NOVELS.
HIS PEOPLE.•
Ms. CIINNINGHAME GRA.HAM is a writer of signal talent whose disinclination to sail under false colours amounts to a veritable obsession. He has never learnt, and does not want to learn, bow to conciliate the gros public ; on the contrary, be takes a sort of childish delight in outraging or sticking pins into it on every possible occasion. He has a positive genius for putting his worst foot foremost. He is the Peter Pan of modern authors, the enfant terrible of belles-lettres in the sense that he has never come to years of literary discretion or reticence, or mastered the art of omission, but invariably writes card acieer. His interest in hignanity is described in the words of the narrator of one of these stories as " half- platonic and half-literary, with just a dash of Socialistic bias • His 14ople.. By H. B. Cuaninghame Graham. London Duckworth and Co. [6s.]
and contempt of the society in which she [the wire-walker], I and all of us exist." His outlook on the races of the world is very easy to define. Other things being equal, the English. man is always in the wrong, for extenuating circumstances can always be pleaded on behalf of the Arab, the Spaniard, the Gaucho, or the Mexican, and he never mentions an instance of cruelty or vice amongst the more primitive peoples without quoting a parallel from Piccadilly or Mayfair. Like the Irishman, he clearly holds that "the ways of Providence are unscrupulous," while in regard to morality be expresses a preference for "the larger or Latin way," as being cleaner than the life in Anglo-Saxon lands, " where nature being what it is, the same things happen, but are rendered meaner by conceal- ment." A chronic sufferer from "the nostalgia of the open plains, the horses and the wild free life" of the desert or the pampas, be assumes throughout the attitude of the anti-com- mercial traveller, civilisation representing for him a vicious circle in which, as man emerges from barbarism, he enslaves Nature, only to be in turn enslaved by progress with its "ten thousand unnecessary wants, become necessities." Hence he is never so happy as when he discovers some forgotten nook, like the Camargue, whose individuality the tide of civilisation has failed to submerge, or recalls the condition of outlying and outlandish places before the advent of steam and other instruments of progress. And yet mixed up with all this admiration of the unsophisticated past there is a strong vein of humanitarianism in Mr. Cunninghame Graham,—a keen sympathy with the weaker side, especially if it is repre- sented by a woman, which it is mighty hard to reconcile with the apotheosis of primitive or patriarchal man which is implicit in most of these narratives. But we have no desire to attempt so hopeless a task as that of evolving a consistent philosophy of life from these capricious chapters. Mr. Ounninghame Graham is not to be pigeon. holed or cross-examined, but to be taken for what he is, an extremely picturesque and incorrigible Iahmaelite, always " agin" any Government, descending in a moment from a plane of distinction or poetical tenderness to the level of a guttersnipe; disgusting and delighting one on the same page ; yet, when the worst has been said against his errors in taste and temper, commanding admiration by his vivid por- traiture, the intermittent but undeniable charm of his style, and his Quixotic championship of the unsuccessful.
Of the sketches and portraits which make up this collection, some half-a-dozen are quite first-rata—notably the wonderful study of "the intense and ancient life "of the Camarguais ; the portrait of the banished Emir; and the episode of the home- coming of the Toledan Spaniard, who, after amassing a fortune in Mexico, finds that all his relations and friends are dead or dispersed. There is a fine touch in the last para- graph, which describes how he wandered down to the river at night and gazed into the stream :—
" A chilly wind blew feathery clouds across the moon. Alga was rising and the Three Diaries, with their gleaming lamps cut through the blackness of the night as diamonds cut glass, joining the earth and sky together with a long beam of light. The battlemented walls outlined against the sky seemed drawn in charcoal, and as the traveller stood leaning on the bridge the Tagus thirstily lapped up against the piers, whilst on its surface came a murmuring as of choked voices striving to be heard, which seemed to greet him, as if the Romans, Arabs, and the Gotha pitied his loneliness, and were stretching out their hands."
Admirable also is the picture of Gualeguayclni, the Gaucho town on the edge of the "camp," before the railway vulgarised it, and, most delicate and graceful of all, the " reconstitution " of the personality and surroundings of a Georgian votaress of botany, "the all-heal of old maids that gentle science, so fit for bruised and disappointed minds." That the same pen could have given us the tawdry and repulsive melodrama entitled " Signalled " is only one out of many instances of that entire absence of self-criticism which mars these brilliant but unequal pages.
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