NOVELS.
AN AMERICAN PRODIGAL!
Mn. G. H. LORIMER has already made himself known to
English readers by his Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son. This novel has all the verve, vividness, and what might be called disguised sagacity of those letters, but we cannot think that the novel is Mr. Lorimer's true medium. At least he has yet to prove that it is. The story of the prodigal son of a "new rich" millionaire is entertaining at every point, but as it invites judgment as a novel it may be as well to remark that it is scarcely a novel at all. It is a series of boisterous episodes; and though it would be untrue to say that the episodes are not appropriate or relevant to the persons—for every deed is relevant to its author—it is quite just to say that there is no interdependence of character, no interior explanation of the action. The plot and the exposi- tion of character run on parallel lines; they never meet. There are two reasons, however, why English readers will like this book,—first, because most of the episodes are delightfully droll in themselves; and secondly, because the writing is a liberal education in the American language. For ourselves, we feel that our interest comes chiefly under the second head. It would be a dull and incompetent criticism which simply remarked : " This is slang," and expressed approval or disapproval of its introduction, as though slang were something labelled and set aside, which could be borrowed by any one and introduced at will into a story like mustard into a salad. The widely ranging figures of modern American speech may come loosely under the head of slang, but they are really metaphors, and many of them are astonishingly good metaphors. Metaphor is the essential thing, for example, in Mr. George Ade's Fables in Slang. Another point to notice is that American " slang " in this sense is much less conservative than our slang. It readily enlarges its borders ; a writer may produce a book of it, mostly of his own invention, and get it at once bodily received into the language. Mr. Lorimer starts off his style at a tremendous "bat" which made us wonder whether his memory or his invention would last out. Frankly, we were relieved to find that it did not, for even such fertility as his can be overdone, and the incessant use of the superlative degree, or its equivalents, is ultimately as cramping in an American writer as it is in an English. The first episode in the prodigal's career with which we are made acquainted secures his dismissal from Harvard. His father, who can neither understand nor tolerate trifling with life, cuts him off with very little money and places him in the mill of business. Before long the prodigal is leading a strike against his father.
He has no particular principles, but hates the atmosphere of wealth—in otheis. He describes a dinner in a rich house :—
"I was the only poor person at the dinner, and the footman would n't have let me in if he had n't been tipped off that I had expectations. It was a gathering of the hope-to-get-in and the almost-in just-rich. Mrs. Storer, standing on a forty-thousand- dollar rug, under a sixty-thousand-dollar near-Raphael, in the hundred-thousand-dollar grand salon of her two-million-dollar chateau—by Bill D'Obbins out of Mansart—and looking with her hawser of pearls and her peck of tasty little Kohinoors like • Jack Spuriock—Prodigal. By George Horace Lorimer. With Illustrations b P. B. (huger. London : John Murray. [en] the Queen of the Amazons leading the Grand March, introdnoed me to over a billion dollars. First there was Riggs—five hundred million, then Nortiger—two hundred million ; and consequently only two-fifths as great and as good a man as Riggs, and receiving from every one present only two-fifths as much deference. Last and least came Jones, a shamefaced, ill-at-ease pauper, with only twenty-five million, who had to be deferential to every one. I made a horrid faux pas right at the start by speaking in a hundred- milliou-dollar tone to a two-hundred-million-dollar man, and was properly snubbed by him. I could n't figure out why I'd been invited, unless they were going to have a small game after dinner ant wanted to use me as the buck. I had just received a fifteen- hundred-dollar sentence from Riggs—his income is a hundred dollars a minute or a second, I forget which—and was handing back a thirty-cent joke in exchange—when my hostess spoke."
After being " fired " from his father's business he becomes in turn a waiter, a "yellow" journalist, a proprietor of quack medicines, a private tutor, and so on. The old Confederate officer who becomes his partner in numerous schemes, some practical enough, some delightfully grotesque (witness the scheme for applying the " vacuum cleaner" to the grooming of horses), is a person one is glad to have known. He is a genial, ingenious, chivalrous ne'er-do-weal whose life is a kind of symbolical protest against too much hurry and seriousness. As for the love story, we cannot believe in this at all. If the prodigal was in love, as we are told, with Anita Grey from the beginning, he was a backboneless puppy to throw away chance after chance, and for no valid reason to estrange his father, who was always ready to behave decently enough. But the author, far from describing a puppy, makes Jack Spurlock simply a likeable " ragger." As another example of the exotic and engaging vivacity of this book let us quote from the chapter in which Jack tells how he became a waiter :-
"First I went over to the cashier for inspection, and she nodded her approval. ' You '11 do, Ferdinand,' was her comment. Now take that gent's order and remember this ain't no Waldorf. Our customers expect the boys to have a little snap and jolly their grub along.' I went to the gentleman and inquired his pleasure with : ' Well, Sport, what '11 it be ? ' a form of inquiry which appeared to possess the requisite amount of snap, for he responded with a demand for chops, eggs, and a glass of milk. Thinking to please my patroness by showing her that I had caught the idea, I sang out to the cook, Baa! Baa ! Cluck ! Cluck ! Moo-o-o ! ' and glanced fatuously at her for approval. But, instead of beaming back, she called me to her and said : 'Cut it out, Ferdinand. Them Call-of-the-Wild dicky-bird stunts is barred in this joint. We ain't runnin' no livery-stable. But everything except nature fakin' goes, just so you remember to always be the gentleman.' " America, it is said, has lived for three hundred years on a reputation for youth, and is still living on it. The present American humourists, who show no sign of imitating as final the humanity and spaciousness of Mark Twain, but continue to experiment in the highest of spirits, make ue think that the youth is a deep reality.
Previous page
