NO
THE WESTOOTES.*
WORK from the pen of Mr. Quiller-Couch is welcome alike for its literary quality and its point of view. To the sedulous novel reviewer whose sense of style is not altogether blunted by familiarity with efficient mediocrity a book like The West- cotes is a veritable oasis amid his endless pilgrimage. Of all the younger writers who have been manifestly influenced by Stevenson, none is less liable to the reproach of illustrating the canon relating to the exemplar wails imitabile than the ingenious "Q." With a fine sense of the value of ornament and of the unexpected, he is not betrayed by the avoidance of the obvious into a laborious quest of the recondite and the exotic. So much for " Q's " style, which, at its best, is dis- tinguished without being affected. And his matter is in keeping with the manner. His stories furnish a sort of literary commentary on Wellington's saying that the dandies could fight. The characters delineated and the incidents devised to give them play are such as naturally suggest a certain bravery of phrase. Mr. Quiller-Couch has never sub- scribed to that peculiarly odious modern convention which assigns the beau riga to the cad. He does not grope in the dustbins or drains of humanity, or deal tediously in irrelevant introspection. Courage and urbanity,—these are two of the qualities which chiefly appeal to him and con- spicuously emerge in the picturesque romance of the Napoleonic Wars which he has given us under the name of The Westcotes.
The basis of the plot is provided by the intercourse of French prisoners and English gentry in a Devonshire town in the second decade of the last century. Dorothea Westcote, the heroine, who lives with her two middle-aged bachelor brothers, Endymion and Narcissus, on the outskirts of Axcester, is close on forty at the opening of the story,—a plain-faced, gracious lady with refined tastes and a tender heart. Endymion is a benevolent despot, Narcissus an easy- going antiquary, and Dorothea, who out of loyalty to her brothers has led a self-effacing existence till her youth has passed, is doomed by the irony of fate to lose her heart to a French prisoner, a young Provençal fifteen years her junior, handsome, accomplished, fascinating, whose real feel- ing for Dorothea is difficult to divine, but may perhaps not unfairly be described as half gallantry, half gratitude. Un- luckily, there can be no question as to the sincerity of Dorothea's attachment to Raoul. The situation is one that
• The Weaken. By A. T. gainer-Conch. Bristol: J. W. Arrowsudtb. London: Sinapkin, Marsha, and Co. L6s.]
might easily be rendered undignified or ridiculous, but Mr. Quiller-Couch has treated it with a charity and delicacy that rob it of all painfulness,—witness the appeal to the gentle reader that follows Raoul's deelaration :- "I pray you be gentle with Dorothea. Find, if you can, some- thing admirable in this plain spinster keeping, at the age of thirty-seven, a room in her breast adorned and ready for first love ; find it pitiful, if you must, that the blind boy should mis- take his lodging; only do not laugh, or your laughter may accuse you in the sequel. She had a most simple heart. Wonder filled it as she rode home to Bayfield, and by the bridge she reined up Mercury as if to take her bearings in an unfamiliar country. At her feet rushed the Axe, swollen by spring freshets; a bullfinch, wet from his bath, bobbed on the sandstone parapet, shook him- self, and piped a note or two ; away up the stream, among the alders, birds were chasing and courting; from above the Bayfield elms, out of spaces of blue, the larks' song fell like a din of in- numerable silver hammers. Either new sense had been given her, or the rains had washed the landscape and restored obliterated lines, colours, meanings. The very leaves by the roadside were fragrant as flowers. For the moment it sufficed to know that she was loved, and that she loved. She was no fool. At the back of all her wonder lay the certainty that in the world's eyes such love as hers was absurd ; that it must end where it began ; that Raoul could never be hers, nor she escape from a captivity as real as his. But, perhaps because she knew all this so certainly she could put it aside. This thing had come to her : this happiness to which, alone, in darkness, depressed by every look into the mirror, by every casual proof that her brothers and intimates accepted the verdict as final, her soul had been loyal—a forgotten servant of a neglectful lord.' In the silence of her own room, in her garden, in the quiet stir of household duties, and again during the long evenings while she sat knitting by the fire and her brothers talked, she had pondered much upon love and puzzled herself with many questions. She had watched girls and their lovers, wives and their husbands. Can love (she had asked) draw near and pass and go its way unrecognised? She had conned the signs. Now the hour had come, and she had needed none of her learning—eyes, hands, and voice, she had known the authentic god. And she knew that it was not absurd; she knew herself worthy of love's belated condescension— not Raoul's; for the moment she scarcely thought of Raoul; for the moment Raoul's image grew faint and indefinite in the glory of being loved. Instinct, too, thrust it into the background; for as Raoul grew definite so must his youth, his circumstances, the world's laughter, the barriers never to be overcome. But merely to be loved, and to rest in that knowledge awhile—here were no barriers. The thing had happened : it was : nothing could forbid or efface it."
The complications that grow out of Raoul's indiscretion are handled with equal skill, and in the issue Mr. Quiller-Couch steers a mid-course between the claims of probability and poetic justice. The modern "realist" would probably have made Dorothea elope with Raoul, to be deserted and die in a garret of charcoal fumes or poison ; but " Q " is an artist as well as an observer of humanity, and he knows that violent or sudden or squalid death is not an indispensable element in a pathetic situation. We have only to add that the minor characters in this admirably written romance— notably the old French General and his friend the Admiral— are drawn with a most charming appreciation of the noblest qualities of French chivalrousness.
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