HEN Zola first formulated his doctrine of the Experimental Novel, and advised the makers of fiction to acquaint themselves with the theories of Darwin, he received rather more credit for originality than was strictly due him. When he spoke glibly of heredity and environment, of atavism and practical sociology, one mentally translated these abstractions into the known terms of Plassans and Tante Dide, of the Rougon-Macquarts and the Paris boulevards. Dazzled by the rather splendid audacity of his methods, one forgot that his innovations were often a matter of degree rather than of kind; and that he was not the first novelist to describe a heroine's boudoir or to draw up a hero's genealogical tree. One forgot that in the making of fiction, from the earliest folk tales downward, there have been certain indispensable factors, just as in painting there have been certain primary colours, -and that two of them are heredity and environment.

One may imagine an artist attempting, on a wager, to paint a landscape without using a single tone of yellow, let us say, or blue. In the same way, one may imagine a novelist writing a story of a man and a woman, so detached from the outside world, so silent regarding their ancestry, their past lives, their present surroundings, so nearly a record of two naked souls, that heredity and environment may be said for once to be eliminated. But such a picture, such a story, would be a mere tour de force, not an honest transcript from life. Every landscape must contain, in varying degrees, some yellow and some blue. Every human story must concern itself with traits inherited from our fathers or acquired through the company we keep. And the novelist to whom his characters are a living reality, men and women. whom he thinks of as having an exist

ence outside the pages of his book, needs no promptings from Darwin in order to make us recognise the ties of blood and of propinquity, any more than the photographic lens needs to be prompted in order to show, in a family group, how the father's eyes, the mother's lips, are mirrored back in the faces of son and daughter. It is not venturesome to say that in some of our best English novels, in Belinda and Emma, in The Newcomes and The Mill on the Floss, there is often more heredity than Miss Edgeworth or Miss Austen, than Thackeray or George Eliot were conscious of putting there. Take any novel of the first magnitude, in which a whole household is described, three generations of genial, kindly gentlefolk, the sort of family that it would be a privilege to know in real life. One of the granddaughters, let us say, is the author's chief concern, and the whole book revolves around her personality. Now if the book is based upon an intelligent observation of life, it is not a vital matter whether the author has worked out the heredity for you, like logarithms, down to the tenth decimal. You are free to work it out for yourself, to trace the heroine's qualities, good and bad, back to their various sources; to conjecture about her many things which the author never once mentioned, perhaps never even thought of. In books, as well as in real life, there are certain family resemblances that are never noticed until pointed out by some comparative stranger.

But it is one thing to recognise in fiction such simple workings of nature's laws as the bequest from father to son of a flashing eye, a hawk-like nose, a stubborn temper. It is something radically different when an author makes you conscious of heredity as an omnipresent power, an inflexible hand of fate, foreordaining unborn lives, even beyond the proverbial fourth generation. What Zola had in mind when he recommended to fellow-craftsmen a study of the

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Descent of Man, and what he kept in mind unwaveringly throughout his own gigantic series of novels, was that a man or a woman is not merely an individual being, a single, separate soul, but something vastly more complex. Each human being is the aggregate of the hopes and fears, the instincts and desires handed down to him through countless generations. He is the heir, physical and moral, of his two parents, his four grandparents, his eight great-grandparents, and back of them a vast host of ancestors, ever widening in geometric progression, through an infinite series of concentric circles, across the ages, into the grey mist of unrecorded time. myriad strands intertwine and blend, to form the thread of a single human life. Some of these strands stretch back to brave men and gentle women; others go back, quite as straight, to knaves and cowards; still others, worn tenuous by time, span the centuries and reach primordial man in his stone caverns. Who shall say which of all these strands is the strongest? Who shall say which shall control a man's destiny? What family can feel assured that there is not some forgotten strain of lawlessness, dormant for generations, that may suddenly come to the surface, to wreck the life of some erring son, some wayward daughter? It is when heredity holds the key to tragedy, when it serves to explain the erratic and perverse tricks of fate, that it becomes a potent instrument in the hands of the novelist who knows how to use it subtly. There are few situations so improbable that the reader will not accept them, if explained by the skilful suggestion of an inherited taint, an inference that they are the sins of the fathers, tardily visited upon the children.

It is a curious fact that, while the realistic school delights in reminding us of the descent of man and the burden of his inheritance, the psychological writers seldom trouble themselves greatly about questions of heredity. To them a human soul is an interesting case, a subject for vivisection; for all the other lives whose births and deaths helped to make it what it is, they care nothing. Having it at the mercy of probe and scalpel, their one interest is in watching its present

quivering anguish. Writers of the school of Bourget or Prévost will dissect for you a woman's heart until it contains no single shred of mystery; they analyse her inmost thoughts until you know her as you know your secret self; but with the history of her race, that made her what she is, they usually refuse to concern themselves. A novel of considerable psychological insight, which at

"Pam."

the same time offers a marked contrast in regard to its treatment of heredity, is Pam, by the Baroness von Hutten. It is written, the author gives assurance, in defence of no theory, and in defiance of no wise and beautiful social law. Yet it is an unconventional book, refreshingly, even deliciously unconventional, and written with a candour that is matched only by its admirably impersonal note.

