FICTION.
THE WALL OF PARTITION.*
THOUGH some people may be tempted to condemn novel reading for the time being, on the ground that it is calculated to blunt the edge of the national temper, we cannot wholly agree, while respecting their motives. We need distraction from the news- papers, and even those non-combatants who fill their time with useful work are glad of an occasional anodyne in the shape of romance. Mrs. Barclay is in the happy position of appealing to two widely different classes of readers, one very large and the other small, and of ministering to the delight of one and the amusement of the other. The bulk of mankind is sentimental and uncritical, and sentimentality is the staple of her stock-in- trade. In one of his immortal papers Artemus Ward observes: " The prevailin' weakness of most public men is to slop over. . . . Washington never slopt over. That wasn't George's stile." Unlike Washington, Mrs. Barclay is never afraid of • The Wall of Partition. By Florence L. Barclay. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. [68.3
slopping over. In the art of effusion she has no rival among living novelists : she gusheth alone as the nightingale sings.
But the force of her appeal to the great heart of the public' does not rest on this quality alone. While dealing with the tender passion in a manner which
borders on the ecstatic, she is always in the long run entirely on the side of the angels. Her theology is strictly orthodox. Virtue is as safe in her hands as in those of the most thoroughgoing exponent of the Adelphi school of melo-
drama, and villainy is equally sure of its just reward. It is true that for a moment we shudder at the thought of the
vengeance which the wicked Lady Valeria—" an alluring woman, absolutely devoid both of conscience and heart"— must surely wreak on the hero and heroine for unmasking her deception ; but the anguish soon passes, and our anxiety is dis- pelled by an opportune overdose of sleeping draught—a device already successfully employed to eliminate the heroine's detri- mental first husband, Lord Hilary. Thus, while Mrs. Barclay plucks at our heartstrings, the process is never unendurable,
but is rather a gentle tweaking more than compensated for by the resultant relief. Another element in The Wall of Partition that makes for popularity is her impartial treatment of the -different strata of our social system. Lady Valeria was the
daughter of a Duke, and, as we have seen, deaf to the call of noblesse oblige ; but the Duchess, of whom we hear occasionally, appears to have been an excellent person, while Lady Hilary was an angel, and nothing could be pleasanter than the relations between the hero and his social inferiors. It is even related of him that he drank cocoa in a humble cottage, though it was the last thing he wanted. Thus Mrs. Barclay not only initiates us into the inner intimacies of high life, but at the same time convinces us of the simple goodness of its representatives. As an antidote to Limehouse nothing could be better. It is, in short, a case of high life above as well as below stairs.
There remains the other class to whom Mrs. Barclay appeals ;
a class which is perhaps best described as consisting of those perverse people who insist on regarding Mrs. Ella Wheeler
Wilcox and Miss Marie Corelli as great unconscious humorists, and who are given to reading aloud, in the domestic circle, favourite passages from Delina Delany and Irene Idclesleigh.. The Wall of Partition never attains to such heights of inspired ineptitude, but some of the scenes between Rodney Steele and Mrs. Bellamy, the Bishop's widow, in her flat, where every- thing, even the reverberant tones of the clock in the hall, were reminiscent of the palace, are not altogether unworthy of the comparison. In particular, we are impressed by the touching anecdote wherewith Mrs. Bellamy was able to supply con-
firmatory evidence of an episode in Rodney Steele's novel. Rodney, while suffering from cerebral hmmorrhage as the result of a fall, wrote a number of letters of which he was subse- quently quite oblivious, but which exposed him to the machina- tions of a blackmailing nurse. This experience he transferred to his novel, and, on asking Mrs. Bellamy whether she con- sidered it possible, she at once rose to the occasion:— "I know it to be possible, by sad experience. The very same thing happened to the Bishop. Oh, not the love-letters ! Dear me, no But loss of memory from cerebral hemorrhage. Tho Bishop was in our closed motor, with his chaplain. He bad held two confirmations and an induction, and was somewhat tired. It was a long run home, over lonely country roads. The Bishop had removed his hat and was dozing. They reached a place where a small stream ran under the road. There was a slight rise, which the chauffeur did not notice. He did not slacken speed. to cross it and the car leapt as they went over, flinging the Bishop violently up off the seat. He struck the top of his head on the roof of the car, and the blow caused cerebral hemorrhage at the base of the brain. He was very ill during many weeks, and felt the after-effects for over a year. Not many people knew it, but he used to have what he called 'blank days '—days when, in the evening, he could not recall any of tho events of the day. As time went on, he merely had blank conversations—conversations which were wholly effaced from his mind immediately they had taken place. This tried the Bishop, greatly. But after a period of complete rest abroad—a time when we road several of your books, together—he fully recovered; only very occasionally having a blank moment, when overtired."
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