NOVELS.
THE HUMAN CRY.* Afnu. ErrouIE belongs to that enviable minority in the
regiment of literary Amazons whose past achievement stimu- lates a confident anticipation of further favours in the future.
Her literary baggage, it is true, at present only extends to three novels, but each of them is worth fifty of the average product, and there is no falling-off in her third venture. For one thing she has a gift for tempering the rigour of character analysis with a judicious admixture of incident. She deals in strong, almost melodramatic, situations, but without falling into the pitfalls of extravagance which beset that perilous path. There is always a restraining influence of intellectuality in her work, and her mordant humour and excellent style would alone suffice to hold the reader quite apart from the social problems which occupy her attention. In The Human Cry there is one problem which dominates the plot—the tragic inheritance of insanity—but although the sad fate of the gracious heroine appeals to our compas- sion the figure which rivets our attention throughout is that on which Mrs. Ritchie lavishes the vials of her scorn—the smart would-be intellectual woman of to-day. She is hardly less severe in her ridicule of the half-baked sentimental Radical, and looks forward to a future in which " much that is ancient and beautiful will be destroyed, and too much power will be in the hands of ignorant men who, for want of social training, confuse self-respect with vanity, punishment with de- gradation, and who call firmness cruelty." Even her opportunist Radical foresees with misgiving the advent of a suburban millennium in which with a statutory four hours' working day we may find ourselves confronted with a different ideal of human life coming from the East, and may go down in the conflict. Yet Mrs. Ritchie does not altogether despair of politicians. Messmer°, the ambitious Radical who regulates his real convictions according to the digestion of his half-educated supporters, finds his ideal in the reserved, fastidious, high-minded, but penniless Violet, and would have
married her, knowing her inheritance, but for the machinations of Eve Tremayne, the smart intellectual lady. Eva has immense advantages in the race of life : good looks, splendid health, and boundless belief in herself. Handsome, voluble, and endowed with a certain superficial cleverness and a knack of mastering the argot of the latest literary philosophical or religious craze, she terrorizes herkindly unintellectual husband, neglects her child, and uses Violet, her husband's orphan
niece, as amanuensis and general drudge. She takes up Mossniore, as a •coming man, with tremendous empressentent,
but drops him like a hot potato when she discovers that he is attracted by Violet. Her meanness and malignity are almost incredible ; yet the portrait is done with such zest and so many vivid touches that it irresistibly suggests a living exemplar. Eva's religious progress from Nonconformity to Anglicanism, and thence to various phases of pseudo-Oriental Transcendentalism, is described with much sardonic humour. After emerging from Anglicanism, which she found to be lacking in enlightenment and philosophical depth, she turned to the East for comfort:—.
"For a week she was inclined to favour the teachings of Krishna, because he was a moral personality superior to that of the founder of Christianity, and she had almost decided upon him when she found the fact stated—truly or falsely—that he had had over twelve thousand wives. Eva felt that altogether this could not in an Oriental be considered to show moral obliquity, still it was not exclusive enough to please her Western tastes. Nothing she read attracted her so much as a little booklet, bound in a limp cover of pale yellow suede, called The Seeker. Tho author of this booklet called himself Hermes, and his brief preface announced that in a vision ho was shown that through his agency the East and the West should join the hands of religious brotherhoods before the century was out. The first truth which The Seeker enunciated was as follows :--4 The husband is as the wife is, and the wife is as the husband, but above all things the Self is supreme.' Now this idea, as Eva remarked to herself, was as ancient as the hills and yet had a real bearing on modern life, She could not recollect any text in the Bible that could equal this in philosophical grip."
She despised Violet for her dependence on dogma,
"Dogma can, after all, only be thrown off by those who have risen to a comparatively high mental plane—a plane where you can make your stand against mere creeds, and say simply, I
R hc /Inman Cry. By Dirs. David G. Ritchie. London Methuen and Co. ess..3 believe in a supreme World Spirit whom I call God, transcendent and yet immanent in all organic nature. I believe in the equality and fraternity and liberty of all human beings, and I believe that I am immortal, and that I am supremely necessary to God and the universe.' Eva did not add in words, but ehe thought, 'I believe that I know what I am talking about,' quite unaware that this is a more stupendous dogma than any that has been invented by the wiles of priostcraft."
Perhaps the happiest comment on Eva's religious crazes is that of Mossmore, when he observes of her encouragement of an American charlatan, "it only shows that women of good education need protection as much as women with no education." Authors do not always succeed in making us share their affection for their favourites, but Mrs. Ritchie has certainly infected the present reviewer with a great deal of her detestation of the odious Eva. It is true that Eva hears the truth about herself before the story closes, but the desire for poetic justice, strong in the unregenerate reader, is rather outraged by the final
tragedy. As a piece of scarifying social satire the book is first rate ; but the artistic balance of the parts is disturbed by the undue prominence assigned to a mean and shallow character, just as the indictment of democracy is impaired by a certain passion of contempt.
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