NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
THE opportuneness of Mr. Stephen Crane's new romance of love and war is more apparent than real, for although the scene is chiefly laid in Greece during the recent war, the hero never really gets to the front, and the nearest approach to fighting is a street scrimmage between a band of American students and a rabble of home-keeping patriots. Active Service, in a word, is less concerned with the tragedy of war than the comedy of war correspondence ; and as one who has had actual experience of both in the campaign of 1897, Mr. Crane has blended invention with observation to very good and entertaining purpose. Rufus Coleman, the hero of the story, is the highly paid, self-assertive Sunday editor of a great New York daily, who has fallen in love with Marjory Wainwright, daughter of a distinguished Professor at the University where Rufus graduated. Now as the young journalist has a not undeserved reputation for hard drink- ing and gambling, the Professor naturally discourages his suit, but finding Marjory obdurate, resolves to create a diversion by taking her on an archmological trip to Greece with eight of his favourite students. As soon as the Professor has carried out his plan of campaign, Coleman finds it necessary that he too should take a holiday in the esame country, and is accordingly despatched by his journal '• (1.) Active Service. By Stephen Crane. London : W. Heinemann. [Ss.]—. (24 Vaida Hanem: the Romance of a Turkish Harim. By Daisy Hugh Pryce. London : Macmillan and Co. 168.)—(3.) Pats the Priest. By S. Baring-Gould. London : Methuen and Co. (Es.)—(4.) Young April. By Egerton Castle. London : Macmillan and Co. (614.)—(5.) Sword and Assegai. By Anna Howarth. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. [6a]—(6.) An African Treasure. By J. Maelaren Cobban. London : John Long. [63.]—(7.) (Inc Your and the Kerr, By Milllesnt Sutherland. London.: Methuen and Co. [6s.)—(8.) resolved F e be Free. By E. H. Cooper. London : Duckworth and Co. (6s.]—(9.) Eureka. By Owen Hall. London : Chatto ant WIndus. 'Vast:in. By E. 1.1rIngston Pr.scott. London : Slijrkin. Marshall, and Co. [6s.]—(1L) All Sots, B.r L. T. Meade. London : J. Nisbet and C. VS to act for them in case of war. On arrival in Greece he finds that hostilities have broken out, that the Wainwright party have got lost in the interior, and that the Eclipse ha. cabled instructions to him to find them. For a while the stars in their courses fight for the lovers. Coleman, at the very moment when his own nerve has shown signs of giving way, finds the role of rescuer thrust upon him. He blunders on the missing party at the dead of night, takes command at once, hides them in a wood while a fight rages in the neighbourhood, and convoys them in safety into the Greek lines. But at this juncture his hopes are dashed by the infelicitous arrival on the scene of Miss Nora Black, a divette of the comic-opera stage, who has been sent out as war correspondent by a rival New York paper. Miss Black is indignant with Rufus for having rejected her advances on the voyage out, and the spretae injuria formae induces her to make mischief between Marjory and her rescuer. For a while she is completely sue- cessf al, but after many vicissitudes and one serious temptation, Rufus routs the unscrupulous Siren, and, thanks chiefly to the gratitude and good sense of the Professor, is reunited to Mar- jory. Mr. Crane's plot is ingenious and entertaining, and the characterisation full of those unexpected—occasionally un- edifying—strokes in which he excels. Rufus is very far from being a hero; we could have dispensed with the con- tinual reference to his consumption of strong liquors ; and the materialistic side of his character is admirably sketched in the sentence where Mr. Crane remarks how, at a moment of great nervous tension, "the quality of mysterious menace in the great gloom and the silence would have caused him to pray if prayer would have transferred him magically to New York, and made him a young man with no coat playing billiards at his club." The slangy, hero-worshipping students—as different from normal Enlist' undergraduates as "Stalky and Co." from normal English public-school boys—are delightful in their way ; so, too, are the Professor, quite a touching figure when. his intellectual arrogance crumbles away in the face of danger, and his worldly wife, with her genius for undermining her own positions. Marjory, too, is an admirable heroine. We quite agree with the American Ambassador and the students that she is far too good for Rufus, but that need not excite our wonder :— " Why did she lore him? Curious fool, be at Is human love the growth of human will?"
