 1899- Reviewed: Academy, 51, 176; Athe- 
 naeum, '97, 1, 241. 
 
 Children of the Mist. London: Innes, 1898; Meth- 
 uen, 1905; New York: Putnam, 1899. Reviewed: 
 Athenaeum, '98, 2, 604. 
 
 Loup-Garou! London: Sands, 1899- Reviewed: 
 Academy, 56, 683; Athenaeum, '99, 1, 432. 
 
 The Human Boy. London: Methuen, 1899, 6th ed., 
 1901 ; New York: Harper, 1900. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '99, 2, 221; E elect. Mag., 134, 128; Indep., 
 52, 196; Spectator, 83, 319- 
 
 Sons of the Morning. London: Methuen, 1900; 
 Amalgamated Press, 1909; New York: Putnam, 
 1900. Reviewed: Academy, 59, 360; Athenaeum, 
 '00, 2, 342; Bookman (Hovey), 12, 233; Indep., 
 52, 2454; Ouilook, 66, 283; Sat. Rev., 90, 592; 
 Spectator, 85, 379- 
 
 The Good Red Earth. London: Arrowsmith, 1901 ; 
 reprinted (under title of Johnny Fortright), 1904. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 60, 425; Athenaeum, '01, 1, 
 689; Indep., 53, 1744; Outlook, 68, 180; Spec- 
 tator, 86, 773. 
 
 The Striking Hours. London: Methuen, 1901. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 61, 173; Athenaeum, '01, 2, 221; 
 Spectator, 87, 289. 
 
 Fancy Free. London: Methuen, 1901 ; pop. ed., 1905. 
 Reviewed: Spectator, 87, 847. 
 
 The River. London: Methuen, 1902; Nash, 1908;
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 451 
 
 New York: Stokes, 1902. Reviewed: Academy, 63, 
 469; Athenaum, '02, 2, 407; Bookman, 16, 180; 
 Critic, 42, 160; Indep., 54, 2834; Spectator, 89, 
 535. 
 
 The Transit of the Red Dragon, and Other Tales. 
 London: Arrowsmith, 1903. Reviewed: Athenaeum, 
 '03, 1, 400; Spectator, 90, 459. 
 
 The Golden Fetich. London: Harper, 1903; New 
 York: Dodd, 1903. 
 
 The American Prisoner. London: Methuen, 1904; 
 Nelson, 1907; New York: Macmillan Co., 1904. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 66, 247; Athenaum, '04, 1, 
 236; Indep., 56, 500; Spectator, 92, 188. 
 
 The Farm of the Dagger. London: Newnes, 1904; 
 Nelson, 1909; New York: Dodd, 1904. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 67, 311. 
 
 My Devon Year. London: Methuen, 1904. Re- 
 viewed: Athenamm, '04, 1, 8. 
 
 The Secret Woman. London: Methuen, 1905; 
 (Handy Modern Fiction), Collins, 1907; New 
 York: Macmillan Co., 1905. Reviewed: Academy, 
 
 68, 83; Athenaeum, '05, 1, 105; Indep., 51, 559, 
 and 59, 1151; Spectator, 94, 33. 
 
 Knock at a Venture. London: Methuen, 1905; New 
 York: Macmillan Co., 1905. Reviewed: Academy, 
 
 69, 906; Athenaeum, '05, 2, 368; Indep., 59, 1348. 
 Up-Along and Down-Along. London: Methuen, 
 
 1905. Reviewed: Athenceum, '05, 2, 894. 
 
 The Portreeve. London: Methuen, 1906; Amalga- 
 mated Press, 1909; New York: Macmillan Co., 
 
 1906. Reviewed: Academy, 70, 139; Athenceum, 
 '06, 1, 194; Indep., 60, 1942 and 61, 1158. 
 
 The Unlucky Number. London: Innes, 1906. 
 
 My Garder. London: (Country Life Library) 
 Newnes, 1906; New York: Scribner, 1907. 
 
 The Poacher's Wife. London: Methuen, 1906. Re- 
 viewed: Athen&um, '06, 2, 578.
 
 452 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The Whirlwind. London: Chapman & H., 1907; 
 Cassell, 1908; New York: McClure, Ph., 1907; 
 serialized in Fortnightly, Jan. -Dec., 1906. Re- 
 viewed: Academy, 72, Q5; Athenaeum, '07, 1, 129; 
 Indep., 62, 1090. 
 
 The Folk Afield. London: Methuen, 1907; New 
 York: Putnam, 1907. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '07, 
 2, 686. 
 
