FICTION.
THIS FREEDOM.* A GIRL grows up in the straitened household of a country parson, where everything is sacrificed to the interests and caprices of not very agreeable male beings—the father and the two brothers. She passes to a boarding-school in London, and her life there, varied by visits to the house of a prosperous aunt, confirms her in her conviction that the world is too much ordered for the sake of one sex. She discovers an aptitude for business, obtains work in which she is highly successful, and then, when she has laid the foundation of an independent career, falls in love. Her feeling about men had never been sex antagonism, but a revolt against their social oligarchy, and she is most deeply in love with Harry Occleve. But love does not change her philo- sophy of life ; she will not sink to the ordinary housewife ; marriage and maternity are not incompatible with a business career for a wife ; the other view is only a relic of the old mas. online monopoly. " They say a woman marries for a home. Wrong, wrong. It's man who marries for a home. . . . Look at little boys playing—it's caves and tents and wigwams they delight to play at. . . . Girls don't play at that ; they play at shops and being grown up, at nursing dolls and nob themselves being nursed." So while she deeply loves husband and children and organizes her home life as skilfully as her business, she stands a little aloof from family duties. The most
• This Freedom. By A. B. M. Hutchinson. London : Hodder and Btoughtani 178. 6(14
modern type of governess is engaged for the children, and in spite of her affection for them she does not regard them as a more intimate and urgent responsibility than, say, a branch of her bank. The result is that they grow up in a world of their own, and one tragedy after another falls upon them, till the book closes with a stricken mother shaken out of all her creeds and lavishing upon the child of a wastrel son the hungry personal care which she had denied to her own.
This seems to be the theme of Mr. Hutchinson's new novel, and it needs to be carefully stated, for it is easily misunderstood. As such, it is a legitimate thesis, a genuine problem ; so would be the converse—the tale of a woman who thought of nothing but her family and saw every member of it go to the devil ; in both cases success depends upon the method of treatment. Mr. Hutchinson has the courage and intelligence to be a moralist. He realizes that the conflict which makes drama is in the last resort a moral conflict. There is nothing in his subject to prevent the book being a great novel.
Much of it is very well done—the childish imaginings of Rosalie, for example, the whole episode of Mr. Simcox and the insurance business, a dozen of the minor characters like the people at the boarding-house, Mrs. Ryke Pounce, Miss Keggs, and Miss Prescott. There is power, too, in the handling of the wretched Hugo. But to the present writer the last third of the book is a pure fairy tale. There is nothing inevitable in the deluge of tragedies, and though as a moralist he may approve, as an ordinary human being he is not convinced. Rosalie's egotism might conceivably have produced such dire results, but we are not shown that it must, and as one catastrophe succeeds another the effect, in spite of the author's earnestness, is so fantastic as to be almost comic. It is a fairy-tale denouement, where consequences do not follow causes.
Mr. Hutchinson has honourably won a world-wide public, and his new book makes one speculate .about the reasons of a great popularity. Good literature may or may not be popular, but some of the best books are tie most widely read, and there must be certain indisputable and fundamental merits in a writer who can cast a spell over vast masses of men. Precision and beauty of style, profundity of thought, an austere logic in the development of character are not essential. But there is something common, say, to Dickens and Victor Hugo which is not found in Flaubert and Henry James, and that something is a merit. In a passage in his Journal Sir Walter Scott wrote : " I am sensible that if there be anything good about my poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition. I have been no sigher in shades." " A hurried frankness of composition "—what is that but gusto, which is the passport to the plain man's affections ? It is most obvious, of course, in the romance of adventure, but it will be found in all novels which make a universal appeal ; the author clutches the reader by the arm and hurries him along, treats him like a friend, establishes a mutual confidence. Inform gusto with a moral purpose, and you get what for want of a better word we may call " unction." It is not a quality to be despised. It is apt, indeed, to be fatal to careful architecture, it usually involves bad lapses of style and much misty, excited, spasmodic psy- chology, and the lack of any spiritual askesis leads to strained situations and mechanical solutions. But for all that it is a priceless quality, for it reproduces as no bloodless analysis can something of the speed and passion of real life. David Copper- field and Les lifisera,bk,8 have an infinity of faults, but they rank by universal consent among the great novels of the world.
Mr. Hutchinson has the quality. He has many others, for the author of the first half of The Clean Heart has notable gifts of humour and insight, and the man who wrote a story which appeared a few months ago in Blackwood has a great power of tragic narrative. But it is his unction which has won him his millions of readers. If he will permit us, we would make two suggestions. A book written too patently to expound a thesis is a dangerous experiment for a writer of his type. His power is narrowed down to a single purpose and by its success he stands or falls. There have been many good novels and a few great novels with a central theme more unconvincing than that of This Freedom, but they have been saved by the ex- cellence of their " side-shows." Mr. Hutchinson is an adept at side-shows, but in this case he has denied himself and stressed a single theme, with the result that his most conspicuous talents are not given full play. The second suggestion is that unction carries with it certain perils which he does not always escape. He apostrophizes his characters too often, and descants on them and fondles them till he slips sometimes into a manner which can only be called kittenish. Also the drama is not heightened by writing " Strike on " in a paragraph by itself at the end of each phase of catastrophe like a legend in a moving picture. These things read as if he were caricaturing himself.
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