Mrs. Edith Mary Moore has devoted her great abilities to proving in The Blind Marksman (Hodder and Stoughton) how shockingly bad the little god's shooting became towards the end of last century. She proves it by the frustrated hopes of Jane, her heroine, who in utter ignorance of life marries a man whose pedestrian attitude of mind is quite unfitted to keep pace with her own passionate and eager hurry of idealism. She becomes household drudge to a master who cannot even talk the language which she speaks naturally, and discovers in a man she has known all her life the lover she should have married, only to lose him in the European War. Here you have both Jane and the ineffective husband—for whom I was sincerely sorry, because he asked so very little of life and didn't even get that—badly left, and the case against Cupid looks black. Mrs. Moore does what she can for him by blaming our Victorian ancestors and their habits of mind; but I think it is only fair to add that, delightful as Jane is, she was not made for happiness any more than the people who enjoy poor health have it in them to be robust, and that, true as much of the author's criticism is, she has not been able to give The Blind Marksman, for his future improvement, any very helpful ideas as to how he is to shoot.
The Devil, in so far as I have met him in fiction, has usually been a highly successful intriguer on behalf of anyone prepared to make the necessary bargain. Sir Ronald Ross, however, to judge from the rather confused mediæval happenings in the Alps which are faithfully described in The Revels of Orsera (Murray), has rather a low opinion of the intelligence of Mephistopheles. Anyhow, a certain Zozimo, deformed in body but of great romantic sensibility, appears to have exchanged his outward presence for that of a rich and handsome young Count, and in this guise wooed the Lady Lelita, for whose sake her father had devised a magnificent contest of suitors at Andermatt in the year 1495. After a great deal of preliminary bungling the supposititious Count, with the Devil in Zozimo's shape as his body-servant, was just about to secure the object of his affections when Zozimo was stabbed by his mother, with the result that the double identity was fused and the Lady Lelita was left with a dying dwarf as her knight. If the plot of The Revels of Orsera is a little unsatisfying the elaboration of scenic description and mediæval pageantry is conscientious in the extreme, and the laughter which followed the malicious pranks of Gangogo, the professional jester of the tourney, must, if I am to take the author's word for it, have made the glaciers ring. There is a great deal in the way of philosophy and psychology that is very baffling in this book, but of one thing I feel certain, and that is that the Elemental Spirits of the Heights, to whom frequent allusion is made, must find the winter sports of a later age a sorry substitute for the rare old frolics of the fifteenth century.
It can at least be claimed for Mrs. Margaret Baillie Saunders that she has provided an original setting and "chorus" for her new novel, Becky & Co. (Hutchinson). Tales of City courtship have been written often enough, but the combination here of a millinery establishment and a community of Little Sisters of St. Francis under one roof in the Minories, gives a stimulating atmosphere to a story otherwise not specially distinguished. Becky was, as perhaps you may have guessed, head of the millinery business, next door to which was housed the firm of Ray, St. Cloud & Stiggany, leather-dressers, the three partners in which all presently become suitors for the hand of Becky. This in effect is the story—under which thimble will the heart of the heroine be eventually found?—a problem that, in view of the obviously superior claims of young St. Cloud over his two elderly rivals, will not leave you long guessing. An element of novel complication is however furnished by the device of making St. Cloud at first engaged to Ray's daughter, who, subsequently retiring into the Franciscan sisterhood, left her fiancé free to become the rival of her widowed father. (As the late Dan Leno used to observe, this is a little intricate!) For the rest, as I have said, an agreeable, very feminine story of mingled sentiment, commerce and ecclesiastical interest, the last predominating.
It is possible that The Sea Bride (Mills and Boon) may be too violent to suit all tastes, for Mr. Ben Ames Williams writes of men primitive in their loves and hates, and he describes them graphically. The scenes of this story are set on the whaler Sally, commanded by a man of mighty renown in the whaling world. When we meet him he has passed his prime and has just taken unto himself a young wife. She goes with him in the Sally, and the way in which Mr. Williams shows how her courage increases as her husband's character weakens wins my most sincere admiration. His tale would be nothing out of the common but for his skill in giving individuality to his characters. Things happen on the Sally, bloodthirsty, sinister, terrible things, which the author neither glosses nor gloats over, being content to make them appear essential to the development of the story. I am going to keep my eye on Mr. Williams, chiefly because he can write enthrallingly, but partly to see if he will accept a word of advice and be a little more sparing in his use of those little dots ... which are the first and last infirmity of writers who have no sense of punctuation.
When a young man sets out to London to make money for his relations he usually (in a novel) writes a book which sells prodigiously—quite an easy thing to do in a novel. Mr. John Wilberforce, however, avoids the beaten track in The Champion of the Family (Fisher Unwin). Jack Brockhurst, the champion in question, became a member of the Stock Exchange, and, if you will accept my invitation and follow his fortunes, I can promise you a fluttering time. Mr. Wilberforce's name is unknown to me, and I judge him more experienced in the mysteries of the Stock Exchange than in the art of fiction; but I like his constructive ability and I like his courage. He does not hesitate to make his champion a prig, which is exactly what a youth so idolised by his family would be likely to become. But, though a prig by training, Jack was not by nature a bore, and his relations (especially his father and sister) are delightful people. Altogether I find this a most promising performance.