NOVELS.
A HIND LET LOOSE.t
Ma. MONTAGUE'S name is not known to the novel-reading public, but the reputation he justly enjoys as one of the most • Impressions of Provence. By Percy Allen. London : Francis Griffiths. [122. 6d. net.] t A Hind Let Loose. By C. E. Montague. London: Methuen and Co. [6s.] brilliant and accomplished journalists lends a peculiar interest to his first venture in a new field. Let us say at once that the expectations thus aroused are amply fulfilled. A Hind Let Loose is a tremendous tour de force. Viewed as an intellectual entertainment, it is an immensely stimulating, and even engrossing, performance. But if any one is rashly minded to infer that because it is written by a journalist it must be the product of a slack or a facile pen, he will be making a great mistake. Though the meaning is always there, and worth getting at, it is not always grasped at a first reading. The proportion of dialogue to commentary is less than the average, and the commentary is deliberately, fatiguingly picturesque. Mr. Montague, like Virgil, disdains to say a plain thing in a plain way. His use of metaphor—though it is generally illuminative—amounts to a passion. His text is charged with literary allusions. If he quotes Browning, he apologises for the "worn lines." He has drunk deeply at the Meredithian spring, and now and again we encounter asphyxiating sentences in the style of Mr. Henry James, e.g.: "How beastly percipient, Dick felt, the beggar's face was; nothing, indeed, distinct enough to resent in the sense that there was in Fay's eyes of the meanness of hinting that Dick was neglecting the work from which the hinter had kept him." But the peculiar quality of Mr. Montague's style is best described, or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, satirised, in his own words. Talking of Dick Brumby's fads, he says that "one was for a kind of writing ; not the right kind ; not saying what he had to say, and that's an end of it, but a plaguy, itchy fussing over some phrase, planing it down or bevelling it off, inlaying it with picked words of a queer far-fetched aptness, making it clang with whole pomps of proper names, that boomed into their places, like drums and cymbals in symphonies, or twinkle and mingle, shot with ironies, or rise and fall like a voice that means more by the tune than the words." In the exordium of Tom Jones, Fielding asserts that " an author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money." Dick Brumby held the contrary view, and so, we should say, does Mr. Montague. He does not cater for the general public, but provides the fare that snits his own taste.
The scene of the story is laid in a great industrial pro- vincial city—the hideousness of which is brought out in passages which remind one of that wonderful description of the Tyne at Newcastle which occurs in one of " Vernon Lee's " essays—and the action passes mainly in the newspaper offices of two rival journals, the Stalwart (Radical) and the Warder (Conservative). Finn and Brumby, the editor-proprietors of the two papers, are incarnations of the extreme party temper, and are so closely identified with their journals that the fiction has arisen, which they sedulously encourage, that they not only inspire but write the principal political leaders in each. As a matter of fact, when the story opens they are both employ- ing the same man,—a brilliant Irish journalist who under the name of Moloney distils Radical venom for the Stalwart, while as Fay he launches the flamboyant Tory thunderbolts of the Warder. The fact that one paper goes to press a couple of hours earlier than the other enables him to play this dual role on the same night, but the essence of his system is the devising of a series of labour-saving formulae which can be adapted to the exigencies of either side. The game goes on famously until one night when the offices of the Stalwart are destroyed by fire, and Pinn, constrained by sore necessity, appeals to his rival for the use of the Warder's machines to print his paper. Brumby, delighted by the chance of posing as a magnanimous antagonist, consents ; but before the inter- view ends Finn has heard Moloney addressed as Fay, and the indignant editors, shocked by the discovery of his duplicity, dis- miss him on the spot. The sequel is full of irony. Brumby and Finn, who always imagined that they wrote their leaders, are now driven to do so in real earnest and with disastrous con- sequences. Brumby is bombarded by letters from " constant readers " complaining of the lamentable decline in the Warder's efficiency ; Finn, more conscious of his shortcomings, is even more depressed by overhearing the brutal comments of men in the street and in railway carriages ; and these criticisms so work upon the rivals that they are reduced to solicit the offender to return. How to reconcile this with the claims of conscience is no easy task ; but a way out presents itself. Bach of them assumes that when the Irishman was writing for his rival he only wrote to render his cause ridiculous. Meantime a third editor has designs on Fay, in spite of the independent warnings of both Finn and Brumby, and the book closes with the successive interviews in which Fay commits himself, not to a dual, but to a triple, role of political ventriloquism.
Mr. Montague may be congratulated without reserve on the rigorous impartiality with which he treats the excesses of party feeling on both sides. His detachment in this regard is quite superhuman. There is decided freshness, again, in his selection of a vulnerable point in modern journalism which its critics have hitherto abstained from attacking,—the opportunities it presents to the gladiator who makes a study of formulae, and " standardises " his work so that it can be accommodated to different sets of circumstances. The practical illustrations of this method are extremely ingenious and amusing, and Fay's adaptation of a concert notice to an exhibition of pictures, and his quick-change transmogrification of a leader for the Warder into one for the Stalwart, are delightful pieces of fantastic comedy. The chief defect of the book, to our way of thinking, is that the mixture of realism and extravaganza blunts the edge of the author's satire. The choice of names, Pinn and Brumby ; the account of their personalities ; and the extreme improbability of Fay being able to duplicate his roles at all, to say nothing of his returning to his old game in an aggravated form after having been once found out,—all this points to caricature rather than satire. But there are moments when Mr. Montague justifies the serious tone of his dedication, and conveys the impression that he is drawing from the life instead of indulging in fantastic exaggeration. The character of Fay, again, is rather puzzling, for while his behaviour is most repre- hensible, he is represented as the victim of opportunity and temperament rather than a calculating cynic. Fay, indeed, after his wife, is by far the most sympathetic personage in the book. As for Mrs. Fay, she once or twice betrays Mr. Montague into sentiment, a thing he abhors. These limitations, a certain spiritual arrogance which is com- bined with the impartiality mentioned above, and the some- what " shoppy " nature of the story, necessarily restrict its appeal. With these reservations we can recommend the book as a wonderful display of intellectual pyrotechnics.
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