NOVELS.
THE SCORE.t
IN the two long stories in "Lucas Idalet's " new book there is only one thought in common so far as we can discover, and that is the perverted idea that "all men kill the thing they love." In the second story, to be sure, there is no killing; but the incident in which a man, filled with a blind and futile passion for a woman who will not marry him, proves his potential power of conquest by nearly crushing her to death in his arms, is essentially similar. We are implicitly asked to believe—for there is no question of stupid revenge or jealousy—that love and brutality are primitively or funda- mentally interchangeable. The woman must be supposed to accept that as natural, for she is not surprised and betrays no resentment. We have noticed the workings of this idea in more than one French novel and play, but we have taken them as an example of the confusion of the abnormal and the normal by slightly overstrained French perceptiveness in the quasi-pathological study of human emotions.
In the first story a young Italian is dying in a hospital, having shot himself with a "soft-nosed bullet." The narra- tive is cast in the form of a confession to a priest. The young man has killed his greatest friend—a friend who had excited in him an absorbing devotion—for the rather inadequate reason that he was incited to do so by his reputed father, for whom, as we are expressly told, he had no liking, or even respect. When he has fulfilled his mission of murder, he learns that the statement that his mother bad been wronged by the murdered man was a distorted and prejudiced revela- tion made to him for a purpose. He bas, in fact, killed his • A History of the Church of England. By the Bev. M. W. Patterson. London ; Longmans and Co. [7s. 6d. net.] t The Score. By Lucas Malet (Mrs. Mary St. Leger Harrison). London John Murray. [ea.] own father. Why the murderer should have unquestioningly accepted the mission from his untrustworthy and inhuman reputed father would be more of a mystery were it not that the author is obviously less particular about the credibility of her story than intent on the glaring contrast and affinity between love and violence.
The theme, though we think it morbid, might be saved by a very large and ennobling treatment. In the Eumenides the Greeks contemplated the spectacle of a man who killed his father, not only for what was held a valid cause, but under actual divine guidance, and yet be was pursued by the Furies, who recognised no excuse for parricide. How the greatest of Greek goddesses pronounces on that difficult conflict of justifications, and delivers Orestes from the wrath of the avengers, is the culmination of one of the most purifying tragedies in the world. But "Lucas Malet" is not Grecian. To begin with, there is a mixture of motives, which, though it might be immaterial elsewhere, prevents this story from being presented on the only conditions attainable to the simplicity and directness of tragedy. The young man speaks of himself as an agent, as it were, of the lea talionis, of the law of inexorable requital, of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He has killed; therefore be must forfeit his own life. We can all understand that. But then he obscures the issue by speaking of his escape from the horrors of the prison where men (saved from death by what is said to be the humanitarian law of the land) rot away in pestilence and sordid misery. That is an intelligible reason for suicide, but it is at all events quite different from the other. And again, the young man speaks as though be had committed suicide only for his mental appeasement. "I am justified in my belief," he says, "that by letting blood I should cease to see blood. The red blot is gone."
We shall not complain especially of the unreality of the author's method,—the highly conscious and elaborately sustained language in which the young man (who is holding back death by sheer panting resolution and loses his memory at intervals) tells his complicated story. For, after all, the setting of the scene is exotic, and it is easy to take the whole thing as designed phantasmagoria or as a symbol. Even so the language falls into a "journalistic" style occasionally which is distracting, as when the young man says : "And to all this his salon, as I entered it, offered an arresting contrast, calculated to stimulate one's appreciation of his personal detachment and the dignity of his attain- ments" ; or, again, it falls into a just too " literary " form for the circumstances, as when he says: "The day was amazing in beauty; sea and sky blazing with rich clear colour ; the town, gardens, mountains, glittering in the sunshine ; Nature, filled with the energy of the vernal equinox, rising effulgent, triumphant, prodigal in desire and in loveliness, from her winter sleep." These are characteristic defects. Readers who have hitherto found in "Lucas Malet's" style strength rather than violence may hope to find it again here. For our part, while we gladly admit the opulence and vigour of her narrative, we have to confess that her preference for the brutal event and the naked and ugly epithet is distasteful. The passage in which the murder is described revolted us with its gladiatorial gusto, but did not move us ; and her provoca- tions are the more regrettable that they do not, so far as we can perceive, add anything substantial to the effectiveness of her stories.
In the second story, which is infinitely the more credible of the two, there are several pages in which an actress, the chief character, debates with herself whether she shall marry the man who a little later nearly crushes the breath out of her. Her reasons " pro " and "con" are as little spiritual as become
her sullied career, but they have not only an excellent shrewd- ness, but an unequivocal generosity which is not uncommon in the kind of woman who may be "bad," but is at least "a good sort." These pages are so well done that they have caused us to hope that "Lucas Malet" will recognise soon that her native power and insight can easily dispense with those adventitious aids to make people "feel" which are to us extremely unpleasant.
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