The first thing I have to say about Initiation (Hutchinson) is that it might have been written by Dr. Clifford. The nice people in it are all Roman Catholics, but a group of Huguenots or of Calvinistic Methodists would have served the author's purpose equally well. For Robert Hugh Benson, the novelist, has (so to speak) told Monsignor Benson, the priest, to mind his own business, and leave him to his, which is the telling of a story, and not the advocacy of any particular form of religion. The second point to notice in the book is that it divides its characters, and incidentally all characters, into those who are initiated and those who are not. The initiated are those who have learnt, chiefly by suffering, the lesson of life, which is that it treats us as it likes. Because they have learnt it, they trust, even when they do not understand, the purpose of the life-giver; because they trust they do not kick against the pricks. The young Catholic English gentleman, of whose initiation the story tells, suffers prodigiously under two of the greatest misfortunes, physical and mental, that a man may endure and live. And yet, when he comes to die, you feel, and he knows, that they are not misfortunes, but the opening up of the way of life. The chief cause of his mental suffering, a young girl of eighteen or nineteen, is described (well on in the book) as a practically insane egoist. She is, to my mind, the weak spot in the story. Frankly I don't believe in her. A girl of her age could not have been so selfishly cruel, and yet have taken in her world as she did. I will own that she took me in at first; but that was the author's fault. He ought not to have let me, as his reader, think her charming and particularly sympathetic when he knew all the time that she cared for no one but herself. I don't think that is playing the game. All the I same, I like his book.
Having read Mr. Reginald Blunt's book, In Cheyne Walk and Thereabout (Mills and Boon), I am now prepared to pass an examination in the history and the worthies (or unworthies) of Chelsea. I know that Don Saltero was no Spaniard, but an ardent collector of childish curiosities who for a time kept a coffee-house and a smoking club of which "the ornaments and apparatus" were eventually offered to Charles Lamb. If I am asked about Dr. Messenger Monsey I shall say that he "tried hard, but with indifferent success, to popularise his own method of extracting teeth by tying one end of a piece of catgut to the offending molar and the other to a perforated bullet, putting the latter with a full charge of powder into a revolver and then pulling the trigger." Then again there is Bartholomew Joseph Alexander de Dominiceti, Lord de Cete et de cortesi, Knight of the Holy Boman Empire and Noble of Venice in terra firma. How did he with his resounding name come to be in Chelsea and there establish "baths, fumigatory stoves and sweating chambers" for the relief of distressed humanity? This question and a hundred others of a similar nature you will find answered in Mr. Blunt's delightful book. Let Mr. Blunt take you by the hand and guide you through his beloved Chelsea. He is the most urbane and the most agreeably gossiping companion. He will re-introduce you to Sir Thomas More, Sir Hans Sloane; to Neild, the prison-reformer, and his son John, the famous miser; to the Carlyles and their servant Jessie Heddlestone, and a host of others. And he will remind you that Dr. Johnson endeavoured to manufacture Chelsea china, and that his chefs d'œuvre always collapsed in the firing. Take my advice and acquire Mr. Blunt's book.
I suspect that Mr. Simpson, who gives his name to the story Simpson (Methuen), can hardly have shared my own exhausting acquaintance with modern fiction, otherwise it is unlikely that he would have behaved as he did. What happened was this. Simpson, though on the wrong side of forty, well off and eminently lovable, was unmarried. Finding a charming old house in the country, he conceives the idea of renting it as a kind of bachelor residential club where he and other congenial cronies can enjoy the life of ease untroubled by any form of feminism. Well, that, to start with, one might fairly describe as "asking for it." But when I add that the old house in question was the property of a still young and charming widow you will probably agree with me that poor Simpson hadn't even a dog's chance from the beginning. It is possible that this fore-dooming may a little spoil your enjoyment of Miss Elinor Mordaunt's otherwise pleasant tale. Naturally, so far from women being banished from its pages, they simply abound; and the tale of the progress of the bachelor club resolves itself into a chronicle of proposals. There is however an attractive variety about the love affairs, of which I liked best that of the youngest couple. With two there is a note of tragedy; and though the courtship of Gilbert Strong, a respectable country lawyer, and the wild gipsy whom he marries may strike you as fantastic, the end of their romance is well told with a fine suggestion of inevitability. On the whole an agreeable and easy-going tale, though without any unusual claim to distinction.
It was an ambitious youth who, while travelling on the Continent, was offered the crown of one of the smaller states and refused it, saying, he "disliked these blind-alley occupations."