One endeavours to remember some one or two outstanding novels
written by any one of the writers of this group. It must be at once
admitted, one fails to recall a great novel. It is true that the great
Victorians, Meredith and Hardy, were hard at work at this time; but,
then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. Then there was
Kipling, Stevenson, Barrie, and George Moore. With the exception of the
last, we have little to do with these here. They do not come within the
scope of the present study.
None of the men of the nineties (as I have defined them) produced
a great novel. It would be well, however, to give at once some
connotation for so loose a term as ‘a great novel.’ Let us then say
that a good English novel is not necessarily a great novel; nor, for
that matter, is a good Russian novel necessarily a great novel. A great
novel is a work of fiction that has entered into the realm of universal
literature in the same way as the dramas of Sophocles and Shakespeare
and Molière have entered that glorious demesne. As a matter of fact,
one can remember, I think in most cases, very few English novels that
are great in this sense; while there are many more French and Russian
works that have an undeniable right to this title. Therefore it is not,
perhaps, so damaging a criticism of the period as it might at first
sight appear to say it has produced no great novel.
But in so far as English fiction alone is concerned, it cannot be said
that the men of the nineties produced work of a very high order in this
form. They do not seem to have had the staying power demanded in such
artistic production. The short poem, the short story, the small black
and white drawing, the one act play--in fact, any form of art that just
displays the climacteric moment and discards the rest pleased them.
It was, as John Davidson said, an age of Bovril. While the novel, it
must be admitted, needs either a profusion of ideas, as in the case
of the Russians, or of genitals, as in the case of the French. But
the art of the nineties was essentially an expression of moods--and
moods, after all, are such evanescent brief conditions. So it is not
unnatural that the fruition of the novel was not rich among these
writers. George Gissing and George Moore, in a way their forebears (I
have in mind more particularly the latter), spread a taste for such
works. Indeed, in his _Confessions of a Young Man_, George Moore may
be said to have predicted the masculine type of the nineties. Gissing
in 1891 was to daunt some with his _New Grub Street_, while Henry
James was to inspire enthusiasm in a few like Hubert Crackanthorpe.
But naturally in the way of stimulus the main goad was France, which
was at that date phenomenally rich in practitioners of the art of the
novel. The Vizetelly Zolas, Mr. George Moore personally conducting the
novels of certain of the French novelists over the Channel, the desire
to smash the fetters of Victorian fiction which Thomas Hardy was to
accomplish, were all inspiring sources which were, however, singularly
unfruitful. Walter Pater long before in his academic romance _Marius_,
which they had all read eagerly, wrote charmingly of a field that
would appeal to them when he said: ‘Life in modern London ... is stuff
sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build his “palace
of art” of.’ But instead of taking the recommendation of this high
priest they read _Dorian Gray_, which Wilde would never have written if
Huysmans had not first written _A Rebours_. The young men of Henley,
it must be confessed, did far finer work than Richard Le Gallienne’s
watery Wildism in _The Quest of the Golden Girl_. George Moore wrote a
masterpiece in _Evelyn Innes_, but Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore in _A
Comedy of Masks_ and _Adrian Rome_ did not retaliate. Leonard Merrick,
who started publishing in the eighties, did not publish his best work
till the nineties were dead and gone; while his best Bohemian Paris
stories may owe as much to Du Maurier’s _Trilby_ (1894) as they do to
Henri Murger. Henry Harland, as I have already said, only struck his
vein of comedy fiction when the Boer War had finished the movement.
George Gissing and Arthur Morrison belong, with Frank Harris, to the
pugilistic school of Henley’s young men, while Richard Whiteing, who
turned from journalism to write _No. 5 John Street_ (1899), was too
old a man and too late with his book to belong to the nineties’ group.
Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with
Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of
the group. The sailor, Joseph Conrad, the Australian Louis Becke, the
Canadian, C. G. D. Roberts, were working out their own salvation, and
had nothing to do with the Rhymers’ Club. The strong creative brain of
Aubrey Beardsley, indeed, in his unfinished picaresque romance, _Under
the Hill_, which I have already mentioned, produced something new, but
it was not a novel; while it is John Davidson’s poetry that counts, not
his novels, which remain unread nowadays on the shelf.
