The Lost Viol: ''A letter bitter to the point of invective''

The Lost Viol by M P Shiel

Matthew Phipps Shiell was born in Montserrat in the West Indies on the 21st July 1865 and was believed to be illegitimate.

He was educated at Harrison College, Barbados before moving to England in 1885 to work as a teacher and translator.  He soon began to write and published a series of short stories in The Strand magazine and other periodicals.  Some of his works were as a writer for hire and it seems probable that even his first novel ‘The Rajah's Sapphire’ (1896) was one of these.

Perhaps his best-known work was ‘The Purple Cloud’ (1901) and it is still considered an important early work of British science fiction.

His first marriage to the Parisian-Spaniard, Carolina Garcia Gomez in 1898 provided him a muse for a character in ‘Cold Steel’ (1900) and several short stories.  They separated around 1903 and his daughter was taken to Spain after Lina died the following year.  Money seemed to be at the heart of the marriage’s problems. 

Shiel, like many writers wanted to write literature but his finances needed more commercial fare. With his more artistic efforts failing to provide he collaborated with Louis Tracy on a series of romantic mystery novels.

In 1902, Shiel published in book form ‘The Weird o'It’ which he described as a true Bible or Holy Book for modern times and its attempt to present Christianity in a radical way.

Soon after Shiel turned his pen to contemporary themes with an historical novel about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.  But he faced declining sales and tried to boost them by returning to a previous success ‘The Yellow Danger’.  These efforts failed to capture any meaningful sales.

By 1914 Shiel was in prison for indecently assaulting and carnally knowing his 12-year-old de facto stepdaughter.  He served sixteen months of hard labour.

Over the next decade Shiel wrote five plays, dabbled in radical politics and translated pamphlets for the Workers Socialist Federation.  In 1919, he married Esther Lydia Jewson.  The marriage lasted a decade but fell apart over his sexual interest in and possible abuse of his wife’s young female relatives.

Financially life was difficult, but he was helped in 1931 to obtain a Civil List pension despite his criminal record.

Shiel published 25 novels, several collections of short stories, essays poems and plays.

M P Sheil died on the 17th February 1947.  He was 81.

Index of Contents

Review

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

REVIEWED BY C. W. MASON

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 27, 1905.

I have in my hand a jewel, to me, in possession, it seems rare and priceless. Yet I believe that if I were to go out in the market-place and hawk its virtues, connoisseurs would tell me that it was worthless, no known species; hucksters would call it imitation chalcedony, and offer five cents for the curiosity; and the lack-wit crowd, whose only right to existence is their readiness to buy everything called a jewel, would not take it as a gift.

This jewel—not of my own finding, as usual when it is really rare—is briefly M. P. Shiel's novel, The Lost Viol (New York, Edward J. Clode, $1.50). The Lost Viol is as recherché a literary hybrid as a cross between moonstone, opal and diamond would be in geology.

What the dickens!

I am really at a loss to know what to say of The Lost Viol. It is awfully bad; it is indescribably good. I should think that both Henry James and George Meredith would greet its author as their vanquisher in psychological intricacies, and that David Belasco would pat Mr. Shiel on the back and tell him that his plot was too far-fetched even for successful melodramatic farce. I hardly suppose any woman could be so consistently criminal as the virtuous Kathleen, or so impossibly clever as the healthy animal, Hannah; and yet (I wonder if I dare?) I should say that between the two of them, the complexity of the creature woman is unraveled as it never was before.

For that reason, I am sure that no woman on earth will be found to indorse my praise. I may as well add, to give them their traditional weapon, that The Lost Viol is exceedingly improper. How could any woman have any feelings or impulses not consistent with a text book on the etiquette of good society? Impossible. How could anything in real life happen which would not be approved by the fiction committee of the Boston Public Library? It couldn't. Then Mr. Shiel must be all wrong from beginning to end, because his heroines have feelings and impulses which are not mentioned in manuals of etiquette, and things happen which no lady would care to allude to.

Hannah, a farmer's daughter—really Sir Peter's, but suppressed; Kathleen, a young woman of wealth and family, and Yvonne, a half-French cousin of Kathleen's, all fall in love with Chris Wilson, also a cousin of all three. Chris is a violinist and a man of genius.

