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The Easy Path

Full Circle — By Mary A. Hamilton

There is no doubt that the author of ‘Full Circle’ has faced her difficult subject with courage and sincerity. But it is the novelist's courage, the novelist's sincerity. These are good, sound, familiar weapons which in a world of turn-tails and sentimentalists we cannot affect to despise, but it is just because her handling of them is so dexterous that we find ourselves wishing to Heaven that Mrs. Hamilton would throw both away and begin all over again without them. It is, we realise, a rude measure to propose, for it would mean the sacrifice of the charming composition of her novel; and this would not be easy for an author whose mind delights in a sense of order, in composing for each character and scene the surroundings that are appropriate and adequate to it. What is the result? The result is another extremely able novel, written with unerring taste and sentiment, well informed, interesting. … It is a great deal better than the average novel—but is that enough? Just for the reason that in taking the easy accepted path Mrs. Hamilton has looked towards the difficult one, we say it is not enough and that ‘Full Circle’ is by no means the novel it might have been.

Her difficult subject is this. Here we have the Quil-hamptons, a family of brothers and sisters, passionately united by the tie of blood and by their affection for a beautiful home. They are met together on the occasion of the eldest sister's marriage, and the meeting is overshadowed by the fact that they realise the time has come when the ‘home life’ must end and they must go their various ways and risk losing themselves in life. We are made to feel that in their case the risk is by no means small. Spontaneous, rich, gifted, original creatures that they are, they are, somehow, a shade too fine for life; there is a doubt whether, at the last moment, the habit to withdraw, to seek shelter, will not prove too strong. Of page 150 them all, Bridget is the one who, the others feel, is most likely to win through and be happy. Staying with them is a Socialist friend of their brother Roger, one Wilfred Elstree. This strange creature is a herald (but against all the rules carrying a trumpet) whom life has sent to parley with them on the eve of the battle. Bridget not only listens; she goes over to him. She accepts life as her swell friend as personified in rough, crude, harsh, hideous, selfish Elstree. At his touch her blood catches fire; at his glance she swoons. They live together until he tires of her and throws her away, to snatch from Roger's arms a little doll of a creature, and, after breaking her, to disappear for four years. On his reappearance he asks Bridget to marry him, but she begs him to wait for six weeks, and at the end of that time he is, of course, engaged to another. Now, if Bridget had really loved Elstree, if he had not been such an out-and-out ranting, roaring stage-Socialist, if their relationship had been important, and yet there had been in his nature some queer brutal streak, some lack of imagination which drove him to seek in another only the means of renewing himself—if Bridget had recognised this and yet won through…. But Love? We have a most convincing account of her physical reactions, of her enjoyment of him and the anguish she suffered when he left her and she waited for the bell to ring—for a letter—a sign—hoped and gave up hope. But Love? Why, on his reappearance after four years Mrs. Hamilton sacrifices the feelings of her heroine to a description of the room by firelight in which Elstree is sitting. Fatal gift of the pen, fatal sincerity of the novelist! How can we believe in Bridget unless we have the whole of her? How can we accept the fact that she did win through if we are not told to what?—if we are put off, cleverly, indeed, with a description of the fascination of London?

We realise in writing this we are too severe upon the author, but it is her fault. If she did convey the impression that she might have written ‘Full Circle’ from page 151 within, how can we be content with her view of it from without?