NOVELS.
THE COUNTRY HOUSE.*
WHETHER as the result of a natural process of mental development, or owing to the mellowing influence of success, evidences of a more conciliatory attitude towards the novel- reading public are distinctly noticeable in Mr. Galsworthy‘is new novel. The average man yearns in fiction, as in real life, for the companionship of likable people. A villain or adventuress is all very well by way of contrast and ex- citement, but the average reader likes a certain percentage of the dramatis personae to be sympathetic. He resents that classification which divides the world into the repre- sentatives of ineffectual virtue and of successful unscrupulous- ness. Mr. Galsworthy, it is true, is a long way off making wholesale submission to the old conventions of poetic justice and the happy ending. There are no wedding-bells in The Country House; but the fact that the ainadrnent avoids a scandal and averts a catastrophe shows that he is prepared to make some small coneession to the desires of the majority. More than that, he bee devoted a great deal of skill and energy to the presentation of three or four characters who are especially designed to win, not only the sympathy, but even the affeetion of the reader. It is true that perhaps the most admirable and delightful of all is a spaniel; but in the case of so strennoas a realist as Mr. Galsworthy we must be thankful for small mercies.
Mr. Galaworthy likes to illustrate in his novels the wotkidg of a System in all its strength and weakness, its solidarity and oppressiveness. In The Man of Property it was the clan spirit of a strong, narrow family which dominated the scene and crushed the life out of aill intruders. Here again a System is involved, though it is harder to define ; but it is to a great extent incarnate in the squire, Horace Pendyce, a domestic tyrant with patriarchal views as regards his own importance and the relations of master and eervadt, landlord and tenant, man and wife. Pendyce is a stupid, strong-willed, obstinate man—in many respects a more civilised Squire Western—with four healthy, stupid children. The girls are mere comely nonentities, a deseription which applies in the main to their brothers; but the heir, George Pendyce, derives a certain adventitious interest from the passionate affection with which he is ',yarded by his mother. Mrs. Pendyce is in the System, but not altogether of it. There is, we gather, a strain of unconventionality in her blood, the members of her family having occasionally shown an inclination to disregard the social commandment, " Thou shalt not be found out." Hence, while refraining from rebellion on her own behalf, she is always ready to condone irregularity in others. Mrs. Pendyce, in short, is a crypto-Bohemian, a lover of beauty, overflowing with com- passionate tolerance, and in the last resort largely responsible for creating the situation which threatens to destroy the equanimity of the squire and to wreck his family ambition. Mrs. Pendyee's favourite cousin, Gregory Vigil, is a visionary philanthropist whose chivalrous championship of the weaker sex is impaired by his ignorance of tho law, by a feverish disregard for conventional prejudices, and by a defective judgment of character. This defect is strikingly illustrated by his infatuation for his ward, Mrs. Bellew, a beautiful, reckless young married woman living apart from a drunken husband. Mrs. Pendyce, though a near neighbour of the husband, constantly invites Mrs. Bellew to stay in her house, though well aware of the ill-concealed admiration of her son. The attach- ment rapidly drifts into a compromising liaison, and Vigil, who has taken an active part in encouraging his ward—whom he believes to be an innocent and much-injured woman—to • The Country House. By JoLto. Galswortily. London Methuen sad Co. Ns.) obtain a divorce from her husband, is suddenly confronted with the news that Captain Bellew has filed a petition against his wife joining George Pendyce in the cause, and learns from her solicitor that she frankly admits the charge. Many of the details of the story are sordid enough, but they are not treated in a sordid manner. The obstinacy and courn,ge of both son and father are naturally drawn, but the real interest of the story centres in the unexpected self- assertion of the gentle Mrs. Pendyce, and the tenacity, amounting even to heroism, which she displays in her successive appeals to her husband, her son, the siren, and the siren's husband. In the end, Mrs. Bellew tires of her lover, who is in truth a most uninteresting young man, and her resolve to give him up enables Mrs. Pendyce, at the cost of a final act of self-humiliation, to secure the husband's consent to withdraw his action. The theme, it will thus be seen, does not differ substantially from that treated by many contemporary chroniclers of the week-end pleasure-hunt. It is, however, raised to a higher plane by the literary skill of the writer, his cold and mordant irony, his searching analysis of character, and the harmony established between the events of the plot and the personages engaged in it. As a study of maternal affection, injudicious and ill-requited, but none the less intensely sincere, it is powerful and impressive. Mrs. Pendyce excites sympathy and compassion. But the spaniel 'John' is an adorable personage ; indeed, many readers would rather share a dog-biscuit with him than eat six courses in the company of the squire's guests.
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