The object of my letter, however, is not to point out the deficiencies of Mr. Saintsbury’s style, but to express my surprise that his article should have been admitted into the pages of a magazine like Macmillan’s.  Surely it does not require much experience to know that such an article is a disgrace even to magazine literature.

George Borrow.  By George Saintsbury. (Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1886.)

ONE OF MR. CONWAY’S REMAINDERS

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1886.)

Most people know that in the concoction of a modern novel crime is a more important ingredient than culture.  Mr. Hugh Conway certainly knew it, and though for cleverness of invention and ingenuity of construction he cannot be compared to M. Gaboriau, that master of murder and its mysteries, still he fully recognised the artistic value of villainy.  His last novel, A Cardinal Sin, opens very well.  Mr. Philip Bourchier, M.P. for Westshire and owner of Redhills, is travelling home from London in a first-class railway carriage when, suddenly, through the window enters a rough-looking middle-aged man brandishing a long-lost marriage certificate, the effect of which is to deprive the right honourable member of his property and estate.  However, Mr. Bourchier, M.P., is quite equal to the emergency.  On the arrival of the train at its destination, he invites the unwelcome intruder to drive home with him and, reaching a lonely road, shoots him through the head and gives information to the nearest magistrate that he has rid society of a dangerous highwayman.

Mr. Bourchier is brought to trial and triumphantly acquitted.  So far, everything goes well with him.  Unfortunately, however, the murdered man, with that superhuman strength which on the stage and in novels always accompanies the agony of death, had managed in falling from the dog-cart to throw the marriage certificate up a fir tree!  There it is found by a worthy farmer who talks that conventional rustic dialect which, though unknown in the provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous young man who succeeds in blackmailing Mr. Bourchier and in marrying his daughter.  Mr. Bourchier suffers tortures from excess of chloral and of remorse; and there is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind, that kind which Mr. Conway may justly be said to have invented and the result of which is not to be underrated.  For, if to raise a goose skin on the reader be the aim of art, Mr. Conway must be regarded as a real artist.  So harrowing is his psychology that the ordinary methods of punctuation are quite inadequate to convey it.  Agony and asterisks follow each other on every page and, as the murderer’s conscience sinks deeper into chaos, the chaos of commas increases.

Finally, Mr. Bourchier dies, splendide mendax to the end.  A confession, he rightly argued, would break up the harmony of the family circle, particularly as his eldest son had married the daughter of his luckless victim.  Few criminals are so thoughtful for others as Mr. Bourchier is, and we are not without admiration for the unselfishness of one who can give up the luxury of a death-bed repentance.