"PAULA."1

To represent human nature as it is not is usually the first care of a novelist who desires popular success, and in looking through the names of authors in a circulating library catalogue, it is easy to tick off a fair number of writers whose shrewd commercial instinct proves too strong for their artistic conscience. The novelist who abuses his talent and hushes the truth that is in him for the sake of a "big sale " is only one of the heirs of all the ages of business enterprise in our nation of shopkeepers. And there is some excuse to be offered for him in these competitive times. Praise is as the breath of life to those who live by amusing their "public"; and when intellectual fibbing yields plenty of praise and pudding there is not a very powerful inducement to cultivate the eternal verities of art. Probably, Mr. Ned Purdon, of whom a friend said at his demise, "he had such a damnable time on this earth, I don't think he'll want to come back", was a literary wight cursed with self-respecting scruples, otherwise the epitaph might not have been so grimly funny. Yes, this playing the bawd with one's pen is a profitable business. I have heard a clever successful novelist advise a novice to make his first fiction "safe". This was perfectly sound literary-cum-commercial advice. You must study the taste of the quarter-educated and the Grundyites if you want to "arrive" in double-quick time. That is to say, you must write a bad story, even assuming that you have it in you to write a good one, because unsafe books are often true books about real men and women, which is precisely the sort of reading that scares and repels ninety-nine out of a hundred novel skippers.

Greatly to be envied is the writer who can snap his fingers at the suffrage of Little Pedlington. He is either a fool or a wise man. In any case, so far as his banking account is concerned, he is, to say the least of it, injudicious. Let the aspirant for literary fame and the coveter of its wealth write his preliminary novel with his tongue in his cheek, and his eye in a fine frenzy rolling towards Little Pedlington; let him gulp down the choking tears of an outraged conscience, assured that if he makes a hit with a shocking farrago of falsehoods he will be heeded when the time is ripe for a

1 "Paula." By Victoria Cross. Walter Scott. London, 1896.

"hill-topper". Such counsel not only implies that our intending novelist possesses the necessary insight for the production of unsafe books, but that he wishes to preserve a few tattered shreds of artistic decency. Without the ability and the principle, you may go as you please; and the chances are that fifty readers' names will be always entered in advance for the hire of your last volume from the Little Pedlington library.

It is a curious fact that millions of novel readers like their fiction adulterated. Most of these worthy folk can detect the presence of chicory in their coffee, when the chicory is in excess of the coffee. Yet they fail to even suspect the admixture of adulterating matter when imbibing their intellectual beverage from the pages of novels. Falsities in fiction that offend the cultivated mental palate, and turn to gall before they can reach a healthy mental stomach, give the most delightful titillations to the tongue and a delicious languor of digestion to the nerves of the average novel reader. There is no need for the invidious mention of names. It is enough to say that a huge proportion of popular fiction is largely composed of rank poison for the mind. For any untruth in a representation of life that pretends to depict human character is a species of poison, not only for the mind, but for the morals also. The charm of imaginative poetry and of fairy legend is in unreality. But the novel is on a different plane.

Now, to those who value a novel for its convincingness, or in other words, freedom from adulteration, it is a keen satisfaction to find a sound piece of work by a new author. "Paula", by Victoria Cross, is, in many respects, such a novel. If it is not a really great book it has very many of the qualities of greatness. It is not a first book. Victoria Cross is already known as the author of "The Woman who Didn't", a title calculated to create some misgivings concerning the merit of the work. I have not read "The Woman who Didn't", and I might have missed the pleasure of reading "Paula" had I not heard that a critic had "cut it up" in a sixpenny review. My benison on that reviewer for his good service to me. I was in the mood for a novel. I wanted to read for relaxation, pure and simple. Why not try Paula "? An ill-defined prejudice is, of course, a foolish and groundless prejudice in most instances, but I will confess that I opened the book with a sort of suspicion and dread that I should be bored. When I had read the first chapter, I found my interest kindled, and as I read on, I had no doubt about the author's insight and skill in character drawing. It is a good many years since I last sat to read a

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novel to the bitter end without rising from my chair. But I had to do it with "Paula". I let the fire die out unnoticed as I read spell-bound and fascinated through "the wee sma’ hours". It was a good time; I have not had such a time since the first reading of "Esther Waters". I found myself muttering good, wonderfully good" as I eagerly turned over the pages, and when I awoke about ten the next morning, my first thoughts were of Paula and Vincent. No doubt all this seems to you very egotistic; but you cannot easily be impersonal in reviewing a novel that makes strong appeal to your idiosyncrasy, and impresses you as an admirable performance.

I would fain not give away the plot of this remarkable story, but without sketching Paula's career briefly I cannot do justice to the novel. This is how the author describes Paula, the provincial parson's daughter, who had come to London to fight fate as a playwright:

"In a few moments she was asleep wrapped in a deep. soundless, dreamless sleep. As the night wore on, slowly the light crept round, and at last it blazed all across the face, neck, and bosom of the sleeper, the white patch spread till it covered all but the tiny feet and these remained in thick blackness. The moonlight rested on her. It was palely divine: she was deliciously human. It lay on her, and touched the mist of yellow hair upon the pillow, the warm red lips, the solid whiteness of the full throat, the plentiful white arm thrown above her head, the long form that lay so easily and peacefully beneath the thin coverlet : it tried to render all these ideal and ethereal, but it seemed a thing apart. Paula lay under the moonlight, warm flesh and blood, pulsating under its ghostly touches, deliciously womanly, delightfully human: a thing made for sorrow and suffering, pain and sin and death. Predestined to all of these, and conscious it was so predestined, and yet looking out upon life joyously, innocently. None of them had approached her at present. Her life had been as clear as the moonlight lying across her face; it might be taken to symbolise her past path through life, as the black shadows enveloping her feet might stand for the thick mud of sorrows and passions in the track of her future. And on her brow and breast lay the cross, the great cross she would have to bear that is common to all flesh -the cross of human desires."

