FICTION.
BEALBY.* THE great difficulty about a farce is bow to keep it up. Authors succeed often enough in making us laugh through their first act or through their opening chapters; but how rarely does our amusement last to the end of the show I The farce-maker has a double problem to solve. Not only has he to contend against his own natural tendency to run dry of entertainment, but he has to fight a dwindling capacity for appreciation in his reader. For the Law of Diminishing Returns has a strong application to laughter. A joke in chapter two may make us roar; but an equally good joke in chapter fourteen will probably leave us cold. Tho author, therefore, in order to be truly successful, must not only main- tain his level, but must positively raise it. The whole work must be a continuous crescendo of amusement unless it is to leave us with a fiat taste in our mouths before we are half-way through it. Every one will be able to recall one or two instances of a farce that fulfils this condition. Charley's Aunt is a bumble but fairly successful specimen. In fiction Mr. Hichens's The Londoners may be recalled, though probably The Wrong Bois is the most classical example. On the wholes we should be inclined to say that the solution of the problem lies in making the amusement depend upon a farcical situation rather than merely upon farcical incidents. A developing situation is more likely to be continuously amusing than a string of events, and it will also serve to focus the reader's attention.
Mr. Wells's new novel, Bealby, is a farce; and though it cannot pretend to the first rank of its kind, many of its readers will be glad that Mr. Wells has turned aside for a moment along such an agreeable by-road. They will find him once more in the mood of Hipps, of The Wheels of Chance, or of something even more irresponsible. No sooiological speculations, no unsavoury problems, are raised in these pages; they are entirely light-hearted, entirely simple- minded—designed in fact, and well designed, to relieve for an hour or two the spirits of the depressed newspaper reader. If Bealby falls short of being a first-rate farce, that seems to be because Mr. Wells has not fulfilled the canon we have ]aid down above. There is no progressive development in the story, no fundamentally farcical situation, but only a series of farcical events. Bealby is tactical and not strategic farce. Mr. Wells has concentrated his fun into three main incidents, one at the beginning of the book, one in the middle, and one at the end. These three incidents are extraordinarily lively, but the interstices between them are considerably less diverting. They have the merits of high comedy rather than of farce; and high comedy in the vicinity of farce is apt to fall rather flat. The story tells us the adventures of young Bealby, the stepson of the head-gardener at Shonts—the Marquis of Cranberry's place, now let, however, to Sir Peter Laxton, of Peptonized Milk fame. Bealby was destined to go into "aervice," and was sent up from the gardener's cottage to the great house to do his apprenticeship as pantry-boy * Beak: e Holiday. By H. 0. Wells. London 3 Methuen and Co. Eus.3 under Mr. Mergleson, the butler. We cannot go into the details of Bealby's recalcitrancies, but we may say that they came to a head during the week-end when the Lora Chancellor was staying at Shouts. Just as Lord Moggeridge was going up to bed, Bealby, in one of his most excitable states, pounced through the door from the back-stairs, collided violently with his lordship, knocked a tumbler out of his hand, and vanished in a moment through another door. Bealby was pursued by the butler :— " Mr. Mergleson reflected and decided upon his line. He came up the service staircase, lifted his chin and with an air of meek officiousness went through the green door. There was no one now on the landing, there was nothing remarkable on the landing except a broken tumbler, but half-way up the grand staircase stood the Lord Chancellor. Under one arm the great jurist carried a soda-water syphon and ho grasped a. decanter of whisky in his hand. He turned sharply at the sound of the green baize door and bent upon Mr. Morgloson the most terrible eyebrows that over surely adorned a legal visage. He was very rod in the face and savage-looking. Was it you,' he said with a threatening gesture of the decanter and his voice betrayed a noble indigna- tion, was it you who slapped me behind Slapped you behind, me lord P '—' Slapped me behind. Don't I speak- plainly?'—'I—such a libbuty, me lord I '—' Idiot I ask you a plain question—' With almost inconceivable alacrity Mr. Mergleson rushed up three stops, leapt forward and caught the syphon as it slipped from his lordship's arm. He caught it, but at a price. Ho overset and, clasping it in his hands, struck his lordship first with the syphon on the left shin and then butted him with a face that was still earnestly respectful in the knees. His lordship's legs were driven sideways, so that they were no longer beneath his centre of gravity. With a monosyllabic remark of a topographical nature his lordship collapsed upon Mr. Mergleson. The decanter flew out of his grasp and smashed presently with emphasis upon the landing below. The syphon escaping from the wreckage of Mr. Mergleson and drawn no doubt by a natural affinity, rolled noisily from step to step in pursuit of the decanter. . . . It was a curious little procession that hurried down the great staircase of Shouts that night. First the whisky like a winged harbinger with the pedestrian syphon in pursuit. Then the groat lawyer gripping the great butler by tho tails of his coat and punching furiously. Then .Mr. Mergleson trying wildly to be respectful—even in disaster. First the Lord Chancellor dived over Mr. Mergleson grappling as he passed, then Mr. Mergleson, attempting explana- tions, was pulled backwards over the Lord Chancellor ; then again the Lord Chancellor was for a giddy but vindictive moment upper- most; a second rotation and they reached the landing. Bang! There was a deafening report—" This adventure and the complications which followed it led to Bealby's Bight from Shouts. The rest of the book is con- cerned with the circumstances of his flight and of his final recapture. We must not spoil the reader's pleasure by describing these, and we will conclude by a word in apprecia- tion of some of the character-drawing. Bealby himself is very attractive, but the Lord Chancellor is the most enter- taining feature of the story. Even though Lord Moggeridge was an admirer of Hegel, it hardly required Mr. Wells's apologetic preface to make it clear that he is not a copy from life. " No one," he truly says, " who knows the real man will for a moment imagine that my figure is meant for him ; physically, temperamentally, they are' absolutely unlike." Finally, to balance the Lord Chancellor—why, by the way, are Lord Chancellors such attractive butts for professional humorists P—there is an excellently drawn tramp, whose philosophizing is the nearest approach to the sociological Mr. Wells that is to be found in Bealby.
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