Talk:The Memoirs Of Constantine Dix

Reviews
The Bookman, August 1905: The next most irritating thing to the novel with a purpose is the novel in which the writer is constantly passing moral judgments on his creations. But for all this, morality cannot be so far divorced from art as to justify a novelist in taking a villain for his hero and then adopting towards him the same admiring and sympathetic attitude as if he were the blameless hero of a love-story. It is true, some of the most fascinating characters in fiction have been villains. Long John Silver, for instance, is really the hero of "Treasure Island." But "Treasure Island" would have been very different if it had been Silver's autobiography, and if piracy and murder had been treated in a matter-of-fact way as an ordinary and natural way of earning a living. At the risk of seeming old-fashioned and puritanical, we must confess to some regret that a writer of Mr. Barry Pain's undoubted talent should select for his hero a common thief. For Constantine Dix is nothing but a thief and a hypocrite, and what is worse, a thief of an uncommonly mean and cowardly stamp; and the fact that we leave him on the point of a well-earned suicide does not restore the moral balance. For Mr. Pain does not allow him a moment of remorse or better feeling. The interest of the book, clever and ingenious as it is, lies not in the character of Dix, but in the success of his thefts. The episodes are undoubtedly ingenious, and there are some characteristic touches of satire. But with all its cleverness, the book is unworthy of Mr. Pain's high reputation.