Fiction
The Speaker, October 13, 1900


QUISANTE By Anthony Hope. London: Methuen
THE IMAGE-BREAKERS. By Gertrude Dix. London: Heinemann

The work of Mr. Anthony Hope would probably be completely great, if he could only obliterate the impression of complete modernity. His last work, Quisante, is a good example of this limitation. If Mr. Hope would only write one book, or one chapter, or one sentence, that might have been written a thousand years ago, or even one sentence that could have been written at any other time than at the present decade, we believe he would have been the first writer of his age. But he has lost that: he has gained popularity. The basic idea of this particular decade is the intense symbolism of small things, small incidents, small phrases; and so far this decade is right enough. No one can too often repeat, in defiance of an inane proverb, the great truth that little things please great minds. So far as impressionism, realism, symbolism, and Mr. Hope's Quisante express this, they are worthy of all encouragement. Quisante is a study of a political parvenu- such a man as Disraeli was in many ways; such a man as Mr. Chamberlain might have been with the two additions of imagination and natural dignity. Alexander Quisante leads a party which is obviously intended for the Conservative party; and Mr. Hope has well compared the innocent snobbery of the leader with the deliberate and evil snobbery of the aristocrats who rely on his leadership.

Mr. Anthony Hope is a particularly appropriate man to approach a subject of this kind. He, more than any other modern writer, has expressed the best aristocratic spirit in modern society. His abruptness, his rapidity, his lightning repartees and remote allusions, are after all only a form of that vast system of conveniences and that luxury of promptitude which are so natural to the richer classes. Just as they need special trains to carry them to their destination, so they require special phrases to carry them to the heart of a subject. But it is pleasant to find that a man, particularly a man of genius, may pass through all this and rise above it. Mr. Hope deliberately describes Alexander Quisante, his hero, as having no manners. But he keeps clearly in the reader's mind, though he never expresses it, the meaning of "manners"- the methods by which something is to be done. And he gives the palm to the man who does it in his own manner, in preference to his great political party, which, with an enormous apparatus of manners, does nothing at all.

We wish that all novels of Socialism and vague unconventionality were as good as Miss Gertrude Dix's work, in which she shows a genuine sense of beauty and delicacy and a comprehension of that nameless aesthetic hunger which has so little to do with Socialism in formula and so much in fact. Still, some Socialists are interested in social economics, and we wish Miss Dix were a little clearer on the intellectual and political side of the matter. Socialism is said to be the doctrine of these "Image-Breakers," yet they give shelter to a young bomb-throwing Anarchist, though the only "image" he is expert in breaking is the living image of God. He is spoken of as if he differed from them only in means; but, if his end was Anarchy, it differed more from their end than Free Trade differs from Protection. It seems improbable that humane and educated reformers would foster this sanguinary young noodle even for the benefit of their own party; but that they should foster him for the benefit of a philosophy flatly opposed to their own seems quite futile criminality. The best part of the work however lies, as we have said, in its aesthetic and emotional delineation. The love-story of Leslie and Redgold, especially towards the end, is really beautiful. But we attach even more importance to that pervading sense of colour and form in which more of an author comes out than the author knows. For every moral and social movement has, potentially, an art, a basic scheme of decoration, a landscape, as it were, at the back of it. One of the best things in the book is the description on the first page of Leslie lying on her bed, a description as severely graceful as a mediaeval tomb, in which there is a real suggestion of that austere loveliness of "plain living and high thinking" which marks the best of these modern revolutionaries.