RECENT NOVELS.*
The Martian is a book which by turns disarms and dis- concerts a critic. The late Mr. du Manner was by all accounts a very engaging and fascinating man, and his amiability overflows freely on almost every page of his latest novel. While, therefore, the naïf charm of his confidences engages the goodwill—indeed one might almost say the affection—of the reader, his frequent ineptitudes and in- discretions give rise to a sense of discomfort, much as when a near relation or dear friend blunders into a humiliating or ridiculous position. The first half of the book is as good as anything that Mr. du Manner ever wrote ; but from the fatal moment when the hero's guardian angel makes her first appear- ance, or rather " precipitates " her first letter, the interest of the narrative steadily declines. Peter Ibbelson, which Mr. Henry James rightly considers Mr. du Manner's best book, contained a decidedly ingenious excursion into the domain of the super- natural ; the uncanny part of Trilby was not altogether badly done ; but Martia, the planetary Egeria who "inhabits Barty Josselin, and prompts him to write the wonderful books which earn for him a reputation on a par with that of Shake- speare, is a miracle of gushing silliness. So long as Mr. do Manlier confines himself to rambling, semi-autobiographical reminiscences of life at a French school, or of visits to French country houses, he is delightful company. And Barty Josselin himself, the wonderfully handsome and marvellously gifted son of an English nobleman and a beautiful French actress, is capital company too, in spite of the mysterious asides of the author as to the subsequent efflorescence of his literary talent. Barty, so far as he is convincing, is a gay and brilliant dilettante. As Mr. dn Meunier describes him in his most effusive style, "He was a born histrion—a kind of French Arthur Roberts—but very beautiful to the female eye, and also always dear to the female heart,—a most delightful gift of God!" An unfortunate misunderstanding with his uncle results in his quitting the Guards, returning to Paris, and taking to art as a means of livelihood. While pursuing his studies he loses the sight of one eye—there is a painful interest attaching to this part of the narrative—and contem- plates suicide, but is rescued by the mysterious intervention of Mantis, his spirit friend, who henceforth regulates hie career, and dictates to him the wonderful books which make him famous. The silliness of Martia's letters is perfectly excruciating, and there is one ludicrous episode in which Martia is bent upon marrying him to a magnificent heiress, while Barty firmly resists and carries the day. Finally, Mantis decides to inhabit one of Barty's children, who is named Marty, and dies at seventeen of "mere influenza." Whereupon Barty himself dies suddenly. The book is supposed to be • (1.) The Martian. By George tin Menrier. With Illustrations by the Anther. London : Harpers.—(2.) The Skipper's Wooing. By W. W. Jacobs. London: C. Arthur Pearson.—(S.) The Invirlhle Man. By H. G. Wells. London : C. Arthur Pearson.-4.) The Octave of Claudia,. By Barry Pain, London: Harpers.— (5.) In Kedar's Tents. By H. S. Merriman. London: Smith. Elder, and Co.—(6.) The Claim of Anthony Lockhart. By Adeline Sergeant. London Hurst and BlacketL—(7.) Pretty Mithal. By Maurits Jokai. Translated by R. Nisbet Bain. London : Jerrold and sons. written by Barty's lifelong chum, Sir Robert Maurice, a prosperous wine merchant and politician, who apologises for his telegraphese style. As a matter of fact, it is the purest, the most undiluted Du Maurier. It only remains to say that the drawings, though unequal, are the greatest attraction in what, with all its glaring absurdities, is still an attractive book.
In The Skipper's Wooing, as in Many Cargoes, Mr. W. W. Jacobs proves himself to belong to the tribe of benefactors. The story of how Captain Wilson, master and owner of the schooner 'Seamew,' won the hand of Miss Annie Gething is one which few people, to use an expressive vulgarism, will be able to read "with a straight face." The plot is simple enough. Captain Wilson, a susceptible salt, falls in love at first sight with a pretty schoolmistress, and in despair of securing an introduction by any other means, is reduced to the subterfuge of calling at her mother's house on the pretence that he believed an old shipmate to be living there. Before he leaves the Captain learns that the father of his innamorata bas disappeared, to the great distress of his wife and daughter, having wrongly imagined that in a quarrel he had killed a man who subsequently recovered. Captain Wilson forthwith devotes himself to the quest of the missing man, and offers a reward of two, and subsequently five, pounds to any of his
crew who may prove successful. Those who have read Mr. Jacobs's earlier stories can readily imagine how irresistibly ludicrous are the developments of the plot. The adventures of the cook, of Fat Sam, of Dick, and above all, the magnificent effrontery of the boy Henry, afford continual food for mirth.
