Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1920-01-24
JOHN R4LTAZAR
LEARNS OF THE VAR
Locke Writes Of a Man Who
Opens His Eyes for the First
Time on Europe Of 1910

John Baltazar must be added to the
long list of curious and erratic heroes
brought from the fecund imagination of
William J. Locke.
This new character is the principal
figure in "The House of Baltazar."
Mr.. Locke has evidently been wondering
how the world would seem to an edu-
Gated and patriotic Englishman VINO
learned for the first time in the middle
of the war what had taken place not
only in the preceding two years but IN
the preceding twenty. So ne set about
building a novel around this by no means
novel idea. His difficulty lay IN max.
ing it seem plausible that the war could
dawn with the shock of surprise on
the consciousness of any Ehglishman
after it had been in progress for two
years.
lie gets out of the difficulty by
making his hero. a combination OF
fool and a genius given to impulsive
acts of self sacrifice. So he has John
Baltazar. at the age of thirty, be the
most brilliant mathematical genius. in
Cambridge University in 1894. He has
him unhappily married and falling in
love with brilliant and charming
young student of Newnham College.
whom he was tutoring. And the girl
with fine sense of honor. He cannot
compromise the girl and he cannot live
with his wife. AS his wife has an
independent fortune he feels no com
Functions in abandoning her. so he
leaves Cambridge the day after he dis
covers the girl loves him. realizes on
his fortune and goes to China under an
assumed name. where he lives for eight
cen years in the heart of the country,
Then he returns to London. taking win
him Chinese youth, whose life he mas
saved. He gets drunk and is arrested.
Then, out of sense of shame that he
had no more self control he retires to
the country, where he leases house on
a moor five miles from any village and
shuts himself up there with the Chi
nesc youth, tempting himself every day
with a glass of port and working on
mathematical and Chinese books. The
Chinese goes to the village once a week
to do the marketing. but is ordered
never to report to Baltazar anything
that he learns in the village. So Bal
tazar's first knowledge of the war comes
when an injured German Zeppelin drops
its bombs on his cottage to save itself
from destruction when it crashes to the
earth. Both he and the Chinese are
seriously injured and arc taken to II
house in the neighborhood, and there
Baltazar discovers what has been hap
pening. AS soon as he recovers he de-
cides to give himself to his country to
serve in any capacity in which it will
use him. But first he visits CAM
bridge and there discoveSs that his wife
had been dead for years. leaving son
born within three months after he dis
appeared. The woman had maliciously
concealed from him the imminence of
his fathcrhood. He finds the son in n
hospital recovering from the loss of a
foot in the army and in the care of a
nurse who was the girl whom he had
loved.
A novelist with only shallow appre-
citation of the human heart would have
had joyous reunion when the three
met. But the emotions of youth who
had supposed himself to he fathcrless
in meeting a strange man who pro-
fessed to be his father must be com
plex. The meeting was not very salts
factory to either. And the girl, now
grown to be a woman of thirty eight.
cannot look upon the man of fifty with
the eyes or emotions of girl of eighteen
regarding a man of thirty Two thirds
of the book is devoted to the adjustment
of the relations between Baltazar and
his son and the woman, mingled with
the war.
Baltazar is drawn with fine under
standing of the way a great idealistic
intellect touched with the impulsiyeness
of folly would react to the war and it's
problems. And Mr.. Locke has shown a
deep insight into the ways of the femi-
| nine character in his trea tment of the
way in which love reawakens in the heart
of the mature woman who in youth had
decided that life no longer held any
romance for her, and had for years
been devoting herself impersonally to
the relief Of suffering. "The House