"Perdidi diem," says the Baron, "or at least the better part of it, in reading Zero the Slaver, by Lawrence Fletcher, who seems to me to be a promising pupil in the school of Rider Haggard and Louis Stevenson, but chiefly of the former. It was a beastly day, snow falling, and North-West-by-North wind howling, bitterly cold, and so," continued the Baron, "I was reduced to Zero. The construction of the plot is clever, as is also the description of a great fight, in the latter portion of the story; but, as a whole, the story is irritatingly ill-written, and tawdrily coloured, while italics are used to bring into prominence any description of some strongly sensational situation."
Few things so annoying to me, personally, as the romancer speaking of his chief puppets as "our friends." This Lawrence Fletcher is perpetually doing. Now his heroes are not "my friends," for, when I read, I am strictly impartial, at all events, through two-thirds of the book, and, if I learn to love any one or two (or more) of them, male or female, I should still resent the author's presuming to speak of them as "our friends." To do so from the first is simply impudent presumption on the part of the author, as why, on earth, should he assume that his creations—his children—should be as dear to us as they are to him?
No—"Our friends," so used, is a mistake.
The influence of Rider Haggard is over the whole book, but in two instances the author has been unable to resist close imitation, nay, almost quotation of a well-known Haggardism, and so he writes at p. 130:—
"Just then a very wonderful and awful thing happened."
And at p. 197:—
"When suddenly, and without an instant's warning, a most awful thing happened."
Both variations on a Haggardism, and both equally spoilt in the process of transferring and adapting.
One sentence, the utterance of a Zulu chief, is well worth quoting, and it is this:—