 The Mother: A Novel. London: Ward, L., 1908; 
 pop. ed., 1909; New York (under title of The 
 Mother of the Man): Dodd, 1908; serialized in 
 Bookman, June, 1907-Mch., 1908. Reviewed: 
 Athenaeum, '08, 1, 221. 
 
 The Human Boy Again. London: Chapman & H., 
 1908; S. Paul, 1910. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '08, 1, 
 476; Spectator, 100, 870. 
 
 The Virgin in Judgment. London: Cassell, 1909; 
 New York: Moffat, 1908. 
 
 The Three Brothers. London: Hutchinson, 1909; 
 Cassell, 1910; New York: Macmillan Co., 1909. 
 Reviewed: Athenamm, '09, 1, 460; Atlantic, 103, 
 704; Bookman, 29, 94; Nation, 88, 282; N. Y. 
 Times, 14, 103 and 378; Outlook, 91, 532; Put- 
 nam's, 6, 494; Rev. of Rev., 39, 762. 
 
 The Fun of the Fair. London: Murray, 1909- Re- 
 viewed: Athenaeum, '09, 2, 205; Spectator, 103, 170. 
 
 The Haven. London: Murray, 1909; New York: 
 Lane, 1909- Reviewed: Athenaeum, '09, 2, 521; 
 N. Y. Times, 14, 740; Sat. Rev., 108, 668; Spec- 
 tator, 103, 851. 
 
 The Thief of Virtue. London: Murray, 1910; New 
 York: Lane, 1910. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '10, 1, 
 337; Atlantic, 106, 809; Indep., 68, 1091 ; Nation, 
 90, 435; Nth. Amer., 192, 135; Sat. Rev., 100, 374; 
 Spectator, 104, 590. 
 
 Tales of the Tenements. London: Murray, 1910; 
 New York: Lane, 1910. Reviewed: Athenaeum,
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 453 
 
 '10, 2, 355; N. Y. Times, 15, 650; Sat. Rev., 110, 
 398; Spectator, 105, 612. 
 
 The Flint Heart: A Fairy Story. London: Smith, E., 
 1910; New York: Dutton, 1910. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '10, 2, 762; Bookman, 32, 404; Indep., 69, 
 1259; Lit. Dig., 41, 1044; Nation, 91, 584; N. Y. 
 Times, 15, 569; Nth. Amer., 192, 851 ; Rev. of Rev., 
 42, 755. 
 
 Wild Fruit. London and New York: Lane, 1910. 
 Reviewed: Academy, 79, 513; Athenaeum, '10, 2, 
 762; Dial, 50, 162; Lit. Dig., 42, 80 and 222; Na- 
 tion, 92, 501; N. Y. Times, 15, 718. 
 
 Demeter's Daughter. London: Methuen, 1911; New 
 York: Lane, 1911. Reviewed: Academy, 80, 198; 
 Athenceum, '11, 1, 328; Bookman, 33, 327; Nation, 
 
 92, 447; N. Y. Times, 16, 237; Rev. of Rev., 43, 
 750. 
 
 The Beacon. London: Unwin, 1911; New York: 
 Lane Co., 191 1. Reviewed: Academy, 81, 246; 
 Athenceum, '11, 2, 237; Bookman, 34, 442; Nation, 
 
 93, 575; Outlook, 99, 788; Sat. Rev., 112, 370. 
 The Dance of the Months. London: Graves & G., 
 
 1911. 
 
 In Collaboration with Arnold Bennett: 
 
 Sinews of War. A Romance of London and the Sea. 
 London: T. W. Laurie, 1906; Newnes, 1908; New 
 York (under title of Doubloons) : McClure, Ph., 
 1906. Reviewed: Academy, 71, 503; Athenceum, 
 '06, 2, 687; Indep., 62, 385; Spectator, 97, 938. 
 
 The Statue. London: Cassell, 1908; pop. ed., 1911. 
 Reviewed: Athenceum, '08, 1, 476. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Academy, The, "Some Younger Reputations: Eden 
 Phillpotts," 55, 431.
 
 454 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Book News Monthly, The, " Eden Phillpotts," 18, 89. 
 
 Chapman, E. M., " The Newer Fiction," in English 
 Literature in Account with Religion, 552. 
 
 Colbron, Grace Isabel, " The Quality of Phillpotts," 
 Forum, 39, 542. 
 
 Gilder, Joseph B., Article on Phillpotts, Critic, 38, 22. 
 
 Howells, Wiliam Dean, " The Fiction of Phillpotts," 
 Nth. Amer., 190, 15. 
 
