Reviews

(Pall Mall Gazette, August 8, 1887.)

Most modern Russian novelists look upon the historical novel as a faux genre, or a sort of fancy dress ball in literature, a mere puppet show, not a true picture of life.  Yet their own history is full of such wonderful scenes and situations, ready for dramatist or novelist to treat of, that we are not surprised that, in spite of the dogmas of the école naturaliste, Mr. Stephen Coleridge has taken the Russia of the sixteenth century as the background for his strange tale.  Indeed, there is much to be said in favour of a form remote from actual experience.  Passion itself gains something from picturesqueness of surroundings; distance of time, unlike distance of space, makes objects larger and more vivid; over the common things of contemporary life there hangs a mist of familiarity that often makes their meaning obscure.  There are also moments when we feel that but little artistic pleasure is to be gained from the study of the modern realistic school.  Its works are powerful but they are painful, and after a time we tire of their harshness, their violence and their crudity.  They exaggerate the importance of facts and underrate the importance of fiction.  Such, at any rate, is the mood—and what is criticism itself but a mood?—produced in us by a perusal of Mr. Coleridge’s Demetrius.  It is the story of a young lad of unknown parentage who is brought up in the household of a Polish noble.  He is a tall, fair-looking youth, by name Alexis, with a pride of bearing and grace of manner that seem strange in one of such low station.  Suddenly he is recognised by an exiled Russian noble as Demetrius, the son of Ivan the Terrible who was supposed to have been murdered by the usurper Boris.  His identity is still further established by a strange cross of seven emeralds that he wears round his neck, and by a Greek inscription in his book of prayers which discloses the secret of his birth and the story of his rescue.  He himself feels that the blood of kings beats in his veins, and appeals to the nobles of the Polish Diet to espouse his cause.  By his passionate utterance he makes them acknowledge him as the true Tsar and invades Russia at the head of a large army.  The people throng to him from every side, and Marfa, the widow of Ivan the Terrible, escapes from the convent in which she has been immured by Boris and comes to meet her son.  At first she seems not to recognise him, but the music of his voice and the wonderful eloquence of his pleading win her over, and she embraces him in presence of the army and admits him to be her child.  The usurper, terrified at the tidings, and deserted by his soldiers, commits suicide, and Alexis enters Moscow in triumph, and is crowned in the Kremlin.  Yet he is not the true Demetrius, after all.  He is deceived himself and he deceives others.  Mr. Coleridge has drawn his character with delicate subtlety and quick insight, and the scene in which he discovers that he is no son of Ivan’s and has no right to the name he claims, is exceedingly powerful and dramatic.  One point of resemblance does exist between Alexis and the real Demetrius.  Both of them are murdered, and with the death of this strange hero Mr. Coleridge ends his remarkable story.

On the whole, Mr. Coleridge has written a really good historical novel and may be congratulated on his success.  The style is particularly interesting, and the narrative parts of the book are deserving of high praise for their clearness, dignity and sobriety.  The speeches and passages of dialogue are not so fortunate, as they have an awkward tendency to lapse into bad blank verse.  Here, for instance, is a speech printed by Mr. Coleridge as prose, in which the true music of prose is sacrificed to a false metrical system which is at once monotonous and tiresome:

But Death, who brings us freedom from all falsehood,
Who heals the heart when the physician fails,
Who comforts all whom life cannot console,
Who stretches out in sleep the tired watchers;
He takes the King and proves him but a beggar!
He speaks, and we, deaf to our Maker’s voice,
Hear and obey the call of our destroyer!
Then let us murmur not at anything;
For if our ills are curable, ’tis idle,
And if they are past remedy, ’tis vain.
The worst our strongest enemy can do
Is take from us our life, and this indeed
Is in the power of the weakest also.

This is not good prose; it is merely blank verse of an inferior quality, and we hope that Mr. Coleridge in his next novel will not ask us to accept second-rate poetry as musical prose.  For, that Mr. Coleridge is a young writer of great ability and culture cannot be doubted and, indeed, in spite of the error we have pointed out, Demetrius remains one of the most fascinating and delightful novels that has appeared this season.

Demetrius.  By the Hon. Stephen Coleridge.  (Kegan Paul.)

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