The play, whose only flaw was a certain rather upsetting ambiguity (whether accidental or designed I could not quite gather) in the last few sentences before the curtain fell, was interpreted with a very fine intelligence. Miss IRENE VANBRUGH'S superbly trained talent showed itself in an astonishing range of moods tethered in a plausible unity of conception. Mr. BOYNE, who is just coming into his own, scored bull after bull. Perhaps he didn't make _Oldham_ quite the Englishman that the author (I should say) designed, but rather an Irishman of that delightfully faint flavour which is so entirely attractive. Miss LILLAH MACARTHY, as _Maude Fulton_, a well-preserved bachelor in the most bizarre modern mode, also a dexterous liar and officious matchmaker, played with her head in her most accomplished manner and gave full value in the general scheme to a character which the author made a person when he might have been content with a peg. Mr. DION BOUCICAULT'S physician was as bland a humbug as ever coined guineas in Mayfair. Mr. MARTIN LEWIS, as a profoundly silly ass, played a difficult hand without fault. Miss NINA SEVENING, as a consoler of handsome men in trouble, and Miss FLORENCE LLOYD, as _Caroline's_ maid, competently rounded off in subsidiary _rôles_ the work of the principals.
Yes, undoubtedly a brilliant performance.
_Caroline Ashley_ . . . . . . . Miss IRENE VANBRUGH.
_Robert Oldham_ . . . . . . . Mr. LEONARD BOYNE.]
[Illustration: _Huntsman._ "GIVE US A BIT O' ROOM! YOU WAS NEARLY IN MY POCKET THAT TIME."
_Flat-race Jockey._ "ROOM? WHY, I WAS NEARLY HALF A LENGTH BEHIND YOU."]
(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerics._)
THE evolution of the long novel appears to be following that of the human race. Instead of the individual, the family now threatens to become the central unit. I confess that this prospect, as evidenced by _Three Pretty Men_ (METHUEN), fills me with some just apprehension. Mr. GILBERT CANNAN has set out to tell how a Scotch family, three brothers, a mother, and some sisters in the background, determines to make its fortune in a South Lancashire city (very recognisable under the name of _Thrigsby_), and how eventually all but one of them succeed. It is a long book and a close; and the dialogue (which of its kind is good dialogue, crisp and illuminating), being printed without the usual spacing, produces an indigestible-looking page that might well alarm a reader out for enjoyment. The book, in its record of the progress of the three, _Jamie_ and _Tom_ and _John_, is really more a study of social conditions in mid-Victorian Manchester than a work of imagination. But there is clever character-drawing in it, especially in _Jamie_, who from a worldly point of view is the failure of the group, making no money, and drifting through journalism to emigration; and in the finely suggested figure of _Tibby_, the ill-favoured kitchen drudge, who is his real centre of inspiration. But first and last it remains a dull business, partly from an entire lack of humour, partly from the absence of any settled plan that might help one to endure the dreariness of the setting. Mr. CANNAN certainly knows his subject, and few novels indeed have given me, rightly or wrongly, a greater suggestion of autobiography. But for once the art of being exhaustive without being exhausting seems to have eluded him.