 Shelley, H. C, "Phillpotts and Dartmoor," Book 
 News, 28, 499- 
 
 White, M. O., " With Phillpotts in Dartmoor," Out- 
 look, 91, 194. 
 
 MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 Essays in Verse. London: Paul, 1892. 
 
 Audrey Craven. London: Blackwood & S., 1897; 
 New York: Author's Ed., Holt, 1906. Reviewed: 
 Academy, 51 (Suppl. June 12), 12; Athenceum, '97, 
 2, 122. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson. London: Blackwood & 
 S., 1898; Constable, 1909; New York (under title 
 of The Tysons): Holt, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 
 55, 478 ; Athenceum, '98, 2, 786. 
 
 Two Sides of a Question. (Containing Superseded 
 and The Cosmopolitan.) London: Constable, 1901 ; 
 New York: Superseded reprinted separately, Au- 
 thor's Edition, Holt, 1906. Reviewed: Athenceum, 
 '01, 1, 332; Spectator, 96, 391. 
 
 The Divine Fire. London: Constable, 1904; Nash, 
 1911; New York: Holt, 1904. Reviewed: Nation, 
 79, 419; Spectator, 93, 1089. 
 
 The Helpmate: A Novel. London: Constable, 1907; 
 New York: Holt, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 73, 
 929; Athenceum, '07, 2, 204.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 455 
 
 The Judgment of Eve. New York: Harper, 1908. 
 Reviewed: Independent, 64, 1039. 
 
 Kitty Tailleur. London: Constable, 1908; New 
 York (under title of The Immortal Moment) : 
 Doubleday, P., 1008. Reviewed: Academy, 75, 17; 
 Athenceum, '08, 2, 122; Spectator, 101, 237. 
 
 The Creators: A Comedy. London: Constable, 1910; 
 New York: Century Co., 1910. Reviewed: Athe- 
 naeum, '10, 2, 415; Dial (W. M. Payne), 49, 287; 
 Indep., 69, 1156; N. Y. Times, 15, 584; Nation 
 (London), 8, 28; Sat. Rev., 110, 688. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Cecil, Lady Robert, " The Cant of Unconventionally 
 and The Helpmate," Liv. Age, 255, 579. 
 
 Underhill, E., A Reply to the Above Article, Liv. 
 Age, 256, 323. 
 
 JOHN TREVENA 
 
 I. PUBLISHED VOLUMES, WITH REVIEWS 
 
 A Pixy in Petticoats. London: (Anonymous), A. 
 Rivers, 1906; new ed., 1908; New York: Moffat, 
 1909. Reviewed: Athenaeum, '06, 2, 474. 
 
 Arminel of the West. London: A. Rivers, 1907; new 
 ed. (Evergreen Novels), 1909; New York: Moffat, 
 1909. Reviewed: Academy, 72, 393; Athenceum, 
 '07, 1, 601; Atlantic, 103, 710; Bookman, 29, 189; 
 Indep., 66, 1082; N. Y. Times, 14, 28. 
 
 Furze the Cruel. London: A. Rivers, 1907; New 
 York: Moffat, 1907. Reviewed: Academy, 73, 66; 
 Athenceum, '07, 2, 683. 
 
 Heather. London: A. Rivers, 1908; New York: Mof- 
 fat, 1909. Reviewed: Athenceum, '08, 2, 149; 
 Bookman, 29, 525; Nation, 88, 92; N. Y. Times, 
 14, 366.
 
 456 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The Dartmoor House that Jack Built. London: A. 
 Rivers, 1909. Reviewed: Athenceum, '09, 1, 669- 
 
 Granite: A Novel. London: A. Rivers, 1909- Re- 
 viewed: Athen&um, '09, 2, 758. 
 
 Written in the Rain. London: Mills & B., 1910. 
 
 Bracken. London: A. Rivers, 1910; New York: 
 Kennerley, 1912. Reviewed: Academy, 79, 447. 
 
 II. APPRECIATIONS, SPECIAL ARTICLES, ETC. 
 
 Bookman, The, " The Habits of John Trevena," 28, 3.
 