Indeed, if the name of a good English novel by any one of them is
demanded, it will be singularly difficult to suggest a satisfactory
title. One can even go further, and state that they did not even have
one amongst them who has handed on to us a vivid picture of their own
lives in the form of fiction. Dowson, indeed, in the dock life of his
books may have autobiographical touches, but they are purely personal.
What I mean is, that there was no one standing by to give us a picture
of them as Willy, the French writer, has given us of the sceptical yet
juvenile enthusiasm of Les Jeunes of Paris of the same period in, for
example, his _Maîtresse d’Esthètes_. What is cruder than Ranger-Gull’s
_The Hypocrite_, which has pretensions to be a picture of the young
men of the period? And when one comes to think of it this is a great
pity, as an excellent novel might have been penned around the feverish
activities of these young exotics of the nineties. Robert Hichens’
_Green Carnation_ is, after all, perhaps the most brilliant attempt to
picture the weaknesses of the period, and it is merely a skit taking
off in the characters of Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reggie two well-known
personalities. _The Adventures of John Johns_, it is true, is supposed
to be the history of the rise of one of the smaller epigoni of the
movement, but it is not a very brilliant achievement, though it has
considerable merit and interest. One cannot indeed say that it is up to
the standard of Ernest La Jeunesse’s _Odin Howes_, wherein the French
Jew has given a veritable flashing insight on the last days of Wilde
in Paris and those holes into which he crept to drink. What a pity,
indeed, an English contemporary has not done the same for the Tite
Street days, or given us in his book a serious study of the strange
world of Whistler or Dowson.
In the face of this strange dearth of novels in this school one cannot
help asking the reasons that engendered it. Without laying down any
hard and fast rules, it will, I think, be seen that this vacuity came
from the Zeitgeist of the group itself. As has been said, the large
canvas, the five-act play, the long novel were _démodé_ for the period.
The age demanded, after the long realistic studies of the eighties in
France, the climacteric moments only when the passions of the _personæ_
of the drama were at white heat, so to speak, and life was lived
intensely. Could not the great scene up to which the five long acts
lead be squeezed into one? Was not the rediscovery of the _Mimes_ of
Herod as a sign of the times? Could not the great beauty of an immense
landscape’s spirit be caught and seized on a small canvas? Could not
the long-winded novel of three tomes be whittled down to the actual
short-story motive? This reduction of everything to its climax can be
seen in all the art of the period. Look at Beardsley’s decoration for
Wilde’s _Salomé_, entitled itself ‘The Climax.’ Conder paints small
objects like fans and diminutive water-colours and Crackanthorpe writes
short stories. The poems of Dowson are short swallow flights of song,
and the epic is reduced to Stephen Phillips’s _Marpessa_. The one-act
play begins on the Continent to make a big appeal for more recognition
than that of a curtain-raiser. Small theatres, particularly in Germany
and Austria, give evening performances consisting of one-acters alone.
It becomes the same in music. The age was short-winded and its art,
to borrow a phrase from the palæstra, could only stay over short
distances. So, whereas there is a strange dearth of novels, the men of
the nineties were very fruitful in short stories. In fact, it would
not be perhaps too much to say that it was then, for the first time in
English literature, the short story came into its own. At any rate, it
would be more judicious to put the period as one in which the short
story flourished vigorously (if not for the first time), in England, as
a ‘theme of art.’ To understand exactly what I mean by this artistic
treatment of the short story[10] as a medium of literary expression,
all that is necessary is, perhaps, to compare one of Dickens’s short
tales, for example, with one of Stevenson’s short stories. The result
is apparent at once in the difference of treatment--a difference as
essential as the difference between the effect of a figure in stone
and another in bronze. The earlier tale has none of the facets and
subtleties that art has contrived to express by the latter narration.
This artistic treatment of the short story by Englishmen, then, was
a new thing and a good thing for English literature. If the long
staying powers required for the great novel in the world of comparative
literature did not belong to the writers of the nineties group, at any
rate they developed, more or less artistically, the climacteric effects
of the _conte_. For the short story crossed the Channel by means of
Guy de Maupassant, and out of it arose on this side for a brief decade
or so a wonderful wealth of art. The short stories of Kipling are by
no means the only pebbles on the beach. In fact, never even in France
itself was there such variety of theme and treatment. The successful
short stories of the period are of all sorts and conditions. To
exemplify as briefly as possible this variety is perhaps closer to my
purpose than to waste time in proving such obvious facts as the anxious
endeavours of all these writers to raise their work to the artistic
elevation demanded of the short story, or their strenuous struggle to
attain a suitable style and treatment for their themes.
