FICTION.
THE WAY OF AMBITION.* IN one of the scenes of his new and brilliant novel Mr. Robert Hichens gives us a genial glimpse of a. famous English com- poser, a handsome man, with merry eyes and a hearty laugh which seemed to proclaim 'Sanity ! Sanity ! Sanity ! Don't be afraid of the composer.' " Mr. Hichens does not exactly cry " Sanity ! Sanity ! Sanity ! Don't be afraid of the novelist" in The Way of Ambition, but he has undoubtedly made con- siderable concessions to the plain person in what the present writer considers to be his best novel. This is all the more commendable because the concessions involve the toning down of those qualities which have earned him his vogue.
If there is one epithet more than another which fits his talent it is " exotic." He has been in the main an amateur of the abnormal, or the supra-normal, excelling in bizarre situations, in the clash of sophistication and primitive in- stincts, in the contrast of the social hothouse and the desert. His best work has hitherto seldom been free from a tinge of morbidity, and we do not say that it is wholly eliminated from his new " aesthetic venture." But the hectic element is certainly less prominent than in any other of his romances of modern manners. There are plenty of queer and attires people in the cast, but they do not monopolize the attention of the reader. On the contrary, the people who really count, and who enlist our sympathy, have a certain core of simplicity and goodness in them. It is true that the most attractive of them all has white hair and blazing dark eyes, and wears a necklace of very fine Egyptian scarabs ; that another is a theosophist, and a third a musical genius. But their eccen- tricities are superficial; they are essentially sane, unselfish, and unaffected, and, in the case of two of them, untainted by contact with the feverish pleasure-seekers whose life is summed up in the words, " To-morrow we die!" It is the hardest thing in the world for a modern novelist—and Mr. Hichens is ultra- modern—to portray goodness which shall not be sentimental or insipid. Yet he has come very near complete success in two cases. This is no small achievement, in view of the modern convention by which the leading roles are so often assigned to the triumphant cad or the social mutineer. Mr. Rich ens, greatly daring, has shown that even an artist may be a gentleman.
Another self-imposed difficulty is the prominence assigned to music and musicians. Few musical novels have attained or maintained popularity. The First Violin is pervaded by a genial sentimentality strangely out of key with the tendencies of modern music, and Alcestis, perhaps the most beautiful musical story written in English, is as unfamiliar to the present generation as Charles Auchester. Mr. Hichens has one great advantage over most of his forerunners in this field: he is a trained musician who has kept in touch with recent developments and is incapable of the solecisms from which few of the greatest novelists are free. It is therefore all the more remarkable that the musician to whom he allots the chief male role should be, if not of reactionary leanings, at least inclined to make Verdi's maxim, torniaimo all' antico, his guiding motto. Claude Heath's antecedents and aims are admirably described in the following passage :—
" Claude was a gentleman, but not of aristocratic birth. His people were Cornish, of an old and respected Cornish family, but quite unknown in the great world. They were very clannish, were quite satisfied with their position in their own county, were too simple and too well-bred to share any of the vulgar instincts and aspira- tions of the climber. Comfortably off, they had no achimr' desire to be rieher than they were, to make any splash. The love of ostentation is not a Cornish vice. The Heaths were homely people, hospitable, warm-hearted, and contented without being complacent, Claude had often felt himself a little apart from them, yet he derived from them and inherited, doubtless, much from them of character, of sentiment, of habit. He was of them and not of • The Way of Ambition. By Robert Hichens. London : Methuon & Co.
them. But he liked their qualities well in his soul, although he felt that he could not live quite as they did, or bo satisfied with what satisfied them. Although he had lived for some years in London he had never tried, or even thought of trying, to push his way into what are called the inner circles.' He had assiduously cultivated his musical talent, but never with a view to using it as a means of opening shut doors. He knew comparatively few people, and scarcely any who were in the swim,' who were written of in social columns, whose names were on the lips of the journalists and of the world. He never thought about his social position as compared with that of others. Accustomed to being a gentleman, he did not want to be more or other than he was. Had he been poor the obligation to struggle might have roused within him the instinct to climb. A forced activity might have bred in him the commoner sort of ambition. But he had enough money and could gratify his inclination towards secrecy and retirement. For several years, since he had left the Royal College of Music and settled down in his little house, he had been happy enough in his sheltered and perhaps rather selfish existence. Dwelling in the centre of a great struggle for life, he had enjoyed it because he had had nothing to do with it. His own calm had been agree- ably accentuated by the turmoil which surrounded and enclosed it. How many times had he blessed his thousand a year, that armour of gold with which fate had provided him ! How often had he imagined himself stripped of it, realized mentally the sudden and fierce alteration in his life and eventu- ally, no doubt, in himself that must follow if poverty came ! He had a horror of the jealousies, the quarrels, the hatreds, the lies, the stabbings in the dark that make too often hideous, despic- able, and terrible a world that should be very beautiful. During his musical education he had seen enough to realize that side by side with great talent, with a warm impulse towards beauty, with an ardour that counts labour as nothing, or as delight, may exist coldness, meanness, the tendency to slander, egoism almost inhuman in its concentration, the will to climb over the bodies of the fallen, the tyrant's mind, and the stony heart of the cruel. Art, so it seemed to Claude, often hardened instead of softening the nature of man. That, no doubt, was because artists were generally competitors. Actors, writers, singers, conductors, com- posers were pitted against each other. The world that should be calm, serene, harmonious, and perfectly balanced became a cock- pit, raucous with angry voices, dabbled with blood, and strewn with the torn feathers of the fallen. The many books which he had read dealing with the lives of great artists, sometimes their own autobiographies, had only confirmed him in his wish to keep out of the struggle. Such books, deeply interesting though they were, often made him feel almost sick at heart. As he read them he saw genius slipping, or even wallowing in pits full of slime. Men showered their gold out of blackness. They rose on strong pinions only to sink down below the level surely of even the average man. And angry passions attended them along the pilgrimage of their lives, seemed born and bred of their very being. Few books made Claude feel so sad as the books which chronicled the genius of men submitted to the conditions which prevail in the ardent struggle for life. He closed them, and was happy with his own quiet fate, his apparently humdrum existence, which provided no material for any biographer, the fate of the unknown man who does not wish to be known. But, of course, there was in him, as there is in almost every man of strong imagivation and original talent, a restlessness like that of the physically strong man who has never tried and proved his strength in any combat."
The story is concerned with the efforts of Charmian Mansfield, the clever modern girl who falls in love with and marries Claude, to lure him from his seclusion, to stimulate his ambition; and to make him justify her belief in his genius by a resounding popular success. In the sequel Claude is so far infected with his wife's ambition that, against his better judgment, he composes an opera, not to please himself, but to captivate the gross public. C h armian leaves no stone unturned in the preliminary campaign, and slaves with feverish energy to organize success, but the, end is unmitigated failure. Yet out of this failure comes
happiness, since Charm ian at last recognizes that her husband has been sinning against the light, while Heath reali zee the unselfishness of her devotion. This is only the roughest out- line of a long and richly embroidered story, in which the scene shifts from London to Algiers and thence to New York, in which the stage is crowded with figures, typical for the most part of the ferment of cosmopolitan culture, and in which the dialogue: is maintained with unflagging vivacity and seasoned with abundance of wit and epigram.
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