FICTION.
LUCINDA.*
ACCORDING to the recently issued official list of publications in 1920, the most notable increase is in the department of novels,
which shows a rise of upwards of 800 on 1919. But the novel has superseded and swallowed up so many other branches of literature that the classification is misleading. It includes propaganda of all sorts, satire, some kinds of theology, and is now the favourite medium for the irregular exponents of psycho-analysis. Any- how, whatever misgivings may be caused by the swelling volume of the output of fiction, they are not likely to be aroused by Lucinda, which is one of the best specimens, if not the best of all, of Anthony Hope's later manner, and, though modern in its setting, is informed throughout by an urbanity rare in modern novels. Such a temper, we may add, is quite in keeping with the antecedents and character of the narrator, the ex- diplomat harnessed to high finance; patient, courteous, tactful, and in the long run rewarded for his chivalrous self-effacement.
Books about the war, whether of fiction or fact, are, for various
reasons, natural though sometimes ignoble, growing out of favour. Anthony Hope has achieved a tour de force, therefore, in telling a story which begins in July, 1914, and runs right through the war in such a way as to avoid the susceptibilities alike of those who want to forget it and those who hold that it ought not to be forgotten. The war is there as a background, influencing the relations of the dramatis personae, affording them opportunities for service, distraction from private griefs ; but the interest of the recital is personal and romantic. The war • record of the young men concerned is creditable if not distin- guished, but two of them are diverted to non-combatant service long before its Conclusion, and a third is disabled by wounds from which he fortunately recovers. And the narrator, again, is the last person who would make capital out of his own exploits or the shortcomings of others. But this judicious handling of tho war nightmare is the lesser tour de force achieved by the ingenious author. His real triumph is the enlisting and retaining of sympathy in the fortunes of so strangely mixed a personage as Lucinda. It is true that she had a. bad start in life, as the only child of an impecunious cadging widow ; of her father we hear absolutely nothing, but the silence is ominous. Lucinda was no saint, and made no pretence to it : she was a Siren and a scalp-huntress, but not an adventuress. She gave herself to a poor creature who deserted her and then " ran away from a good marriage and a better man " in order to go back to an exotic scallywag, for that, to speak brutally, is what " monkey Valdez " was. The excuse is that she loved him, but, in view of the number of nice and good women who marry scally- wags in real life, it is adequate. If it be asked why, we can only fall back on the Byronic tag :- " Why did she love him ? Curious fool, be still: Is human love the fruit of human will 1 " Don Arsenio Valdez (educated at Beaumont and Christ Church) has charm, of course, but Anthony Hope has not altogether • Lucinda. By Anthony Hope. London : Hutchinson. Rs. ad. flak] suoceeded in conveying it. Lucinda was severely punished for her perverse fidelity to the man of her choice, who was agambler, adventurer, and shameless sponger on his friends, even to the extent of exposing his wife to the mortifying humiliation of making her unconsciously a pensioner on the bounty of the one woman in the world to whom she felt most antipathetic. For Lucinda was fiercely independent, never made " a poor mouth " about her hard and lonely life. She had, in fact, many of the primitive virtues and was fortunate in possessing a certain hardness of nature which enabled her to survive the shattering of her first idol with equanimity and could always find consolation in the simul- taneous exercise of her fascinations on her numerous admirers. How she retained the devotion of the best of them, in spite of her persistent refusal to let him idealize her, and triumphantly rehabilitated her position at the expense of her wealthy and respectable critics—all this and much more is told in the pages of a novel which makes no pretence to edification, but is just an entertaining and acute study of an attractive woman, but not a woman's woman.
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