FICTION.
JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.* ARTISTS have a way of emerging in strange environments and asserting themselves 15-Ap idpoy. Dvorak was the son of a pork-butcher, Faccio of a baker, and Verdi's father, if he was not exactly a candlestick-maker, undoubtedly sold candles. Martin Moir, the young artist whose struggles towards self- expression are so vividly depicted in Mr. Niven's story, was at least unhampered by poverty, for his father was a well-to-do manufacturer of flannelettes and shirtings and winceys, and though Glasgow may not be exactly a beautiful city, its painters and etchers have of late won a European reputa- tion. But though the stimulus of opportunity was not wanting, Martin was seriously handicapped in the race. He had talent and persistence of a sort, but he lacked confidence and driving-power. He was not of the stuff of which rebels are made, and his filial devotion stood in the way of his emancipation. He was only a boy of sixteen, and by no means sure of himself, when his father took him away from school and put him in the business. Moreover, he was partly reconciled to a commercial career by the belief that he could turn his talent to practical account in the designing of patterns. Applied art his father could understand and tolerate, but as an independent means of livelihood—art was starvation, and he felt that he would be a criminal not to prevent that. But the real obstacle was Martin's mother, who was devoted to her son in her exacting way, but regarded art with horror as incom- patible with morals or even decency. The story is founded on the interaction of these three characters, and while it ends in the complete conversion of the father, the tragic demo iinienl is precipitated by the invincible Puritanism of Mrs. Moir. Martin's apprenticeship to business is described in great but never wearisome detail. He very soon recognizes his Meow- petence, but, in his own words, he "would like to get through without having to put up a fight." His love for his mother blunts his resolve. He drifts into ineffectual truancy, yet does not wholly neglect his work. The wisest of his brother- clerks recognize that he is on the wrong tack long before he is mOved to take the plunge. Yet the final impulse comes in .Tutice of the Peace. Ply Frederick Nivert. Londo4: Nvoleigh-Naisa. -UM.] a wholly unexpected and dramatic way. A Canadian buyer discovers that he is colour-blind, and when his opinion is confirmed by a great oculist his mother seems to have won the day. How with this defect can be ever become an artist ? But his sense of form and his draughtsmanship are recognized by experts, and his father consents to his attending an art school as a sorb of half-timer. From the first his mother scents moral pollution in his new surroundings, and in a moment of madness he insults her, quits his home, and starts life on his own resources, earning enough money as a silver polisher to pay for his keep and fees. For a while his father stands aloof, misled by his wife's reticence— she never shows him a penitent letter from his son—but later on the misunderstanding is cleared up, and when Martin justifies himself by winning a scholarship the reconciliation is complete. The sequel shows Martin steadily advancing in his art in the studio of a French painter in Paris, winning laurels as an illustrator and exhibitor, yet wounded and saddened by the veiled but unmistakable hostility of his mother. As in his boyhood, so in his early manhood, he felt "wildly hopeless over the belief that to his mother the proof of any talk of affection could best be given by doing things he did not want to do—' for mother's sake, because you love mother." His father came much nearer to him than his mother; and yet it was her affection that he craved—" an affection which she seemed to demand and ignore." The story gains in variety, while it loses in concentration, from its twofold motive. It gives us a series of studies of artists in various stages of development—Martin, the Big Man at the Glasgow Art School, his friend Wilson, his French master, to mention 110 others—but the central interest is in the human relations of Martin and his parents, and, above all, in the strange and perplexing character of Mrs. Moir. Some authors contrive to bore us by manifesting a love for their characters with which they are unable to infect their readers. Mr. Niven's ruling passion is not love but dislike for Mrs. Moir. For a long time we are inclined to ascribe her perverse attitude to a mixture of Puritanism and jealousy; jealousy of her son's art as detaching him from her and estranging her from her husband. It is only quite late in the book that the real motive is revealed in a strange and wholly unfounded misread- ing of her husband's innocent attachment to a girl whom he had known before his marriage, with whom he had resumed friendly relations after it, and who had been an artist. Recognizing in her son certain qualities which reminded her of Jessie Ray, she came to transfer to him the jealousy she had felt for the woman whom she had replaced in her husband's affections. These perverted "maternal impressions" warp her whole nature, and, beginning somewhat like a modern Mrs. Jellyby, she develops into a fanatical votary of social purity, half- baked American theology, " freak " philanthropy, and un- scientific eugenics. Not only does she wreck her husband's domestic happiness, but she is the cause of her eon's premature death, for Martin dies of a brain seizure brought on by reading a letter from her pen in the same paper which contains the notice of his first serious exhibition. The shock is too much for his father, who soon follows him to the grave. We cannot acquit Mr. Niven of a certain amount of gratuitous agony-piling in the closing chapters of the book, or of exaggera- ting the amount of cruelty that may be inflicted by a virtuous woman. The best excuse that can be offered for Mrs. Moir was that she was not quite sane, yet we are not sure that Mr. Niven means us to regard her in that light. On the other band, the conflict between filial piety and the instinct of self- expression is finely done. Mr. Niven, in fine, has given us a powerful, engrossing, disquieting book, but it is far more convincing as a study of the artistic temperament than as a criticism of Puritanism.
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