FICTION.
HT OTHER DAYS"
IN one sense this is a novel of to-day; but as it was written before the war and without any anticipation of its imminence, Mrs. Sidgwick has emphasized this detachment in her title. It is perhaps just as well that a novelist should make the point clear, but no one who turns to fiction for an anodyne can find any cause of complaint against a story in which the trials and troubles are only those of normal times of peace and the convention of a happy ending is vigorously and effectively upheld.
A long and admiring study of Mrs. Sidgwick's novels brings home to the present writer certain predilections and limitations in her outlook. The limitations are self-imposed and wise : for she never handles a theme that overtasks her strength. She is contented, like one of the minor characters in her book, to write "novels of a quiet kind," her aim being to entertain and not to harrow or perplex. As for Mra. Sidgwick's special predilection, it is to exhibit the misfortunes of meritorious and attractive people who, through no fault of their own, have come down in the world and are dependent on the bounty of angular, oppressive, purse-proud, and often frankly odious relatives or patrons. These dependants have all the virtues plus charm and wit and good looks, and they always manage to emancipate themselves in the long run. The only fault that we have to find with these refined and charming victims of vulgarity and opulence is that they do not take a more active hand in rescuing themselves from their oppressors. Mrs. Sidgwick is quite true to nature in representing these tyrants as impervious to satire or criticism, and we do not ask for any dramatic or sensational turning of the tables. You cannot defeat people like Sir Lucius and Lady Tuft. All their investments are in gilt-edged securities ; they commit no crimes, and walk through the world mail-clad in invulnerable complacency. But that the adorable Mrs. Clondesley should have endured the role of pensioner for fifteen years after her estrangement from her artist husband is nothing short of amazing. Simon Clondealey certainly had behaved very badly, but Mrs. Cloudesley had £200 a year of her own and a houseful of furniture. However, we are not quarrelling with her sub- missiveness, or with her lack of enterprise in making inquiries about her husband, whom she never ceased to adore, since if it had not been for these qualities we should never have been regaled with the admirable portraits of Sir Lucius and Lady Tuft, perfect specimens each of them of " shiny " and smug respectability. At the end of the fifteen years, at whioh time we first make her acquaintance, Rosalind Cloudesley, the daughter, is nineteen, and it is tuber judicious insubordination, coupled with pique at being jilted by her cousin Tony Tuft, that we owe the release of Mrs. Clondesley and her daughter from the elmekles of villadom and their flight to a cottage in • In Other Dag,. By lire. Allred Sidgeick, London: Nothnen and CO. .(611.3 Oornwall, in the centre of an art colony. Of the artists and their genial camaraderie Mrs. Sidgwick gives us a picture that is altogether engaging. The refugees are taken to the heart of the community, and all goes well for a while. Rosalind speedily consoles herself for the perfidy of the faithless Tony, whom she never really loved, and who was quite unworthy of her, in the companionship of Dan Merivale, a young painter of great promise and good heart. Unfortunately the situation is complicated by the outrageous behaviour of Miss Veronica Teal, a young lady of no talent but great powers of fascination, and still more by the sudden arrival of the errant husband, Simon Cloadesley, who, in the fifteen years since he parted company from his wife, had achieved a European reputation. The atrocity of Veronica's conduct was twofold. Failing in her bold effort to assert her proprietary rights in Dan Merivale, she then devoted all her energies to spoiling the reconciliation of Simon and his wifo. How these efforts were frustrated, and how she finally succeeded in detaching Tony from the bride of his parents' choice, is told with great vivacity in these pages. But Mrs. Sidgwick is much more than a mere entertainer, and can be serious on occasion to the best purpose, as when, for example, she describes the first real reunion of husband, wife, and child after their long and quite unnecessary separation :- "Ii "It was an odd supper party. The three people who should have led an intimate family life fee-fifteen years sat down together for the first time since the mess bad made that life impossible. Alt these years he had mimed it too, for he mu not a man who strayed from one disorder to another, never happy unions ha was off the tracks. The traditional artist's life, that carious blend of hard work, orgy, and simplicity, its exclusions and its wide lines, had all cast their spell over him in their time but wore thin as he found his strength and reached his highest loveL Especially the orgies had lost their youthful glamour. To dance till dawn with models and their like in scanty costume, to ruffle it with men all more or less drunk and noisy, to rouse the night and sleep the day no longer seemed to him an essential part of that fuller life that makes the artist such a superior creature to the tame domestic Philistine. As the years went on ho gave himself so wholly to his work that without definite intention his life became methodical in certain ways. He slept at night because he wanted the best of himself by day, he had few associates because he often changed his luarters, and he would not go into ordinary society because its claims and its attentions exasperated him. He needed freedom and loneliness for his work, he wanted companionship in his leisure hours, and while he had lived the life of the Wandenng Jew he had longed for hearth and home, for wife and child, for the sanity and peace in which his mature work would develop safely. In all the arts there are men and women who never come to this serenity and to the end of their days find the fulfilling of their temperament in the abandonment of Law. They get inspirations from disorder and feel order to be sterilizing. By nature they are vagabond. Some are only irregular in their lives, some appal every clean, honest soul by what they do: and yet leave work to the world in which the honest and the clean rejoice humbly. There is no denying this, and the problem of it strikes at the roots of thought. Unhappily the evil they do spreads like a pest among the weaker-kneed and gives rise to a gospel of debauch without a harvest of genius. Because amen who can paint drinks, his followers drink though they can't paint, and when a poet celebrates vice in exquisite verse the young men of his school go suddenly to the devil but give their generation nothing but a base example. This will go on as long as genius is infirm and poverty of mind ia ape-like, but it is always the apes who will see things as their kind see the earth and the sky, topsy-turvy, hanging to their branch head downwards. Those who keep their heads right side up see that the giants of the human race are as various in their natures as in their works, and that it is as stupid and untrue to soya temperate man cannot be great as to say that an intemperate man cannot thrill the most innocent amongst you with the fruits of his in- temperance. So what we call a bad man may do good work, but what the apes call a domestic man may do good work also and when Simon Cloudealey wanted his home and his wife and child you need not thinkthat his brain was softening and his right
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