NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* IT has lately been discussed whether
journalists are or are not worn out by forty. What, we wonder, is to be said of the modern novelists, whose abnormal "output" reminds one of the caricature of Mascagni, the Italian composer, writing operas with both hands and both feet? Certainly, if we except Miss Bmddon, the greatest staying-power is displayed by those writers who produce at leisure, amongst whom must be reckoned Miss Rhoda Broughton. Already to be numbered amongst the veterans—it is upwards of thirty years since her first novel appeared—Miss Broughton retains, if not the fougue de vingt ass, at least a considerable measure of that vivid energy of expression, and that passionate love of health, strength, and beauty, which have always marked her writings. Miss Broughton has not always been regarded as on the side of the angels ; on the contrary, her earlier works—though severed by a wide gulf from the polemical feminism of the modern emancipation novel—certainly showed a somewhat mutinous spirit of revolt against the precepts of Mrs. Grundy. But in The Game and the Candle, though the means adopted may be somewhat devious, the end is at least capable of a highly edifying construction ; and while the cynical reader may ascribe the discomfiture of Jane Etheredge to mere cynicism on the part of the author, it is equally capable of serving as an illustration of the futility of setting our directions on earthly things. Jane Etheredge has married from the schoolroom a rich, highly educated, unattractive, exacting husband, thirty years her senior. After a loveless wedded life of eight years he endeavours to exact from her on his death-bed a promise that, while free to marry again, she willinot replace him by a man named Miles. Miles some five years previously had made love to her in her husband's house, but had left suddenly at her request after a tender farewell, which Jane now learns for the first time that her husband had overheard. This promise Jane will not give, though it causes her genuine grief to refuse his dying request, and though she is fully aware of the penalty attached to her refusal and Mr. Etheredge before he dies revokes his will in her favour and leaves everything to his elder sister. Accordingly, Jane goes forth into exile at Richmond to be near a young male cousin of literary tastes who had acted as her husband's secretary as well as the keeper of her own conscience—it was at his instigation that she had given Miles his congd—and endures the mockery of mourning with a constant struggle between revolt and remorse, sustained all the time, however, by an exultation in the sacrifice made for her absent lover, of whose fidelity she obtains evidence through a sympathetic common friend. Eventually Miles returns from California, but the tempestuous precipitancy of his first visit produces a temporary estrangement, besides leading to a complete rupture between Jane and the faithful cousin. As the year of her widowhood closes, Jane goes to Scotland to visit her friend, Lady Barnes, and, meeting Miles, is engulfed in a transient delirium of amorous rapture from which she is rudely awakened to find that he is nothing more than a handsome animal with a mendacious tongue and an incorrigible faculty of flirtation. The book ends abruptly with the irrevocable breaking off of the engagement, but, readers of a speculative turn can hardly resist the conclusion that the frustration of Jane's hopes may prove the opportunity of the literary cousin.
• (1.) The Game and the Candle. By Rhoda Broughton, London Macmillan and Co. (66.)—(2.) Samuel Boyd, of Catchpole Square. By B. L. Farjeon. London : Hutchinson. [raj—Madame lean: a Tourist Story. By Mrs. Camp- bell Praed. London : Chatto and Windua. 8e.]—(4.) God's Greeting: a Story of This Our Day. By John Garrett Leigh. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. r
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a0.3—(5.) The Spies of the Wight. By Headon Hill. London : C. A. Pearson. Se 64.]—(6.) Our Code of Honour. By Hope Hnntly. London: Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. [66.]—(7.) The Cruise of the • Golden Wave.' By W. N. Oscar. London : A. D. Imes and Co. [66.3—(8.) Helot and Hero. By E. Livingston Prescott. London : Simpkin and Co. [6s.]—(9.) The Unrnnod By Paul Laurence Dunbar. London ; Service and Paton. [bs.]—(10.) The Bloch D0119148. By S. B.. Crockett. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. Lee.] She is only twenty-six, she will infallibly console herself, and is really to be congratulated rather' than commiserated with on the sudden fiasco brought about by her timely, though painful, discovery. The book is extremely clever, and Jane, in whom the joie de vivre and a wholesome dread of public opinion are perpetually waging war; Lady Barnes, the faded sentimentalist, tenacious of purpose spite of her hazy manner; and the two tailor-made girls for ever "cadging" on their friends, are all drawn with remorseless candour. But it is hardly a pleasant novel, and labours under the radical defect that there is not a single character in the book who enlists sympathy, and only one who inspires respect.
