THE SURVIVORS.*

MR. CRESSWELL has managed to write a very striking book. Still, striking and readable as is The Survivors, it is not a satis- factory novel. Its very excellences act as incentives to our regret. We cannot spare a real novelist, and to find one so nearly approaching, and yet in the end never reaching the goal, is very disappointing. Mr. Cresswell has the power of rapid and vigorous narration. He can photograph a situa- tion, material and psychological, with inimitable skill. He can weave the subtle threads of dialogue, and flash the shuttle of brilliant epigram and keenly pointed reflection through the warp of his story. He can kindle and keep burning the interest of his readers. In all the lower technique of his art he shows a master's hand. But here his conquest of his art is stayed. He has no dramatic perception. He can evolve a string of striking and picturesque situations; they flow • The Survivors. By Henry Creswell. 3 vols. London : Horst and Blackott.

in smooth obedience at his will ; but he cannot turn them to their true account. The story-teller must have the playwright's sense ; he must make his characters move inevitably, not at hap- hazard, from scene to scene. Of dramatic fitness, of the power of developing and sustaining a continuous and regular action, Mr. Cresswell has no notion. His novel is a kaleidoscope which, as it turns, gives situation after situation, new, interesting, and fertile of interest ; but commanding motive there is none.

The great novelists fashion their work otherwise. Like some organic growth unfold the stories of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens. The characters, the situations, with them, are welded each to the other and to the story with the same necessity that marshals the clustering groups of "The Last Judgment," or the procession of the Parthenon Reliefs.

Mr. Cresswell's art has a curious, almost an exact analogy, in the work of the newer school of French painters. The Paris impressionists paint as he writes. Among the best of them, there is the same skill of hand, with the same tendency to let technical mastery degenerate into mere slap-dash ; the same lack of dignity and of repose. It is hardly fair to the novelist to suggest a comparison with M. Jan van Beers ; yet it will illus- trate our meaning. The same brutality of tone, the same realism, reserved for what is unpleasant, withheld for what is charming, the same impertinent materialism, the same touch of half insanity, the same apparent delight in details a little cruel, a little ugly, and a little morbid, that are present so strongly in the painter, all have their counterparts in the novelist. In one point, however, the novelist shows that his art is not a foreign importation, bat is true to the traditions of

English fiction. He never bows the knee to M. Zola. The silly prurience of the feeble English imitators of the author of Nana has no place in his pages. The brutality of tone—and there is really no other word—which pervades characters of The Survivors just as it pervaded Mr. Cresswell's other very in- teresting novel, Incognita, is simply a brutality of the head and heart. That this tendency to the materialistic view of human nature has not led him to the worship of the goddess Lubricity,

is indeed a very hopeful sign. The general healthiness of Mr. Cresswell's work in this respect, and the strong evidence that the maunderings of Parisian erotomaniacs have no influence with him, make us believe that at last he will see that Impressionism is not, in truth, the end or the means of art; and that then he may, in continuity and in sympathy with the great masters of English fiction, produce work worthy of his undoubted literary ability.

The Survivors, so called because it works out in a semi-satirical vein the theory of the survival of the fittest, opens extremely well. The dramatis personce are photographed for us thus :— "On a certain fine afternoon a few years ago, a train of the Underground Railway conveyed in one of its composite carriages thirteen persons from South Kensington to Westminster. With these persons the reader shall in time make such closer acqaaintance as the circumstances of this history may demand. For the present, suffice it to say that they were—first, in a second-class compartment, a Nonconformist minister and his nephew; in a first-class compart- ment, two dandies, two bankers, a big man, broad-backed, bull- necked, and of a sottish appearance, and a short, thin, pale-faced young lady of nineteen, very much flustered at having become somehow parted from her mamma ; in another first-class com- partment, another banker, his two step-daughters, and his brother- in.law ; and finally, in another second class compartment, that nearest the engine, an exceedingly handsome man of abant two-and- twenty, who quietly slipped into the carriage at South Kensington just as the train began to move. The three bankers, oddly enough, were partners, but had no knowledge that they wore riding in the same carriage, having joined the train at different stations. More oddly still, the one who had his step-daughters with him bore the most astonishing resemblance—costume only excepted—to the Nonconformist minister."

