22 SEPTEMBER 1906, Page 20

NOVELS.

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD.* THE success of Mr. Hichens's new novel is not to be judged merely by reference to the high standard he has set himself in The Garden of Allah. He has rendered his task all the more arduous by a deliberate disregard of the law of suspense. With a tragic end in view, we take it that the aim of the artist should be to create an atmosphere of expectancy and misgiving, a sense of impending and ultimate disaster, with- out, however, enabling the reader to foreshadow accurately whence or how the blow will fall. The march of events should be inevitable ; but one should only realise its inevitableness after, and not before, each step in the progress. Otherwise the element of surprise, which is of the essence of recreation— using the word in its broadest sense—is minimised, as in the novel before us. The catastrophe is not only implicit in the opening chapter, but Mr. Hichens further discounts its effect by giving us what almost amounts to a scenario of the whole story. For when we learn that an ugly, though brilliantly clever and intellectual, woman of thirty-four is about to many an extraordinarily handsome but unintellectual young man ten years her junior—who is, moreover, though born and bred in England, half Sicilian by birth—when we also learn that it is their intention to spend their honeymoon in Sicily, no preternatural sagacity is required to divine the consequences. If any doubts remained, they are speedily dispelled by the immediate sequel, in which, to make her husband's atavistic relapse all the easier, Hermione leaves him alone with his Sicilian peasant friends and goes off to Tunis to nurse her friend Emile Artois, a French novelist, who has been struck down by sudden illness at Kairouan. The "call of the blood" is not likely to be any the less insistent when to opportunity is added the sting of jealousy and the excuse of desertion.

It is no small proof of Mr. Hichens's skill that after handi- capping himself at the outset by this clear foremast of the trend of events, he should have contrived to render the development of this study in exotic heredity so continuously engrossing. The scene, after the first chapter, is laid exclusively in Sicily, and we know of no better picture in English of the glamour of the landscape and the strange, semi-barbarous attractiveness of the natives. The portraits of the peasants, notably the boy Gaspare and the fisherman Salvatore— the one loyally vindictive, the other sordidly ferocious —are extraordinarily vivid presentations of the "rustic chivalry" of Sicily ; and the progress of Maurice Delarey's reversion to type, from the moment of his arrival to the hour when he goes to meet his doom, is traced with a fidelity that is always picturesque and, though at times long-drawn, never tedious. Maurice, it should be noted, though a faulty, is far from being a vicious character. He is the victim of circumstance and environ- ment, and the very unselfishness of his adoring wife is the most potent engine of his downfall. In regard to Hermione, Mr. Hichens has perhaps over-elaborated the antithesis between her nncomely exterior and her nobility of mind. He makes us realise her goodness, her unselfishness, her chivalrous devotion ; but her intellectual fascination is not so con-

'The Call of the Blood. By B. S. Mellen& London; Methuen and Co. [68.]

vincingly illustrated. The character of her friend, the novelist Artois, again, is rather an ingenious experiment than a complete success. Here once more Mr. Hichens has been perhaps beguiled by the ambition to combine the incom- patible,—in this case a cruel brain with a tender heart. It is an engaging picture, that of friendship getting the better of psychology, and prompting Artois in the long run to rival Hermione's own chivalry by acts of splendid mendacity designed to spare her the worst pangs of disillusionment ; but it is somewhat hard to reconcile with the authorship of "cruel, piercing, brutal works of art" and the careful dis- section of women's characters.

We have said that Mr. Hichens has impaired the impressive- ness of his catastrophe by revealing it at the outset. It is only fair to say that in the treatment of individual episodes he is invariably successful in stimulating the curiosity of his readers. The scene of Maurice's first visit to the "house of the sirens" is a fine example of Mr. Hichens's suggestive method of bringing home the mystery and romance of the night. Even more striking is the culminating episode of Hermione's search for her missing husband. Mr. Hichens's style harmonises excellently with his subject. Its colour is at times rather hectic, but in the main it seems to heighten the effect of a remarkably interesting and dramatic study of the survival of pagan and primitive instincts.