IN his new novel Mr. Benson leaves that dreary and
con- ventional world in which he has chosen to dwell so long, and has the courage to grapple with a real human problem. His work, therefore, deserves to be treated with all respect, as that of a prodigal returning to at lewd a modified state of grace. His other books were amusing enough, but they had as little to do with the art of fiction as the romances of the Family Herald. One regarded his characters in the way in which the ordinary man thinks of casual club acquaintances. He likes the clothes of one, the voice or the looks of another, but he knows and cares nothing about what manner of men they may be. Mr. Benson's clever, facile " trait-portraiture " never attempted to give us a living man or woman, only a mannerism of speech, a trick of the eyes, or a way of carry- ing an umbrella. The action of the story was of that easy melodramatic type which gives the reader the same sense of drama as the movements of a biograph. In truth, the whole thing was aridly conventional, but it was so far better than other works of the kind in that it was fully up-to-date. Just as a biograph is a shade less spectral if it gives us events which happened a few hours before, so Mr. Benson achieved a spark of vitality by dealing in the latest slang, the most recent fad, and the topics not of last year but of yesterday. In his new book he has followed a new road. He has taken one of the eternal problems of human life, and he has endeavoured to work it out through the medium of characters carefully studied and laboriously realised. It is the old problem of age and youth and their attempt to live together, the old genera- tion proud of its faith and achievement, and the young genera- tion knocking clamorously at the door. A boy and a girl grow up in a country rectory, the children of an Italian mother, who died young, and an austerely refined father, a scholar, and the younger son of a noble family, whose life is wholly devoted to his faith. His family have no share in his ideas. Both have the religious temperament ; but in the girl, Helen, it is combined with a wide tolerance and love of the joys of life, and in the boy it takes the shape of a passionate devotion to the beautiful, especially in the form of music. When we first see them there is a wide estrangement between parent and children, which grows deeper as the boy Martin neglects his Cambridge career and devotes himself to his art, and the girl falls in love with a man who, otherwise an admirable match, is a convinced unbeliever. The father, torn between love of his children and his own ideal of conduct, refuses to yield ; and the boy and girl, in whose ears Magda's cry of 'Son' io " had begun to ring, choose their own path,—Helen to marry her lover, and Martin to follow music and join the Roman Church. Helen returns to compromise, puts off her wedding for six months, and devotes herself to her father, with the result that his hard fidelity to conscience is softened, and in the dawning tolerance there is the chance of a recon- ciliation. For Martin it comes too late, for, having made a brilliant success at his debut, he returns to the parsonage only to be stricken with fever, and solves the enigma by dying in his father's arms.
The materials are good, and up to a point Mr. Benson has made good use of them. For the conception of Helen we have nothing but praise. The girlish gaiety superimposed upon an hereditary seriousness works out its logical course. Her conduct is completely natural, and the feminine attempt at compromise—a sacrifice, as Lady Sunningdale puts it, to a duty which she did not believe in—seems to us the best and subtlest piece of character-study in the book. Moreover, we are convinced of her beauty and charm, which is more than can be said of most heroines whom we are enjoined to con- sider beautiful. Martin, so far as he goes, is good; and the father, if not completely realised, is carefully and tenderly drawn, so that the emotional effect is achieved, though our reason may not wholly accept him. But the chief success lies in the minor characters,—Karl Rusoff the musician, Stella
* The Challepers. By E. Benson. London: W. Heinemann. [Se.]
Plympton, Lord Yorkshire, and especially Lady Sunningdaler. The last is indeed a real achievement, for she is of the family of irresponsible, paradoxical women whom Mr. .Benson has filled his former books with ; but she lives, whereas the others were shadows. Her chatter is admirably done ; but there is a background of adequate understanding which makes her not only an amusing but an attractive figure. Her introduction shows considerable art, for she performs the part of a worldly chorus to explain, and also to s3t in relief, the spiritual conflicts of others.
Our criticism may be put in a word. Mr. Benson still suffers from the fault of his earlier method. In the case of Lady Sunningdale he has used what was good in it, and rejected the rest ; but he is not always so happy. It is particularly notable in his comments in propria persona on his characters and their actions, which are often done with a kind of false jocularity which jars upon U3 as incongruous. The same fault is to be traced in his frequent sentimentality. There is too much real passion in the tale to make the author's love of occasionally hanging over an emotion quite acceptable. In one or two instances, also, we cannot feel that he has quite succeeded in realising his characters and making them intel- ligible to the reader. The father, who in the main is well done, seems to us to get ultimately into a frame of mind which is necessary enough for the plot, but not quite intel- ligible, granted the data of his nature. His very sincerity would have made him more amenable to enlightenment, if ho were a Christian rather than an ecclesiastic, as Mr. Benson apparently would have us believe. But often the position is reversed, when the exigencies of drama require it. So, too, with Martin's conversion to the Roman Church. The author makes it clear that it was the crude impulse of a boy, but the fact that an act is crude does not justify crudity in its presentment, which is how the episode impresses us. Rather than look for blemishes, however, we would desire to con- gratulate Mr. Benson on a most desirable new departure.
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