Talk:The Rose in the Ring

Reviews

 * "The value of sincerity and some recent books" by Frederic Taber Cooper in The Bookman (US) Nov 1910:
 * Mr. McCutcheon has often won the present reviewer's reluctant admiration for his almost unsurpassed ability to do precisely the thing that he has tried to do. There is no one writing in America to-day who can so successfully turn out the purely artificial and pseudo-romantic type of adventure story which so overwhelmingly appeals to the modern matinée girl as the author of the Graustark stories. But in this book there is, blended with his usual element of popular appeal, a certain quality that in the past has been rather conspicuous by its absence. I am not attempting to endorse the plot of The Rose in the Ring as being anything else than what it actually is, melodrama, pure and simple. The only heir to a big Virginia estate, a boy still in his teens, is wrongfully accused, by an unscrupulous uncle, both of murder and of theft of a will; with circumstantial evidence tremendously against him, the boy runs away and finds a haven of refuge in a travelling circus, where in the disguise of a clown he finds himself able to elude the eyes of the sharpest detectives. Among his many friends none is more devoted than a certain professional pickpocket, whose devotion is inspired by his chance defence of the pickpocket's brother, a hunchback, misshapen in mind as well as body. This hunchback's crimes are the chief factor in bringing the pickpocket within the shadow of the gallows, in almost spoiling the hero's chance of vindication and in well-nigh branding the book itself as a "penny-dreadful." And yet all of this taken together cannot alter the fact that Mr. McCutcheon, when he was a small boy in some Western town, on certain rare occasions, must have gone to the circus; that the wonder of these occasions, the smell of the tan-bark, the glitter and magic of the ring, the inimitable wonder and fascination of the circus atmosphere must have got once for all into his blood—and so, now that after a lapse of many years he gives us a novel of the circus, he cannot, whether he will or no, fail to reflect something of that early enthusiasm. We smell the tan-bark, we thrill with the ceaseless gallop round and round of the piebald horses, the crack of the ringmaster's whip, the cheap wit of the painted clown; we are country boys again, watching the rise of the magic group of white tents, as though they were so many palaces rising in response to the rubbing of some Aladdin's lamp, the agency of some invisible geni of the field. And this is why The Rose in the Ring ought to appeal not merely to Mr. McCutcheon's accustomed audience, but to certain other readers as well who have not yet forgotten the time when they hoarded their pennies for the price of admission or perhaps successfully wriggled their way beneath the flap of canvas on those wonderful and rare occasions when the circus came to town.