All Communications and Commissions must be addressed ‘THE BOOKMAN,’ Graphic Office, Auckland.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue XXII, 1 June 1895, Page 512

All Communications and Commissions must be addressed ‘THE BOOKMAN,’ Graphic Office, Auckland.

A friend of mine, a bookman after tny * The ,n own heart, to whom I had lent Anthony The Car. Hope’s ‘ Dolly Dialogues ’ after reviewing them the other day, returned them to me with the comment that they were ‘ the foam on the waters of modern thought and literature.’ The remark is an extremely happy one, as all who have read the Dialogues will smilingly admit, and showed the customary keenness and correctness of his critical faculty, for foam gathers on deep waters as well as in the shallows, and is, indeed, most beautiful when gazing through its semi-transparencies we here and there obtain suggestive and delightful glimpses of the depth beneath. Light and airy, frothy and foamlike, as are the ‘ Dolly Dialogues,’ we perfectly realise that there lies beneath them a very considerable depth of knowledge of human nature. But how truly profound is Mr Hope’s knowledge, and how wonderfully keen his insight into Nineteenth Century life and character is only revealed in the most recent of his works to arrive in this colony.

It is a very considerable time since I have read a book which more profoundly interested me. Saving in one or two of Mr Pinero’s plays, I do not remember to have met in modern literature certain types of character drawn with such convincing faithfulness. It is said of the principal personage in the book that 1 he is terribly human,’ and this remark, which is made by one of the lesser characters in the story, is true of all. They are terribly human—human in their inhumanity human in selfishness and in unselfishness, in wit and stupidity. The whole book palpitates with human life. There is no single lay figure in the group of men and women we meet ; all are living, breathing, absolutely natural Nineteenth Century men and women, swayed by those master passions, love and ambition —passions whose antagonism has in the past made countless such stories as that here told, and which will continue so to do as long as they themselves shall exist.

Strangely enough, I have read no single English review of the book, and so am absolutely ignorant of the place it has taken amongst books of the day. But this I know that Ruston and Maggie Dennison (with whom the story is mainly concerned) have joined Herrick (from the • Ebb Tide’), (from the ‘ Bonnie Briar Bush ’), and (from the ‘Jungle Book ’), in that mental reception room, where a strange company are gathered together—the company of those whom I have met in literature, and who refuse to be forgotten.

The title, The Cod in the Car, is, I venture to think, somewhat unfortunate. One does not recognise its applicability till the book is half finished, and it holds out no promise of the absorbing interest of the story. The god is Ruston, and he drives the Juggernaut car through the rest of .the characters and their lives. Ruston is, so it seems to me, a fancy portrait of Cecil Rhodes—a man with a great African scheme to push, an immense territory to be exploded and undertaken by the Omofaga Company, of which he is promoter. Omofaga is Ruston’s very life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, neither even love nor passion, may stand in the way. To understand Ruston one must read the book, but some idea of his character may be had in the following description by the author : —

In all things evil and good, to the world, and-a thing quite rare —to himself. Willie Ruston was an unaffected man. Success, the evidence of power and the earnest of more power, gave him his greatest pleasure, and he received it with his greatest and most open satisfaction. It did not surprise him. but it elated him, anti his habit was to conceal neither the presenc3 of elation nor the absence of surprise. That irony In the old sense, which means the well-bred though hardly sincere depredation of a man's own qualiti s and achievements, was not his. When he had done anything, he liked to dine with his friends and talk it over. . . .

Unaffected. free from self-consciousness, undivided!? bent on his schemes, unheeding of everything but their accomplishment.

he had spent little time in considering the considerable stir which he had. in fact, created in the circle of his more intimate associates They had proved pliable and pleasant, and these were the qualities he liked in his neighbours. They said agreeable things to him and they did what he wanted. Ha had stayed not (save once, and half in jest, with Maggie Dennison) to inquire why, and the quasi-real. quasi-burlesque apprehension of him—burlesqued perhaps, lest it should seem too real—which had grown up among such close observers as Adela Ferrara, and Seiningham, would have struck him as absurd, the outcome of that idle business of brain which weaves webs of fine fancies round the obvious, and loses the power of action in the fascination of self-created puzzles. The nuances of a woman's attraction towards a man, whether it be admiration, or interest, or pass beyond, whether it be liking and just not love—of interest running into love -or love masquerading as interest, or what-not, Willie Ruston recked little of. He was a man and a young man. He like women and clever women —ye’, and handsome women. But to spend your lime thinking of or about women, or worse still, of or about what women thought of you, seemed poor economy of precious days—amusing to do, maybe, in spare hours, inevitable now and again—but to be driven or laughed away when there was work to be done.

