Mn. ARTHUR MOORE'S diverting extravaganza can hardly be included in
the category of novels "with a purpose," unless, indeed, the intent to amuse, in which it certainly succeeds, can be so regarded. But though conceived and executed in a spirit of light-hearted and irresponsible frivolity, it exhibits a certain demonstrable correspon- dence with the facts of life as realised by all who have at any time indulged in the dangerous pastime of practical joking. A hoax is a two-edged weapon, or, to vary the metaphor, it occasionally turns out to be a boomerang, and recoils on the head of the jaculator audax who launched it. Thus a friend of the present reviewer, who had an idiotic habit of causing himself to be announced at the houses of his friends under fictitious names or aliases, once sent up the name of a foreigner whom he had not seen for several years, with whom he was not personally acquainted, and whom he believed to be three thousand miles away at the moment of his visit. But by an unlucky coincidence the real Simon Pure happened to be in the room when his counterfeit was announced, with the result that the impostor ignominiously turned tail and fled. We mention this incident merely to illustrate the fact that the long arm of coincidence does occa- sionally intervene to confound and frustrate the machinations of the practical joker.
Mr. Moore's plot, however, is a subtle variation on such experiences as the foregoing. In his story the chief con- spirator, having invented an elaborate fiction to serve the interests of a friend, is persuaded by the sequel—some of the persons sought to be imposed on having seen through the hoax, and played up to it—that after all he was not inventing, but inspired by some telepathic influence,—that he was, in fact, only a puppet moved by strings in the hands of others. Paul Morrow, his friend, is a susceptible youth in affluent circumstances desirous of discovering some colourable pre- text for cultivating the acquaintance of a charming young lady to whom he had rendered a service on a railway journey. He finds out that she lives with her brother, Mr. Plimsoll Drew, "Expert Adviser," in Bacon's Inn. Accordingly, Anthony Wilder, the chief long-bowman, concocts a won- derful yarn representing Morrow as the innocent accomplice of a society of cosmopolitan Anarchists, on the strength of which he consults and retains the service of the "Expert Adviser." The girl, whose affections are already engaged else- where, overhears the interview, divines the motive, and, without enlightening her brother, enlists the aid of her fiancé to hoax the hoaxer by impersonating the imaginary conspirators, and in general by making the story come true. Wilder is thus. gradually led on to believe in the materialisation of the phan- toms of his circumstantial imagination. Morrow falls into the same trap, the" Expert Adviser" plays his part in earnest, and even his sister has uneasy misgivings as to the legitimacy of her methods, and the possibility of some real peril in the background. But in the issue all tragic complications are successfully averted, and the conspirators part company in the best of humour with each other. Mr. Moore has given his fantasia the sub-title "an Exorbitant Story," and the description is perhaps well merited. It must, however, be honourably distinguished from the great majority of recent similar excursions into the realms of the absurd. It has, as we have endeavoured to show, a certain substratum of Teri- similitude. Romancers unquestionably have a way of coming to believe in the long run in the figments of their imagination; and the tables are not infrequently turned on the perpetrators of practical jokes. Apart from this, the narrative is brisk, the incidents are ingeniously contrived, and the characterisa- tion neat and consistent. Archers of the Long Bow reminds one by turns of Stevenson's Wrong Box and his New Arabian Nights ; but it is a family resemblance, not a faint echo, and. we shall hail with pleasure any further efforts of Mr. Moore in a difficult but attractive field of fiction.
• Archers of the Long Bow, By Arthur Moore. London: A. Constable and Co. [6s.]
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