[10] Frederick Wedmore in _On Books and Arts_ (1899) discusses
the short story as a distinct artistic medium. It can never
be a ‘novel in a nutshell.’
Numerous examples of their art at once crowd the mind, such as Ernest
Dowson’s _Dying of Francis Donne_, Max Beerbohm’s _Happy Hypocrite_,
Frederick Wedmore’s tender _Orgeas and Miradou_, Arthur Symons’s
_Death of Peter Waydelin_, the works of Hubert Crackanthorpe, or
the fantastic tales of Arthur Machen, or Eric Count Stenbock’s[11]
_Studies of Death_. H. D. Lowry, though of Henley’s young men, works
at the same art of studies in sentiment in his _Women’s Tragedies_.
So does Mr. G. S. Street in his _Episodes_ and George Egerton in her
_Discords and Keynotes_. Among the others who deliberately tried to
write the short story as an artistic theme at that period and who
were at the same time in the movement can be mentioned Henry Harland,
Rudolf Dircks in his _Verisimilitudes_, Richard Le Gallienne, Kenneth
Grahame, Percy Hemingway in his _Out of Egypt_, etc. Then we have men
like R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. W. Nevinson, clearly influenced by
the movement and writing alongside of it of the ends of the earth they
have visited. The former, for example, in a short story like _Aurora La
Cujiñi_ (Smithers, 1898) clearly reflects the influences of this period
which gloried in the abnormal in Art. Known as a socialist of courage,
Mr. Graham, whose name betrays his origin, has also visited many of
the exotic places of the world. In his able book _Mogreb-el-Acksa_
he has given us vignettes of Morocco that are unsurpassed; in his
volume _Success_ he has told us of those Spanish-speaking races of
South America, of the tango, and the horses of the pampas, and the
estancias he knows so well. In _Aurora La Cujiñi_ we have a vignette of
Seville so realistic that we almost believe that one is justified in
considering that there is just enough motive in it to vivify it with
the quickening touch of the short storyteller’s wand. It is slow in
starting, but when this motive comes suddenly at the end we are almost
left breathless, realising that everything that went before was but a
slow, ruthless piling up of local colour. It is all done with such
deliberate deftness. How we see the scenes unrolling slowly before us.
Like the thrilled people on the benches we watch the Toreador about to
make his kill as we read:
[11] Eric Stenbock was at Balliol, Oxford. He collaborated in
a volume of translations of Balzac’s ‘Short Stories.’ He
contributed to Lord Alfred Douglas’s _The Spirit Lamp_.
As a specimen of his style the following extract from
his short story, _The Other Side_, may be offered. It is
supposed to be an old Breton woman’s description of the
Black Mass:
‘Then when they get to the top of the hill, there is
an altar with six candles quite black and a sort of
something in between, that nobody sees quite clearly,
and the old black ram with the man’s face and long
horns begins to say Mass in a sort of gibberish nobody
understands, and two black strange things like monkeys
glide about with the book and the cruets--and there’s
music too, such music. There are things the top half like
black cats, and the bottom part like men only their legs
are all covered with close black hair, and they play
on the bag-pipes, and when they come to the elevation
then--. Amid the old crones there was lying on the
hearth-rug, before the fire, a boy whose large lovely
eyes dilated and whose limbs quivered in the very ecstacy
of terror.’
The “espada” had come forward, mumbled his boniment in Andaluz, swung
his montera over his shoulder upon the ground, and after sticking his
sword in every quarter of the bull had butchered him at last amid the
applause of the assembled populace. Blood on the sand; sun on the white
plaza; upon the women’s faces “cascarilla”; scarlet and yellow fans,
and white mantillas with “fleco y alamares” in the antique style...;
women selling water, calling out “aguá!” in so guttural a voice it
seemed like Arabic; Cardobese hats, short jackets, and from the plaza a
scent of blood and sweat acting like a rank aphrodisiac upon the crowd,
and making the women squeeze each other’s sweating hands, and look
ambiguously at one another, as they were men; and causing the youths,
with swaying hips and with their hair cut low upon their foreheads,
to smile with open lips and eyes that met your glance, as they had
been half women. Blood, harlotry, sun, gay colours, flowers and waving
palm-trees, women with roses stuck behind their ears, mules covered up
in harness of red worsted, cigar girls, gipsies, tourists, soldiers,
and the little villainous-looking urchins, who, though born old, do
duty as children in the South.’