Pam may best be defined as a searching analysis of the growth and development of a woman-child, under painful and abnormal conditions. Pam is but ten years old when we first make her acquaintance. She is, moreover, an illegitimate child, whose parents live in open defiance of conventions; and she is not only aware of her peculiar misfortune, but discusses it in all its bearings with a precocious intelligence that is distinctly startling. Her mother is the oldest daughter of Lord Yeoland, who surprised no one when she eloped with Sacheverel, the tenor,-a strain of lawless blood, it seems, had for generations distinguished the women folk of the Yeolands, but when Sacheverel's deserted wife refused to get a divorce, the truant couple placed themselves hopelessly beyond the pale by continuing to live together and to flaunt their perfect and radiant happiness in the face of social ostracism. A life of idle drifting about Europe, with few friends but those whose lives are as unconventional as their own, such is the atmosphere in which Pam spends the first ten years of her life; and it is partly due to this unfortunate environment, partly to her early knowledge that she is quite superfluous to her mother's happiness,-partly also to that latent strain of lawless blood in all the women folk of the Yeolands,

that she has developed into a strangely precocious, abnormally wise little creature, who at times already affords startling glimpses of the woman that she is destined to become. At the opening of the story, her grandfather tries to rescue Pam from a situation that the family realises has become untenable. But Pam quickly finds the staid atmosphere of her new English home irksome to her, and clandestinely returns to share her mother's irregular life for six years longer. During these years, while she learns and openly discusses so many matters that a girl of her age has no business to know, Pam formulates a certain lawless creed regarding love and marriage. Her mother has defied the world, and has found a lasting happiness by doing so. Accordingly Pam decides that she, too, will accept love if it comes to her, but that she will never marry. With all her precocious knowledge of her illegitimacy, the girl has never felt the sting of the world's scorn; through all these years, her knowledge of her mother's shame has rested lightly on her. It is only when she in her turn gives her heart away that she awakens to a full sense of the irreparable loss that her mother's selfishness has cost her. The book, though written with a light touch, deals subtly with some deep questions, and leaves behind it an impression that refuses to be easily shaken off. And never for an instant are you allowed to forget that the responsibility for Pam's unhappiness rests partly with her mother, partly with her grandfather, and partly with that long line of lawless women folk, sleeping more or less uneasily in their graves.

"A Servant of the Public."

In Anthony Hope's new story, A Servant of the Public, we have on the contrary nothing whatever to do with generations dead and gone. Whatever responsibility rested upon the parents and grandparents of Ora Pinsent, for making her what she is, Mr. Hope remains discreetly silent. He simply places her before us, to tantalise and perplex and bewitch, just as she bewitches Lord Bowdon and tantalises Ashley Mead almost to the point of their undoing. Ora

Pinsent is a young actress, who has taken London by storm. She has a husband somewhere, it is said, "whose name does not matter;" indeed, it matters so little that it does not prevent her from letting Ashley make ardent love to her, one Sunday afternoon, though all the while she "preserves wonderfully the air of not being responsible for the thing, of neither accepting nor rejecting, of being quite passive, of having it just happen to her." Thus with a single penstroke Mr. Hope has set the woman unmistakably before us. Throughout the book she practises the art of having things just happen to, the art of dodging responsibility. With Ashley Mead she drifts, dangerously one thinks, at first, until one sees how easily she checks his ardour when she chooses, with a nervous laugh, and a low whispered "Don't, don't make love to me any more now.' She talks much solemn nonsense about her duty to the husband whose name does not matter, and about her intention to renounce Ashley, although one realises that there is really nothing to renounce, nor ever will be. And when the time comes for her company to leave London and start on their American tour, here also she plays the passive rôle, neither accepting nor rejecting. It is not until the weary months of her absence are over and she comes back as the wife of her leading man, that Ashley begins to see her as she really is; only then that he feels her power over him has ceased; only then that he can say, "I no longer love her, but I wish to God I did!" It is not easy to convey an impression of a woman's charm, when it lies not in what she says, but in the way she says it; not in what she does, but the way she does it. But this is precisely what Anthony Hope has done triumphantly in his portraiture of Ora Pinsent,-Ora, with her upturned face, with its habitual expression of expecting to be kissed, is one of the few heroines of this season's fiction that will not easily be forgotten.

