NOVELS.
MOl7NT., FOR some of us the publication of Mr. C. F. Keary's The Wanderer over twenty years ago was an event ; not one of the great literary events of a lifetime, but one of those agreeable discoveries which, like a conversation with an exceptional stranger, put us quickly in touch with a new and cultivated companion and leave their mark alike on the mind and memory. The Wanderer was a cry of thankfulness from an unconventional soul which had escaped from a material thraldom and found liberty. It did not express everything, just because escape—especially escape from the humdrum of some daily service—is not everything, being rather an "eternal nay" than an "eternal yea." But, like the cry of curlew on the moor, it did evoke or respond to many primal instincts of independence and defiance that must be in every man. We remember very well, too, A Mariage de Convenance by the same author, which handled an extremely difficult medium—fiction in the epistolary form—with learned skill, and of course Mr. Keary has written much else in prose and verse. Yet he is not, we suppose, a popular writer. He has not the warmth or enthusiasm which kindles ; even when he celebrates liberty it is something of a pagan celebration. He has his conception of art, which is a very rigid one, and it is certain that he would not yield an inch of it to gain illicit successes. All honour to him for that! Let those appreciate him who deserve to do so 1
The tendency of one truly artistic mind is to strip the affairs of life more and more of everything that is accidental till only the quintessential is left; while the tendency of an opposite mind, not less artistic, is to throw the net over what is assumed to be essential ever wider and wider. In that view, indeed, nothing is unessential,—life is made up partly of full and strong threads, but partly also of broken threads which
• The Mount. By C. P. Keary. London : Constable and Co. [Os.] may appear to flutter fruitlessly in the wind, yet have their effect on the fabric of which they are a genuine part. me. Keary is of the second school. As in the case of Mr. Henry James, whose difficult subtleties compass a wonderful precision of definition, nothing is really irrelevant with him. You may say summarily and simply that a man travelled from London to Crewe, or you may go to the trouble of mentioning the intermediate stations at which he stopped or through which he passed, and one way will be as right as the other. The latter gives you undeniably the fuller picture; but it may also be tedious, like a journey in a slow train. For ourselves, we never find Mr. Keary tedious ; but the hasty reader whose palate cannot taste fine shades of flavour will perceive no reason for the insistence on minute differences of tone and meaning. Mr. Keary does not write for him, and is, we suspect, splendidly indifferent to his judgment. But there is another reason why Mr. Keary is not as widely read as he ought to be. As we have suggested already, there is a neutral quality in his criticism of life. In his new novel, as in others, he takes life as he finds it ; he finds some people good and some bad, and he describes both impartially ; but he neither affirms nor condemns, even by implication.
The scene of The Mount is that part of Staffordshire where the towns lie beneath an almost unbroken pall of smoke, and the chemicals with which the air is laden bite into the face of Nature, pitting, discolouring, and withering everything. Those who were not tied to the place by industrial con; flexions have fled before the blight, and a new " aristocracy ' has arisen to people the old manor-houses. The opening description of the mixed assembly at the "Infirmary ball" is extremely well and faithfully done. Here we are introduced to Wilfred Ingram, a sensitive, well-bred man whose family is "better" than most others in the neighbourhood, but who has not qualified by wealth for membership of the new aristocracy, and who is too proud to be at his ease with any other society. He is a reserved man who suffers acutely because he cannot confide in others, or even in himself. He is chivalrous, but he is not popular. In the ways of the world he is a child, although he has been an officer in the Army. Into the small group in which he moves there comes a girl, who, having studied as an artist at Munich, has become designer to one of the factories. Her views and habits are those of the Murgeresque people among whom her character has been formed; she has adopted the Munich code,—" theories of the antiquity of our code of morals and the superiority to them of the superior man." She has been " wronged " by the head of the factory, to use the word which expresses the fact, but which is ambiguous in this case; for though it would have satisfied Wilfred Ingram, it would hardly have been recognised by Margaret Vaughan. When Wilfred discovers the truth he acts with a Spanish intensity of chivalry, not on the girl's indulgent estimate of the sin to which she was an accomplice, but on his own. He commits murder, although even then he is in the characteristic state of being hardly sure of his own resolves, or of knowing whether lie has not acted partly in self-defence. At all events, he was in love with Margaret Vaughan, and that was his incentive. She, too, has been brought to a new and strange experience ; the Munich code has fallen away from her like an affectation, and "the old way of love" in this crisis triumphs over both her instinct and her reason. Mr. Keary seems to be about to end on an emphatic "yea." But that would be unlike him, and, as so often in reality, the accomplished thing sinks below the quality of the expectation. We shall not tell bow this happens; enough to say that it is, after all, the fault of the Munich code. We do not see life always as Mr. Keary does, but let us pay our tribute of respect to the masterly handling of the revolution in. Wilfred's mind when the few pretexts for his crime slip away from him. This is the work of a genuinely distinguished mind in a day when distinction among novelists is rare.
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