TWO GOOD NOVELS.* To say of a book that it
deserves to be read twice, is, as a rule, only a more definite and emphatic way of declaring it excellent. When, however, we say that Mr. Zangwill's new novel, The Master, demands a second perusal, we mean some- thing more than this. It is quite true that its interest is hardly likely to be exhausted in a single reading, unless that reading has more of care and deliberateness than is usually given to a work of fiction ; but the precise significance of our remark lies in the fact that the imaginative and intellectual motive of the book is disclosed only in the concluding chapters, and therefore, in order to receive a full impression of it, it is almost necessary to return to the earlier portion of it, and to repernse it with the interpretation supplied by the dinouement. With regard to any novel which is really organic, Respice finem is a word of wisdom, but to The Master it has a special applicability, and we should not be surprised if some critics were to say that Matthew Strang's sudden change of front is an artistic blunder, inasmuch as itis some- thing for which the reader is almost wholly unprepared. We believe that such a criticism, plausible as it seems, is really superficial. It is true that the course of events seems to be leading up to something else than Strang's renunciation of delight for duty ; but the personality, the character, of the man is really a more important factor than the circumstances of his life ; and if we realise the character we perceive the unity of the story. In the history of Matthew Strang, as in that of Mr. Hardy's Tess, character and circumstance are in conflict for the mastery of a soul. In Mr. Zangwill's book character is the victor ; in Mr. Hardy's book it is the vanquished ; and we believe that the former presentation is more imaginative than the latter, because truer to the normal facts of life.
Matthew Strang is a Nova Scotian lad in whom art is the once supreme object of passion. By tentative efforts in por- trait-painting he accumulates sufficient money to bring him to London and to pay the fees of an art-school; but his little hoard is soon exhausted ; his work fails to bring him a "living wage;" and at last he is, in despair, compelled to confess his failure. He returns to Nova Scotia, and, under terrible pressure of temptation, makes his one fatal blunder by marrying a commonplace, vulgar, unsympathetic girl, whose little fortune will enable him to continue his artistic career. He has sold himself, but he gets his price, for he is in London once more, this time to find success, not failure. Bat he and his wife drift apart ; her life is lived in the dingy suburban home, his in the town studio; and fashionable society, which has begun to pay court to the new lion, does not even know him as a married man. This is the
• (1.) The Master. By I. Zaogwill. London: W. Heinemann.—(2.) Het Debut. By Mrs. Herbert Martin. 3 Tole. Loudon : Hurst and Blaokett.
situation when he meets the beautiful Mrs. Wyndwood- beautiful to soul as to sense—in whose companionship he finds the inspiration for which he has hungered. She is drawn to him as be to her, and Strang seems to be drifting towards a second blunder that will be more ruinous than his first, when an accidental meeting restores him to possession of himself; and for the sake of fidelity to his soul he goes back to the vulgar wife and the prosaic suburb, fully believing that he is turning his back, not merely upon delight, but upon the art which is his life. In this, however, he is deceived ; the last sacrifice is not demanded from him. For a time, indeed, his energies of creation and expression become numbed and paralysed, but the self which has been saved from self asserts itself in expression once more, and the work of the Master be- comes charged with a finer significance, a truer distinction than it had ever possessed. Of course the narrative scheme of the book is very inadequately rendered in a brief synopsis, for the book is an unusually full one ; but it will be seen that Mr.
Zangwill's conception is rich in large opportunities, which he does not fail to utilise. It would be too much to say that The Master is free from defects,—even obvious defects. The early Nova Scotian chapters are too much elaborated, because they are not an integral portion of the work ; and though they provide some admirable studies of the life with which they deal, they exist for their own sake rather than for the sake of the whole. Then, too, the amount of studio-chatter is surely excessive. The impression of a certain society and of certain modes of thought and life, could have been conveyed quite sufficiently with much less of that minuteness of detail which is occasionally suggestive of cram, and which will pro- bably prove wearisome to those to whom the art-world is a terra incognita. Most serious of all, however, is the voluntary surrender of Mrs. Wyndwood, not because it is what is called "unpleasant," but because it seems to us inconsistent with Mr. Zangwill's conception of a nature which, passionate as it is, is represented as singularly pure and selfless. These are faults of which the reader will, according to his temperament, make much or little; but even he who makes the most of them must admit that The Master is a novel of marked ability and great interest.