At the same time, there is a pleasant vein of homely romance in Mr. Jacobs's work, which affords a welcome relief to the side-splitting fun of such chapters as that which narrates the cook's visit to Mr. Dunn, or Fat Sam's disastrous assumption of the role of an amateur detective. "The Brown Man's Servant," the short story which completes the volume, is a powerful tale of a diamond robbery, which shows that Mr. Jacobs, when he chooses, can successfully abandon broad comedy for blood-curdling mystery.
The central notion of Mr. H. G. Welles grotesque romance, as he has frankly admitted, has been utilised by Mr. Gilbert in one of the Bab Ballads, being that of a man endowed with invisibility but susceptible to heat and cold, and therefore obliged to wear clothes. But while Mr. Gilbert treated the theme in a spirit of fantastic farce, Mr. Wells has worked it oat with that sombre humour and remorseless logic which stamp him as a disciple, conscious or unconscious, of the author of Oulliver. Swift, however, excelled in the logical conduct to its extreme consequences of some absurd proposition ; Mr. Welles method is in its essentials much more realistic. He does not posit his invisible man ; he tells us how he became invisible as the result of a discovery in physiology based 'upon actual scientific data, for Mr. Wells is no dabbler but deeply versed in these studies. It is characteristic, again, of his method that his invisible man should be neither a buffoon nor a immourist, but a moody, irritable egotist, with a violent and vindictive temper. Griffin, in short, is really a tragic figure. His dreams of unlimited power are rudely dispelled by experience of the terrible practical drawbacks of his position, his desperate efforts to live in rustic seclusion are baffled by the curiosity of the villagers, and the exigencies of his position gradually accentuate his natural unkindliness until it develops into sheer inhumanity. Theft is followed by murder, the whole countryside is raised against him, and after he has found an asylum for a while in the house of a doctor, a fellow-student, to whom he confides the whole story of his discovery and its futility, the doctor's suspicions are aroused, information is given to the authorities, and the invisible man takes flight, with the sole desire of revenging himself on his friend. The last scenes of all, in which the invisible man, now inflamed with homicidal mania, besieges the doctor's house, and is finally hunted down and battered to death by the mob, are as vivid and gruesome as anything that Mr. Wells has done. As, however, he is so strong in realistic detail, we may be allowed to ask whether it is not the case that his invisible man, as an albino, would have been handicapped by short eight. To sum up, The Invisible Man is an amazingly clever performance, of engrossing interest throughout ; we should call it fascinating were it not that the element of geniality, which lent unexpected charm to The Wheels of Chance, is here conspicuously absent. The Octave of Claudius is the most ambitions and serious work that has issued from Mr. Barry Pain's vivacious pen, and it may fairly be said to have justified his temporary abandonment of the lighter vein. The story is curious, out of the common, and if it does not altogether carry conviction, keeps the reader in suspense up to the very last- Claudius Sandell is a young man of good birth, education, and prospects, who has quarrelled with and been disowned by an eccentric father, and endeavours to make a living by his pen. After enduring great privations he is discovered, when at the point of starvation, by a wealthy doctor, who takes him into his house, nurses him back to health, and treats him as an honoured guest. Dr. Lamb's motives, as it turns out, are not disinterested. He is a man of wealth, of a magnetic personality, who is absorbed in physiological re- search, and finding in Claudius a Quixotic sense of honour, a deep sense of indebtedness to his benefactor, and an imperfect zest for life, Dr. Lamb proposes to give him 28,000 for eight days' freedom, after which Claudius is to become the doctor's absolute property, body and soul. Claudius has only a dim inkling of the purposes to which he is to be converted, but he brushes his misgivings aside, accepts the bargain, and enters on his "octave" of liberty. Immediately his zest for life reawakens ; he falls in love with a charming girl, who returns his affection ; a lucky speculation on the Stock Exchange enables him to pay back—if the doctor would
accept it—the 28,000. His rejected novel is accepted with effusion, and finally his father makes overtures for reconcilia- tion and settles a large sum of money upon him. For the precise nature of the Nemesis which befalls Dr. Lamb and releases his victim from the prospect of vivisection and death, we must refer our readers to the pages of Mr. Barry Pain's very clever story. It cannot be called pleasant because of the extremely painful episode of the doctor's unhappy wife, who conceives an unavowed affection for Claudius, and is goaded into insanity by the hideous cruelty of her husband. As for Dr. Lamb, in whom an ardent devotion to the service of collective humanity is combined with callous disregard for the feelings of the individual, we find him rather hard to swallow. The pictures of the Wycherley household, and the struggles
of Mrs. Wycherley to get into society, are decidedly amusing, though Mr. Pain often spoils his effects by a certain forced facetiousness.
