Horace Blake. By Mrs. Wilfrid Ward. (Hutchinson and
6s.)—Mrs. Wilfrid Ward has divided her book into two -almost independent parts : first comes the story of the long illness of Horace Blake, the successful, immoral, unbelieving -dramatist, ending with his return to the Roman Catholic iaith of his childhood and with his death ; the second part is mainly an account of the writing of his biography by his .daughter and Stephen Tempest, with the inevitable conflict between their desire for truth and their ideal conception of Blake. Now this division of a novel into two is full of possibilities, for it shows, first, the man as he was, and then, by means of gossip and criticism, how he appeared to those with whom be came in contact. It is to be hoped that Mrs. Ward will make the experiment of further developing her 'method ; it has been used in the writing of biography, and might be yet more successful in fiction; we would have, in -the first half, the man's thoughts, words, actions, all that he meant to convey, never the certainty of what lie did convey ; then, after his death, the steady working out of the impression -which he had left behind him. In Horace Blake it is the latter part which is the more satisfactory, for the conversion .of a man of Blake's temperament to the romantic Roman Catholicism of a Breton cure does not somehow seem con- vincing; and Mrs. Ward makes most vexatious use of the much-abused word "genius."
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