My Contemporaries in Fiction. By David Christie Murray. (Chatto and
Windus.)—We do not care, as we have said more than once, to criticise a critic. Mr. Murray has at least the right to speak without incurring the reproach that reviewers are commonly authors who have failed. Greater novelists there are, but scarcely any who have written more delightful stories. "Joseph's Coat" and "The Primrose Path" please, as little fiction is able to please, if they do not exactly awe or astonish. Being then, in his way, a master of the craft, Mr. Murray has something worth hearing to say. Of all his judgments that on Charles Reade seems to be as just and well expressed as any. Reade aggravates his readers not unfrequently, but he can be taken down from the shelf again and again; and what could be a better test of enduring interest ? In one matter we hail Mr. Murray as an ally with special pleasure. He does not admire Mr. Hardy's new manner. And he says something about Mr. George Moore which is so good that we cannot refrain from
quoting it. The critics have told us, he says, that Mr. Moore is an observer. This is his comment :—" As a matter of fact, that is absolutely what he is not. He is so far from being an observer that he is that diametrically opposite person, a man with a note- book. The man who, amongst men of letters, deserves to be ranked as an observer is he who naturally and without effort sees things in their first place, aspect, proportion, and perspective. The man who is often falsely described by the title which expresses this faculty is a careful and painstaking soul who is strenuously on the watch for detail, and who takes much trouble to fill his pages with it."
Previous page
