An Affair of Dishonour. By William de Morgan. (W. Heine-
mann. 63.)—We may borrow, for the purpose of expressing our general opinion of this tale, the comment of Mr. John Rackham, groom, after he has related the local ghost story : "It's an ugly class of tale, to my thinking." Sir Oliver Ragdon, who is separated from his wife, induces Lucinda Mauleverer, the daughter of a neighbouring squire, to live with him, and kills her father in the duel which follows. The rest of the book is occupied with the account of how, unable to tell her the truth, Sir Oliver conceals the fact as long as he can, and of what happens after she dis- covers it. All this is told in a very powerful way. But the radical difficulty in making the story really convincing is this. The two characters of Oliver and Lucinda cannot be adequately developed together. The more clearly we are made to see what the man actually was, how absolutely mean and selfish—no impulse to truth and honour is suffered to go beyond a bare beginning—the more difficult we find it to imagine the truth about the woman. Is it possible that one who was truly noble—and this is what we are asked to believe—could have sacrificed everything, home, honour, conscience, for such a creature? We are told that the love of the one was high and pure, of the other base and sensual, but we cannot recognise the distinction. There must have been something of Phaedra, in Lucinda for her to act as she did, unless we are to revert to the belief in a baneful Aphrodite whom no human will can resist. We do not question the ability of the novel—when we get away from the story for a while, as in the picture of the battle of Solebay, we can appreciate this to the full—but as a whole we can but repeat the groom's verdict, "an ugly class of tale."
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