FICTION.

A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH.*

"GOD offers to every mind its choice between truth and

repose." So says Emerson in his essay on Intellect. The lover of repose will accept the first creed which he has inherited or which comes his way, but the lover of truth will "abstain from dogmatism and recognize all opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung." Although he suffers he is what the other is not—a "candidate for truth." Mr. Beresford's hero, Jacob Stahl, is such a candidate : an unlovely, rather feckless creature, but still, it seems, a candi- date. Whether he reaches truth, or what the reader (very likely differing from the author) would call truth, we are not told. Apparently we are to learn this in another volume, for Mr. Beresford, in the manner of Mr. Arnold Bennett and of Mr. Bennett's French precursors, is recounting the history of Jacob Stahl in leisurely stages, the present or second volume of the history reviewing facts related in the first volume, and

to a slight extent seeing them from a different angle. At the end of the present volume we leave Jacob no longer halting between the ideals of a "self-sacrifice which is not purposive,"

and of a "courage to grasp and hold." With the phase of bold- ness which brings us to this situation we are promised a decisive

change in Jacob's unstable character ; but the union with a woman who is not his wife does not appear to guarantee much more nobility than Mr. Beresford generally sets before his

readers. However, this union is evidently to be the "final mould" of Jacob's life.

Mr. Beresford is indeed a niggard in the presentation of attractive or disinterested motives in human beings. What might be called cynicism, however, is frequently no more than a manner ; the thing described lies underneath so patently truthful that it defies you to say that cynicism tins filched away reality. The episode of Jacob's self-sacrifica, which was not "purposive," is brilliantly done. At the beginning of the story Jacob is already separated from his wife and financially in very shoal water. He is for both moral and social reasons the very kind of fish which would do credit to the fishing of Hie Rev. Cecil Barker—that renowned reformer and support of desperate "cases." All London is the parish of Mr. Barker, who, at his Sunday evening supper parties, brings together such characters as reformed drunkards and women who combine subversive views with dangerous personal charms. He tries to keep them all on the side of the angels, though less perhaps to the honour of the angels than to his own. Barker's mind is an extraordinarily subtle amalgam of generous impulse, fine inspiration, morbid curiosity, and debasing egoism, and

it would be impossible for any one, least of all for Barker himself, to say where the religious flame ended and the illicit pleasure of playing with the forces of his personal magnetism began. Barker's character is by far the most

considerable accomplishment in this book, and it is a very remarkable one. Jacob does not understand that Barker's interest in him would have lasted longer if only Jacob's sins had been more striking and persistent.

"The mediocre, the easily penitent, the reluctant or fearful sinner, had no attraction for Barker. He loved his own like— the gambler, the desperate, the extremist in vice or virtue. Ho believed that be could mould the personality of Jacob Stahl as wax. Cecil Barker, with all his brilliant gifts, not least of them his gift of insight, did not discover that Jacob Stahl was not wax, but rubber. He could be impressed momentarily, and in time he hardened, but in essentials he was less easy to model than granite. Granite may be broken with a hammer."

Again :— " He was only selfish in the rigour of his self-denial; as detached from the small interests and concerns of life as a Yogi, developing his own personality at the cost of human sympathy. He worked by love and the profession of love among smaller

* A Candidate for Truth. B,y J. D. Beresford. London Sidgwiek and Jackson. pa.]

personalities, yet it is hard to believe that love was what he sought at last. He was a superman who worked for no rewards here, and none ever heard him speak of any hope of reward here- after. His eschatology was written in some sealed book that he never opened. His was a personality to command admiration and compel love. Even those who—like Jacob Stahl—suffered bitterly at his hands still remembered him in after-years with admiration and love."

The discriminating reader will be able to appreciate the quality of Mr. Beresford's studies in character from these extracts. There is a great deal that is quite as good. The character of Mrs. Murgatroyd, the female Barker, who throws a spell over Mrs. Stahl and keeps her away from her husband, in spite of Barker's campaign to bring about a reconciliation, is not developed. But the portrait of Barker with his undaunted idealism, his boldness of proselytizing, his swear- ing, his casuistical yielding to the adversary of points which do not matter—all these things may awake among some readers precise memories of certain highly original personages among our modern clergy.

The rest of the episodes—Jacob's experiences as a writer of advertisements, his lukewarm passages of friendship -with

the literary Mrs. Latimer, his own literary struggles, even the growth of his irregular love for Betty, which is to be the transforming element in his life—do not compare with the scenes in Barker's house.