FICTION

. BAD CHARACTERS

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair. By Hugh Walpole. (Mac millan. 7s. 6d. net.) SOME of the most unpleasant characters in fiction, like Becky

Sharp, are thoroughly likeable. Indeed, half the art of writing agreeable novels lies in making the _bad characters sympathetic and credible. There is a kind of villain, the old melodramatic kind, who is so nauseous, so little like a man, that one is never interested either in his turpitude or in his ultimate fate. He is generally risible, and always a mere foil for the nobler characters. The case is different when a villain is endowed with really human attributes, when his psychology and his motives are in accordance with the general experience, when one can somewhat condone the sin for the magnificence of the sinner. Shakespeare so understood this that he made his villains the only wholly credible persons in his plays. Iago and Lady Macbeth, for example, are actually far more vital and admirable than their associates ; we know their circum-

stances and appreciate the reasons for their behaviour and recognize that, being the people they were, they must of neces-

sity have behaved as they did and that the universe was the richer for them.

Crispin, the scarlet-haired, white-faced maniac of Portrait of a Man with Red Hair is so suave, so cultivated and super- latively devil-ridden that it is very much to Mr. Walpole's

credit that he can make us believe in and at moments almost admire the monster, for certainly if one met him in a hotel, as he was met in the novel, one would refuse to credit his existence and dismiss him with " there ain't no such animal." Crispin specialized in a complicated form of sadism, but incest and murder did not come amiss, and the fact that he collected exquisite etchings from the worst motives was one of his minor vices. He had enthralled his own son, his daughter-in-law :—

" her face had a childlike purity in its rounded cheeks, its large brow and wondering eyes."

He aimed at subduing a harmless bachelor American visiting Cornwall, and had done horrible things to horses and old countrywomen. The action of Portrait of a Man with Red Hair lasts only one night, into which some admirably described excitements are packed, and Crispin is foiled at the last gasp,

three of the characters already streaming with blood, by a pmierful Cornish sailor who, like another Samson, brings an iniquitous house tumbling about the villain's ears. There is an almost unscrupulous cleverness in Mr. Walpole's way of flinging in a delightful picture of a fishing village on public holiday as a background to Crispin's enormities, and the whole story moves with an easy gait. Putting the book down, one hastens to reassure oneself that it was foolish to be so extremely anxious to turn over each next page, and that it was all very well for Mr. Walpole to remind us now and then of the almost submerged but existent " better part " of the red-haired Crispin, and to make the exhausted but triumphant American when all is over see a vision of his

" little white face crowned with red hair, but not evil now, not animal—friendly, lonely, asking for something. . . ."

We insist that we were not really convinced by so spectacular but unlikely a bogy. It is true Crispin is not a great villain.

But the novel is a masterly shocker.

Mrs. Nicholson does not force the heroine of The Dancer's Cat upon one as Mr. Walpole does his hem. Lydia Manuiloff

has a real if rather irritating charm, the grace of a clever spoilt child. It is not revealed until the end of the story whether she is in fact a murderess, or the helpless cause of a tragedy. She is a Russian refugee, young and lovely, who teaches dancing in London, is attended by a frightful old hag and goes out shopping with a Siamese cat trotting by her side. Small wonder, then, that Lady Glenforsa is bitterly angry when she learns that her handsome son Euan is associating with Lydia. Small wonder that she—and the reader too—gradually con- cludes that the dancer is responsible for Euan's death. It is only gradually, almost tantalizingly, that Lydia's rather odd motives, her odd philanthropy, courage and unselfishness become as apparent as her eccentricity, her wilfulness, men- dacity and sententiousness. She even has and both preaches and practises some odd, rather charming anti-Bolshevist propaganda.

Mrs. Nicholson tackled a difficult problem when she elected to contrast such an original with an arrogant, admirable English matron so as to lead us to suppose she was in fact con- trasting the pre-War and the post-War European. A touch too much sweetness, something perilously near sentimentality at times, spoils her effects, but the characters are cleanly drawn, the story moves forward by its own impetus, and one feels that while this novel is quite good and most charming to read, that Mrs. Nicholson's next might quite well be much better. She has a nice sense of emotional situations, and she has the tact to make her Russian dancer no vulgar home- wrecker but a sort of Dame aux Camellias up to date with all the contemporary young woman's moral sanity : a heroine who precipitates tragedy but with whom even at her most irritating one can still sympathize broadly.