Talk:The Witness for the Defence

Reviews

 * "The Theory of Social Revolutions" in the Outlook, 28 February 1814:
 * Mr. Mason is a past-master in the art of handling a situation so as to hold the interest tense. There are, indeed, two striking situations in this story and each holds the reader closely. In the first a distinguished lawyer goes on the stand and "lies like a gentleman" to save the woman he loves from an impending conviction for the murder of her half-crazed, alcoholic, and brutal husband; in the second he faces the question whether he shall hold his tongue when he finds that the woman is about to marry another man. The novel is an absorbing piece of story-telling.


 * "Current Fiction" in The Nation, 12 February 1914
 * Murder, as Mr. Mason's heroine and Mr. Onions's hero commit it, is hardly what you would call a crime. Looked at rightly, i. e., with a ready willingness to be guided by the author's intention, it is scarcely more than an undeserved misfortune. To understand all is to forgive all. The question then is—as we imagine an up-to-date author putting it to himself—What degree of murder can the reader be made to understand? Just how heavy a homicidal handicap is it safe to impose upon a favorite character? What delicious fooling can be extracted from the absurdities of such a proposition has been dramatically demonstrated by the whimsically audacious Mr. Barrie. But Mr. Mason and Mr. Onions, not having envisaged their self-imposed task shrewdly enough to realize its intrinsic thanklessness, have addressed themselves in all seriousness to the devising of murders that shall answer to the definition and still attach as little odium as possible to their perpetrators. Both of them have hit upon the expedient of making the villain the victim of the violent taking off, and thereby greatly simplified the problem.


 * Mr. Mason's heroine shoots a hard-drinking and peculiarly malevolent husband who "keeps all his drunkenness for her." Having thus peremptorily ended her seven years of domestic purgatory in India, she is acquitted upon jury trial and returns to her girlhood home in England. The exact degree of her guilt remains her secret until almost the end of the story, when inquiry into the evidence is privately revived toy the perturbed relatives of a young man who wishes to marry her, and she is unexpectedly confronted with the witness whose testimony at the trial had cleared her. This personage, a barrister of considerable reputation and an M.P., had dined with her and the husband of detestable memory on the very evening of the murder, and so had been in a position to have his evidence believed, though by no means to believe it himself. Furthermore—and here we get back to the original root of bitterness—this same perjured witness for the defence is the very man who years ago had deliberately preferred his ambition to her love. Her confession as finally made to him—and us—just fails to bring the shooting within the plea of self-defence, but succeeds fairly well in shifting the responsibility for her ill-advised marriage and the consequent tragedy to his shoulders. Under conviction of sin he is more than willing that they should expiate their errors together; but a punishment better fitted to his crime is meted out to him, and Stella Ballantyne's welfare is given into the safekeeping of a younger champion.


 * "The Weakest Spot and some Recent Novels" by in The Bookman, March 1914
 * The Witness for the Defence, by A. E. W . Mason, offers an entirely different problem in the art of construction. Imagine the familiar, so-called triangle situation; a highly successful English barrister summoned professionally to India, runs across the love of his youth, whom in those old days he was too poor and too selfish to marry. She is. now the wife of a middle-aged and somewhat apoplectic official in the civil service, a secret drunkard who not infrequently beats her in a jealous rage. The English barrister passes one evening with them, at the temporary encampment necessitated by the husband's official rounds. The wife, with finger-mark bruises still livid on her throat, is distinctly pathetic in the brief moments of private reminiscence with her former lover. The husband, left alone with his guest at the close of dinner, betrays a cowardly, half maudlin fear of the natives, who happen to know that he has evidence 'which will send one of their leaders to jail. A highly dramatic incident, intensified by the husband's alcoholism, hastens his guest's departure; but, returning for his pipe, purposely left behind, he has a final word with the woman, whom he realises that he still loves,—and he finds her cleaning and loading a rook-rifle. T h e next day, just as he is preparing to sail for England, the newspapers inform him that his host of the night before is dead, shot with a bullet which happens to fit the rook-rifle. The wife is accused of the murder. He postpones his sailing, and it is his testimony which saves her. He tells, under oath, of the fear that the deceased man had of the natives, due to his possession of dangerous evidence against a certain notorious Hindoo bandit, in the form of a tell-tale photograph which the witness now has in his possession. He further describes how, during that evening his host had suddenly sprung up and violently struck with a whip at the side hangings of the tent, because a long, brown arm and hand had crept in, snakelike, toward the desk where the photograph lay. Of course, the widow simply had to be acquitted on this evidence, for it furnished a motive; while the prosecution had no logical motive to offer,—a woman who has borne unspeakable indignities for eight years seldom turns, like the proverbial worm, in the ninth. At this point Mr. Mason is guilty of the same fault that we have just charged against Mr. Stacpoole, namely, he shifts the scene back to England, introduces us to an entirely new set of people and, after a considerable lapse of time, shows us the widow, ostracised in the home of her childhood, because public opinion is still sceptical of the verdict of the Indian court. Being still young and attractive, she quite naturally encounters a young man who correctly estimates her value as a woman and wishes to marry her. But his family, of the typically conservative British sort, interested first and foremost in preserving their social standing, insist upon making private inquiries; and while the manner of these inquiries would consume too much space in a brief review, the resultant facts may be summarised as follows: first, the lady did shoot her husband, not by accident, but quite deliberately, because she was goaded beyond the point of endurance; and secondly, the barrister perjured himself in giving his evidence; the deceased, indeed, had spoken of a brown arm; but it had existed only as a figment of his imagination, born of a whiskey-heated brain. And at this juncture, in the family council, which has met to decide whether or not the acquitted widow is fit to marry the son and heir, it turns out that the family council has had its trouble for nothing; first, because the pair are secretly married already, and secondly, because the young husband has had the miraculous shrewdness to guess the truth, although the wife has not mustered up the courage to confess. Now, this sort of story is good enough sport where the cards, so to speak, are all fairly dealt. But Mr. Mason is in the position of a gambler who has kept most of the trump cards up his sleeve. His delineation of character has been deliberately superficial; he has introduced us quite casually, and without a hint of warning, to a heroine who turns out to be a murderess; to a correct and amiable gentleman who is suddenly revealed as a self-confessed perjurer, and to a sadly uninteresting hero, who at the crucial moment manifests a degree of insight that ought to be the peculiar privilege of Omniscience. The Weakest Spot in this volume by Mr. Mason is unquestionably his failure to make us sufficiently acquainted with the personalities of his characters. He does not play the game fairly. It is as though he had given certificates of character to a choice selection from the Rogues' Gallery. And this is only one of the book's weak spots.