(1) An Author’s Love: Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Mérimée’s ‘Inconnue.’ (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets. By Graham R. Tomson. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
A THOUGHT-READER’S NOVEL
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1889.)
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénoûment one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display. In the case of Mr. Stuart Cumberland’s novel, The Vasty Deep, as he calls it, the last page is certainly thrilling and makes us curious to know more about ‘Brown, the medium.’
Scene, a padded room in a mad-house in the United States.
A gibbering lunatic discovered dashing wildly about the chamber as if in the act of chasing invisible forms.
‘This is our worst case,’ says a doctor opening the cell to one of the visitors in lunacy. ‘He was a spirit medium and he is hourly haunted by the creations of his fancy. We have to carefully watch him, for he has developed suicidal tendencies.’
The lunatic makes a dash at the retreating form of his visitors, and, as the door closes upon him, sinks with a yell upon the floor.
A week later the lifeless body of Brown, the medium, is found suspended from the gas bracket in his cell.