The young man who got into the carriage just as it was moving

was Tudor Carnac, the hero. The two step-daughters of the banker were Miss Isabel and Miss Sixta Flamanc, the heroines of the second and third volumes respectively. Their step-father, Mr. Flamanc, was the banker who bore "the most astonishing resemblance" to the Nonconformist minister, Mr. Scarrow. The pale-faced young lady was Miss Peard, destined to become the wife of the hero, though not the heroine. Mr. Tudor Carnac is eminently one of the fittest, one who survives. He starts with nothing except the wages of a shop-assistant, and yet con- trives to build himself up a fortune by a successful stroke of luck at Monaco. The sixteen thousand pounds he wins there are, however, not enough for his ambition, and he resolves to acquire a really substantial fortune by marriage. He finds at Paris, on his way home from Monaco, Miss Peard, who has eight thousand pounds a year, and he then and there makes her fall in love with him. The mother, however, intervenes, and as Tudor Carnac is not very keen on the enterprise, he for the moment gives up his thoughts of the heiress. He had, before leaving England, been rather struck by Miss Isabel Flamanc,

but when he returns and sees her again, he falls desperately in

love. She likes his handsome face and fascinating address, but has to tell him that he is not rich enough for her. She has eighty thousand pounds, and naturally looks for an

equivalent. Carnac determines to make himself worthy of her by becoming rich. Being one of the fittest, he is, of course, not such a fool as to think of doing this by working. He will enrich himself by getting hold of Miss Peard's money. How he does this, just before the Married Women's Property Act comes into

operation, cannot be related here. Suffice it to say he obtains possession of her wealth. This done, his next step is to get rid of Mrs. Carnac in a gentlemanly way,—Mr. Canine is always polished and well-bred. His idea is a happy one.

He forces her to take to riding. She cannot ride in the least, but yet is made by him to get on highly fed, spirited horses every day. Of course, an accident is only a question of time. For this Mr. Carnac waits with sober and, exemplary patience. It comes in six months, and he is free. Then arises the question,—Shall he marry Isabel? He

takes time to consider, finds he gets rather bored with her, and finds also that her younger sister has become the handsomer of the two, and, what is more, has developed from a hideously morbid invalid into a person obviously " fit " to survive. He marries her, and they doubtless beget survivors as fit as themselves. We see them in the vista opened by the novelist,—rich, beautiful, respectable, loving and beloved, without fear and without remorse. That Mr. Carnac has com- mitted murder never enters any one's head. His wife's death is only a proof that she was not fit to survive. Such is the main thread of the story. The under-plot, however, is really as important, and, on the whole, as interesting. The extraordinary change of identity which takes place between Mr. Flamanc and Mr. Scarrow is described with immense ingenuity and con- siderable breadth of handling. Given that a man who fancies him- self tired of life can be persuaded to commit suicide by the fact that special circumstances will enable him to manage it without the odium and unpleasantness to his family generally incident to

such an act, and the scene at the inn between the banker and the Nonconformist minister is extremely cleverly told. On this, or on the powerful though hideous and morbid incident of Sixta's struggle with and conquest over death, we will not dwell at length. Our readers will judge them for themselves. The account of Mr. Carnac's proposal to Miss Agnes Peard is worth quoting, to give a notion of Mr. Cresswell's style of half-comical, half-satirical narration :—

"As for Agnes, she was crimson, and trembling with alarm and confusion, and scarcely knew what he was saying or not saying. Only she knew that presently he had risen, and she too, and that he had got hold of her hand, and was asking her to be his wife. It cannot be—it cannot be !' she replied. 'It cannot be.'—'Nay, Mies

Peard—Agnes ! If you knew how I love you!'—' ! it cannot be —it cannot be !' repeated Miss Peard like a parrot. That had come into her head to say, and she was too confused to think of anything else. Tudor persevered bravely. Did she not know that he loved her ? Did she not believe that he would make her happy ? He was not a wealthy man. He had only four thousand a year to offer her (the Impudent dog said four thousand !) But he would perform miracles. She should lack for nothing she could desire. Not a hint that he knew she had money of her own. He knew better than to suggest that. And they would be so happy ! Their lives should be a dream, beneath the summer shadows of the trees.' But Agnes was obdurate. It was all very pretty to listen to, but the man had taken her too entirely by surprise. And there was Mamma.' So she sat down, and said, 'Oh ! it could not be ; it could not be ! She was the most unhappy of creatures.' He most go and forget her. Ile would find some other woman more worthy of his love. She would always think of him as a dear elder brother. She would never marry now, and all the other things every woman says when she refuses a man ; for they all say just the same things, and tho man who has been refused by half.a-dozen knows it."

This way of writing will doubtless attract some people, while it will irritate others. At any rate, no class of readers will find The Survivors dull. For ourselves, we consider it, with all its faults, a remarkable book, and, what is more to the point, the work of a writer who has in him power to do mach better. If Mr. Cresswell will drop his impressionist method, and the wearisome iteration of commonplace cynicism; still more, if he will cast his characters in a less brutal mould, and draw the natural as well as the deformed; if he will remember that, without preaching, a novel may have a purpose, and that

without purpose all art falls to the level of M. Jan van Beers ; if he will develop a central action through a sequence of interdependent and co-ordinate, not eccentric, situations, and will lean rather to what is sane than to what is depraved in the intellectual delineation of his men and women,—he may use his great gift of readableness to produce a real contribution to English fiction. A successful writer of fiction in English has here, in America, and in the Colonies, an audience of nearly a hundred millions. Surely it is worth while to give up even the dearest tricks of the impressionist to touch such a public. That without this sacrifice he will not touch them except on the surface, the history of English literature leaves no doubt.