Owing to Sir Peter's pressure, Chris marries Hannah; on the wedding day he discovers that he loves Yvonne, and runs away from Hannah, who hunts him across Europe in vain for two or three years. She catches up with him one day, when, in the height of fame, he stars at a concert in London. She follows him home; waits outside his door till 2 in the morning, when his boon companions leave him, they and he well intoxicated; she slips in; he does not recognize her; they both sip wine which has been drugged by a vindictive valet; waking late next day, Chris still sleeping, Hannah realizes what has happened. She resolves to disappear, because she would hate to have Chris think that he had recovered her after his desertion. On a sudden thought she steals one of Chris' violas (a musical instrument) with a few other trifles, as proof of the night in case of an event which would convict her of infidelity. The event happens; but the viol has been stolen from her. Meanwhile, susceptible Chris is again in love with Yvonne; he is persuaded to commit bigamy by marrying her in France and to invalidate this stigma, Hannah anticipates him by committing bigamy in England. But on the eve of the second wedding Yvonne is accidentally murdered. Hannah, robbed by her own premature heroism, tries a last resource; she writes the anonymous letters of a feminine admirer to the man of genius, and Chris is captured by the invisible writer. But when she is, after two years, about to reveal herself, some one—the same person who stole the viol from Hannah and accidentally murdered Yvonne—steals Hannah's child, and establishing the identity of the anonymous letters, declares herself to be the unknown woman who spent the night under hashish with the careless genius. Chris is disappointed, but convinced, for Hannah, summoned to submit her maternal claim to the instinct of the child, does not appear. Someone has informed against her and she has been summarily arrested for bigamy.

The amazing Jack-in-the-box intrigues are by no means exhausted yet; but I must hasten to the core: the spring of all these incredible malevolences is Kathleen, the wealthy, virtuous, sickly, sprightly little hunchback—the quaint maid. She lived in a fervid atmosphere of theft, murder, forgery, eavesdropping and slander; she was incapable of crime, even of naughtiness; she acted on impulse, simply from love; and I leave it to women to say if women are capable of being a little—tortuous, shall we call it?—in winning out against more favored rivals in the pursuit of an incompetent man. Personally, I am sure Mr. Shiel has shamefully libeled the sex. And I notice that women haven't a good word to say for the book. They sniff.

Oh, woman, lovely woman! You are indeed—

Beg pardon; a slip of the tongue. You aren't, you couldn't be. But if I had time to be a man of genius I think I could forgive much to be loved with so much unscrupulousness. In any other line of business, however (so they tell me who have known the snare), it is a tremendous nuisance to be loved in any way. Blessed (I'm glad I'm bald) is the man who happens to be unattractive. I cannot say the same for woman. The more unattractive a woman is the more fascinating she is liable to become. I suppose no beautiful woman was ever loved the way millions of plain women have been and are being loved. The novelists have beautiful heroines; but Shakespeare—see Sonnet cxxx.

Chris, however, never came near loving Kathleen, and when he was reluctantly convinced that she was the mother of his beautiful child (a delightful, but—him, him chapter), and the author of the charming anonymous letters, he became quite ill and hurried off to Europe as soon as his French honor had exacted a proposal of marriage. Hannah, the healthy, steadfast, resolute yet womanly creature, was the creature he wanted all the time, and fortunately she knew it when he didn't, so she won out.

You will see that there is quite too much riskiness in this freakish novel to be suitable for the young person. And, of course, you will say that, being risky, I have no right to allude to it at all, and you will get me hauled over the coals for it, as usual. Can't help it. You know by this time that when I think a novel very clever, I have got to crack it up or die in the attempt. I think The Lost Viol marvelously clever and as before said, marvelously bad. If, however, one were to set to work to define the flaws—the scraps of diary, the jerky, hurried style, etc.—each and all might turn out to be artistic.

I cannot conceive how Mr. Shiel came to write this book. That it is a study of known women is obviously incredible; that it is a transposition of self-analysis is likewise unimaginable; the femininity is not the femininity of the male genius, which has its proper analysis in Chris. The idea must have grown, not been made. As without chart, the author began to wade into the inconsistencies of the female character, he gradually found them accumulating until they presented a specter of abnormal distortions. Finally, he said to himself: I will take an abnormal and physically distorted woman and make her the incarnation of all the faults, while I make a normal and well developed woman the incarnation of all the virtues peculiar to women under the stimulus of love. In each, as an individual character, he runs away into grotesque caricature; I neither believe that any highly cultured woman could deliberately attempt murder twice and theft three times (to say nothing of the lies) than I believe that any well made and athletic woman could become a savante, linguist, pianist and violin virtuoso in a couple of years. Yet it would be easy to defend Mr. Shiel even in these extremes. He, however, knows the difference between the adaptability of women and the culture which exacts the admiration of the connoisseur.

