NOVELS.
THE TWYMANS!'
A NOVEL from the pen of Mr. Henry Newbolt is a wel- come refreshment to the traveller in the arid plains of modern fiction, and admirers of his distinguished talent and lofty outlook will not be disappointed by his new venture. In one respect it is particularly interesting, for while he has done as much as any living writer of verse to illuminate the best traditions of public school life, this, if we mistake not, is the first occasion on which he has dealt with that subject in a prose narrative. The early chapters of The Twyrnans give us a series of vivid pictures of life at two schools—a small grammar school in the Midlands and a great public school in the West Country. Stories of school life for the most part deal almost exclusively with games and play hours ; little is told us of what goes on in school ; and the relations of boys and masters are too often represented in the light of an eternal duel between rebellious youth and hidebound authority. Mr. Newbolt does not eschew this side of school life ; the discipline at Casterby School is of the roughest, under a headmaster of volcanic tempera ad with a great belief in the cane. There is a fight, and a brilliant description of a school quarter-mile race at Downton. But we may note one great difference between Mr. Newbolt's attitude and that of the conventional chronicler of school annals. His boys are not absorbed in their present: they have a hold on the past and reach out to the future. They are boys, in short, who are going to be men. So, too, with the masters. Mr. Newbolt is not concerned with conventional types—the athletic, the tiresomely precise, or the ridiculous. He writes of a school—the original of which is easy to guess— where there was a strong, just head, and where many of his staff were men of strong and original character, not without a touch of genius. The case of Downton was excep- tional, but few public schools have lacked one such master, and we are glad that Mr. Newbolt should have done poetic justice to a class of men whose services have seldom been acknowledged in fiction. Dr. Cumberland's sermon is no doubt Mr. Newbolt's own, but the inspiration of this noble discourse must have come direct from the preacher to whom he listened as a boy, and the spirited, tangential talk of Mr. Don is a happy tribute to another stimulating and unforgettable personality.
School life and school ideals, however, only form an episode in The nay-mans. The story deals with a dozen or more years in the life of the hero, and his sojourn at Oxford is
• The Twpmans. By Nenryaiewbolt. London : John Murray. [8:43
treated in the same vein. When a new edition of the- volume In Praise of Oxford, recently reviewed in these columns, is called for we hope that room may be found for the- fine passage in which Mr. Newbolt summarizes the charm of Oxford :— " The real charm of Oxford and the life men live there is not to- be seen or imagined from outside. It is not an effect of mere" sentiment, aroused by the presence of beautiful buildings, of immemorial customs, of gardens laid with ancient turf and shadowed by stately trees. It does not lie in the quality of the- learning that is offered there, or the pastimes and pleasures that abound in many kinds : nor in the prestige of the great names of" the past, nor in the morning freshness of youth. To all these- there is one thing added : the city is a fairy city, neither in the- world nor of it neither far from the world nor oblivious of it; it stands solitary, but nearby, as it were, upon the cloud-hills of dawn,. at the meeting-place of all yesterdays and all to-morrows, and its- life is timeless. While you are there—so the Percival of a later- day might have said to his younger self—the world of men will be always before your eyes, a vivid and curious spectacle for- your philosophy to muse upon : but it will have no power to trouble- you. You will suffer none of its anxieties, limitations, perplexities : you will be delivered from the pain of transitoriness, for though, you yourself will change incessantly, it will be only as thought and feeling change, to be incessantly renewed, and in all circum- stance you will be untouched—set in an unfading oasis, a point of windless calm. Give yourself up to work or play, as you will : it is not these that will haunt you all your life after : it is the- sure and certain continuance, the life of timeless, changeless, fearless perfection that we who have so long lost it so long andi poignantly regret.
Farewell, we said, dear city of youth and dream ! And in our boat we stepped and took the stream."
The plot of The Twymans is somewhat fantastic. Percival Twyman is the claimant to an 'estate which for centuries. has been enjoyed by another branch of the family, but before he is told of the family claim he has already chosen, the rival heir as his greatest friend at Oxford, has fallen in love with his sister, and has been hospitably entertaineiP by the reigning Twyman. Percival, who corrects his inadequate imaginations of Oxford by residence in her midst, is an attrac- tive hero in whom high seriousness is touched with romance, Inheriting his idealism from his dead father, he holds- his own against the influences brought to bear by his, mother, a genial, practical woman, and one of his guardians. The other—his sailor uncle—encourages his crusading, quixotic temper, and when the crisis of his life is reached he- makes his renunciation cheerfully enough.
Suggestive and stimulating though the story is, the total. impression is not equal to that produced by its episodes. Although there is one underlying idea—that the true adven- tures of life are spiritual, and are still to be found even in a life. " encumbered with Socialism, calling cards, closure by compart- ments, Church membership, and bathing regulations "—we are- somewhat distracted by the multiplicity of issues raised in, the progress of the narrative. Mr. Newbolt might easily have made three stories out of his materials, and the- book suffers from his prodigality. The extreme shortness of the chapters, again, impairs the organic continuity of the" romance, the elimination of Percival's first love is abruptly- done, and Althaea, Percival's true affinity, is too elusive to be- wholly satisfactory. But with all deduotions The Twymans is a delightful book, admirably written, full of a mills sapientia and showing at every turn the high quality ascribed to the hero by his uncle—" an eye for the stars."
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