NOVELS.
A FREE LANCE OP TO-DAY.*
AT a time when local colour in fiction is to often the result of an ad hoc study deliberately undertaken for purposes of literary manufacture,, it is matter for congratulation to encounter such a novel, as this by Mr. Hugh Clifford. He has not laid the scene of his story in the Malay Archipelago and Sumatra because the novel-reading public knows next to nothing about that quarter of the world and he had " mugged up" something about it. His choice is not dictated by con- venience or the desire to produce a volume ; it is simply an effective illustration of the old truth that a man writes best of that which he knows. But long residence is not enough in itself to enable a man to write intelligently about outlandish parts. He needs interest, sympathy, and the literary faculty, —qualities which, as readers of the Spectator are already aware, are happily united in Mr. Clifford to a very remarkable degree. He has enjoyed exceptional opportunities, and he has turned them to exceptional account as an interpreter, at once sympathetic, yet critical, of the mind of the Orjental. We use the word "critical" deliberately, for it is characteristic of his attitude that with all his enthusiasm. for the magic and glamour of the East, and his liberal recognition of the engaging and admirable qualities of the brown man, he holds firm, without any exultation or arrogance, to his reasoned belief in the superiority of Western civilisation. In a word, he has never succumbed to that fascination which has from time to time thrown its spells over expatriated Europeans, and converted them into wholesale apologists, and even champions, of Oriental manners and morals. Against this denationalisation, of which some remarkable examples have been witnessed of late years, the story before us is a powerful and elokuent protest, and deserves attention if only on that ground. But it is also valuable and salutary as an antidote to that false Imperialism —noisily represented in the fiction of to-day—which seeks to glorify filibustering as a means of bracing the national fibre.
Maurice Curzon, the hero of the story, is a public-school product, a muscular young Philistine with undeveloped intellectual capacities, a victim of competitive examinations pitchforked into an Oriental, banking-house, who soon ex- changes the role of clerk for that of prospector in the Malay States. There he gains a knowledge of the natives and their language, and amasses a certain amount of money. Behold him, then, at a loose end in Singapore, his appetite for adventure still unappeased, listening to the tempter in the shape of a native Rajah, who proposes that he should embark his capital and intelligence in a gun- running expedition into Acheh—or Acheen, as we more often
• d Free 1~4 of To-day. By Hugh Clifford, C.M.G. London: Methuen and Co. [69.]
hear it called—that little State with which the Dutch have been waging intermittent and ineffectual warfare for the last twenty years or more. Thoughtlessness, love of adventure, and the desire to gain wealth, and so justify his suit of a fascinating widow, unite to overbear his saner judgment, and after a perilous voyage in a native sailing-boat, he lands his cargo, and guided by the friendly Achehnese, pene- trates to the city of the King in the interior. The storm scene, the escape from the Dutch gunboat, the journey into the interior of Sumatra are admirably told, and Mr. Clifford's interesting historical digression on the past history of Acheh, with which his hero is acquainted, goes a long way to explain, if not to justify, Maurice Curzon's sentimental enthusiasm for the indomitable Achehnese. Equally convincing, however, is the process of disillusionment, in which the dangers of de- nationalisatn are luridly set forth in the person of the renegade English witch-doctor, Pawang Uteh, a truly horrific figure.
The main moral of the story is set forth in the striking passage which summarises the reflections of the hero after a short experience of his fancied Utopia :-
"It seemed to Maurice that,' since his arrival in Acheh, his whole outlook upon Oriental life had undergone a change. Till now, the love which he bore to brown folk had warped his vision, tempting him to exchange his European birthright for the Asiatic's unsavoury mess of pottage, and had led him into making superficial comparisons between natives and men of his own race, to the disadvantage of the latter. Studying Malayan peoples with insight and sympathy, it had been impossible for him to avoid noting the swift and steady deterioration which inevitably results as one of the first consequences of close contact with Europeans, and seeing this he had thought to detect the cause in certain un- attractive qualities of the white man, rather than in the moral weakness of the brown race. But Fate had flicked him, like the bad shilling to which his father was fond of comparing him, into a State which from the beginning of things had been ruled and inhabited by men of the Malayan stock, and here he had found a complete refutation of his most cherished theories. Gradually, but with inexorable force, the convic- tion of the hopeless limitations of the brown peoples had been brought home to his mind. Their moral and mental inferiority revealed itself at every turn—in the ineptitude and inefficiency of their systems, in their lack of self-mastery, in their inability to resist sordid temptations, in their complete want of discipline, in the absence of all the higher, more altruistic qualities whereby men may rule their fellows ; above all in their hopeless incontinuity of purpose. The words of wise old Thomas k Kempis came to his mind, No man securely commands, save he who hath learned well to obey !' That maxim, he thought, stands for all time, and therein is written the doom of the brown races. Maurice recalled, with dreary amusement, the feeling of shame which had so often beset him when, after he had lived much among natives and had learned to grasp their standpoint, he had watched Europeans unwittingly outraging the notions of propriety and fitness which obtain among the people of the land. He remembered the disgust with which he had witnessed the scene in the bar of the Singapore racecourse, and how its vulgarity and coarseness had revolted him. Then he had been inclined to overrate the significance of that which he found so unlovely; now, in this hour of reaction, his bias lay towards the other extreme. Acheh might be still undefiled by the vulgarity which is essentially a product of Europe, but it was the great things, not a trifle such as that, which really mattered. The worst of all these men, upon whom he had looked with scorn, had some principle to guide them in their dealings with their fellows ; few, he fancied, if the truth were known, would be found to be without their secret record of kindliness, self-sacrifice, generosity, and truth. Maurice groaned aloud. His quest, in the cause of which he bad endured so much and forfeited so many things, had ended in futility. His heart yearned after his own people. His ideals could not be satisfied by even the best that the brown races had to offer him. This white man, once so nearly de- nationalised, was now face to face with discoveries which hurt him."
Even worse disillusionment is yet in store for Maurice Curzon as the inevitable result of his ill-omened association with the Achehnese raid on the Dutch encampments. But while the book as a study in denationalisation—arrested in the case of the hero, complete in that of the witch-doctor—is a powerful and valuable contribution to international psychology, the necessity of providing the usual romantic interest has greatly impaired its artistic excellence. In order to wind up his love episode Mr. Clifford has been obliged to lean heavily on the long arm of coincidence. The unexpected meeting with the yachting party and their rescue from an equivocal position, in which they are rendered suspect alike to the natives and the Dutch, though vigorously told, comes somewhat as an anti- climax to the earlier and far more impressive scenes in which the hero occupied an isolated position amongst his brown associates.
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