NOVELS.
LOVE THE JUDGE.*
Mn. WYMOND CAREY'S earlier adventures into the domain of historical romance showed such vigour and fertility of inven- tive resource that the sight of a new novel from his pen excited pleasurable anticipations. We are all in favour of the novelist who refuses to allow his initial success to fix him for ever in one groove. Enterprise and versatility are to be wel- comed in fiction as elsewhere, and Mr. Carey has both qualities in abundance. But while we readily admit that he was amply justified in breaking new ground, and recognise in Love the 'fudge many of the elements which make for popularity, we cannot admit that he has achieved any real artistic advance on his earlier efforts, or that his highly coloured delineations of modern society have any essential correspondence_ with fact. Mr. Carey's previous novels aroused the hope that he might prove a worthy disciple of Mr. Merriman and Mr. Weyman. Here he only exhibits himself in the light of a formidable rival to Mr. Oppenheim and Mr. Max Pemberton, but vastly inferior, as a purveyor of excitement, to the Miss Braddon of the " seventies " and "eighties." It is true that Mr. Carey refrains from employing the apparatus of the old-fashioned sen- sational novel. There are no murders in his narrative, and only one sudden death. He dispenses altogether with rescues and • L01141 the Judge. By Wymond Carey. London : Methuen and Co. [6e.] hair-breadth escapes a its Adelphi, preferring to administet thrills through the medium of situation rather than of action. Yet no modern writer deals more unblushingly than he in the conventional mid-Victorian vocabulary of eulogy when be is describing the physical and mental qualities of his dramatis personae. His heroine is a " slim sylph" : indeed, she hardly ever appears on the scene without some allusion to her slim- ness (in the physical sense) or her innocence. Her most formidable rival is conspicuous for the "finely chiselled regularity of her features" and her "faultless dress," while another lady is remarkable, amongst other charms, for the "matchless delicacy" of her skin. The villain of the plot, an unscrupulous American financier, has bloodshot eyes, and in moments of emotion his lips are always cracked. The process of labelling, in short, is carried to such an extent that the characters are hard put to it to live up to their looks. Still, Mr. Carey must be credited with the introduc- tion into melodrama of a new type of adventuress, the young
lady who has been for four years at Girton, who reads Euripides at her toilet, and combines with the "persuasive, enigmatic smile" of a Mona Lisa an intuitive genius for the operations of the Stock Exchange. Thoroughly worldly and coldly ambitious, she falls passionately in love with the hero, a self-made Napoleon of finance ; and when he becomes engaged to the "slim sylph," joins hands with his deadliest enemies to ruin and reduce him to poverty and impotence, thereby hoping to render him dependent solely on herself for the rebuilding of his fortunes. She fails, but a Quixotic act of self-sacrifice on his part gives her another chance. Dick Forster ruins himself to secure the future of the sylph after their engagement has been broken off, and Gertrude makes a final and characteristic bid for his affections :—
"4 May I be your doctor for a few minutes,' she asked, 'and tell you what I think you ought to do ?' He nodded. Well. I infer you are done with finance. You are tired of making money. You won a splendid victory some weeks ago, so splendid that it would be difficult to repeat it. Victories can pall. I am not sorry. If I were you I should just continuo to live in Blooms- bury for a month or two, thinking and reading. Only those '— she was speaking slowly but with intense conviction—' only those who can understand great literature know what an anodyne it can be. It is the finest and subtlest of all anodynes, for great literature, the literature of power, is the criticism of life in artistic form by the minds of those who have suffered, suffered but not succumbed. Go to those minds and let them speak to you. The greatest of all literatures you have not yet mastered— Greek. If you want some work, and you will, Mr. Forster, learn Greek. The literature of modern Christian and of modern pagan culture rests on Greek thought; the solid and enduring products of the modern mind from the Middle Ages to our own time, from Aquinas to Hegel and T. H. Green, become a new thing to the man who can read Homer, 2Eschylus and Plato in their own lan- guage. Don't think me a prig, but I am profoundly convinced that true statesmanship for our world of to-day must begin, though it does not end, with the assimilation of Hellenism.' He leaned back in his chair. How marvelously this girl's trained and cultivated mind penetrated his. The anodyne of the literature of power— to read and to think—that was what he had boon trying to do, and intended, now that he was free, to continue. 'And then '—her voice grew in animation= I should ask Jim Wason to come with me to Germany and I should spend a year there. It will be the making of Jim Wason.'—' Germany ? ' he questioned, with a flash of surprise. 'Why ?'—` Germany,' she answered, smiling, 'in the past could always teach us English two things very dis- similar: music and the scientific spirit. It still can. Modern Germany adds a third lesson : the limits of the material as distinct from the ideal in the building up of national and individual life. If you don't make haste, Mr. Forster, the last will be the only lesson that modern Germany can teach. The new Germany, too ambitious and too impatient for wealth to believe in the idealism that unified it, will soon be simply an object lesson of how little the material can, and how much it cannot, do fur an ambitious people. So go to Germany after you have got your pick-axe comfortably into the bedrock of Hellenism, and you will come back to your friends here and achieve for England not what you have learned in Germany, but some of the lessons that the permanent spiritual inspiration of Greece has taught our noblest poets, mir deepest thinkers and our wisest statesmen.' Dick listened with increasing interest. He liked this advice, so simply and so sincerely offered. And how different it was from what all his friends had been dinning into his' ears for a month. But when a woman with brains and knowledge makes love, she always does it in an unconventional way, and that is why it is usually so irresistible."
That Dick Forster was proof against such intellectual blandishments may be taken as conclusive evidence of a force of will equal to his "terrifying and inexhaustible physical powers." It is pleasant, however, to learn that Gertrude ultimately consoled herself with Sir Guy Lemare, the sun- burned and intrepid traveller, whose self-control had been conspicuously displayed in the trying circumstances described in the following passage :— " Two footmen were in the drawing-room. Lemare, as Dick said, was a well-bred gentleman. Although on entering he had a cruel, a tremendous shock, and mastered himself with difficulty, outwardly he was calm."
Sir Guy's ordeal reminds us of a priceless phrase in another novel by a forgotten author describing how a guest was ushered into the reception-room of a stately mansion by "some butlers." That Mr. Carey should be altogether un- conscious of these and other absurdities is almost incredible. Yet, in view of the patent seriousness of his • rhetorical moralising's, one shrinks from crediting him with a deliberate intention to burlesque the most stilted dialogue of Mr. Pinero and the manners of society as depicted in the comedies of Mr. H. A. Jones. It is only right to add, in conclusion, that, in spite of the sustained unreality of the narrative, Mr. Carey keeps his puppets on the move with such unflagging energy that the reader remains agreeably amused by their antics to the close.
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