TWO NOVELS—AMERICAN AND FRENCH.*

IT has often been said, and said quite truly, that recent American art, both plastic and literary, shows various traces of French influence; but it is very easy to exaggerate their im- portance, for even in work where such influence is most clearly discernible, it betrays itself mainly in manner, and hardly at all in substance. During the past quarter of a century, the progress of American literature in all essential matters has been in the direction of national individuality ; we have for the first time an American school of writers, or rather, we have two or three schools which bear every mark of being not acclimatised exotics, but indigenous products of the soil. Here, for example, are two recent novels, one by a distinguished American, the other by an equally distinguished Frenchman, and though there would be little profit in a detailed critical contrast between books which occupy hardly any common ground, it is interesting to place them side by side, because they do undoubtedly exhibit in a very striking manner the features which differentiate the imaginative literature of America from the imaginative literature of France. Passing from one book to the other is, in fact, nothing less than a change, not of surroundings merely, but of climate.

In the work of Mr. W. D. Howells no thoughtful reader can have failed to observe a continuous deepening and widening of human interest. It may be said that the order of develop- ment in his prose is not unlike the order of development in Lord Teruayson's verse. Both the American novelist and

• (1) Annie Kilburn. By William D. Howells. Edinburgh : David Douglas. dadri Comilla. Translated from the French of Paul Bourget by lire. Cashel Hoey. London: Spencer Elackett.

the English poet were artists from the first ; but at first neither was anything more than an artist ; the gift of finished graceful expression preceded the acquisition of anything very substantial to express. Such poems as "Adeline" and "Recollec- tions of the Arabian Nights" stand in the same relation to the author's intellectual growth as that occupied by such sketches as A Foregone Conclusion and A Fearful Responsibility. Both poems and sketches may be described as life-school studies of single figures and single groups,—mere experiments in line, modelling, and colour, intended to train the mind and hand for the production of compositions which should have an

interest more human and universal than that excited by skilful

technique. The latest books of Mr. Howells have in them recognisable flesh and blood : his people do not elude us, as was their wont in the old days ; we know them, and can, as it

were, grasp their hands. He has, moreover, developed a remarkable gift of enabling us to see and realise the individual person not merely as an individual, but as a member of a society. In spite of his attention to detail—to what often seems even triviality of detail—he is often singularly suc- cessful in his suggestion of moral, intellectual, and emo-

tional atmosphere ; and his possession of this power is very noticeably manifest in Annie Kilburn. The full measure of his success in this respect can, of course, be gauged only by those who know the book ; but every now and then we come across a little passage which, taken by itself, serves to indicate its nature. After eleven years spent in Rome with an invalid father, Miss Kilburn, after his death, comes back to her old home in the country town of Hatboro', Massachusetts.

Some old friends of her girlhood call upon her, and entertain her with a discussion of the family affairs of the new minister at the Orthodox Church, a widower left with one little girl :—

" don't see what he expects to do with that little girl of his, without any mother, that way,' said Mrs. Gerrish. He ought to get married.'—' Perhaps he will, when he's waited a proper time,' suggested Mrs. Putney demurely.—' Well, his wife's been the same as dead ever since the child was born. I don't know what you call a proper time, Ellen,' argued Mrs. Gerrish.-5 I presume a minister feels different about such things,' Mrs. Wilmington remarked in- dolently.—' I don't see why a minister should feel any different from anybody else,' said Mrs. Gerrish. It's his duty to do it on his child's account. I don't see why he don't have the remains brought to Hatboro', anyway.'—They debated this point at some length, and they seemed to forget Annie. She listened with more interest than her concern in the last resting-place of the minister's dead wife really inspired. These old friends of hers seemed to have lost the sensitiveness of their girlhood without having gained tenderness in its place. They treated the affair with a nakedness that shocked her. In the country and in small towns people come face to face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing, household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial, and whether the corpse looked natural. But ever so much kindness goes with their disillusion : they are blunted but not embittered."

This is very simple ; it may, indeed, be called obvious ; but it is in the selection of features of life which are at once obvious and significant that the true realist shows his skill. In a few sentences like those we have quoted, the sordid narrowness, the lack of fine quality, and withal the wholesome humanness of common life in such a town as Hatboro', are all revealed to Us. The woman who finds herself set down in this environ-

ment may be beat described as an American Dorothea Brooke, —less youthful, less beautiful, less winning than her English prototype, and altogether a much less warmly coloured and more superficially prosaic nature, but still essentially a Dorothea, with a large but vaguely outlined ground-plan of life, and all sorts of yearnings for tl at satisfaction of spirit which comes of triumphantly helpful service. For the story of her attempts, her failures, and her successes—in which last she is not rich—readers must go the pages of what we think will seem to them, what it certainly seems to us, the very best book that Mr. Howells has written. He has certainly never given us in one novel so many portraits of intrinsic interest.

