BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 11677, 8 February 1902, Page 8

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

‘The Hist on- of Kir Richard Ciilmady.’ By Lucas Malet. London: Methuen and Co. Dunedin; Whitcombc and Tombs.

Any book of 620 closely-printed pages ought to contain that within it which shall justify its length, otherwise it is pure presumption on the pari. of the author to ask the public to buy and read it. This is generally reco tnised. Apart from Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, and now Lucas Millet, not many present-day writers have sufficient confidence in themselves or their work to elaborate their views upon God, file, immortality, morals, love,, and nastiness to this extent. They feel, and everybody is thankful for the sentiment, that from three to three hundred and fifty pages in good-sized (yjte are all they are entitled to, even when judged by the most lenient and sympathetic of readers. Mrs “ Lucas Malet" hits, however, taken 620 pages to say that which, ns far as the story itself is concerned, could have been told in half. or. if we only deduct the overplus of descriptive max ter, in at. most 450. We find nothing in ‘Richard Calmady’ to jus tify its hu.k. That it contains many splendid bits of writing, keen insight into human motives, close analyses of certain phases of life, common sense, sarcasm, humor, pathos. and eloquent passages we gratefully adndt ; but neither its teaching, nor morality, nor philosophy appeals to us. Tite book leaves a decidedly unpleasant taste in the mouth, creates irritation, is overdrawn, purposeless, and in many chapters emphatically nasty. it marks, in truth, the vast strides we have made on the downward path in literature since the days of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and, in a degree, George Eliot. These writers are classics. Though dead and buried from seventy down to twenty years ago, they have audiences whose numbers increase with the years. Nor is the reason far to seek. They are clean, human, natural. The father can read them aloud in the family circle, the lover can pass them on to his sweetheart, whole pages can be and are copied into our school primers and readers, and thousands are orally delighted when they are interpreted by ihe elocutionist and skilled reader. This cannot be done with our Hardy, James, or “ Lucas Malet.” ‘Richard Calmady’ is a book for men and women who are not particular. It pimply has to be hidden and kept out of the girls’ way. It is, in parts, sensuous, luxurious, and licentious. The exalted strain cf morality employed is largely the shocked cant of one who is not prepared to discard all the conventionalities. It is the modern veneer which barely hides the primitive beast. Vice is so artistically presented aa to cease to be repellant. It sweeps away poor ordinary- matter-of-fact middle-class virtue, and reigns supreme. We take the liberty of affirming tliat- there is absolutely no need for this perfection of detail. We know there are vicious men and vicious women in tha world, and we know that they possess great fascinations; but we do not want their doings served up to us in novels purporting to be the latest aad most finished product of a woman of genius. It would appear as though Mrs “Malet” was fearful of the book “catching on” minus these excursions into the domain of the Cyprian Venus, for that these will “ take with the crowd ” we 1 can hardly doubt. Not that there is any originality about her Helen Dc Vallorbes. She is common in the history, song, drama, and novel of nil ages and all cities, from the da vs when Zuleika wooed Joseph to the hour when Zola gave us Nana. And wc fail to see why “Lucas Malet”—who, fora clergyman’s wife and daughter has a remarkable acquaintance with the stage accessories of unbridled license and the chamber of Lais—should make her lady’s maid pass array her time with reading a yellow paper covered French novel in order to indicate her character. The red paper covered English novels by our own modern women writers are equal to Flaubert, Maupassant, Bourget, Dumas, or De Kock. They may not be quite as gross as Zola, but they are infinitely mo-re insidious. We believe that the authoress of ‘Richard Calmady,’ in the course of a recent interview, said that she was chiefly interested in studying men, as, being one, she knew all about women. We are afraid she does not. Certainly her present work contains no suggestion that she has the least approach to an acquaintance with the millions of honest, pretty, faithful little women among whom the bulk of her own readers will doubtless be found (the nobility are not much given to purchasing novels about themselves). “ Lucas Mulct’s ” men and women belong to society—the. highest- society—and there is hardly a clean one among the lot The men all seem to pass much of their time in the society of women who are “ fair and kind, but not wise ”; and the women are, if not physically impure, apt ro call a spade a spade. Here is how the hero speaks to the woman who is in love with him:

“I mayn’t amount to very much, but at least J have never used my personal illluck to trade on a woman’s generosity and pity. What I have had from women I have paid for it in hard cash. In that respect my conscience is dear. It has been a bargain fair and square and aboveboard, and all mv debts are settled in full.”

