Great World

FICTION

Great World*

The Story chooses to set out in Anno 1892. Queen Victoria is still assiduously mourning the Prince Consort. Mr. Gladstone has become somewhat bumptious. Edward of Wales has learned his Paris. Society calls itself fin de siecle.

Having married her five tall sons into fringes of the aristocracy, Mrs. Townley, the eminently capable wife of a Midlands ironmaster, rounds out her social campaigns by installing an only daughter, Isabel, as duchess of the neighboring castle. Having thus freed her offspring from the primal curse which rests, rightly she feels, upon the working classes, this strong-minded matron ceases to occupy us save as a cheerfully talkative advocate of other good works, like the Dorcas Society and the Ragged School Union.

At Durridge Castle, sway is still held by George, Duke of Rothbury, aged 92, a godson of George III, benign but sharp-tongued anachronism of great Wellington's day. His were the affections to capture which Isabel was schooled in sense and sensibility. His approval it was that brought about her marriage to his great-grandson and heir, Herbert Stretton. This ancient duke lives to order champagne at the birth of a great-great-grandchild; but the latter is a girl and renders his passing unsatisfactory to him, as his frosty wit renders it regrettable to us.

A boy would have been more satisfactory because Herbert Stretton, though a lovable fellow, promises and proves to be a county duke, a lover of dogs and a breeder of kine, and not a great duke for the nation. His contribution to his time is a negative one of standing for, rather than doing, the fine things that are passing out of English life. He is fighting Boers when his heir is born, and takes a bullet in the heart soon after writing Isabel about this second George's upbringing. "A rough-and-tumble bringup," he writes, "nature's way . . . nothing finicky."

But little George is his mother's consolation as well as her trust. He loves his nurses; later flowers. Annabel, the eldest daughter, wears the family trousers. George at Oxford; George not knowing what he wants to do except that it is not politics, empire-building, society life or the glebe; George spinning like an amiable, girlish weathercock in the fickle breezes of philosophy; George letting himself in for scrapes through his weak sympathies--here deft satire descends to caricature hitting off the lady-men of Mayfair and War-blaming flapperdom.

To save the boy and finish the book to the tune of "God Save the King," the author puts George in love with a daughter of the old nobility and we last see him muttering high resolves and swearing by Lord Nelson to cultivate patriotism.

The Significance. "The only great world worth talking about is the British Empire," says this Dusterman to decaying English aristocrats, "and the great world must spin on." Refinement and kindness of heart are the great world's sun and moon; courage and honor are its driving forces. This is a book in praise of Seriousness, written with Meredithian gusto, Thackeray's facile exhibitionism and brilliant Dickensian portraiture in glossy, original prose.

The Author is that astute, exquisitely rude, by no means superficial anonymity that hung The Mirrors of Downing Street. In this, his first sustained flight, one comes closer to grips with his tastes and sympathies. British to the core (he feels that the U. S. is but an adolescent province); he is saturated with his country's political, cultural, spiritual history, and bodies forth to perfection the beef-and-ale rationalism of an old regime. Queen Victoria would approve.

* The Great World--A Gentleman with a Duster--Doran ($2).