Pigs in Clover

Book excerpt: All progress, literary or other, seems to be by pendulum-like swings. Only the other day London was enthusiastic over the pale poison of Rossetti or the golden dreams of William Morris, and knights in mystic armor strode gloomily across the stage. Then it was bored or cynical. Today it raves over the brutal power of "Frank Danby's" novel, "Pigs in Clover," in which the chief characters are a self-made Jew and a very modern authoress. As Mr. Oppenheim cynically remarks, cynicism is out of fashion; one must now be energetic over something. And so we find coming to us, at present mostly as an echo, a torrent of praise drawn forth by this energetic book, which, whatever its defects, stands easily above the average of contemporary fiction. "Mr. Danby" has chosen large themes for treatment. Karl Althaus, the Jewish offspring of London gutters, has become the South African magnate, the co-worker of Cecil Rhodes, and one of the empire builders of the Cape. Stephen Hayward is the typical English statesman of high principle and growing popularity and influence. The main theme of the book, however, turns about the frail Joan de Groot, author of "The Kafi'ir and his Keeper," and the hypocritical Louis Althaus, foster-brother to Karl, both also South African. Between the two springs up an illicit love, which this time does not, as so often in fiction, blow over in psychologic clouds, but ends in physical tragedy. In a subordinate place in the picture stand the erratic loves of Aline Hayward, "barely seventeen, malleable, the daughter of first cousins-a decadent by inheritance." The whole constitutes, so far as the subject is concerned, a. distinctly sinister sketch, which is only redeemed to nobility by the gigantic shadowy outlines of Karl Althaus and Hayward looming up in the background. The treatment of the picture is as masterful as the conception. "Mr. Danby" has the very rare dramatic faculty of blotting out all trace of himself and writing objectively and impersonally. Everything points to the guidance of a stage manager of high talents; but nowhere do we see him in propria persona. " There are my figures," he seems to say; " be content with them." The character drawing, especially of Karl Althaus on the few occasions when he comes into full view, is executed with a sense of restraint and reserve force, but with a vividness which makes him alive to a degree very rare in fiction. The most characteristic note of the book is its realism. And herein lie its defects. Realistic treatment is bad enough when applied to the details of drunken orgies or the coarsenesses of the proletariat; but realism in the description Of illicit love approaches close to the line of bad taste, and is in danger of becoming artistically low. Love, even when it is illicit, may be beautiful. But to make a woman, who is at first drawn in lines so fine as to inspire our admiration, the tool of a morallcss schemer, to describe the gradual degradation of all that is best in her life, the loss of chastity, of self-respect, and even of intellectual power, to depict the career of this woman as her character weakens under the strain and she becomes more and more the unresisting creature of passion, and finally to lead her with carefully elaborated details to an end of gloomy, shuddering horror, -this is brutal. The book might almost have been written by Zola. --The Critic, Vol. 43.