To which the heroine, represented by Mrs Malet as existing in a mental environment of sweetest chastity, replies: “ Richard, if you don’t care for me, if you don’t want me, bo honorable; tell me so straight out, and let us have done with it. 1 am strong enough, I am man enough, for that. For heaven’s sake, don’t take me out of pity. I would never forgive you. There’s a good deal of us both one way and another, and we should give each other a hell of a time if I was in love and you were not. But if you do care, here I am. 1 have never failed anyone yet I will never fail you. I am yours body and soul. Marry me.” The character of Katherine Calmady is a very lovable and worshipful one up to a certain point, but wc weary of her moans and groans in time. Her sorrows were immeasurably less than those hundreds of other women are called upon to endure, and her blessings transcendently greater. Yet we are called upon to listen to the former to the almost complete exclusion of the latter. The love of a mother for her child—the purest form of earthly love—will, beyond question, suffer all things, bat we should at the same time have preferred a little womanly indignation in preference to tears and sighs when Richard, in his unseemly rage, blasphemed both God and woman to her face. There is far too much made out of Richard’s deformity. We admit its sadness, but cannot appreciate its horror—pathetic, temporarily grotesque perhaps, but with his other blessings of person and mind not to be named in the same breath with fifty other things that might have been. It was necessary, however, for Mrs Malet’s purpose to enlarge on this aspect of Calmady’s pre-natal misfortune in order to justify his and her own wanderings into Castle Joyous, and dallying away their hours with the Lady of Delight. The asserted repulsiveness of this affliction is made the hinge upon which Richard’s defiance of decency turns. It is his excuse and Lucas Malet’s opportunity. What the book would have been shorn of this redundancy of plain speaking and treatment we do not know, but its edr-

cnlation would probably be much less. There is an amusing family—aristocratic, of course—composed of many sons and daughters, and these, with their vices and chatter, form the most interesting of the secondary characters, although one’s idea of the morality of the upper ten, or twenty, is not considerably heightened. We iiave no reason, however, to doubt its accuracy, but the picture of a father chuckling over the portraits of his sons’ mistresses is a little startling until we remember where we are. “ Lucas Malet ” has not got away from her environment. Her conception of the world would seem to be that of aft enlarged Hotel Cecil, a glorified Savoy, where every woman wears low-neck, silk dresses and all the men are looking for an intrigue—a common conception, wc notice, among women romancers. But genius should be above it. Great gifts—and Mrs “Malet” has, them—demand high uses. There are, as Lord Dutferin recently emphasised, too many “ educated and clever women to break through the barriers of propriety and lead the way into the sickly groves of Astarte,” and if Lucas Malet, with all her command of words and her wonderful power of arranging them, cannot write a great work without sacrificing at the shrine of the goddess of lubricity, then she should not write at all. The puffery of publishers and the chatter of a coterie of critics should be valued, if possible, at their proper worth, and an impartial but rigorous comparison mado by herself between her own productions and those works which the world has, fortunately for itself, so far shown no signs of forgetting. Then she may discover how they became great without containing a line that, as Scott said on his deathbed, ho would rewrite if he could. We are aware that in saying what we have said that we lay ourselves open to the charge of misunderstanding and misinterpreting. We merely give the results of the impression the book has left upon ns, and that, wo think, is as fair a test as any. One cannot criticise in detail nor ask questions over ‘ Richard Calmady.’ We can onlv submit results.

‘Before T Forget.’ By Albert Chevalier. London : T. Fisher Unwin. Mr Chevalier having gained a name and fame as an impersonator of the temdon coster, has deemed it advisable, or necessary, nr pavahlo, to write an autobiography. He is st ill' a voung person —that is, if we dare call a man of forty young —and, witn a good twenty-five rears of life in front of him. will, doubtless—if the present venture pays —give the public many other editions at intervals of five years or so. Beyond the fact that it is something to be able to say that you have, by your impersonation of a costermonger made a reputation throughout England, Canada, the States, and Australia, we, do not know that Mr Chevalier has much else to tell us. His style is crisp, chatty, and humorous, and we are brought into relationship with the ups and downs, and the “ behind the scenes ” machinery of our public entertainers. There is also much sound advice scattered throughout, whilst shrewd common sense is not lacking. To those of ns who are about the same age as Chevalier and can recall the names, places, and plays to \vhich he refers, the book is more than ordinarily welcome, especially, as in our own case, when we learn that Chevalier earned his first ten shillings in a tiny theatre in the north of London, wherein wc ourselves have often ranted and declaimed, and at much about the same time as did the now great coster himself. And so it is that wc realise for the thousandth time how small this bit of star-dust we term the earth really is.