NEVER TOO LATE.* TEIERE should be joy among the Muses.
Mr. Hichens has repented : in December Love he has written a serious novel. The plot is fairly commonplace. A fashionable woman of sixty, once a Society beauty, longs, even at her age, to attract the attentions and affections of you g men. She loses her self-respect in this attempt, but succeeds for the moment in gaining the love of a man of twenty-nine. At last, recognizing her meanness and her absurdity, she renounces her trivial desires and accepts the true and suitable affection of a man of her own age. There is a theatricality about many of, the characters. We are given, for example, a painter of genius. He excels Whistler in the brilliance of his remarks and Ben Jonson in brutality and kindheartedness. He has an un- paralleled astuteness in the judgment of men. He is a Bohemian and frequents the Café Royal.' The Café Royal,' it should seem, is the English Montmartre,' where genius meets the demi-monde. There is a villain, too, who looks a perfect gentleman except for an inexpressible air of the uncanny, the terrifying, the Satanic. And such a villain ! King of the Underworld, dark-featured, cold, calculating, irresistibly attractive to women. To get rid of him Mr. Hichens has to sacrifice one of the world's masterpieces. He does it quite cheerfully. There should be sorrow among the Muses for that. Perhaps as a mark of his seriousness Mr. lichens displays his intimate knowledge of modern literary and artistic tendencies. The more sympathetic of his characters read the poems of the Sitwell group and ask, " What do you think of Wyndham Lewis's portrait of Ezra Pound ? " Of course, he doesn't allow any of them to reply.
In his repentance Mr. Hichens is not thoroughly purged of sin. But he has rediscovered -his conscience ; and, in conse- quence, December Love is the best novel he has written. The English of the novel is scrupulous ; the dialogue is natural ; and some of the minor characterization is excellent. It is pleasant to see in Mr. Hichens occasional signs of an ability to deal impartially with his characters. He shows admirably,
• Doodler Love. By Bobert.Mohens. London; Cassell. r7s. ed. net.'
for instance, that two likeable people may distressingly fail to like each other.. His study of Beryl Van Tuyn, a vivacious, rich, beautiful, and hard-headed American girl, is well-poised : the reader may pass his own judgment upon her in accordance with his own prejudices ; Mr. Hichens has not forced an interpretation on him. For this reason she will affect him far more than the terrible Nicholas Arabian, King of the Underworld. Mr. Hichens is still only an apprentice to literary honesty ; he will probably find, like Dryden, that if for once he writes entirely disinterestedly, entirely conscien- tiously, he will produce not only the best work of his life, but also the most popular.
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