 INDEX 
 
 OF NAMES AND TITLES 
 
 Abaft the Funnel (Kip- 
 ling), 124 
 
 Academy, The, 20, 282, 345, 
 382 
 
 A fair of Dishonor, An, (De 
 Morgan), 33, 49-51 
 
 Alice- for-Short (De Mor- 
 gan), 39-41, 53 
 
 Alice in Wonderland (Car- 
 roll), 286 
 
 Almayer's Folly (Conrad), 
 7, 11, 12, 19 
 
 Ambassadors, The, (James), 
 193, 346 
 
 Amy Foster (Conrad), 25- 
 26 
 
 Anna of the Five Towns 
 (Bennett), 213, 221-222 
 
 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 
 113 
 
 Annunzio, d', Gabriele, 299, 
 349, 377, 400 
 
 Apuleius, 282 
 
 Arminel of the West (Tre- 
 vena), 329, 331-333 
 
 Assommoir, L', (Zola), 357 
 
 At the End of the Passage 
 (Kipling), 142 
 
 Athenaeum, The, 101, 205, 
 208 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, The, 2 
 
 Audrey Craven (Sinclair), 
 256 
 
 Babe in Bohemia, A, (Dan- 
 
 by), 386 
 Baccarat (Danby), 386, 400- 
 
 401 
 
 Bagot, Richard, 368 
 Ballad of Reading Gaol 
 
 The, (Wilde), 398 
 Balzac, Honore de, 4, 358, 
 
 359 
 Bar Sinister, The, (Davis), 
 
 283 
 Barbary Sheep (Hichens), 
 
 365-366 
 Barrack - Boom Ballads 
 
 (Kipling), 123, 130 
 Barrie, J. M., 286 
 Battle of the Weak, The, 
 
 (Dudeney), 322 
 Bazan, Emilia Pardo, 378 
 Beacon, The (Phillpotts), 
 
 116-119 
 Bella Donna (Hichens), 350, 
 
 369-370 
 Beloved Vagabond, The, 
 
 (Locke), 148, 150, 153, 
 
 155, 163-165, 167, 168, 358 
 Below the Milldam (Kip- 
 ling), 143 
 Bennett, Arnold, 206-231, 
 
 251 325 
 Benson, E. F., 233, 251 
 Besant, Sir Walter, 233 
 Between Two Thieves (De- 
 
 han), 378 
 Beyond the Pale (Kipling), 
 
 142 
 Black, William, 97, 251 
 Black Beauty (Sewell), 283 
 Black Spaniel, The, (Hich- 
 ens), 348, 351, 352, 353 
 Bob, Son of Battle (Olli- 
 
 vant), 280, 282-285 
 
 457
 
 458 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Bohlau, Helene, 378 
 
 Bohme, Margarete, 378 
 
 Bookman, The, 120 
 
 Boynton, H. W., 52 
 
 Bracken (Trevena), 324, 
 338-341 
 
 Brazenhead the Great (Hew- 
 lett), 80, 82-85 
 
 Brewster's Millions (Mc- 
 Cutcheon), 216 
 
 Browning, Robert, 13 
 
 Buondelmonte's Saga (Hew- 
 lett), 78, 79 
 
 Buried Alive (Bennett), 
 217-218 
 
 Cable, George W., 95 
 
 Call of the Blood, The, 
 (Hiehens), 366-367 
 
 Call of the Wild, The, (Lon- 
 don), 283 
 
 Capsina, The, (Benson), 
 233 
 
 Card, The, (Bennett), 218- 
 219 
 
 Cecil, Lady Robert, 35 
 
 Charlatan, The, (Gissing), 
 251 
 
 Chene et le Roseau, he, 
 (La Fontaine), 21 
 
 Children of the Mist (Phill- 
 potts), 94, 101-104, 105, 
 107, 110, 113, 327 
 
 Children of the Sea (Con- 
 rad), 14, 20 
 
 City of Pleasure, The, (Ben- 
 nett), 216 
 
 Clayhanger (Bennett), 213, 
 219, 226-230 
 
 Collins, Wilkie, 40 
 
 Colossus, The, (Roberts), 
 232 
 
 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 50 
 
 Conrad, Joseph, 1-30, 33, 54, 
 55, 56, 107, 204, 290 
 
 Contemporary Review, The, 
 2 
 
 Copper Crash (Danby), 
 386 
 
 Country House, The, (Gals- 
 worthy), 182, 191-194 
 
 Courting of Dinah Shadd, 
 The, (Kipling), 142 
 
 Crawford, F. Marion, 251, 
 368 
 
 Critic, The, 344 
 
 "Danby, Frank," 254, 255, 
 
 376-414 
 Danny (Ollivant), 280 
 Dante, 61 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 377 
 Davis, Richard Harding, 
 
 283 
 Debdcle, La (Zola), 13 
 Dehan, Richard, 378 
 De Morgan, William Frend, 
 
 31-53, 281 
 Denry the Audacious (Ben- 
 nett), 217-219 
 Departmental Ditties (Kip- 
 ling), 123 
 Derelicts (Locke), 156-157, 
 