There are fashions in literary themes as in everything else.
The memory of some of us goes back some forty years or more, when George Gilfillan was writing his Literary Portraits, Alexander Smith his Life Drama, Sydney Dobell his Balder, and Charles Kingsley his Alton Locke. In those days everybody
wrote about the Poet with a large " P," and in these days everybody, at any rate, every novelist who has a reputation to maintain, writes about " the artistic temperament." Of course a poet may be considered to have an artistic tempera- ment, but just now his particular variety of it has lost its vogue, and painters and musicians have taken his place in the public estimation. There is, therefore, something that seems quite natural in the discovery that, as Mr. Zangwill has given us Strang the painter, so Mrs. Herbert Martin should give us Erma Laniska the musician. To give to a review of the two books an appearance of balance and symmetry, one ought to be able to say that as The Master is a success, tempered by occasional defects, so Her Dojbut is a failure, modified by intermittent merit ; but the " shows of things " do not always conform themselves to " the desires of the mind," and Mrs. Martin's novel, like Mr. Zangwill's, is in its own way a good thing. Indeed, it is hardly exaggeration to say that it is an excellent piece of work,—perhaps on the whole the best thing which its author has done, and this is not faint praise. Of the artistic temperament there are many species, but there is one broad distinction which no one can miss,—the distinction between the artist who is all expression, all effusion, and who, so to speak, wears his impulses upon his sleeve, and that other artist who is not consciously and deliberately self-contained and reticent, but naturally dumb,—dumb, that is, if called upon to express him- self through any vehicle save the art which is his one avenue of expression. Erma Laniska is one of these dumb ones. Near the beginning of the book there are some sentences in which she is describing her shallow-hearted mother, but which serve as a revelation of herself r-
"` She is hard, Lisa, as bard as that marble slab. She calls me hard and cold, and she thinks she is not, because she can talk about feelings, and I can't; but for all that, Lisa, it is I that feel and she that talks. I don't think she can help it, I suppose she is made so; but all the time she speaks and uses fine words about her sufferings and her happiness now, I say to myself, These are words, nothing but words ; they don't cost anything, they don't
mean anything." She did not suffer much—not as she said she did. She hated to be poor and despised ; but when father was taken away,' Erma lowered her voice into a whisper, thrilled with strong, intense feeling, when the news of his death came she cried, and sobbed, and shrieked; but she could think of little things—of her meals, of her dress.'"
By a simple transposition of the lights and shadows in this portrait of Madame Laniska it becomes a not less faithful portrait of her daughter, who can feel, but not speak ; who can suffer in absolute silence ; who, in the ardour of a selfless fidelity can sacrifice what is indeed her life, and yet leave those for whom the sacrifice is made to think her cold, ungrateful, even fickle and disloyal. It is a type of character which the imagination can realise for itself with ease; but the art which can render it for others with a just distribution of emphasis, is art which is unusually fine and delicate. Mrs. Martin deals most successfully with the difficulties of her task, and she has
avoided with special skill the blunder which an inferior artist would have made in presenting Erma as a winning character. She is not this. We who are behind the scenes, pity and admire her ; but we are hardly attracted by her ; we feel that had we been the people who mistrusted and misjudged her, we should have erred with them. This is as it should be ; and it is not easy to commend too highly the instinct which has im- pelled Mrs. Martin to be simply truthful, when, by a very slight deviation into untruth, she could have achieved that obvious effectiveness whif:la, to the " popular " artist, is the one thing desirable. We hope it will not be inferred from the method of our review that Her Dgbut is a one-character novel, for it is nothing of the kind. In the course of an admirably constructed story there are at least four other persons whose portraits are not less satisfying than the portrait of Erma ; but in painting them Mrs. Martin's task has been much less difficult. It is as a study in the tragedy of unconquerable reserve, of a missing capacity for the self-revelation which wine comprehension and sympathy, that the book is noteworthy.
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