Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/155

 the same dear old conventional personages. I can't say characters, for there isn't a character, there isn't an individual, there isn't the ghost of a human creature, in the book. Simon Warre, his wife, his friend, his wife's lover, Allegra—nor one is a man or a woman of flesh and blood, whom we can recognize, whom we can think of as of people we have known: each is a formula, a shadow, a conventional type. And then—Allegra! Allegra carried me back an appalling number of years into the past, to the time when I was young and foolish. Everybody, when he was young and foolish (and generally in the flush of enthusiasm that follows his first visit to Italy—for a fortnight, at Easter, say), everybody has written a novel whereof the heroine was a pale mysterious Italian girl, the daughter of a nobleman; and wasn't she almost always named Allegra? And then everybody who was prudent has burned his manuscript. I burned mine, thank mercy; but Mr. John Oliver Hobbes has published his. Ah, weel, bairn, ye maun just live and lurrun.

"Ah, but the style! The style's the thing!" cries the Pressman. Quite so; the style. Mr. Hobbes seems to be perpetually straining in his style for the quality vaguely called distinction (which, I lately read, in the Saturday Review, of all places, is as easy as minor poetry), but, easy as it is, he never succeeds in achieving it. What he does achieve is—sometimes a feeble echo of Mr. George Meredith; sometimes a flimsy imitation of Miss Austen; sometimes a bit that is Carlylean or Tupperesque; and, more often, gems of pure Journalese, so that one might wonder, "Is Mr. Hobbes, too, a Pressman?" But style is personal, style is the man. Here there is no style; there is only a mechanical mixture of the washings of many styles.

From the leaden pretentiousness of Mr. Hall Caine and the glassy pretentiousness of Mr. John Oliver Hobbes, it was storative