NOVELS.
THE GREAT SKENE MYSTERY.*
PRE benevolent reader may well find his interest in Mr. Capes's work alloyed with a good deal of anxiety. Admiration is alternately excited by a genuine romantic power, and stifled by some preposterous inappropriateness or ugliness. Which of these strains will eventually prevail in Mr. Capes's writing? In The Great Skene Mystery, we fear, there is no evidence of the approaching subjugation of the unhappy side in a curiously double literary character. We can sometimes hardly believe that the same mind has produced some finely conceived passages in which certain portentous traits of nature corre- spond implicitly and delicately to tumultuous human experi- ence, and has also produced phrases which annoy and repel instead of satisfying the reader. This same mind, too, resorts to expedients which are far too unreal to be easily forgiven. The story has, for the greater part, the shape of an auto- biography. It is that of an uncouth young man—at times tempestuous, at times sullen—who solves the problem of his parentage. The prologue—wherein the exchange of babies, which is the beginning of the mystery, is described—intro- duces us to as unsavoury an old hag as any in fiction. Mr. Capes is not content with simple horror, which we believe he could create in an exalted form ; he must needs make it nauseous. Perverse, again, is his choice of words. Although many of them are wonderfully illuminating in their strangeness, others are simply forced, artificial, untrue. A certain percentage of his mistakes might be called errors in taste ; others might be due to a want of either common-sense or humour. He seems to be in mortal terror lest any one should suspect him of deferring to humdrum standards of respectability. We have no right to dictate to any one what his standards should be, but in any case it may be useful to point out that when too much gallantry is expended on easy triumphs over received opinion the spectacle does not really impress the onlooker. The uncouth hero, not being appreciated by his reputed mother and stepfather, retires to a lodge in the woods where be lives a hermit's life. No reader of Stevenson will need to be reminded what a true romance was made out of loneliness in " The Pavilion on the Links," and as though to remind one more piquantly of what one writer succeeded in doing and the other has failed to do with much the same material, an exotic element in the figure of the Italian guide appears in The Great Skene Mystery. Every one will remember the play Stevenson makes with the Italians in his story—the vague but oppressive sense of an impending doom of secret and cut-throat vindictive- ness. One or two scenes in the lovemaking of the hero, Richard Gaskett—his love developing out of an intense dislike which is to be regarded as only the accidental expression of the stirring of great emotions—show Mr. Capes as a writer who is really capable of directness and strong simple feeling. The use made of coincidence in tracking down the villain stretches our belief too far. Clues grow on every tree, and we hardly know what to make of the introduction of Sherlock Holmes and Watson (under those names) towards the end of the story. It is as though Mr. Capes felt doubtful of his story • Ile: Great Skene Efystery. By Bernard Capes. London : Methuen and Co.
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after all, put his tongue in his cheek and exclaimed comically " Take it as you will. I give it up myself." The " latest manner " of the story, at all events, prepares us for the Drury- Lane-like device by which the marriage lines (unless these can be produced like a season-ticket no one in true melodrama is properly married of course) are discovered in the brandy flask of a murdered man. If Mr. Capes's defects should arise
from some constitutional inability to criticise his own work, his friends will hardly know what to advise. The kind of story he has attempted here is best done after all in the manner of Wilkie Collins or Sir A. Conan Doyle. Stevenson, of course, tried to graft the conditions of art and philosophy upon a detective story, but even brilliant independent passages in it could not altogether atone for the faulty construction. We hope that Mr. Capes will experiment again. It is certain that there is a great employment for his powers if the right vehicle can be found. We quote a few sentences to show Mr. Capes at his best. They describe the journey of Richard Gaskett and the Italian guide through the Mont Cenis tunnel :—
" After that, it seems bathos to compare the prospect with a transformation scene at a pantomime ; yet, I think, perhaps, the latter analogy is the apter. The instant glide from terrific night into fairyland; the stupendous brown gullies, dripping icicles from a sabre's length to a maypole's ; snow in fields, on slopes, in ravines, all of a blinding lustre, and stained in its shadows of a celestial blue ; a world of high-lifted iridescence, streaked with gold leaf, spangled with glass dust, discharging ice-crusted torrents under archways of glittering rock, climbing peak over peak to the heaven-painted `cloth' of light, living and violet, which makes its background—that is how the vision of Italy first broke upon me, emerging from the portals of the underworld. But, as to Geoletti, the man was translated like Bottom the weaver. If, to me, the world had suddenly sprung into a vision of cloud-capped towers' and glittering pinnacles chiming unearthly music from diamond bells, to him it was as the thronging of old familiar spirits gathered to greet his return. He gazed and gazed, and danced on his seat, and uttered uncouth ejaculations. He hugged himself into spasms, and bit his nails, and glared with burning eyes that the rising waters of his soul could hardly quench. Have you ever seen the wild spirit of the sea wake in a captive gull when the wind came on to blow? So wrought the spirit of his mountains on Geoletti. I think there was not one of us whose soul did not respond in some measure to the tragic) pathos of that revelation. For what trifling messes of pottage cannot the fool in us be induced to part with his inheritance !"
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