This girl is compelled to sing in the chorus at a theatre while she lives in hope of winning success with a play. She shares rooms with her brother, who supports himself by teaching music. Paula meets Vincent Halham a young man of fortune, a very modern type. He was what some young ladies and curates call “a rank materialist," which is only a term of ignorant aversion for a philosophic habit of mind. Paula finds him manly, kindly, and cultured.

He was absolutely indifferent to what others thought or said of him, provided they were polite and amiable in his presence. If they chaffed him upon being moral he smiled pleasantly, if they taxed him with being immoral he smiled just as pleasantly, and no

one felt any the wiser. But it his conventional virtue was perhaps over-estimated, his natural innate generosity and worth of character was probably underrated."

At first Vincent's sentiment towards Paula is platonic, until the girl, "swayed by some power that seemed quite new to her and beyond herself", throws her arms around Vincent's neck and kisses him.

Paula has written a play, and sent it to Reeves, the manager of a theatre. Reeves will produce the piece on one condition only, that Paula shall marry him. It is here that Victoria Cross shows her psychological insight. Paula's artistic passion is of the nature of an unquenchable lust. She has rare gifts, but hitherto her talent has been utterly unrecognised. Her fortune as an artist is secure if she will marry Reeves.

"Here was her desire given into her hand. She would be very great. All her dreams her vague hopes, her longings of years past were here crystallised into tangible form and pressed upon her, but now weighted with a condition that rendered them worthless."

She recoils at the notion of selling herself. Her heart is Vincent's. But Reeves is as obdurate as a Shylock; her success is in his hands, and he will not produce the play unless she consents to marry him. Paula tells Vincent that she has sold herself to Reeves. "I wanted my liberty so much," she says, "There's no liberty where there's poverty, but this will be only exchanging the tie of poverty for the tie of marriage." Vincent has not asked Paula to marry him; but when he hears of this terrible sacrifice, he casts asides all his scruples against marriage. He is conscious of his innate fickleness, and he has been honest enough to remain a bachelor. But now the subtly mingled motives of jealousy of Reeves and sympathy for Paula impel Vincent to forego all other considerations, and he begs her to accept him. The play of two forces in the girl's mind is admirably presented by the author at this crisis of the tale.

"What necessity", says Vincent, "is there for you to marry the man you don't like, instead of the one you do?" "The necessity", replies Paula, "that it is the quickest way of working out my own powers; the necessity for working them out lies in the powers themselves. Don't you remember how I told you the first day I saw you how gifts are a handicap on the race of life? They are if the goal is happiness,

.. You are simply dominated by the great despot that is enthroned within you. Your talent, whatever it is, makes you work for it. I don't suppose I can explain further to you Vincent, if we talk for ages," she said, getting up and walking excitedly about the room. "I can only say this,

that when any gift is bestowed upon you, the irresistible impulse to use it is given too; that when by any divine power the brain is fertilised it must produce, just as when a woman has once conceived she must bring forth."

And so Paula barters herself for fame, and the gods look on, laughing in irony. She drinks every drop from the golden goblet of success; and the first months of her married life were "full of happy, eager, tremulous longing and looking forward, which kept all her feelings excited and her lifestream flowing at high pressure". But Nemesis in the form of avenging Nature, pursues her. Contempt for Reeves, a kindly, dullish animal, turns to defiance and loathing, and Paula leaves him. She is joined by Vincent, and the pair go abroad together. The outraged husband vows that he "will shoot Vincent at sight". Now we come to the weakest part of a story that is otherwise full of strength. In order to save Vincent, Paula returns to Reeves; that is to say, she again commits the supreme sin against Nature-the very sin that had brought all the trouble upon her-simply because her husband is going about with a pistol, like a melodramatic bravo, threatening to put a bullet in his rival's head.

A complex woman's mind is marvellously intricate, and its motives are inscrutable. Yet it seems to me that the situation is forced here. Surely Paula could have devised some other means for protecting her lover against Reeves? Nor does the portrayal of Reeves's character convey the impression that this ease-loving, sleek, well-fed fellow had enough sentiment and romance in him to rush about the Continent breathing threatenings and slaughter against the man who had run away with his wife. A man of the Reeves type would more probably have solaced his wounded spirit with champagne at the Wellington or the Gaiety Restaurant. Undoubtedly, coarse natures are often extremely susceptible to jealousy; but I question whether a prosperous, pursey theatrical entrepreneur would neglect his business, and, what is more important still, incur a charge of murder through an insane ebullition of jealousy. Such conduct is not to be reconciled with Reeves's character as drawn by the author in the earlier chapters of the novel. However, if you admit that there is no accounting for human conduct, and especially for the actions of a complex woman, you must absolve Victoria Cross from a charge of inartistic treatment in this episode. At all events, Paula allowed herself to be intimi dated and recaptured by her husband, when she might have had him bound over to keep the peace, while she remained with Vincent. But, as Anthony Trollope used to say, "where would my story have been then "?