 169 
 Dickens, Charles, 4, 8, 33, 
 
 120, 178, 179 
 Divine Fire, The, (Sinclair), 
 
 208, 252, 253, 254, 255, 
 
 256, 262, 271-278, 279 
 Dolly Dialogues, The, 
 
 (Hope), 233, 234, 235, 
 
 237-239, 244, 250 
 Dop Doctor, The, (Dehan), 
 
 378 
 Dr. Phillips (Danby), 379, 
 
 387 
 Drums of the Fore-and-Aft, 
 
 The, (Kipling), 139 
 Dudeney, Mrs. Henry, 297- 
 
 323 
 Dumas, Alexandre, 236 
 Du Maurier, George, 34 
 Dweller on the Threshold, 
 
 The, (Hiehens), 352
 
 INDEX 
 
 459 
 
 Earthwork out of Tuscany, 
 (Hewlett), 65 
 
 Eighteenth Century Col- 
 ored Prints (Frankau), 
 382 
 
 Eliot, George, 95 
 
 Essays in Verse (Sinclair), 
 256 
 
 Esther Waters (Moore), 101 
 
 Falk (Conrad), 26-28 
 
 Felix (Hichens), 357-359 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 120 
 
 Fille Elisa, La, (E. and J. 
 de Goncourt), 377 
 
 Five Nations, The, (Kip- 
 ling), 130-135 
 
 Flames (Hichens), 343, 
 351 
 
 Flaubert, Gustave, 8, 208, 
 209, 230, 377 
 
 Florence, Villani's History 
 of, 58, 59 
 
 Folly Corner (Dudeney), 
 297, 299, 306-312, 313 
 
 Fond Adventures (Hew- 
 lett), 78 
 
 Fool Errant, The, (Hew- 
 lett), 80-82 
 
 Forest Lovers, The, (Hew- 
 lett), 20, 57, 65, 82, 87 
 
 France, Anatole, 153 
 
 Frankau, Mrs. Julia (see 
 "Frank Danby "). 
 
 Fraternity (Galsworthy), 
 178, 182, 194-199, 200 
 
 Fromentin, Eugene, 348, 349 
 
 Fruitful Vine, The, (Hich- 
 ens), 350, 370-374 
 
 Furze the Cruel (Trevena), 
 324, 328, 329, 333-337, 338, 
 341 
 
 Galdds, Benito Perez, 230 
 Galsworthy, John, 2, 3, 4, 
 
 5, 21, 177-205, 251, 281, 
 
 325 
 
 Garden of Allah, The, 
 
 (Hichens), 342, 347, 350, 
 
 353, 362-365, 370, 375 
 Gautier, Theophile, 349 
 Gentleman, The, (Ollivant), 
 
 50, 280, 289-296 
 Gissing, George, 208, 250 
 Glimpse, The, (Bennett), 
 
 217, 219-220 
 Glory of Clementina, The, 
 
 (Locke), 172-175 
 Glyn, Elinor, 374 
 God in the Car, The, 
 
 (Hope), 232 
 Golden Ass, The, (Apu- 
 
 leius), 282 
 Golden Fetich, The, (Phill- 
 
 potts), 109 
 Goncourt, De, (Edouard 
 
 and Jules), 208, 209, 230, 
 
 377 
 Good Bed Earth, The, 
 
 (Phillpotts), 107, 327 
 Grand Babylon Hotel, The, 
 
 (Bennett), 215 
 Granite (Trevena), 333, 
 
 338 
 Great Miss Driver, The, 
 
 (Hope), 244-247 
 Green Carnation, The, 
 
 (Hichens), 342, 344, 348, 
 
 351 
 Grimm's Fairy Tales, 286 
 "Gyp," 233 
 
 Habitation Enforced, An, 
 (Kipling), 143-144 
 
 Haggard, H. Rider, 109 
 
 Halfway House (Hewlett), 
 56, 88-90 
 
 Hans Blinker (Dodge), 41 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 95 
 
 Heart of a Child, The, (Dan- 
 by), 379, 382, 384, 401- 
 404, 408 
 
 Heart of Darkness (Con- 
 rad), 14, 24, 29
 
 460 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Heather (Trevena), 328, 
 
 330, 333, 337, 338 
 Helena's Path (Hope), 243- 
 
 244 
 Helpmate, The, (Sinclair), 
 
 252, 255, 262-269 
 Hewlett, Maurice, 50, 54-93, 
 
 94 
 Hichens, Robert, 342-375 
 Hilda Lessways (Bennett), 
 
 227 
 Hitopadega, The, 137 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 52 
 Hope, Anthony, 232-251 
 Howells, William Dean, 95, 
 
