There has followed me hither a bundle of press notices of a recent book
of mine. They are favourable. I ought to be delighted. I happen to be
annoyed.
What takes place in this absurd book? The three unities are preserved. A
respectable but rather drab individual, a bishop, whose tastes and moods
are fashioned to reflect those of the average drab reader, arrives at a
new place and is described as being, among other things, peculiarly
sensitive on the subject of women. He cannot bear flippant allusions to
the sex. He has preserved a childlike faith in their purity, their
sacred mission on earth, their refining influence upon the race. His
friends call him old-fashioned and quixotic on this point. A true woman,
he declares, can do no wrong. And this same man, towards the end of the
book, watches how the truest woman in the place, the one whom he admires
more than all the rest, his own cousin and a mother, calmly throws her
legitimate husband over a cliff. He realises that he is "face to face
with an atrocious and carefully planned murder." Such, however, has been
the transformation of his mind during a twelve days' sojourn that he
understands the crime, he pardons it, he approves it.
Can this wholesale change of attitude be brought about without a plot?
Yet many of these reviewers discover no such thing in the book. "It
possesses not the faintest shadow of a plot," says one of the most
reputable of them.
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