Besides, Rufus was fully conscious of his unworthiness. We should have liked, we confess, to have heard what the pro- prietor of the Eclipse thought of his conception of the duties of a war correspondent.
Valda Ildnem, that very charming, if unconvincing, "romance of a Turkish harim " which recently ran its course in Macmillan, is a modern variant of an antique formula in fiction,—the unavailing love of a gallant Frank for a beauty of the seraglio, ending generally in the bowstring and the Bosphorus. Valda Hanem is the beautiful Circassian wife of a Turkish Pasha living in Cairo, with whom Captain Fitzroy, one of the army of occupation, falls in love at first sight. Disguising himself in the garb of a workman during the" installation" of the electric light in the Pasha's palace— a strange mixture of romance and "actuality "—be carries on the clandestine acquaintance until he has wrung from Veldt), the admission that his love is returned. Ultimately the Pasha discovers the secret, Valda dies of brain fever, and Captain Fitzroy returns in despair to England. So much for the bare outline of the story. But the working out reveals a whole crop of surprises. For the hero is not the handsome Captain at all : it is the poor Pasha, a gallant soldier, a strict monogamist, whose only grief is that his wife, to whom he is devotedly and chivalrously attached, fails to repay his love by more than esteem and respect ; who is absolutely broken- hearted on her death, and seeks a soldier's death on the battlefield in the war with Greece, while Captain Fitzroy con- soles himself on the voyage home with a fluffy-haired, "
tious" second-rate English girl.
That fertile and ingenious writer, Mr. Baring-Gould, presents us in his new romance, flab° the Priest, with a picture of the afflictions endured by Wales in the days of Henry I. surnamed Beauclerk. A certain amount of rather sketchy local colour is introduced into the book, but one cannot help feeling that the setting (like the romantic back- ground of a landscape at the photographer's) has been. contrived for the adventures, rather than inc an ventures for the setting. The escapes, hiding of priests, and usurpations of their offices might have taken place any where with merely a slight alteration of name and locality. But the narrative, though by no means up to the level of Mr. Baring-Gould's best work, is alert and vigorous, and will doubtless please those who like their history diluted with fiction.
Mr. Egerton Castle's Young April is as gay and gallant a story as we have read since The Pride of Jennie°. The "take off" is excellent : the heir to a dukedom, roaming across the Continent with an obsequious tutor, hears suddenly of the death of his uncle, and as only a month remains before his twenty-first birthday, he resolves to make the most of his irresponsibility. Behold him, therefore, changing costumes and places with the postilion of a beautiful prima-donna on the road to a neighbouring Court, fighting a duel with the diva's adorer, Count Neuberg, losing his heart to a frail but fascinating Countess, and coming under the sway of an amaz- ing English Admirable Crichton, Michael Spencer by name, who is high in favour at the Court. The story is an ingeniously woven and highly coloured web of amorous cross-purposes, for while the Countess is beloved by Spencer, the prima- donna is in love with Spencer, and Count Neuberg is infatuated with the prima-donna. Mr. Castle mingles tender sentiment, passion, and pathos with his gaiety, and the result is at once extremely improbable and extremely agreeable.
Miss Howarth's new novel, Sword and Assegai, deals in exciting fashion with the Kaffir Wars between 1834-1851. The military tactics of the Kaffirs resemble so closely those of the Boers as to lend a spice of actuality to the narrative. Might not the following sentence, for example, have been written any time during the last fortnight F—" These regular troops from England don't understand that kind of warfare. They are brave enough, but they stand in the open to be shot down like sheep, and never once catch sight of their enemies, who are all in the bush." The book should prove excellent reading to those who like plenty of adventures emphasised by the tuck of drum.