 113, 206, 211, 230 
 Hugo (Bennett), 216 
 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 377 
 
 Idols (Locke), 156, 159- 
 
 160, 169 
 Imaginative Man, An, 
 
 (Hichens), 354-355 
 Immortal Moment, The, 
 
 (Sinclair), 269-271 
 Incompleat Etonian, An, 
 
 (Danby), 379, 382 
 Indiscretion of the Duchess, 
 
 The, (Hope), 235 
 Innocente, L' (Annunzio), 
 
 400 
 Intrusions of Peggy, The, 
 
 (Hope), 250 
 Island Pharisees, The, 
 
 (Galsworthy), 180, 183 
 " Islanders, The," (Kip- 
 ling), 133, 135 
 It Never Can Happen 
 
 Again (De Morgan), 45- 
 
 48, 52 
 Ivanhoe (Scott), 291 
 
 James, Henry, 1, 8, 33, 128, 
 130, 142, 152, 230, 346 
 
 Joseph in Jeopardy (Dan- 
 by), 379, 380, 382, 408- 
 414 
 
 Joseph Vance (De Morgan), 
 32, 33, 34, 37-39, 50, 53 
 
 Judgment of Eve, The, (Sin- 
 clair), 255 
 
 Jungle Books, The, (Kip- 
 ling), 127, 130, 135, 137, 
 143, 282 
 
 Just-So Stories, The, (Kip- 
 ling), 127, 282, 286 
 
 Katasaritsagara, The, 137 
 Kim (Kipling), 17, 55, 129, 
 
 130, 135, 137-141 
 Kipling, Rudvard, 17, 54, 
 
 55, 56, 122-147, 282 
 
 La Fontaine, Jean de, 21 
 
 Lavedan, Henri, 233 
 
 Leonora (Bennett), 221, 222 
 
 "Lesson, The," (Kipling), 
 133, 135 
 
 Let the Roof Fall In (Dan- 
 by), 386 
 
 Letters from the East 
 (Kipling), 129 
 
 Lettres de Jeunesse (Zola), 
 124 
 
 Light that Failed, The, 
 (Kipling), 283 
 
 Likely Story, A, (De Mor- 
 gan), 33, 49, 51, 52 
 
 Little Novels of Italy (Hew- 
 lett), 78 
 
 Little White Bird, The, 
 (Barrie), 286 
 
 Locke, William John, 148- 
 176, 325, 358 
 
 Londoners, The, (Hichens), 
 343, 351 
 
 Loot of Cities, The, (Ben- 
 nett), 216 
 
 Lord Jim (Conrad), 21, 24, 
 29, 204 
 
 Loti, Pierre, 349 
 
 Loup-Qaroul (Phillpotts), 
 94 
 
 Lourdes (Zola), 348
 
 INDEX 
 
 461 
 
 Lucas, E. V., 34 
 Lying Prophets (Phillpotts), 
 98-101 
 
 JVlcCutcheon, George Barr, 
 216 
 
 McTeague (Norris), 335 
 
 Maartens, Maarten, 251 
 
 Maey, John A., 2 
 
 Maison Tellier, La, (Mau- 
 passant), 377 
 
 Man from the North, A, 
 (Bennett), 207, 209 
 
 Man of Property, The, 
 (Galsworthy), 180, 181, 
 183-191, 194, 200 
 
 Man Who Would Be King, 
 The, (Kipling), 137 
 
 "Mandalay" (Kipling), 129 
 
 Margueritte, Paul, 400 
 
 Mark of the Beast, The, 
 (Kipling), 142 
 
 Maternity of Harriott Wick- 
 en, The, (Dudeney), 301- 
 306 
 
 Maupassant, Guy de, 8, 152, 
 208, 230, 376 
 
 Maxwell, William B., 251 
 
 Men of Marlowe's (Dude- 
 ney), 297, 312-317 
 
 Mendes, Catulle, 359 
 
 Meredith, George, 33, 152, 
 325 
 
 Merrick, Leonard, 207, 325 
 
 Mill on the Floss, The, 
 (Eliot), 95 
 
 Mine Own People (Kip- 
 ling), 126 
 
 Mirror of the Sea, The, 
 (Conrad), 19, 29 
 
 Moore, F. Frankfort, 233 
 
 Moore, George, 377 
 
 Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, 
 The, (Locke), 148, 150, 
 153, 160-163, 166, 169 
 