In short, defying the convention that preserves a shocked silence over noctes ambrosianae, I am going to say that I am not less grateful to the critic who revealed to me The Lost Viol than I once was to the critic who revealed to me Meredith's Egoist. They were, as it happens, one and the same. And I pass the revelation on.

Hold: here I am back again. I have said nothing about Chris. If a woman, you will perhaps have no trouble in perceiving at once that Chris was the sort of man who is loved. But if a man, you will much, at first, resent it that the three nicest women in the place should promptly fall head over skirts in love with a long-haired lackadaisical musician. I should resent it, even with my bald head and No. 12 feet. But by this time I think Chris the most lovable lunatic I have ever met. I think that as a portrait, he is unique in fiction. I cannot refrain from quoting the picture of him at the happy finale—and anyhow you want a specimen of Shiel:

And here it came into Chris' head (he was then the most famous living violinist) to give himself to Barc-la-Forêt (a village fair) that one day in Time, and plays. He had not handled a fiddle for days, and the spirit came upon him. He caught his Bergonzi from Grimani (his valet) and struck in with the other fiddlers on the green, nor was it long before he alone was playing. Never was the ear of Barc-la-Forêt tickled by the gospel of such mirth; every one forsook all else, and crowded to jig around the frivolous seraph dropped down among them; wondering that out of that staid monsieur such riches of fun should gush; there he stood—stout, respectable—in his frock coat and top-hat; the top-hat, however, was rather cocked back, one leg cocked forward, and, if one looked closely, there was a certain butting and instigation of his brow which was in the very spirit of revel and godless company. They all came and jigged. Hannah jigged with Rowland-Jones till he was out of breath, then with the village lads, then with Rowland-Jones again, letting slip side glances at Chris, her legs (ahem! they're always in evidence) plying in a stubbornness of glee, answering still to the unrelenting spur of his joy, while still the brook of his improvisation flowed on, and the dancing grew ever larger and crazier round the giggle of his G and the skittishness of his tittering chanterelle. It was near 5 o'clock when he tossed the fiddle to Grimani, smiled with Hannah, and said to Rowland-Jones, 'I am hungry, my friend.'

I am too familiar by practice with the knack of imitation, even of assimilation, to be misled by style in these days. Bits like that staid monsieur, a certain butting and instigation of his brows, the giggle of his G," are often laboriously improvised by tentative poets. Here each and all are hallmarks. From beginning to end the book is instinct with spontaneous originality.

THE LOST VIOL

CHAPTER I

Yes, a grand night, was the thought in Miss Kathleen Sheridan's mind, as she passed into the west lodge-gates of Orrock Park on the evening of the 21st of November, '98: an evening of storm, with the roar of the sea in the ear. The young lady stopped at Embree Pond in the park to watch the sheet of water shivering to its dark heart under the flight of the squalls; then with her long-legged walk (she was a hunchback), went on her way, showing in her face her delight in this bleak mood of nature.

Some way further, however, on hearing the hoofs of a horse, her expression changed to one of very real fright, for she had a thought of one Sir Percy Orrock, beheaded by Cromwell, whose ghost gallops about on a headless horse in rough weather; but this turned out to be only Mr. Millings, the land-steward: for, on coming round to the manor-house, the young lady found Millings there talking to Sir Peter Orrock, who at a window was holding his ear forward to hear the land-steward's news.

Good evening, Mr. Millings, called Miss Kathleen, laughing from ear to ear, with strings of black hair draping her face. Well, uncle, I have been sketching it all on the heath—witches on broomsticks, 'strange screams of death in the air.' That silver lime of Farmer Carr's is blown flat. Uncle, if you ask me to stop and dine, I may consent.

Hm, muttered Sir Peter to himself, better stick to your own dinner. Go on, Millings—same old story, eh?

Same old story, Sir Peter, answered Mr. Millings: there won't be any of Norfolk left soon, at this rate. Mrs. Dawe's cottage gone, and with it her son, James Dawe, and three of the boats—

Well, it is their own fault! called out the little maid, living on the edge of the cliffs, when they know—

Got nowhere else to live, muttered Sir Peter. Dawe drowned, Millings?

