Thorpe's Way. By Morley Roberts. (Evelekh Nash. 6s.)— Mr. Morley
Roberts, like many other writers of the present day, is in full revolt against existing social conditions, especially those regulating marriage. Like those of his contemporaries, again, some of Mr. Roberts's remedies for the present state of things are exceedingly questionable. He, Mr. Shaw (whose views we deal with elsewhere), and other writers of like inclination appear to
that the State is very foolish in not allowing educated young women to gratify their desire for motherhood and yet not be obliged to shackle themselves with the undesired fetters of matrimony, Putting, as do these writers, all considerations of religion aside, it is to be wondered whether they have in the least contemplated the consequences of their suggestions. Do they think that the State would be bettered by a large increase in the number of fatherless infants ? Legally, of course, the offspring of unmarried women might be legitimatised, but who is to father these unfortunate children during the days of their education and adolescence? The holders of these theories either despise the male sex com- pletely, or overlook the fact that the father should play an all- important part in the education, using the word in its true sense, of his sons and daughters. Again, even if, through the endowment of motherhood, the ladies were subsidised for populating the com- munity, would it be good for social conditions to have an enormous increase in the number of only children, or are the unmarried. ladies to be permitted to have several children ? If so, it seems difficult to put down their repugnance to marriage to extreme delicacy of feeling. This is plain speaking; but when such measures are advocated in the fiction of the day, the time has surely come to look closer into the consequences of these proposals and to speak quite frankly as to what they are likely to be. Considered as fiction, Mr. Morley Roberts's new novel is decidedly poor. We suppose he would consider the beginning very modem; it is concerned with highly unpleasant people who talk a great deal of very conventional nonsense about the immorality of every-day morality. When the mother of the heroine, however, proceeds to act in a truly Early Victorian manner, things become much more exciting, and the account of how the very ultra-modern hero climbs as nimbly over the roofs of his imprisoned sweetheart's house as if he had done his courting in the year 1870 is distinctly entertaining. In Mr. Roberts's pages we are glad to see that even his fictitious contemporary press does not approve of the fiction supposed to be composed by his hero. We are told especially of the "epileptic fit of insane virtue" suffered by the "Grandmothers' Gazette," "a journal sacred to intelligent animals and the middle classes." We can, of course, form no guess as to which of our contemporaries is indicated by this description, but, could we know, we should congratulate that journal on being the subject of Mr. Morley Roberts's moral strictures. The sexual morality inculcated by the modern school of writers is not particu- larly new. It was known in Nineveh and Tyre, and in the last decadent stages of the civilisation of the Roman Empire.
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