 Mother of the Man, The, 
 (Phillpotts), 115 
 
 Motley, A, (Galsworthy), 
 
 200-201 
 Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson 
 
 (Sinclair), 257-261 
 Mrs. Balhurst (Kipling), 
 
 144-146 
 Mrs. M axon Protests 
 
 (Hope), 247-249 
 Mummer's Wife, The, 
 
 (Moore), 377 
 Murger, Henri, 153 
 
 Nana (Zola), 377 
 
 Nell Gwynn, Comedian, 
 
 (Moore), 233 
 New Canterbury Tales, The, 
 
 (Hewlett), 78 
 New Review, The, 17 
 Nicoll, Dr. Robertson, 223 
 Nigger of the Narcissus, 
 
 The, (Conrad), 13, 14, 19, 
 
 290 
 Norris, Frank, 334, 335, 336, 
 
 337 
 Nostromo (Conrad), 21-24, 
 
 29 
 
 Octopus, The, (Norris), 336 
 
 Old Wives' Tale, The, (Ben- 
 nett), 206, 213, 219, 222- 
 226 
 
 Ollivant, Alfred, 50, 94, 280- 
 296 
 
 On the City Wall (Kipling), 
 142 
 
 Open Country (Hewlett), 
 88, 90-92 
 
 Orange Girl, The, (Besant), 
 233 
 
 Orchard Thief, The, (Dude- 
 ney), 297 
 
 "Ouida," 154, 155, 282 
 
 Outcast of the Island, The, 
 (Conrad), 11 
 
 Pardon, Le, (Margueritte), 
 400
 
 462 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pascarel ("Ouida"), 154 
 
 Patrician, The, (Gals- 
 worthy), 183, 200, 202- 
 203, 205 
 
 Pemberton, Max, 50, 215 
 
 Personal Record, A, (Con- 
 rad), 1, 11, 18 
 
 Phantom Rickshaw, The, 
 (Kipling), 126 
 
 Phillpotts, Eden, 94-121, 
 326, 327 
 
 Phroso (Hope), 232 
 
 Pickwick Papers, The, 
 (Dickens), 34 
 
 Pigs in Clover (Danby), 
 255, 376, 379, 383, 384, 
 386, 388-398, 404, 405, 414 
 
 Pinero, Arthur, 52 
 
 Pixy in Petticoats, A, (Tre- 
 vena), 329, 330, 333 
 
 Plain Tales from the Hills, 
 (Kipling), 130, 135, 181 
 
 Polite .Farces (Bennett), 
 207 
 
 Portreeve, The, (Phillpotts), 
 110-112 
 
 Prince Otto (Stevenson), 
 233 
 
 Prisoner of Zenda, The, 
 (Hope), 233, 236, 250 
 
 Puck o' Pook's Hill (Kip- 
 ling), 141 
 
 Quatre Evangiles, Les, 
 (Zola), 124 
 
 Queen's Quair, The, (Hew- 
 lett), 56, 59, 66, 71-78, 85, 
 92 
 
 QuisanU (Hope), 239-241, 
 250 
 
 Rachel Lorian (Dudeney), 
 
 297, 322 
 Redcoat Captain (Ollivant), 
 
 280, 285-289 
 Rescue of Plufjles, The, 
 
 (Kipling), 124 
 
 Rest Harrow (Hewlett), 82, 
 
 88, 90-92, 93 
 Return, The, (Conrad), 20 
 Reivards and Fairies (Kip- 
 ling), 54, 123 
 Richard Yea - and - Nay 
 
