NOVELS.
PETER HOMUNCIILLTS.*
BREEDING is supposed to prove itself in its liberties. A man is to be judged by the ease and confidence with which he moves along an uncertainly marked frontier of good taste and good manners without ever transgressing it. It follows that there are men who, in search of the bubble social reputation, conspicuously challenge the same danger and as conspicuously fail to keep on the right side of the line. The cub whom Mr. Canaan makes the hero of his story is one of these. In learning in his audacious, imitative way to be a gentle- man, and incidentally a man of letters, he succeeds in being almost incessantly offensive. This is not said in explicit condemnation of the story, as on p. 170 the author remarks : "For the first time in his life Peter was bored, and Peter bored was twenty times as offensive as Peter cock-a-hoop." Mr. Canaan, therefore, produces an effect which be expressly set out to produce. We are thankful that Peter was not more often bored, but we are still left in doubt as to the degree of Peter's offensiveness in Mr. Cannan's eyes, for we cannot honestly say that Peter was often " cock-a-hoop." He had his moments of exhilaration, if an unwarrantable and insolent air of superiority may be taken as covering that state, but he was more usually in a condition of morbid and hysterical bitterness and mortification. Again, this statement is no explicit condemnation of the story ; knowing that the author means Peter Davies to be offensive, we need not trouble about the degree of offensiveness intended, but have only to acknowledge his success in general terms. His scheme, which is quite a good one, is to describe the youthful days of a man who has brains and social adaptability, —the latter quality less common in Englishmen than in any European race; to conduct him from one class of life to a higher ; to help him to take some intellectual ballast on board ; above all, to see hint through two affairs of calf-love, which leave him ultimately no sadder than such affairs do leave young men; and thus to commit him to the world with his future nearly all before him, and with no ransoms to pay.
The cld formula of the "good idea badly worked out" may be applied here with some explanatory reservation. Mr.
• Peed, Homunculus. By Gilbert Cumin. London W. Heinemann. [Cc] Canaan is distinctly clever ; but to be candid, we must say that the offensiveness does not belong entirely to Peter Davies. Mr. Cannan appears to be anxious to show that he is emanci- pated and accepts no fetters. His mistake is to suppose that it is an important matter to show this. We do not know whether be is young, but his manner would certainly be less unbecoming to youth than to age. It is too conscious of itself and too introspective. If he will take our advice, which is sin- cerely offered, because, in our opinion, he is a brand well worth plucking from the burning, lie will not be so desperately afraid, as he betrays himself to be here, of relaxing the tautness of his epigrams, and of being now and again simple, comfortable, and placid. Some of the epigrams are good, some are all glitter without substance, some are platitudes. Staccato writing and staccato emotions become wearisome after a time, and highly elliptical conversations are not necessarily accept- able because at least one great master of fiction has employed them not incompatibly with a high subtlety in studying character. Mr. Canaan would do much better to think less of shooting epigrams into the air, where they drift like spiders' threads waiting to be attached to something—they have no rela- tion that we can determine to life or the progress of the story— and to think more of excluding absurdities from such a mundane affair as the narrative, which after all is indispensable, and may as well be credible. For instance, he fits into the space of half-an-hour a visit to a lady's drawing-room, where a con- siderable conversation takes place, and a journey half across London, and at the end Peter has ten minutes in hand. Lastly, Mr. Cannel' should verify his Latin and Greek quota- tions. When these are inaccurate they are a peculiarly gratuitous disfigurement. If he can rid himself of an apparent predisposition to believe that people are uninterest- ing who have a simple and definable object in life, and who are not in a continual state of intellectual or spiritual insurgency (which incidentally has the effect of making many of his characters painfully alike), we believe that the qualities which refuse to be disguised even in this story will assert themselves and place him well above the ranks of the ordinary writers of fiction.
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