NOVELS.
THE INTRUSIONS OF PEGGY.*
Triounn Mr. Anthony Hope has perhaps achieved his most resounding successes in the domain of mock-Royal romance, he has shown on half-a-dozen occasions that his talent for the portrayal of contemporary manners is at least equal to his skill in compounding mediaevalism and modernity. When there are so many expert psychologists at work in the former field, the possession of the wizard's cloak of romance is, on the whole, the more valuable endowment. Surprise is of the essence of recreation, and a novelist who can provide us with a magic exit from humdrum surroundings, or a rainbow bridge into the dreamland of adventure, is possibly a greater bene- factor to his species than the ruthless photographer of squalid actualities. Still, it is a great thing to have two strings to your bow, and we shall never quarrel with Mr. Anthony Hope as a Ruritanian absentee so long as he gives us such admirable results as are to be found in The Intrusions of Peggy, in which the glamour of romance is thrown over a plot which in no respect transcends the possibilities of experience. Good workmanship we always expect from him, and we are never disappointed. Though an industrious, and even prolific, writer —he has given us twoscore books and plays in the past dozen years—his work hardly ever shows signs of hasty or careless composition. He writes well, even elegantly, but without re- liance on artifice. His urbanity is relieved from insipidity by a spice of wit, a touch of genial cynicism. Yet with all his social insight and charm of presentation, he has never before invested any of his characters with that peculiar quality which makes the reader long to meet them in real life, or at any rate hear more about them. Now in the novel before us Mr. Anthony Hope baa to a great extent outstripped these limita- tions, and given us in his wayward, impulsive, but chivalrous heroine just such a person. By the creation of Peggy Ryle Mr. Anthony Hope takes his place amongst the tribe of benefactors. This is no mean achievement, and we heartily congratulate Mr. Anthony Hope on the feat of adding to the limited circle of characters in fiction one whom every right-minded reader would be honoured to have as an acquaintance and proud to own as a friend. No great stress is laid upon Peggy's looks, but we are made to feel that with her it is not the asixwo; dna xxiii,roy, but combined with style, erpression, gaiety, courage, and loyalty that completes the enslavement of her admirers. She is essentially a modern girl, an impecunious orphan living a bachelor life, untroubled by thoughts of chaperonage, consorting chiefly on terms of frank good-fellowship with several clever young men of her own age — artists, actors, and authors — enjoying the entree to fashionable society, yet for all her apparent frivolity by no means afraid, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, to sit at home and think; unspoiled by her social success, un- vulgarised by her contact with Bohemia, and in all that really ma_ tiers thoroughly wholesome and womanly. And her lover, Tommy Trent, is of the same stamp. As for her " intrusions,"
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Co. TIM, IntnLekitI of Peggy. By Anthony Hope. London : Smith, Elder, and N.] they are always welcome, and generally suggest the character of the good genius, the knight-errant, or the den en machind. But though Peggy dominates the story, the reader's interest is keenly enlisted in half-a-dozen other characters. In one of them, Airey Newton, Mr. Anthony Hope endeavours to solve a curious and original problem,— can the vice of miserliness be eradicated ? Newton is in all other respects a most engaging person; clever, thought- ful, kindly, even lovable, but possessed by the demon of cupidity, which it remains for the enchantress Peggy to exorcise. For Peggy, who Lae long believed him poor, discovers her error simultaneously with the further discovery that Airey Newton's advice to her friend Mrs. Trevalla, at a critical period of her life, induced her to make the plunge that in the long run led to financial ruin. Peggy has already divined that Airey Newton is in love with Mrs. Trevalla, and her chivalrous intrusion proves that love can be not only a liberal education, but an education in liberality. Mrs. Trevalla her- self is another interesting study, a young and attractive woman whose life has been well-nigh wrecked by a schoolroom marriage to a drunkard, and who, after a brief widowhood, makes a fresh and brilliant start under exalted auspices. But before she can gratify her ambition by a grand marriage her resources run dry, and driven to speculation as a last resource, she plays into the hands of a rejected and unscrupulous suitor. Then comes Peggy's great chance, and right nobly she rises to the occasion.
It has become too much the fashion of late to celebrate, or at any rate record, the triumphs of caddishness, the successes. of the ill-conditioned. We are glad to find Mr. Hope rebel- ling vigorously against this inversion of the older formula. Peggy's campaign against Mrs. Trevalla's persecutors Beaufort Chance, the declasse politician, and his dubious financial associates—is quite delightful in its mixture of dash and diplcmacy, of frontal attacks and dexterous flanking movements. For the rest, the cross-currents of modern society, the constant " deals " between aristocrats and pluto- crats, the contrast between the old and the new noblesse, are handled with remarkable perception and humour. In Lady Blixworth and Mrs. Bonfill we have two very admirably contrasted studies of the maitresse femme. Lord Mervyn is the perfection of the gentlemanly prig, and Fricker, the financier, and his vulgar but clear-sighted daughter remind one of nothing so much as some of Mr. Sargent's recent portraits. But after all, the outstanding feature of the book is not its well-directed satire, but its humanity. The dis- agreeable people are there, but they do not monopolise attention. Peggy's special coterie are all delightful ; and as. for Peggy herself, she is perhaps the nicest " new woman " that we have met in modern fiction.
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