DOI article:
Books: a letter to the editor and an offer of a prize
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27806#0141
From “The Yellow Dwarf” 137
the same dear old conventional personages. I can’t say characters,
for there isn’t a character, there isn’t an individual, there isn’t the
ghost of a human creature, in the boolc. Simon Warre, his wife,
his friend, his wife’s lover, Allegra—not one is a man or a woman
of flesh and blood, whom we can recognize, whom we can think
of as of people we have known : each is a formula, a shadow, a
conventional type. And then—Allegra ! Allegra carried me
back an appalling number of years into the past, to the time when
I was young and foolish. Everybody, when he was young and
foolish (and generally in the flush of enthusiasm that follows his
first visit to Italy—for a fortnight, at Easter, say), everybody has
written a novel whereof the heroine was a pale mysterious Italian
girl, the daughter of a nobleman ; and wasn’t she almost always
named Allegra ? And then everybody who was prudent has
burned his manuscript. I burned mine, thank mercy; but
Mr. John Oliver Hobbes has published his. Ah, weel, bairn, ye
maun just live and lurrun.
“ Ah, but the style ! The style’s the thing ! ” cries the Press-
man. Quite so; the style. Mr. Hobbes seems to be perpetually
straining in his style for the quality vaguely called distinction
(which, I lately read, in the Saturday Review, of all places, is as
easy as minor poetry), but, easy as it is, he never succeeds in
achieving it. What he does achieve is—sometimes a feeble echo
of Mr. George Meredith ; sometimes a flimsy imitation of Miss
Austen ; sometimes a bit that is Carlylean or Tupperesque ; and,
more often, gems of pure Journalese, so that one might wonder,
“ Is Mr. Hobbes, too, a Pressman ? ” But style is personal, style
is the man. Here there is no style ; there is only a mechanical
mixture of the washings of many styles.
From the leaden pretentiousness of Mr. Hall Caine and
the glassy pretentiousness of Mr. John Oliver Hobbes, it was re-
storative
the same dear old conventional personages. I can’t say characters,
for there isn’t a character, there isn’t an individual, there isn’t the
ghost of a human creature, in the boolc. Simon Warre, his wife,
his friend, his wife’s lover, Allegra—not one is a man or a woman
of flesh and blood, whom we can recognize, whom we can think
of as of people we have known : each is a formula, a shadow, a
conventional type. And then—Allegra ! Allegra carried me
back an appalling number of years into the past, to the time when
I was young and foolish. Everybody, when he was young and
foolish (and generally in the flush of enthusiasm that follows his
first visit to Italy—for a fortnight, at Easter, say), everybody has
written a novel whereof the heroine was a pale mysterious Italian
girl, the daughter of a nobleman ; and wasn’t she almost always
named Allegra ? And then everybody who was prudent has
burned his manuscript. I burned mine, thank mercy; but
Mr. John Oliver Hobbes has published his. Ah, weel, bairn, ye
maun just live and lurrun.
“ Ah, but the style ! The style’s the thing ! ” cries the Press-
man. Quite so; the style. Mr. Hobbes seems to be perpetually
straining in his style for the quality vaguely called distinction
(which, I lately read, in the Saturday Review, of all places, is as
easy as minor poetry), but, easy as it is, he never succeeds in
achieving it. What he does achieve is—sometimes a feeble echo
of Mr. George Meredith ; sometimes a flimsy imitation of Miss
Austen ; sometimes a bit that is Carlylean or Tupperesque ; and,
more often, gems of pure Journalese, so that one might wonder,
“ Is Mr. Hobbes, too, a Pressman ? ” But style is personal, style
is the man. Here there is no style ; there is only a mechanical
mixture of the washings of many styles.
From the leaden pretentiousness of Mr. Hall Caine and
the glassy pretentiousness of Mr. John Oliver Hobbes, it was re-
storative