SIMON THE JESTER (Illustrated)

When one realizes the nature of William J. Locke's literary formula, it follows naturally that so long as human nature exists there is no possibility of his particular vein ever running dry. To word it crudely, his trick seems to be to take life as it is and then willfully turn it topsy-turvy. He peoples his mimic world with bizarre and whimsical characters verging on the grotesque and then suddenly surprises us by a sense of their kinship—the sheer inborn humanity of them. "What do people usually do, what do people usually think?" he seems all the time to be saying. "Well, my people are going to do and to think 'the mundane' but far otherwise! They shall do impossible, illogical things; they shall amaze and shock and irritate you at times—and yet you shall love them despite yourself because in them you shall see the reflex of your own hopes and fears, your own successes and failures."

It would be venturesome to profess to analyze the birth and origin of Simon the Jester. But let us suppose, by way of illustration, that Locke, in an idle hour, had been re-reading 'Pendennis', that he had relished once again those wonderful chapters recording the good Major's maneuvers to rescue Pen from the wiles of Emily Costigan. Supposing, as he closed the book, that his inborn streak of perversity had flashed across his mind the question, what would have happened if the Major, after rescuing Pen, had himself fallen victim to the charms of the Fotheringay. Of course, the analogy must not be forced too far. There is not one note in common between Locke's group of characters and those of Thackeray, because his mind worked along an entirely different groove. But the comparison serves to illustrate his characteristic way of turning the ordinary situations of life upside down. Substitute for the punctilious and dignified Major a man whom fate has picked out as a victim of its grimmest hum our — a man snatched from a proud eminence of statesmanship and confronted with the fact that a painful malady gives him less than six months of remaining life. Substitute for the placid and rather bovine Emily a wonderful, magnetic creature of slumberous fire; a famous trainer and exhibitor of wild beasts with the lithe grace of a panther in all her movements, and the yellow glow of a cat's eyes in her glance. Substitute for little Bows the equally devoted and far more grotesque figure of a Greek dwarf rejoicing in the name of Anastasius Papadopoulos with his company of trained cats, his extraordinary jargon of modern languages and his homicidal madness riots through the book like a figure from an Offenbach libretto — and you have a very fair initial idea of the structure and material of 'Simon the Jester'.

Furthermore, quite apart from the characters and the story, there is an epigrammatic quality in this book of Locke's unequaled since The Morals of Marcus. It will be remembered that in Jane Austin's 'Emma', Frank Churchill demanded that each member of the party to Boxhill should regale the company with one very clever saying or two only moderately clever or three very dull ones.

This is the usual fate of writers who attempt the epigram — to be moderately clever once or twice and after that to be very dull indeed. It is Locke's peculiar good fortune to have a seemingly exhaustless fertility of epigram. It is very largely due to this pervading sparkle of dry humor that 'Simon the Jester' is a book which bears well the rather trying test of opening it at random and re-reading familiar passages long after the main thread of the story has lost its novelty.