The disciples of Dickens have too often served to enforce the truth of the maxim decipit exemplar vitas itnitabile. To the rule, however, an honourable exception may be admitted in the case of Mr. Farjeon, who if he has not, in Stevenson's phrase, quite the " fist " of "Box,". is a good deal more than a mere echo of the resonant tones of his great master. Samuel Boyd, of Catchpole Square, is an elaborate and intricate story, of the murder of an unscrupulous and tyrannical usurer, the mysterious disappearance of his clerk, Abel Death, and the extrication from the toils of suspicion of a generous but in- discreet young man named Dick Remington, who has been supplanted in the affections of his lady-love by the usurer's son, and unselfishly endeavours to divert natural suspicions from his successful rival. The heroine of the plot is a little girl, the daughter of the missing clerk, who besides acting as fairy godmother to her numerous brothers and sisters, plays a sensational part in tracking down the murderers. Gracie Death is one of those precocious town children, whose wits are sharpened by the stress of poverty, such as Dickens loved to paint ; and the only fault we have to find with her is that in the early stages of the story a little too much capital is made out of her cough,—e.g., "Such a rasping cough, forcing what little blood she had in her poor body up into her pallid face.
Such a wearing, tearing cough, as though some savage malignant beast, lurking in her chest, was clawing at it in sheer devilry and scraping it clean to the bone !" Here you have Dickens's familiar device of impersonation and iteration carried to dangerous excess. Mr. Farjeon's characters remind us not a little of the little girl who had a little curl, &c. But in an age over-enamoured of subtle characterisation, it is pleasant now and again to encounter an author who draws so unmistakable a line between his sheep and goats.
Mrs. Campbell Praed, though long since distanced in the race of audacity by more uncompromising interpreters of emancipated womanhood, has contrived to provide her readers with a regular feast of surprises in Madame Izan. A heroine of surprising beauty is no novelty, but when she turns out to have been stone-blind until the age of twenty, to have been married to a man—and a Japanese into the bargain —whom she has never seen, to have been separated from him immediately by the intervention of her people, and, finally, to be travelling in the East in ignorance whether she is a wife or a widow,—why, the situation is fraught with all manner of romantic possibilities. That a young Australian mining millionaire should fall in love with her at first sight was only natural ; nor was it to be wondered at that, on her arrival in Japan, the self-effacing husband should attach him- self to her suite in the disguise of a guide. Having revealed thus much of the plot, we shall preserve a discreet silence as to the dinouement, merely observing that it is as unconventional as the most fastidious amateur of the unusual could desire, also that young women who see the light for the first time at twenty can hardly be expected to arrive at years of discretion at twenty-five. The narrative is handled with Mrs. Campbell Praed's usual alertness, and the humours of the ladyjournalist and the fussy valetudinarian lend piquancy to the recital.
Mr. Leigh's story of masters and men in South Lancashire, God's Greeting, is so strangely compounded of strength and weakness, sense and sentimentality, sympathy and prejudice, realism and melodrama, accurate local and technicall knowledge and ignorance of the ways of the world, as to render the task of a reviewer far from being a sinecure. The character of the central figure, a clever orphan lad adopted and educated by a pitman and his wife, is well conceived without being alto- gether attractive. Dick Bradley's aspirations after culture and the classics have the inevitable result of estranging him from his foster-parents and their daughter Julia, a rough factory lass whose devotion he is anxious to repay by.marriage.
TO complicate matters,- Dick becomes infatuated with Miss Dorothea Garaint, daughter of the principal millOwner in the ne.ighbourhood ; Julia, driven mad by jealousy, fires the mill, and pushes the millowner's only son into the canal, where he is drowned, and suspicion is concentrated on Dick Bradley, who, apart from circumstantial evidence, has taken an active, and even iiffla,mmatory, part against the masters in the labour war in the neighbourhood. Julia, being mad, is unable to clear flick; but at the last moment Dorothea gives evidence conclu- siv.ely establishing an alibi, and, what is more, makes it plain to herlover that his affections are returned.. Dick is none the less true to life for being an imperfect hero ; one sympathises with him in his literary aspirations, in his despairing efforts to fix his affections on the vulgar but warm-hearted Julia. But we are quite unable to comprehend the attractiveness of his high- born goddess. We have no objection to Mr. Leigh's impas- sionedtirades against the tyranny of millowners and directors, his sneers at English Judges, or his flouts at English clergy- men. Even where they are most ungenerous, these outbursts are at least inspired by genuine feeling. It is where he depicts the: oppressorsof the poor in their kindliest aspect, and, above all, in the delineation of their womenfolk, that he is least satis- factory. The afflicting archness of the Dunally sisters, the fulsome pride of their heavy father in his skittish children, the facetious sallies of Percy Garaint, and the pert coquetry a his sister go far to ruin the powerful impression created by the pictures of life in the mine, at the pitbrow, and in the working man's home. Imagine a millowner's daughter observing to a respectable young working man, a propos of his study of Latin : "I shall hear you quote Ovid some day," and on his interjecting, "Or Cicero?" replying: "No, no—Ovid. He is the best,' and she smiled merrily at mystified Dick Bradley."