Africa is also the scene of the next novel on our list, but there is nothing topical or historical in Mr. Maclaren Cobban's recital of the astounding adventures of the English doctor and his friends who penetrated the depths of Morocco in quest of the fabulous wealth buried in the mysterious White City. The clue to its whereabouts is furnished by evidence transmitted partly in writing, partly by tattooing on the arm of a white and the bead of a black boy—Mr. Cobban has presumably taken a leaf out of his Herodotus here —and the difficulties of solving the puzzle are seriously compli cated by the kidnapping of the two boys, and ultimately of the entire party, by a villainous Basha. The escape of the captives, their journey to the White City, and subsequent struggle with a race of veiled men and a gigantic human octopus, impose a dangerous tax on the credulity of the reader, and read more like a parody of Mr. Rider Haggard
than anything else. An African. Treasure, in fact, degene- rates into sheer nightmare. We look to Mr. Cobban, to whom in past years we owe much excellent entertainment, to redeem this lapse from the usually high level of his achieve- ments.
The Duchess of Sutherland has written in One Hour and the Next a very earnest, thoughtful, and, if the truth be told, rather tedious novel, in which the shattering of an emanci- pated young woman's ideals is enacted to an accompaniment of Socialism, strikes, labour problems, and kindred topics. Repelled by the austerity of her father, a schoolmaster in an industrial centre, Agnes Stanier determines to find distraction outside her home, and becomes "typist" to Robert Lester, a labour leader. Robert Lester is in constant antagonism with Philip Assheton, a high-minded and amiable Christian Socialist, who cherishes an unrequited affection for Agnes. Agnes, in turn, succumbs to the personal magnetism of Lester, which is unfortunate, as be is married to a wife whom he adores, but who has a hereditary predisposition to insanity, and lives in retreat. Agnes is unaware of the existence of the wife, and on making the discovery is terribly upset, denounces Robert as a hypocrite, and returns to her father's roof. The book is really very carefully written, but the author commits the initial error of representing her heroine in such an exceedingly unattractive, unfeminine, and unfilial light in the opening chapters that the expiation of her errors leaves us comparatively unaffected.
Mr. Cooper's new novel, Resolved to be Free, is decidedly amusing, and in a sense original, since there cannot be many novels in which interest is enlisted in a hero of only sixteen or thereabouts. The attempt cannot be pronounced an entire success, but Mr. Cooper deserves credit for a spirited venture. The character of the "boy financier," Gerald Franklin—one recalls that delightful account of the commercial academy in The Wrecker—is, however, hardly' a lifelike character. We are told that he has the most extraordinary insight into, and grasp of, all the details of business, and particularly of the business of an entirely fraudulent Freehold Building Society, —but his acts hardly bear out the author's assertion. No boy of Gerald's reputed sharpness would have trusted the fraudu- lent Mr. Marshall with a halfpenny for a single day. Again, the financial details essential to the progress of the plot are not set forth with the clearness which the reader is entitled to expect. But the story as a whole is decidedly entertaining.
In Eureka Mr. Owen Hall lends a certain spice of novelty to a well-worn plot by making out the civilised but unheard-of nation, introduced to us by the usual band of adventurers, to be a tribe descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. It is true that since the exploit of "Alan Quater- main," no discovery of a hidden but civilised nation by a small band of adventurers can claim the merit of originality, bat at any rate Mr. Hall invests with romance and picturesqueness. the preliminary search through ancient MSS. in Ceylon, as well as the voyage "in the path of the rising sun" which lands his adventurers in Australia.
We cannot profess to be much impressed by the "Romance of Modern Egypt," which Mr. Livingston Prescott has entitled Illusion. It is the story of a nefarious plot to ruin one of Mr. Prescott's usual gallant young officers by the hypodermic injection of a mysterious drug which produces the effect of drunkenness. The author bustles his puppets about the- stage with considerable vigour, but we have found the whole story curiously artificial.
Mrs. Meade relates in All Sorts the fortunes of a widow and her daughter, who, being reduced to financial straits, resolve, at the suggestion of the daughter and narrator, to start a boarding house for "paying guests" in Bloomsbury. Their housekeeper-partner, a truly egregious female, draws up a tariff on such a basis as to render profit impossible even with a full house. Fortunately, they are rescued by a devoted lover, who refuses even his promised reward—the hand of the heroine—when he finds that she loves another. Mrs. Meade,
who is apparently convinced that a gulf both wide and deep sunders the dwellers in Mayfair and Belgravia from those of less favoured quarters of London, has given us a meritorious rather than stimulating specimen of the" middle- class" novel.
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