Nigel's Vocation. By W. E. Norris. (Methuen and Co. Gs.)—
Mr. Norris is the best of companions for an idle hour,—not because his books lack the graver qualities of good fiction, but because of his charming Thackerayan style, his good humour, and his genuine power of drawing attractive and lifelike people. His new volume seems to us one of the happiest of his recent works. It is primarily a study of the religious temperament, the young man who, after a short plunge into evil habits, enters a monastery, leaves it to take up a great property which is bequeathed to him, muddles his love-making, and finds the world so unsatisfactory that he retires to the cloisters again and attains happiness. Nigel Scarth, with his ill-balanced, unstable, and yet upright nature, is cleverly and sympathetically drawn. There are, in addition, whole hosts of excellent people of the sporting, out-of- doors type which readers of Mr. Norris know so well. There is also a pretty adventuress drawn with the accuracy of unhesitating dislike. Mr. Norris rarely succeeds in portraying a repulsive male character—the blind Mr. Trenchard in this book is a very modest rascal—but he can draw with the utmost fidelity a detestable woman. Not the least of the merits of the book is that it is not a mere palimpsest of impressions, but a story told with the true storyteller's art. A character in a novel is not less living for the reader because it is developed through the action of the plot, and not expounded in an elaborate analysis by its creator.
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