As we read this magical evocation of the spirit of place we rub our
eyes and ask ourselves have we not been there. This prose of vivid
impressionism is the goal of one and all. As the plein air school
painted in the open air before Nature, so these men must write as
closely round their subject as actual experience can allow them. The
vivid realisation of a mood, as we shall see in Hubert Crackanthorpe,
is the desired prize. Turn through the pages of Ernest Dowson’s
_Dilemmas_, and read, above all, _A Case of Conscience_; leaf
Frederick Wedmore’s[12] _Renunciations_, and pause over _The Chemist
in the Suburbs_, wherein, as H. D. Traill said, the story of Richard
Pelse’s life is a pure joy; in both cases vivid impressionism and
mood realisation are the keynotes of the work. To understand these
tendencies better and the excellence of the work achieved, it will be
more advantageous, perhaps, to consider in more detail one writer only
who carried the charm of the prose pen to a higher degree of emphasis
and finish in the short story than any of the others, to wit, Hubert
Crackanthorpe.
[12] About the worst of Frederick Wedmore’s short stories,
such as _The North Coast and Eleanor_, there is a hint of
the melodrama of Hugh Conway’s _Called Back_, but it is
a feeble replica of the original. The most successful of
his short imaginative pieces, as the author rightly terms
them, on the other hand, have a refined grace of slow
movement that is at once captivating and refreshing. It
seems impossible that the same man could have essayed both
the worst and the best. As a specimen of the latter type of
work, let me fasten on to the description of the entourage
of Pelse the chemist, the man with the tastes above his
position:
‘There came a little snow. But in the parlour over the
shop--with the three windows closely curtained--one
could have forgetfulness of weather. There was the neat
fireplace; the little low tea-table; a bookcase in which
Pelse--before that critical event at Aix-les-Bains--had
been putting, gradually, first editions of the English
poets; a cabinet of china, in which--but always before
Aix-les-Bains--he had taken to accumulate some pretty
English things of whitest paste or finest painting; a
Worcester cup, with its exotic birds, its lasting gold,
its scale-blue ground, like lapis lazuli or sapphire; a
Chelsea figure; something from Swansea; white plates of
Nantgarw, bestrewn with Billingsley’s greyish pink roses,
of which he knew the beauty, the free artistic touch.
How the things had lost interest for him! “From the
moment,” says some French critic, “that a woman occupies
me, my collection does not exist.” And many a woman may
lay claim to occupy a French art critic; only one had
occupied Richard Pelse.’
A curious anomaly can be remarked here, that in this period the great
work of prose fiction was not to be resharpened by the young men to
nearly the same extent as they resharpened the poetry and the essay.
None approach Meredith and Hardy, who move like Titans of the age,
while Kipling and Crackanthorpe are the only two young men that give
any quantity of imaginative prose work of a high new order (and in
saying this one must not overlook Arthur Morrison’s _Mean Streets_, or
Zangwill’s Ghetto Tales, or the work of Henry James) until Conrad came
from the sea and Louis Becke from Australia to give new vistas to our
fiction. But it is not with them we are concerned here, but with Hubert
Crackanthorpe,[13] of whose life the poet has sung:
[13] It is interesting to note the verses also of the French
poet Francis Jammes dedicated to Crackanthorpe. Jammes
lived at Orthez when Crackanthorpe visited that remote
countryside.
Too rough his sea, too dark its angry tides!
Things of a day are we, shadows that move
The lands of shadow.
Crackanthorpe commenced his literary career as the editor, with W. H.
Wilkins, of _The Albemarle_, a monthly review started in January, 1892,
with a splendid supplement lithograph.