 (Hewlett), 50, 55, 56, 66- 
 
 71, 72, 92, 291 
 River, The, (Phillpotts), 94, 
 
 107-109 
 Road in Tuscany, The, 
 
 (Hewlett), 58-60 
 Roberts, Morley, 232 
 Robin Brilliant (Dudeney), 
 
 297 , 
 Rod, Edouard, 259 
 Ruskin, John, 148, 170 
 
 Sapho (Daudet), 377 
 
 Saracinesca (Crawford), 368 
 
 Sebastian (see Incompleat 
 Etonian), (Danby), 404- 
 408 
 
 Secret Agent, The, (Con- 
 rad), 29 
 
 Secret Woman, The, (Phill- 
 potts), 109-110, 113 
 
 Sense de la Vie, Le (Rod), 
 269 
 
 Septimus (Locke), 148, 150, 
 167-169, 170, 175 
 
 Serao, Matilde, 378 
 
 Servant of the Public, A, 
 (Hope), 241-243, 250 
 
 Shakespeare, A Life of, 
 (Lee), 20 
 
 Ship that Found Herself, 
 The, (Kipling), 124-125 
 
 Shoulder-Knot, The, (Dude- 
 ney), 297 
 
 Simon Dale (Hope), 233 
 
 Simon the Jester (Locke), 
 148, 170-172 
 
 Sinclair, May, 208, 252-279 
 
 Skram, Amelia, 378 
 
 Slave, The, (Hichens), 343, 
 349, 355-357
 
 INDEX 
 
 463 
 
 Smollett, Tobias, 120, 293 
 
 Snaith, John Collis, 206, 325 
 
 Soldiers Three (Kipling), 
 123, 130 
 
 Somehow Good (De Mor- 
 gan), 41-45 
 
 Sons of the Morning (Phill- 
 potts), 104-107, 115 
 
 Spanish Jade, The, (Hew- 
 lett), 87-88 
 
 Sphinx's Lawyer, The, 
 (Danby), 379, 398-400 
 
 Spindle and Plough (Dude- 
 ney), 297, 299, 318-322 
 
 Spirit in Prison, A, (Hich- 
 ens), 367-368 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 290 
 
 Stoker, Brain, 35 
 
 Stooping Lady, The, (Hew- 
 lett), 80, 85-87 
 
 Story of the Gadsbys, The, 
 (Kipling), 141, 144, 234 
 
 Strindberg, Gustav, 377 
 
 Sudermann, Hermann, 376 
 
 Superseded (Sinclair), 254, 
 261-262 
 
 Tales of Unrest (Conrad), 
 20 
 
 Talisman, The, (Scott), 72 
 
 Taming of John Blunt 
 (Ollivant), 280 
 
 Teresa of Watting Street, 
 (Bennett), 216 
 
 Tertium Quid, The, (Kip- 
 ling), 127 
 
 Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 
 (Hardy), 42 
 
 Thackeray, William Make- 
 peace, 33, 40, 120 
 
 They (Kipling), 141 
 
 Thompson - Seton, Ernest, 
 282 
 
 Three Brothers, The, 
 (Phillpotts), 116 
 
 Three Weeks (Glyn), 374 
 
 Tolstoy, Leo, 230, 293 
 
 To-morrow (Conrad), 24 
 Tongues of Conscience 
 
 (Hichens), 353 
 Traffics and Discoveries 
 
 (Kipling), 123, 130 
 Trevena, John, 324-341 
 Trionfo della Morte, II, 
 
 (d'Annunzio), 377 
 Trois Mousquetaires, Les, 
 
 (Dumas), 291 
 Trollope, Anthony, 8, 35 
 "Truce of the Bear, The," 
 
 (Kipling), 123, 129, 133, 
 
 185 
 Truth About an Author, 
 
 The, (Bennett), 207, 208 
 Turgenev, Ivan, 4, 208 
 Typhoon (Conrad), 12, 21, 
 
 24, 29 
 Tysons, The, (Sinclair), 252, 
 
 255 
 
 Under the Deodars (Kip- 
 ling), 126 
 
 Under Two Flags 
 ("Ouida"), 154 
 
 Under Western Eyes (Con- 
 rad), 29 
 
 Valdes, Armando Palacio, 
 
 230 
 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 
 
 13, 34, 188 
 Vie, Une, (Maupassant), 190 
 Vie de Boheme, La, (Mur- 
 
 ger), 154 
 Villa Rubein (Galsworthy), 
 
 179 
 Vintage, The, (Benson), 
 
 233 
 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 205 
 Ward, James and Wil- 
 liam, Life of, (Frankau), 
 382 
 Waugh, Arthur, 344
 
 464 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Westminster Review, The, 
 
 178 
 Where Love Is (Locke), 
 
 155, 156, 157-159 
 Whirlwind, The, (Phill- 
 
 potts), 94, 112-115 
 White Dove, A, (Locke), 
 
 169 
 " White Man's Burden, 
 
 The," 123 
 Wireless (Kipling), 141 
 
 Wise Woods, The, (Dude- 
 ney), 323 
 
 Without Benefit of Cler- 
 gy (Kipling), 128, 137, 
 141 
 
 Woman (London), 207 
 
 Woman with a Fan, The, 
 (Hichens), 357, 358-362 
 
 Zola, Emile, 124, 181, 230, 
 293, 299, 348, 357, 376
 
 THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE 
 
 American and English (1580-1912) 
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 The most comprehensive and representative collection of 
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