FICTION:
THE HUMAN BOY YET AGAIN.*
SOME years ago Mr. Eden Phillpotts introduced into modern fiction a Human Boy, who so far justified his title by being a considerable advance, to say the least, on the brand of boy invented by the late Dean Farrar. There was, indeed, no question of his being human : the only question was whether he were not too human for belief. If there were a verb " to boy," one might say that he boyed more consistently and continuously than do boys in real life. Nevertheless he
deserves our gratitude for having, little by little, ousted the egregious Eric and all his tribe from the affections of men.
Mr. Walpole's boy is more genuine still, with just that hint of complexity without which no characterisation can be regarded as authentic. Jeremy Cole is at once typical and individual. He loves football ; he is misunderstood by his father ; he is generous, courageous and romantic. But, happily, we are left with the impression that he is something more than the mere sum of his qualities :—
" He was a two-sided boy, and he had already a strange, secret interior life within his very healthy and normal exterior. one. There is nothing harder, perhaps, in our own experience than to look back and discover when it was that that secret life was, as it were, first confirmed and strengthened by something in the real world that corresponded to it."
Of that secret interior life, it must be confessed, we are allowed but one indubitable glimpse, unless ten-year-old Jeremy's adoration of a lovely lady at a dance is to be accounted another. It is the chief defect of this book that it promises far more than it achieves. It is a coin that rings true,- but it is a very small coin. Yet Mr. Walpole is undoubtedly to be congratulated on the accuracy of his memory and the delicacy of his touch. His small boy's psychology; so far as it goes,
is true in every detail ; and the incidents whereby it is illus- trated are skilfully chosen. Two of the subsidiary characters are equally well done—Helen, the insatiable egoist, and plain Mary, the sentimental sister—but the rest are figures of straw. Jeremy's Uncle Samuel is merely the embodiment of. Mr. Walpole's personal preferences ; and Jeremy's father is that perennial butt, the pompous and narrow-minded, clergy- man. As for Hamlet, the dog, he is, frankly, a bore. When the inevitable American professor writes the inevitable thesis on " The Dog in Literature," Mr. Walpole will get low marks.
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