_Wreckage_, the younger writer’s first volume, appeared in 1893, and
contains seven studies of very unequal merit. Its French inspiration
as well as its French emulation is at once apparent, for in place of
a foreword is the simple, all-sufficing French quotation as a keynote
of the type of work displayed: ‘Que le roman ait cette religion que
le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom: “Humanité”;--il
lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est là.’ The youth of the
writer (he was only twenty-eight) must be remembered when discussing
the inequality of these studies in passion, for all hinge on the old
eternal theme. The last three are perhaps more finished work than
the first four, and this is a pity from the point of view of the
reader. _Profiles_, indeed, the longest, is also in some respects the
worst-conceived attempt. It is crude and immature in conception and
projection. A young officer, in love with Lily Maguire, is deceived
by her for a very Emily Brontë-like figure of a bold, bad, handsome
man. The girl becomes a disreputable member of the prostitute class,
and Maurice, like the young fool he is, wishes to redeem her. But
Lily, whom the sensuous, romantic life has taught nothing, could
never, she thinks, marry a man she did not care for, although she
would sell herself to the first Tom, Dick, or Harry. _A Conflict of
Egoisms_ concerns two people who have wasted their lives and then
utterly destroy themselves by marrying one another, for they were
too selfish to _live_ even by themselves. _The Struggle for Life_ is
a Maupassant[14]-conceived, but ineffectively told story of a wife
betrayed by her husband, who sells herself for half-a-crown if she can
go home in an hour. _Embers_ is much more effectively told, and here at
last we begin to realise Crackanthorpe is getting at the back of his
characters. The same applies to that able gambling story, _When Greek
meets Greek_, while in _A Dead Woman_ we have Crackanthorpe at last in
his full stride. Rushout the innkeeper, inconsolable for his dead wife,
is as real as ‘bony and gaunt’ Jonathan Hays, who was the dead woman’s
lover. How the husband discovers the dead woman’s infidelity; how he
and Hays were to have fought; and how at last ‘each remembered that she
had belonged to the other, and, at that moment, they felt instinctively
drawn together,’ is told by a master’s hand with a slow deliberation
that is as relentless as life itself. Here the narrative is direct and
the delineation of character sharp. These two men with the card-sharper
Simon live, while as for the women of the book we wish to forget them,
for they have nothing to redeem them except possibly the little French
girl from Nice.
[14] Maupassant’s _Inconsolables_.
Two years later appeared a far more ambitious and maturer volume
containing half-a-dozen sentimental studies and half-a-dozen tales of
the French villages Crackanthorpe so loved and understood. His method
of work becomes more pronounced here, that is to treat an English
theme in the French manner, a task which demands more culture than
the ruck of the conteurs for the English magazines attain with their
facile tears and jackass laughters, their machine-like nonentities and
pudibond ineptitudes. Crackanthorpe, indeed, has left no following
behind him, and only once later can I recall a volume of short stories
that suggests his manner: J. Y. F. Cooke’s tales of the nineties in his
_Stories of Strange Women_.
In this new volume as before, Crackanthorpe devotes himself to
the expansion of the sentimental study, the problems of sexual
relationships, which are not altogether pleasing to every one, and this
may account for his limited appeal. In _Wreckage_ all the women were
vile, but here he evidently intends to picture the other side of women
in Ella, the wife of the poet Hillier, with its slow Flaubert unrolling
of her infinite delusion. In _Battledore and Shuttlecock_, in Nita,
of the old Empire promenade days, he again develops the good side.
While in the study of the _Love-sick Curate_ we feel that Ethel is not
hard-hearted, but only that the Rev. Burkett is an unutterable idiot.
_Modern Melodrama_ is the short, sharp climacteric stab of Maupassant
perhaps not over well done. The sentimental studies close with
_Yew-Trees and Peacocks_, which seems rather to have lost its point in
the telling. The tales of the Pyrennese villages where Crackanthorpe
used to stay are typical productions of the delight of the men of the
nineties in their sojourning on the sacred soil of France. _The White
Maize_, _Etienne Matton_, and _Gaston Lalanne’s Child_ are perhaps not
unworthy of the master himself in their simple directness, devoid of
all unnecessary padding. With a few phrases, indeed, Crackanthorpe can
lay his scene, strip his characters nude before us. How we realise,
for instance, Ella lying in bed the night before her mistaken marriage
with Hillier. She is there in all the virgin simplicity of the average
English country girl:
The window was wide open, and the muslin curtains swaying in the
breeze bulged towards her weirdly. She could see the orchard
trees bathed in blackness, and above a square of sky, blue-grey,
quivering with stifled light, flecked with a disorder of stars
that seemed ready to rain upon the earth. After a while, little
by little, she distinguished the forms of the trees. Slowly,
monstrous, and sleek, the yellow moon was rising.
