NOVELS.
HETTY WESLEY.*
THE appearance of a novel from the pen of the admirable " Q" is always a welcome event, few of his contemporaries bringing to the task of authorship so rich or so well culti- vated a natural endowment. For in him invention and sym- pathy are fortified by scholarship and style. His method of presentation is picturesque and engaging, he excels in the use of literary ornament, and his books have that refreshing quality seldom attained by writers who of choice or necessity are immersed in actuality, or who maintain an attitude of cold and dispassionate detachment towards their dramatis personae. In fiction, as in biography when written by a friend of the subject, a certain bias, a moderate partisanship, is well- nigh indispensable, and is quite compatible with that self- effacement practised by the greatest masters of the craft, Tourguenieff, in particular, being a notable example. All these qualities are to be found in Hetty Wesley, which, none the less, is far from being a perfect novel, if, indeed, it can strictly be called a novel at all. For to begin with, while it would be pedantic to insist on the application of even a modified form of the " unities " of the classic drama to a romance, novels undoubtedly lose in the efficacy of their appeal when the action is spread over a number of years. In the present instance the interest is certainly focussed on a brief period in the history of the heroine, but after the climax has been reached the author again and again raises the curtain at long intervals to give us a glimpse of her after-life. The force of a drama—and two-thirds of the book is strongly dramatic—is impaired when the climax is succeeded by a set of detached tableaux. That is the first, and most obvious, criticism suggested by Mr. Quiller-Couch's treatment of his theme. The second, and more serious, is that he has attempted, much in the same way as Mrs. Atherton attempted in her story of Alexander Hamilton, to combine romance with biography in alternate compartments. Some chapters are entirely made up of documentary evidence extracted from the actual correspondence of the Wesley family. For the rest, while in the main following the accepted and authentic events of the family history, Mr. Quiller-Couch has invented the dialogue, and allowed himself a free hand in expanding historical narrative, dramatising or placing a new construction on actual incidents, and de- veloping elaborate character portraits of the less well-known actors in the domestic drama, by turns tragic, heroic, and squalid, that was played out in the Lincolnshire vicarages of Wroote and Epworth. This alternation of well-authenti- cated historical theme with imaginative variations must, in our opinion, exert a somewhat disconcerting influence on the plain reader, since his mental attitude is bound to vary as he is confronted with contemporary documentary testimony or the romantic commentary of the novelist of to-day. That the imaginary expansion is skilful, picturesque, pathetic, and poignant we are cordially ready to admit; nor are we pre- pared to deny that it is consistent in the main with the evidence supplied by the records of the Virsley None the less, we contend that for once Mr. Q tiller-Couch's artistic sense has failed him, and that the method of pre- sentation adopted is calculated to confuse rather than convince the reader. His chivalrous championship of Hetty Wesley is intelligible and justifiable, but we cannot help thinking that it would have been more effective had it taken the form of a biographical study.
Even those who are disconcerted by the composite form of the book cannot fail to be deeply interested by the vivid
• Heity Wesley. By A. T. Quiller-Couch. London: Harper & Brothers. [63.]
picture it gives of the home life of the Wesleys. What Mr.. Quiller-Couch has been chiefly concerned to show is the heavy sacrifice of domestic happiness on the part of his daughters by which the Rector of Epworth remained faithful to his. harsh creed, carried on his literary labours, and prepared his. sons—who only fill subsidiary roles in the story—for the high calling for which he believed them to be destined. Mr. Quiller- Couch does full justice to the unflinching courage and tenacity with which Samuel Wesley faced the hostility and intimi- dation of his parishioners, while representing him as some- thing like an Oriental patriarch in his relations to his. womenfolk. That his autocratic temper led to much domestic friction, and even unhappiness, is notorious, and the problem, whichprimarily occupies Mr. Quiller-Couch is to fathom the mystery of the strange marriage of lifehetabel, the most gifted, highly educated, and beautiful of his daughters. Southey in his Life of John Wesley simply states that his sister's affections were engaged by a suitor who was neither ineligible nor unworthy, but that her father refused his consent,. and that out of pique she married the first man who offered, a vulgar, ill-educated, undesirable person of low birth named Wright, who caused her great misery by his profligacy. Another biographer describes Wright—her husband—as a drunken glazier. The motive of her desperate choice seems so in- adequate in these accounts that the existence of some graver underlying cause might be plausibly conjectured. In Mr.. Quiller-Couch's story, Hetty, in a moment of rebellion against. her father's harshness, flies from his roof, and is betrayed by her lover under a promise of marriage which he has no intention of fulfilling. Realising his perfidy, she returns home, vowing to marry the first man who asks her to be his wife, and promptly carries out her vow when the glazier Wright comes forward. We do not know what support Mr. Quiller-Couch has for his version of this painful episode—a tragic variation. on The Vicar of Wakefield—but in order to render it more plausible he is driven to represent the low-born suitor as inspired, and, for a while at least, exalted and refined, by a chivalrous adoration of Hetty. For this attitude on Wright's part there is no evidence whatever that we are aware of ;. and in view of the repeated resort to precise documentary evidence in dealing with Hetty's subsequent career, we find it hard to justify this blending of fact and romantic conjecture. Apart from the question of literary ethics involved, Mr. Quiller-Couch has treated his theme with a delicacy and gentleness above reproach, though the absence of relief and the continuous gloom of the latter half of the narrative lend it a depressing character seldom associated with his bright and intrepid pen.
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