FICTION.
MULTIPLICATION IS VEXATION.
Race. By William McFee. (Seeker. 7s. exl.) IT is hard to believe that Race is the work of a single mind Rather it seems the joint production of a committee—a committee with representatives in all the households, rich and poor, of West Barnet, its headquarters, with members too in the offices of wine-merchants and engineers, in the studios of Chelsea, in Hampstead, in Rouen, in South America ; a committee presided over by a capable chairman, who has known how to reduce the experience of his lieutenants to order and present it, with all its authenticity and technicality thick upon it, in the form of a chart of modern life. Yet not quite modern. Mr. McFee has added to his studies in social analysis a study of historical development : the action of the book begins with the fall of Mr. Heath, subsequently to be the father of seven daughters, from that death-trap of the late 'eighties, the high bicycle. The persons of the book increase as rapidly as the poor schoolmaster's family ; but their multiplicity is not a warning against Victorian improvidence, for Mr. McFee knows very well what to do with them, which Mr. Heath, incapacitated by his accident, almost criminally did not. There might be grounds for comparing Mr. McFee's survey of human tendencies and endeavours to the divisions on a phrenologist's dummy ; but the char- acters are much more than types ; they create a place for themselves instead of filling one.
Race is a good enough book to raise the question of how far a novelist can properly crowd his stage. Obviously congestion is a merit in the picaresque novel, the nature of which demands that its characters should be here to-day and gone to-morrow. Indeed the longer they remain, as certain figures in the more nomadic passages of Tom Jones and Lavengro testify, the more boring do they become. Nor could one wish impeopled and unfeatured a great panorama like Tolstoi's War and Peace ; for a bird's-eye view of a desert with, at best, but one oasis would be extremely dull. But a work which has for its chief interest the development of human character cannot afford to multiply indefinitely 'the sources of that interest. The maxim, so consoling in real life, that " there are as good fish in the sea as ever time out of it." is fatal when it makes itself felt in a novel ; it unwinds the springs and releases tension. We simply must not be allowed to believe that living round the corner there is a man called Dick who is in every way as worthy of our interest and respect as Tom, whose acquaintance it has taken us perhaps six hours of reading to make ; and that if Tom is killed the author can produce Dick as a substitute, like a conjurer taking eggs out of a hat. Mr. McFee does nothing so crude as this ; but if his book at times lacks impetus and impulse it is because, godlike, he revels too much in acts of creation for their own sake : he introduces new characters without due regard to perspective. But it is unfair to labour this trifling defect of Mr. McFee's impressive and considerable qualities : his invention, his knowledge, his control over and power of fusing the most stubborn material. If he had not partially hidden the candle of insight (to use a Hassanism) under the bushel of observation, Race might have been a great book ; in any case it is a stimulating and remarkable one.
Mr. Agnew's Dublin Pride and Mr. Goldring's Miss Linn have a superficial similarity of plot : in each the heroine is the daughter of a Dublin professor, and in each the heroine leaves Ireland to seek her fortune, as it were, in England. But for different reasons. Kathleen Rafferty had to leave home because she contemplated marriage with an Englishman and a Protestant, a step her father, a con- firmed opponent of mixed marriages, could not countenance ; while Sally Taylour sought to escape the intolerable sur- veillance of her governess, Miss Linn, a clairvoyante, a theosophist and (possibly) a diabolist.
Mr. Agnew's colours show faint beside the darker imaginings of Mr. Goldring ; perhaps in any company they would be a little pale. Dublin Pride combines an ambitious design with extreme unpretentiousness of execution. At its best it is shrewd and unforced, with passages of a charming humour, and it portrays with sympathy and insight that character which can be of all characters the most tiresome— a woman with an inexhaustible power of making up her mind to change it. Neither vacillating nor purposeless, she would not let consistency override judgment, and the lives of three men were deeply affected by her (quite logical) changes of front. By emphasizing her artlessness Mr. Agnew has kept her selfishness in the background, and she remains to the end attractive and wayward, never a minx or a coquette, though behaving like both. But her character is too inconclusive to justify the inconclusive ending of the book, or to tempt us into following, very closely, the author's Thackerayan review of her past and speculation as to her probable future. The abstract problems of the book, its religious and moral issues, are its weakest point ; it is agreeable and often graceful apart from them.
Neither of those epithets would describe Miss Linn. She is the word " sinister " made flesh ; and the earlier part of the book, which describes her descent on the unequal Irish household, and her abominable treatment - of her cowering pupil, is very telling. Unfortunately there creeps into the relationship between the two women a hint of melodrama ; the black and the white magic cancel each other out, and Miss Linn finally appears as a fierce but beneficent fairy godmother, her vitality absorbed by snobbery and good works, terrible only to the dissolute artist whom Sally had, much against his better judgment, persuaded into marrying her. After its impressive opening we hoped for something better from Miss Linn than lively but commonplace descrip- tions of Bohemian life in London and Paris.
Yesterday, too, is a curiously unequal book. It was a gesture of supreme masculinity, the act of a hundred-per-cent. he-man, for the hero to put the Isle of Wight into a state of siege simply in order that the heroine, rigorously imprisoned there, might indulge her taste for a romantic and forcible wooing. One can easily detect the places (they are about equal) where this extravaganza, with its charming side issues of Cabinet Ministers kidnapped by freebooting suffragettes on the high seas, fired Mr. Davey's imagination and where it did not. There is considerable humour in Yesterday, but more facetiousness.
Of Miss Sybil Creed's detective story, The Shot, one can say little except in praise. It combines good character- drawing with incredible ingenuity of plot ; and only con- firmed lovers of the very horrible will be disappointed in it.
L. P. 11..t.wrizy.
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