A personage of this description cannot plunge into so great a pool as London without causing a very considerable stir, and those who stand in the way, inadvertently or other wise, must be either ‘ bruised or broken.’ Inadvertently Ruston wins first the interest, then the love of Maggie Dennison, whose husband is a necessity to him in floating Omofaga. The whole story lies in telling firstly how Ruston absorbs Mrs Dennison, and then how nearly Mrs Dennison absorbs him. The fight between love and ambition is long and bitter. It seems impossible such a man should give way, and when at last he does the woman is quick to recognise that the victory is but temporary. She has won him ; he will sacrifice his career for love of her. He has admitted that he meant to force himself to break off an entanglement which involves her honour and his future, but passion has conquered. * You came here.’ she said, ‘ meaning to send me away.' * I was a fool,’ he said grimly between his set teeth. . . . ‘ Kiss me, Willie.’ she said, ‘l’m going back home.’ He took her in his arms and kissed her. She released herself, and gazed long in his face. ‘Why?’ he asked, ‘you can’t bear it; you know you cant. Come with me, Maggie. I don’t understand you.’ * No ; I don’t understand myself. I came here meaning to go with you. I came here thinking I could never bear to go back. Ah, you don’t know what, it is to live there now. But I must go back. Ah, how I hate it?’ She laid her hard on his arm. ‘ Think if I came with you ! Think, Willie!’ ‘Yes.’ he said, as though it had been wrung from him, ‘ I know. But come all the same, Maggie,’ and with a sudden gustof passion he began to beseech her, declaring that he would not live without her. ‘ No. no,’ she cried ; ‘it’s not true, Willie, or you’re not the man I loved. Go on, dear; go on. I shall hear about you. I shall watch you.' ‘ But you’ll be here —with him,’ he muttered in grim anger. ‘ Ah, Willie, are you still—still jealous? Even now ?’ A silence fell between them. ‘ You shall come,’ he said at last. ‘ What do I care for him or the rest of them ? I care for nothing but you.’ ‘ I will not come, Willie. I dare not come. Willie, in a week—in a day—Willie, my dear, in an hour you will be glad that I would not come.’ . . . Maggie Dennison put out her hand and met Ruston’s. She pressed his hand with a strength more thin her own, and she said, very low, ‘I am dying now—this way—for my king, Willie,’ and she stepped out into the rain, and climbed into the cab. ‘ Back to where you brought me from,’ she called to the man,and, leaning forward, where the cab lamps caught her face, so that it gleamed like the face of some marble statue, she looked on Willie Ruston. Her lips moved, but he heard no word. The wheels turned and the lamps flashed, and she was carried away. Willie started forward a step or two, then ran to the gate and, leaning on it, watched the red lights as they fled away ; and lor g after they had gone, he stood there, bare headed, in the drenching rain. He did not think ; he still saw her. s’ ill heard her voice, and watched her broad low brow. She still stood before him, not the fairest of women, but the woman who was for him. And the rumble of retreating wheels sounded again in his ears. She w as gone. How long he stood he did not know. Presently he felt an arm passed through his, and he was led back to the house. . . . Willie Ruston drew his chair nearer the fire, and spread out bis hands to the blaze. And as the heat warmed his frame, the stupor of his mind passed, and he saw some of what was true—a glimpse of his naked self thrown up against the light of the love that others found for him. And he turned away his eyes, for it seemed to him that he could not look long and endure to live. And he groaned that he had won love and made for himself so mighty an accuser of debts that it lay not in him to pay. For even then, while he cursed himself, ard cursed the nature that would not be changed in him; even while the words of his love w ere in his ears, and her presence near with him ; even while life seemed naught for the emptiness her going made, and himself nothing but longing for her ; even then, behind regret, behind remorse, behind agony, behind self-contempt and selfdisgust. lay hidden, and deeper hidden as he thrust it down, the knowledge that he was glad—glad that his life was his own again, to lead and make and shape; wherein to take and hold, to play

and win, to fasten on what was his, and to beat down his enemies before his face. That no mtn could rob him of. and the woman who could would not. So, as Maggie Dennison had said, in the passing of an hour he was glad ; and in the passing of a week he had learnt to look in the face of the gladness which he had and loathed.