Quixotic self-sacrifice is also the central motive of Mr. Merri- man's new novel, In Sedar's Tents, the scene of which is, with the exception of the first two chapters, entirely laid in Spain, the period being that of the Carnet War of sixty years ago. The hero is an impulsive young Irishman, who in order to divert suspicion from a brother barrister who has mixed himself up with the Chartists, taken part in a riot, and is in danger of being arrested on a capital charge, executes a sudden " bolt " to Spain. The ruse is successful, but Conyngham pays dearly for his generosity. A compromising document, of the contents of which he is entirely ignorant, is entrusted to his care by a treacherous Spaniard. This letter, which relates to the organisation of a plot against the person of the Queen, is lost through no fault of his, and his path is everywhere beset with spies and assassins, while the father of the man whom he is supposed to have killed in the Chartist riot comes hot-foot on his track. From this danger Conyng- ham escapes, but his connection with the letter involves him in a labyrinth of deadly peril. General Vincente, however, the Royalist General with whose daughter Conyngham has fallen in love, believes in his innocence, and employs him in the desperate and heroic stratagem by which the conspiracy against the Queen is foiled. The climax of the story is reached in a thrilling scene in which the General's daughter, having changed carriages with the Queen, impersonates the latter to give her time to escape, while her father, with Conyngham, an old priest, and a few followers, keep the mob at bay. The story is well told, and with a felicitous appre- ciation of the traits of Spanish character. But the curious reader will be disappointed by Mr. Merriman's reticence as to the subsequent fortunes of Horner, the man so generously shielded by Conyngham.
Industry so tireless as that of Miss Sergeant must inevitably tell on the quality of the work produced. The Claim of Anthony Lockhart is in Miss Sergeant's most frankly melodramatic manner, and contains a rich and varied assortment of sensational ingredients—the meeting of long- lost cousins on a field of battle, a missing will, a venal doctor, a penitent kleptomaniac—compounded with con- siderable skill and alertness of treatment, but lacking entirely in verisimilitude. The denouement, in which that unfortunate nobleman, the Earl of Morven, who has fallen completely under the sway of the venal doctor, discovers that his brother, the kleptomaniac, instead of having succumbed to a blow from his (Lord Morven's) hand, is chained up in the cellar by the wicked doctor, attains to a pitch of absurdity quite dis- tressing in the author of No Saint.
No summary of the plot of Pretty Michal, which in its out- lines is melodramatic, and even extravagant in the extreme, can give any notion of its gorgeous colouring or the wealth of enthralling incident with which Jokai has invested his theme. Gruesome and horrific as many of these incidents undoubtedly are, we have the assurance of Mr. Bain, a spirited and efficient translator, that the archives of the ancient city of Kassa, the theatre of the principal scenes in the story, have supplied the author with the necessary documentary evidence. Pretty Michal is one of Jokes later novels, but it is marked by all the exuberance and audacity of youth. Briefly put, the story is that of the beautiful daughter of a learned but artless professor, entrapped into a marriage with a young pastor, who turns out to be the son of a hereditary executioner. Forced by his father to follow his ghastly trade, and brutalised by his duties, Henry Catsrider alienates the affections of his wife, who deserts him for her lover, Valentine Kalondai. After many vicissitudes, the hapless Michel is tried, con- demned to death, and executed, her lover, who shares her sentence, escaping from the scaffold, and ultimately perishing on the field of battle. Abounding in brilliant descriptions, grim humour, and intensely dramatic situations, the book is stamped from end to end with the wizardry of genius. If not as fascinating as The Green Book, it is even more remarkable for its sombre force and full-blooded imagination.
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