The Spiex of the Wight is a decidedly exciting story of the campaign carried on by an enterprising young journalist, at the behest of a Napoleonic editor, against a gang of foreign spies bent on procuring secret information as to our coast defence& Baron von Holtzman, alias Count Filiostro, alias Mr. Campion, reminds one slightly of Count Fosco, but there is originality—as well as defiance of one of the most familiar passages in Shakespeare—in the notion of a set of spies masquerading as a German band. The love interest lacks distinction, the hero's repeated allusions to "my dear girl" are somewhat trying, the sinking of the enemies' ship is rather unsportsmanliie, and the conduct of the young English officer is little short of disgraceful. But as an illustration of the say- ing that. "the pen is mightier than the sword" the story is a vigorous piece of sensationalism.—Our Code of Honour is an Anglo-Indian romance in which the heroine addresses a male acquaintance as "poor chap," and bids him "keep his hair on." The merit of the narrativelmay be judged by a passage describing an evening party :—" Miss Hopkins favoured them very daintily upon the mandoline, while Lady Forsyth afforded great pleasure by being persuaded to sing. Her voice was still fresh, and she sang some rare provincial songs of France, of which she had a perfect store in her memory." On another page we read of a man's feet being "perfectly chaussured." —The Cruise of the 'Golden Wave' is a capital tale of a romantic homeward voyage in a Chinese clipper in the fifties. Mr. Fearl, the mate, is as original a character as we have encountered for some time, witness his description of his skipper :— "Such a waddlin' barometer I never come across in all my life. Ye might know what sort o' weather we're havin' by just lookin' at him, an tappin' him every now and then in the small of his back, without needin' to put yere head outside. In calms an' cat's-paws he's a mild edition of Old Nick, WI' the barb of his tail trapped ; at four knots he's a fidgetty lunatic ; at eix he's an irritable cuss ; at seven to nine lie's a rare good shipmate, an' ' that's his high-water mark. At ten knots he becomes a sweet-tempered idiot ; at twelve he's a sickenin' exhibition o' boisterous happiness ; an' in bad weather he's two degrees better'n a special providence, seem' as he can be depended on to be al'ays to hand."
By way of epilogue there is a spirited " chanty " called "Sailor-Men," in which the writer speaks up for the mercantile marine much as Mr. Kipling has done for Tommy Atkins.— Mr.- Livingston Prescott's Helot and Hero, like all his work, has cleverness and vivacity, but the sentimental note is strained to falsetto pitch throughout.—Mr. Dunbar, the well-known coloured poet, gives us in The Uncalled a sym- pathetic study of humble life in a small town in Ohio. The hero is the son of drunken parents, deserted by his father, and on his mother's death adopted by kind neighbours and trained for the minisfry. Mr. Dunbar introduces us in the main to a sordid and bigoted little community, redeemed, happily, by one or two magnanimous and tolerant souls.—After The Lilac Sunbonnet, • The Grey Man, and The Rd Axe, Mr. Crockett now gives us The Black Douglas, bit in spite of the sombre title the story is as highly coloured as any of its pre- decessors. It has a historic bails in the connection with France of the fifteenth-century Douglases, through Archibald, the fourth Earl, who was made Duke of Toumine, and in the tragic death of his grandson William On this basis Mr. Crockett has built up a free fantasia, in which heroic hobble- dehoys are spitted against witches, werewolves and devil- worshippers. The book, in fact, is an amalgam Of boisterous jocosity, calf-love, and charnel-house horrors. As an instance of Mr. Crockett's habitual avoidance of the golden mean, we need only quote his method of expressing the archness of his heroine. Instead of putting "said the girl," he writes " drolled the minx."
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