Annie Kilburn herself is a masterpiece of quietly veracious art,—the art which depends for its effect on unswerving fidelity -to the truth of Nature ; but because she is painted in low tones, she stands out from the canvas a little less distinctly than one or two of the other figures. Mr. Peck, the minister, is a striking character, a sort of Savonarola in home-spun. He is as enthusiastic in his way as Miss Kilburn is in hers ; though

while her enthusiasm is sanguine, his is sombre, and he has a firmer grasp of the facts of life, because he sets his face like a

flint against pleasant illusions. If the portrait of Mr. Peck be notably impressive, that of the clever, superficially cynical,

but essentially kindly Bohemian, Ralph Putney, is as notably brilliant. The defect of the ordinary clever man of fiction is that we do not hear his cleverness, we only hear about it; but Putney's clear-sighted, biting persiflage sparkles and coruscates for Mr. Howells's readers, and is not left to be accepted by them on vague report. Above all, we feel that he is a human being, not a mere costumed machine for the turning out of epigrams; indeed, the main charm of Annie Kilburn lies in the fact that it arouses and maintains our interest in the wholesome commonplaces of human nature and human ex- perience of which we can never tire.

To pass from such a book to Andre Cornelis, is a change like that of passing from the sweet, cool airs of a country lane in spring, to the closeness of a confined, sunless chamber. The book can be described at once briefly and adequately; for it is simply a retelling of the story of Hamlet as that story shapes itself in the mind of a Frenchman whose hero is not a dateless Dane, but a typical nineteenth-century habitant of the Parisian monde. Andre Cornelis tells his own story, which begins with the event of his father's mysterious murder in the room of a hotel, whither he has gone for a business interview with a stranger, who has disappeared, leaving no traces behind him. The next memorable date in the youth's life is that of the marriage of his mother, a delicate, sensitive woman of the clinging type, to M. Jacques Termonde, a lifelong friend of her husband's, who happened to be with her at the time of his death, and who since then has been her guide and adviser. Between Andre and his step-father there has slowly arisen a strong mutual antipathy ; and as the youth grows into manhood, he gradually withdraws himself from his mother and her husband, and drifts into the dissipations, and worse than dissipations, of fast Parisian life. Only one link binds him to his post, and this is the recollection of the vow, made in boyhood, to track out and hunt down the unknown murderer of his father. He has never freed himself from this self-imposed obligation, and yet he has done nothing to fulfil it; partly, no doubt, because allured from the vengeful quest by more sensuous attractions, but mainly because he knows not where to begin, and feels in the depth of his heart that it is folly to hope for success where the trained servants of the law have met with utter failure. Things are thus with him when he comes into possession of a packet of letters written by his father during the last four years of his life to an only sister to whom he was warmly attached. From these letters be learns that during the whole of this time, M. Cornelis had suspected the loyalty and honour of his friend Termonde ; that he had been devoured with jealousy which seemed to have been not ill-founded, so far at least as Termonde was concerned; that he had come at last to entertain doubts even of his wife's loyalty and purity; and that these suspicions had made his last days one long misery. Here surely is a clue, but what a terrible one! The police had been baffled not merely by the ingenuity of the criminal, but by the absence of a motive, for no one could be named who bore Cornelis ill-will, or who would profit by his death. The letters, however, suggest a motive which would be amply sufficient; but though Andre. has been in communication with the authorities, he dare not, for the sake of his possibly innocent mother, place in their hands evidence which points to her as an accomplice of her second husband. He determines to work alone, to watch both her and Termonde, and to wring from the criminal an implicit or explicit admission of guilt. From this point onward the tragic interest deepens with every chapter. Andre soon becomes convinced of his mother's innocence, for he sees her in situations in which a sensitive, somewhat hysterical woman must, had she been guilty, have betrayed herself by word, or look, or gesture ; but the inscrutable Termonde is not so easily fathomed. That his was not the hand which dealt the fatal blow, Andre knows, for he himself was with Termonde at the time the deed was done ; but the mere physical alibi fails to prove that his was not the controlling mind. This is what Andre has to discover, and the story of the long tournament et, autrance between the cold, wary man of the world, and the feverishly impulsive modern Hamlet, with his traps to "catch the conscience" of the murderer—if murderer he be—is beyond all doubt masterly work of its kind. It is not our business to tell the story, only to indicate the nature and drift of it, and such indication has been sufficiently given. AmvIre Cornelis is a singularly skilful book, an intensely interesting book, and a book which is devoid of all overt nameable offence against bones mores, whether we interpret mores as manners or morals ; and yet it leaves such a bad taste in the mouth that we must feel that the skill has been wasted, and that the interest is morbid. In the older Hamlet there is evil enough, but we have glimpses of blue sky and the sweet breath of open spaces ; here we are cramped up as in the confessional or the prison cell, and inhale only the atmosphere of crime. If Annie Hilburn and Andrg Cornglis can be considered as in any way representative of contem- porary imaginative literature in the United States and in France—and we think they may fairly be so considered—the fear that American fiction is becoming unwholesomely Galli- cised is, to say the least, an exaggerated alarm.