NOVELS.
A LIKELY STORY.*
Wrra a wisdom that cannot be too highly commended, Mr. de Morgan postpones what most writers would have called a Preface to the very end of his book. Novel readers even more than general readers resent prefaces much in the same way that theatre-goers resent overtures in the orchestra. They have come for one form of entertainment and do not want another. But at the end of the play, especially if it is a good play, they rather like a speech from the author, and this Mr. de Morgan has furnished in the diverting "Apology in confidence," in which he discourses in a vein of gentle expostu- lation with the critics, English and American, who seem to regard it as a crime on his part that he should ever wish to write a romance that was not Early Victorian and Suburban. With Mr. de Morgan's general point of view we find ourselves in cordial sympathy. If this narrow view had been enforced in the case of Dickens, for example, we should never have had A Tale of Two Cities. A novelist should not be condemned to go on repeating initial successes. At the same time, in view of the quality of his last effort, we are exceedingly glad that Mr. de Morgan has.magnanimously decided on a compromise in which the two main demands of his critics have been substantially conceded. The time of the story is Victorian, though it is late, not early Victorian ; the scene is laid for at least part of the time in the suburb of Coombe, and he has placed in that suburb "the earliest Victorian aunt," to his thinking, that his pen has yet been responsible for. There remains the question of length. Many of his readers have complained that his previous ventures have suffered from prolixity. - It is only fair to add that thoroughgoing de Morganites find in him a himmlische Lange of which they can never have too much. Here again he has yielded to the advocates of abridgment and compressed his narrative within the normal limit of 100,000 words, or less than half of his usual allowance.
, Compromises in art do not always work out so well as in politics, but where they are so judiciously combined with an honest asser- tion of individuality as in the book before us, the result is eminently satisfying. Mr. de Morgan retains his exuberance in spite of conforming to the 100,000 words limit; he has not abandoned any of those characteristic but engaging manner- isms which are of the essence of hismethod, and he remains,
''01 Likely Story . "By William deli organ.' London: W.- Heinen:=4- [gs.] an unrepentant, a convinced, and a convincing admirer of that great era of which he is so faithful a chronicler, so dis- tinguished an ornament. Yet there is nothing old-fashioned; about the book : the most-carefully-drawn characters are, it iw true, those who are Victorian in manners and ideals, but Mr. de Morgan is a vigilant student of the younger generation,. and nothing is more effective in his new novel than his kindly satire of the dawn of Post-Impressionism or of the application of scientific methods to the study of the supernatural. Accord- ing to his wont the dramatis persona belong to three distinct social strata. There are first the representatives of Bohemian Chelsea in the persons of Mr. Reginald Aiken, artist and picture-restorer, and his colleagues ; there are the Suburbans,. some Philistine and others with • strivings after culture ; and there are the County people and Belgravians- The link between the three groups is furnished by a picture of an Italian Cinquecento beauty, -which Sir Stopleigh Upwell, M.P., has commissioned Mr. Aiken to restore, and which his- daughter, Madeline Upwell, and her lover, Captain Calverley, come to look at in Aiken's studio. The " ascription " is doubtful, but there is no doubt about the merit of the work,. which is so well painted that it has endowed the canvas with a magical power—that of talking. It tells its story—a. passionate Cinquecento story—to Mr. Pelly, an old connoisseur; while he is staying with Sir Stopleigh Upwell, and even its photo- graphs go on talking to Mrs. Aiken after she has quarrelled with her husband and returned to the roof of her aunt Priscilla, in her native Suburbia. Meantime Captain Calverley has gone out to South Africa and been reported missing. So we- have a disconsolate and neglected husband, a virtuous but unimaginative wife who has yielded to unfounded suspicions,.. and a heart-broken but high-spirited young woman of quality,. with nobody to help them but a talking picture. The picture,. however, does not merely talk, it observes ; and, while its own, story furnishes Madeline Upwell with helpful distraction, its- evidence serves to end the estrangement of the Aikens. Any- thing more disparate than the strands of romance and realism of which the story is woven it would be hard to imagine,. but the result is a triumph for the story teller. You may dismiss certain incidents as absurd and improbable, but you cannot resist the charm of a narrator who makes you feel as if you were listening to an improvisation. How any pen. could travel fast enough to keep pace with the ceaseless flow of Mr. de Morgan's invention is a puzzle which no laborioua. composer can ever understand.
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