THE SLAYING OF "SENTIMENTAL TOMMY."

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 10863, 12 January 1901, Page 6

THE SLAYING OF "SENTIMENTAL TOMMY."

Readers of serial fiction, and of colonial editions, alike know the end now of "Sentimental Tommy," and may ponder on the question how a sentimental and most felicitous- writer, as Mr. Barne truly is, could have brought himself to such a sorry parting with a hero. "Hang him, hang him.'." said Mr. Heady, in a certain famous trial, but who could have imagined the author of "A Window in Thrums" giving this ungracious sentence upon a true Thrums' character?

-— That the Tommy of the stair, the Tom who rose and prayed , for her ladyship, V ting there so brazen in the black frock* 6 yellow stripes," the Tommy who/™! 0 mourning for Lewis Doig, >ck. Jacobite risings in the Hen,,A? Delon g j to our mind his early of sequels to the inherent. disappoiA en m Ivis firsfc —in fact, on the prep"fficult to see howdelicious exploits, jo'uid have suflmently any grown conclude dismissal goes bepleased; Butfbecoming failure. It Is ted yond the Injects to a. tragedy. R. L. not thayindeed, contended that "The Steveofnster" must have come to a sad Litytil was only wrested to brightness by !Ri regard for our feelings rather than 4 own art; and in "Sentimental Tommy" ■ there were evident foreshadowings of ill days for "Tommy and Grizel." Still, no artistic need had prepared us to find the Thrums "wonder" hung by the neck, like the historic sheep-stealer, who points a moral for an English country-side. A previous case of accidental self-suspeneion has occurred in fiction. The victim in that instance only forestalled a more judicial hanging. Has Mr. Ba'rrie, perhaps, some abstruse Thrums moral in coupling a Sentimental Tommy with BilfSykes? Barries own explanation would more probably follow the lines on which he professes to have written Tommy's biography—"telling nothing about him that was not true," he declares, "but doing it with unnecessary scorn, in the hope that I might goad you into crying, 'Come, come, you are too hard on him.'" Tommy may be killed with unnecessary squalor, to goad the reader into objecting to his dying at all.. This hypothesis is tenable, and suits with a certain obliqueness to be remarked in the ways of Thrums, where even Grizel, the straightforward, one remembers, must have her "α-ooked smile," Yet how differently the case would have gone with Thackeray, who, discoursing on the story of Phillip, tells how he had intended to drown Ids two villajne on board the President, or some other tragic ship, and how the mere imagining it brought relenting. "I pictured to myself T?irmin'e ghastly face amid the crowd of shuddering people on that reeling deck in the lonely ocean, and thought, 'Thou ghastly, lying wretch, thou ehalt not be drowned j thou shalt have a fever only; a knowledge of thy danger, and v chance —ever so small a chance—of repentance.'" With this good instance, he salts his admonition to the impartial writer to act "not a la mode le pays de Pole, but always to give quarter." Barrie has evidently forgotten his, Thackeray, and blunted his respect for death with too much study of modern ways—though even Crockett, on his most blood-curdling page has, go far, preserved the neck of a hero. It may be reprehensible sentimentality to object to a mishandling of puppets. "As Thou hast power over mc, So have I power over these." says Rudyard Kipling very rightly in "L'Envoi" to "Soldiers Three." Yet to act hangman to your best creation, seems a rather too arbitrary use of power. In the case of "Tommy and Grizel," we feel convinced that any jury of intelligent readers , deliberating on the latest death in fiction, will give a verdict not of justifiable homicide, I but of "Wilful murder by a heretofore blameless novelist."