Eden Phillpotts is an author who seldom lets you forget that the men and women he writes about are the product of countless generations who have lived out their lives close to the good, red

earth of Dartmoor. In all that he writes, his short stories as well as his longer novels, his dominant note is the debt that

"Knock at a Venture."

his people owe to the past, the antiquity of their customs, their superstitions, their friendships. and their enmities, handed down from father to son. Knock at a Venture is the title of his latest volume of miscellaneous sketches, written in a light vein for the most part, yet laden also with a certain quaint and primitive philosophy. One of the lightest of these sketches, which none the less lingers in the memory because so different from Mr. Phillpotts's usual manner, is "Corban," which tells how two old men, neighbours and lifelong friends, fell out and nearly broke off the marriage long since arranged between their children. One of the two old friends kept pheasants, the pride of his old age; the other owned a fine tomcat, the Corban of the title. Now Corban acquired the bad habit of stealing and making off with the young pheasants, and their owner after frequent threats, one night fired a hasty shot, and Corban was henceforth missing. His master refused to be comforted and vowed bitter vengeance on his old neighbour, declaring that the latter's son should never wed his daughter, though their banns had already been. twice called in church. Under shadow of this serious menace, the girl and her lover concocted a daring plot to bring about a reconciliation. At his birth, eight years before, Corban had not been the only kitten; and his twin, identical in marking, hair for hair, still lives at a nearby farm, from which the conspirators without difficulty brought it home. The murder of Corban had never been admitted, so with the advent of the new Corban it was easy to persuade his delighted master that he had done his old friend gross injustice, and a reconciliation was speedily effected. Unfortu

nately, however, the conspirators did not notice until too late that the new Corban happened to be of the wrong sex, and the story closes with a strong probability that the fraud will be discovered before the wedding can be carried to a finish.

"The Passport."

Heredity plays its part in a new and pleasant little story by Richard Bagot, The Passport, because if a certain young woman had not been the living image of what her mother had been a score of years earlier, then a certain priest who had loved that mother and had lost her, in days before he was a priest, might not have taken quite such an active interest in the daughter's love affairs. The scene, like that of most of Mr. Bagot's novels, is Italy; and since he has chosen this time to keep away from the political quarrels of the Quirinal and Vatican, and to write a simple, straightforward love story, The Passport might quite fittingly be placed upon the shelf with the Roman stories of Marion Crawford. Indeed, it is quite a dainty little idyl, of how a fine young fellow, who was not of the nobility, dared to love a young princess, who was heiress to a large estate,—and what is more, dared to tell her that he loved her. But the young princess's stepmother happened to be under the influence of a rascally French abbé, whom it did not suit at all to have the princess marry, and thus take out of his control the estate from which he was reaping a rich harvest. So he and the step-mother bear off the poor young princess, and keep her in durance vile in her own castle. All this sounds quite like a mediæval tale, especially when we read further of secret passages in the old castle, through which the princess is rescued by the priest who once loved her mother; how the abbé's villainy is discovered, and how the curtain falls upon the reunited lovers, while the step-mother, convinced of her injustice, says "bless you, my children." Frankly, the story makes rather better reading than an epitome of it would warrant one to expect.

If the aid of heredity can be invoked in fiction, to win credence for an extravagant tale, what is to be said of the possibilities that are opened up to the writer who boldly founds his story upon the doctrine of the transmigration of souls? The novelist who justifies love at first sight on the ground that his hero's grandfather had loved his heroine's greataunt, forty years before, finds his ingenu

"Ayesha."

ity hopelessly thrown in the shade by an author whose hero boldly declares, "I love you because two thousand years ago, in one of my many incarnations, you were my wife." Before metempsychosis it is time. for heredity to retire discomfited. These thoughts are suggested by a perusal of Ayesha, Mr. Rider Haggard's long-promised sequel to his first big popular success, She. Occasionally it is borne in upon a reviewer that it would be a most interesting experience if it were possible for him, with all the advantage of his present sanity of judgment, to approach as if for the first time a certain book that stirred his pulse a matter of a score of years ago. She was one of the books that stirred the pulses of a good many readers not lacking in intelligence, in the days of its first appearance. Has our taste changed and our discrimination grown keener through the intervening years, or has the pen of Mr. Haggard lost its magic? One is inclined towards the belief that there was real magic of a certain kind in She. It was a lurid story, wild as the Arabian Nights, but it did hold you, against your better judgment. And in the end you saw the fabulous She-who-must-be-obeyed shrivel before

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your sight, turn into a grotesque, apelike creature, a dried and crumbling mummy. You heaved a sigh of relief and pitched the book aside; She was ended, once for all, satisfactorily, conclusively ended. Somehow, the bare idea of a resurrected She, holding sway in the unexplored fastnesses of Central Asia, does not appeal kindly to the imagination; while the spectacle of the narrator and his ward on their bizarre odyssey among the mountains and the monasteries of Thibet, accompanied everywhere by a faithful but half-starved yak, over precipices where a goat could not find footing, contains an element of the grotesque that strips it of its slight illusion of reality. One feels quite grateful to the timely avalanche that finally overtakes the yak and neatly decapitates it, leaving its body ready for the hungry wanderers to dine off it. As for the finding of She, and what follows, there is no use in trying to persuade oneself that one liked it, when one knows all the time that one did not. And the worst of it is that Ayesha has spoiled the memory of She, and pleasant memories are not so numerous that one can see them spoiled with equanimity.

Frederic Taber Cooper.