She was no longer thinking of herself! She had forgotten that
to-morrow was her wedding-day: for a moment, quite impersonally,
she watched the moonlight stealing through the trees.
Again, Ronald, the youth from the Army Crammer’s, finds his way into
the music-hall, where he encounters Nita:
Immediately he entered the theatre, the sudden sight of the scene
stopped him, revealed, as it were, through a great gap. The stage
blazed white; masses of recumbent girls, bathed in soft tints,
swayed to dreamy cadence of muffled violins before the quivering
gold-flecked minarets of an Eastern palace. He leaned against the
side of the lounge to gaze down across the black belt of heads. The
sight bewildered him. By-and-bye, he became conscious of a hum of
voices, and a continual movement behind him. Men, for the most part
in evening dress, were passing in procession to and fro, some women
amongst them, smiling as they twittered mirthlessly; now and then
he caught glimpses of others seated before little round tables,
vacant, impassive, like waxwork figures, he thought.... He was
throbbing with trepidating curiosity, buffeted by irresolution.
With the same exactitude the lonely fells around Scarsdale, where
Burkett is parson of the small Cumberland village, arise before us.
His posthumous volume, _Last Studies_, contains only three rather
long short stories, an ‘in memoriam’ poem by Stopford A. Brooke, and
an appreciation very gracefully done by Henry James. Referring in the
field of fiction to the crudity of the old hands and the antiquity of
new, his appreciator finds it difficult to render the aspect which
constitutes Crackanthorpe’s ‘troubled individual note.’ He comes to the
conclusion, ‘What appealed to him was the situation that asked for a
certain fineness of art, and that could best be presented in a kind of
foreshortened picture.’
The short story is mainly of two sorts: ‘The chain of items, figures in
a kind of sum--one of the simple rules--of movement, added up as on a
school-boy’s slate, and with the correct total and its little flourish,
constituting the finish and accounting for the effect; or else it may
be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt
to summarise, and compress for purposes of presentation to “render”
even, if possible, for purposes of expression.’ From the French
Crackanthorpe learnt the latter method, and practised it. When we come
to look at these last three stories (which with the tiny collection
of _Vignettes_ completes his work) we see how admirably exact is this
criticism of his senior.
In _Antony Garstin’s Courtship_ he is back in his own countryside of
Cumberland among the shrewd, hard Dale folk. It is a little masterpiece
conceived almost in the hopeless bitterness of Hardy at his darkest,
most pessimistic moment. The crudeness in workmanship has gone, only
the relentless inevitability of it all remains like the tragedies of
life itself. Rosa Blencarn, the parson’s niece, a mere cheap flirt
of unfinished comeliness, is but the bone of contention between the
personalities of Antony and his mother. The widow Garstin is as fine
a character as Crackanthorpe, in his twenty-two stories, has created.
She lives, and in her veins flows the passion of disappointed age. ‘She
was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years.
Her face was gaunt and sallow; deep wrinkles accentuated the hardness
of her features. She wore a widow’s black cap above her iron-grey hair,
gold-rimmed spectacles, and a soiled chequered apron.’ How easily we
can see her saying to her great hulking son: ‘T’ hoose be mine, t’
Lord be praised,’ she continued in a loud, hard voice, ‘an’ as long as
he spare me, Tony, I’ll na’ see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it.’
It has all the unsavoury cruelty of humanity, and to find other such
scenes in English literature we have to come down to Caradoc Evans’s
_My People_, or James Joyce.
In _Trevor Perkins_, in a brief masterly way, we have the soul of the
average young man of the nineties, who has ceased to believe in God or
tolerate his parents, sketched for us. He walks out with the waitress
of his bunshop, and we realise at once he is of those who are doomed
to make fools of themselves on the reef of her sex. The last story,
_The Turn of the Wheel_, is the history of the daughter who believes
in her self-made father, and despises her sidetracked mother as an
inferior being, only to find she has made a great mistake. It is one
of the longest stories he wrote, and moves easily in the higher strata
of London society. From this fashionable world to the rude and rugged
scars and fells of Cumberland is a far cry; but here, as elsewhere,
Crackanthorpe finds the friction of humanity is its own worst enemy.
Yet behind all this impenetrably impersonal bitter play of human
passions in these short stories, one feels somehow or other the distant
beats of the author’s compassionate heart, which his sickness of life
made him forcibly stop in the pride of his youth before he had time to
realise himself or fulfil his rich promise.