REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



October 1, 1913. 



pitv, fear, shame, spite, hatred, scorn — 

 and plays upon them and the souls of 

 his readers just the tune — musical, harsh 

 or jagged — as pleases him, holding 

 their attention, soul and body, until he 

 has finished. 



In his present story he takes a beauti- 

 ful young girl, living on an island — 

 which may be Irish or Manx — makes 

 her the child of a tyrant father, who 

 tears her from a dying mother, and 

 then builds into her life an -episode 

 upon which Mary's fate turns — which 

 would be unthinkable if any but Hall 

 Caine had placed it there. 



Mary has been sold in marriage lov- 

 ing a friend of her childhood. A 

 schoolfellow covets her husband's 

 wealth. Get him to divorce Mary ! So 



the friend is invited by her husband 

 and her enemy, and just before his ar- 

 rival, while Mary herself is absent, the 

 whole house-party goes, without warn- 

 ing, for a trip round the island, leaving 

 Mary to receive the guest alone. Would 

 any girl, not ignorant though convent- 

 bred, fall into such a trap, when even 

 her maid warned her of the scheme, 

 and would a house-party run away 

 when a great Arctic hero was expected ? 

 But Mary stays and receives the man 

 who loves her. And Hall Caine glues 

 our eyes to his pages while we follow 

 Mary in all her subsequent sufferings, 

 until they culminate in death. It 

 would be keenly interesting to take the 

 two Marys — -Bjornson's creation and 

 Hall Caine's — and compare the two 

 wherever they touch. 



SIR GILBERT PARKER'S LATEST NOVEL. 



The Judgment House. By Sir Gilbert 

 Parker. (Methuen, 6/-.) 



Sir Gilbert Parker, in his opening note, 

 says : " Except where references to char- 

 acters well known to all the world occur 

 in these pages, this book does not pre- 

 sent a picture of public or private indi- 

 viduals living or dead." The note was 

 needed, for in this intensely dramatic 

 story the imagination is tempted to fix 

 upon one or other notorious personages 

 and to say, "Surely this was So-and-so." 

 Yet, after all, such personification is 

 quite immaterial. 



In this drama of human life and 

 human passions the locale would 

 scarcely matter, if it were not that 

 during at least one-third of the book the 

 chief characters are gathered in South 

 Africa during a war which is still so 

 recent that every mention of it finds an 

 echo in our own hearts. Jasmine Grenfel 

 — who divides heroine honours with a 

 prima donna of the day, named Al'mah 

 — is a beautiful Society girl with a good 

 income, who is partly engaged to a bud- 

 ding diplomatist, when she meets with a 

 Rand magnate, Rudyard Byng, who is 

 worth three millions. It is not his money 

 alone, but his strong personality which 

 attracts this girl of multifarious powers, 

 and she marries him. Her first lover 

 leaves England at once on a political 

 mission, and does not return until the 



eve of the Boer War. Meanwhile Jas- 

 mine has been queening it in Society, 

 and has encouraged too much some of 

 the men surrounding her. Two spies are 

 members of her husband's household, 

 one his secretary, the other his valet. The 

 secretary has betrayed more than one 

 woman, and Jasmine, ignorant of this, 

 has given him sufficient encouragement 

 for him to write a fatally compromising 

 letter to her. Meanwhile Jasmine has 

 been able, by somewhat unscrupulous 

 means, to help her first lover in his poli- 

 tical aims. He, too, in his gratitude 

 and renewed love, writes a compromis- 

 ing letter, and one of the great scenes of 

 the book is when the husband summons 

 him as he is entering the house to come 

 and see a letter to his wife which one of 

 the spies had picked up and purposely 

 dronoed on the floor so that Mr. Byng 

 could not avoid seeing it. Ian Stafford 

 naturally supposes that it is his own 

 letter, but is quickly undeceived. Thence 

 onward the action is as rapid as it is 

 thrilling, the culminating point being 

 reached at the close of one of the most 

 terrible of the battles on the veldt, the 

 singer as well as Jasmine having joined 

 the Red Cross Brigade, both desiring to 

 make some atonement for wrong-doing, 

 Jasmine imagining that the hospital in 

 which she is serving is, in some sense, a 

 House of Judgment. 



