FICTION.
MEN AND GHOSTS.• Ma. MONHHOUSE'S clever novel is a variant on the autobiographical life-history with which we have become so familiar of late years. The narrator gives us an account of his parentage and youth, the gradual growth of the sceptical habit which undermined his ancestral Methodism, and the move to Manchester, where he entered the cotton trade in his father's warehouse, but set up a bachelor estab- lishment at Darley. But we soon recognize that this is going to be no full-length life-history: Ten years at Darley are hastily passed over, and the recital culminates in a brief but complicated episode in which he and his friend Campion and the girl who in- fluenees and attracts them most are the chief characters. But while Godfrey Fenn, the narrator, is always kept back by his critical detached egotism and the gulf that divides him, an agnostic, from Rose Avery's unquestioning faith, Campion rules himself out by his irregularities, and by his compromising relations with a village girl. Rose is enlisted as confidante and confessor, with far-reaching results for both the men. She espouses the cause of the village girl, who was engaged to, a decent man in her own walk of life. But the prospects of her position being regularized by marriage with Reuben Harper, a local preacher, are shattered by his scruples, which are far from discreditable, and the long debate whether Campion should or should not make an honest women of Jessie Bland is brought to a crisis when he meets with a terrible climbing accident, and is continued round what proves his death-bed by his friends and parents. The characters are subtly drawn and acutely con- trasted the spiritual Rose, whose mystical vein makes her idealize the dying man ; Fenn, the ineffectual critic, too half- hearted to seize the prize, too considerate to intrude on the com- panionship which means so much to his friend ; Campion, exuberant, dramatic, impulsive to the very close ; the cool, efficient doctor; the professional climbers whose regret is mixed with impatience ; Campion's self-protective parents; and Jessie Bland, torn between jealousy and admiration of Rose. The earlier stages of the episode are not lacking in humorous relief, but its development is inevitably painful, though handled with delicacy. A happy ending is out of the question, and the prospect of ultimate reunion between Rose *. Men and Ghosts. By Allan Monkhouae. Leaden: Collins, Sons, and Co. 16s. net.]
and„Godfrey, though not dismissed as impossible, is left shadowy and improbable. But even old-fashioned readers cannot quarrel with the denofirnent. The mating of a hardened agnostio with a devout mystic would bring happiness to neither.
Previous page