No, Sir Peter, but I'm afraid I must say rescued at an awful cost: he was rescued by Miss Langler, who has just been taken home to Woodside in a dying state.

Hannah? Hannah Langler? breathed Sir Peter, turning very pale.

The lad was carried out two hundred yards, said Mr. Millings, where he clung to the bottom of one of the three boats; on the cliffs I found a crowd watching him, including Fagan, the coast-guardsman, who told me that the lifeboat was coming round from Wardenham; but I thought from the first that it would come too late, for I could see Dawe nearer in every time the lighthouse beam swept over him: and so it proved, for, as the lifeboat-light appeared round the north headland, Dawe was thrown up by a breaker on a strip of sand—

But Hannah? said the baronet.

Miss Langler was in the crowd with her father, said Millings; she had been holding up Dawe's mother, who was fainting, but when Dawe was all of a sudden lying on the strip of sand below us, I saw Miss Langler running among the fishermen, begging one and another to save him before the next wave. 'There's nothing like venturing,' I heard her say twice or thrice, but they answered that that would only mean two deaths instead of one, and I fully agreed with them. When the next breaker drew back from the cliffs we all looked to see Dawe gone with it: but there he still was, and I now heard Miss Langler cry out to Horsford, the lighthouse-keeper, 'Now, now, Horsford, venture now,' and then, all at once, I was aware that she herself was going down the cliff-side by that little foot-path near the church-tower.

But, God's name, man, couldn't some of you stop her, a whole crowd of you there? said Sir Peter.

It couldn't be done, Sir Peter, I regret to say. Two or three did make a try to hold her, but she was gone like the wind. Personally, I confess, I was rather paralyzed: she looked pretty small down there in the mouth of the sea, like a fly in an engine at work; it was rather painful. Old Farmer Langler fell on his knees; no one had a word to say. I don't suppose it lasted ten minutes on the whole, but I shouldn't care to live through it again. Dawe's a heavy lout, a head taller than she, and twice she was felled by the sea with him in her arms. When a wave withdrew, we saw them still there, and another wave coming. Two of the womenfolk fainted. I with some other men ran half-way down to see better, and got drenched. However, she won back to the path with her unwieldy prize, and there gave in. We then ran down and got them somehow to the top; Dawe was taken to the postmistress's cottage, and Miss Langler home to Woodside. Both are in a pretty bad way, they say.

Well, it is her own fault! called the quaint maid shrilly against the wind from the outer hall. Hannah has a secret pride in her physical powers which stood in need of a ducking.

The baronet muttered something, turned from the window, and in five minutes was passing out of the house, well wrapped up, with his rusty top-hat pressed on his head, and a footman swinging a lantern before his steps.

What, going to Woodside, uncle? asked Kathleen, who still stood in the outer hall, how wonderfully good of you!

The baronet did not answer. She went out with him. Beyond the east gates they saw the lighthouse beam traveling over land and sea in turn, the one thing which the storm could not fluster. A drizzle, like spray caught from the sea, struck the face. It was very bleak. They met only a manure-cart whose driver saw, head-to-wind, his horses' manes, tails, and forelocks floating out at random on the streams of the storm. Sir Peter was silent, but the quaint maid had ever something to say in her laughing way. Isn't it fine? she cried out: one feels as if one were oneself the storm! Then presently: Did you read all that about Chris Wilson? That boy is going to be the maestro of the day, you'll see. He has won the year's prize-violin, and been publicly embraced by Strauss. Yvonne writes me that he's the wildest of madcaps, and leaves broken hearts in every capital: this is the boy that I am supposed to be engaged to.

At this Sir Peter stooped sharply to her ear, saying: Better drop that talk, and think of something besides men.

But what do you mean? cried back Kathleen: wasn't it arranged before I was born that he should marry me? Not that I care at all, or would marry him, if he wanted me; in a lower tone she added: you have no humor, mon oncle.

This is Hannah Langler's birthday, too! she called out presently: did you know? She will remember the date of her ducking. Isn't it an extraordinary thing that on each of her birthdays that girl receives a present from some unknown person? This time it is a ring that must have cost two hundred pounds.

How old is she today? asked Sir Peter, stooping to her ear.