THE MYSTERY OP HILLARD.*

THE name of Mr. Richard Dowling is unfamiliar to us, and as its title-page records no previous literary achievements, we; are justified in inferring that The -Mystery of Milani is a first book. As such, it seems to us a work of very considerable promise. Its defects are those which come of inexperience, its most note- worthy weaknesses being a certain awkwardness of construction, and an occasional inconsistency in the presentation of character ; but to compensate for these, there are merits which are by no means common in the circulating-library fiction of the day,— originality of conception, true imaginative grasp of curious psychological conditions, and an ability to deal adequately and impressively with striking situations, among which we include crises of spiritual development, as well as of external event.

There is one impression for which as yet we want a word,—the impression directly opposed to that indicated by the participial adjective "disappointing ;" and this is the very word we miss, when we attempt to indicate in the briefest possible. manner the mental effect produced by a perusal of The Mystery of Kinard. We are compelled to take refuge in phrases, and to say that it is a book which im- proves as it proceeds to so curious an extent that, were it not for the marked uniformity of the style, we might think that it had been written at two periods separated by a long interval, in which the author had been diligently preparing himself, both by study and practice, for his chosen task. The earlier half of the first, volume is likely to daunt any one who is not either an omnivorous novel-devourer, or a hard-working reviewer, too conscientious to adopt the habit of Dr. Johnson, and judge of the quality of a literary leg of mutton by the flavour of a single slice. The personages to whom we are introduced seem shadowy, characterless, and con-

• The Mystery of a ole. By alcbard Dowling. London: Tinsley Brothers.

ventional ; the story begins from two or three separate points, and we are not allowed to follow any thread of narration sufficiently long to be able to guess where it is leading us, or to feel any strong interest in speculating upon its convergence with the other threads which we have been asked to take up and compelled to drop ; and in addition to these things, the merely literary style is wooden, monotonous, and destitute of charm. This is discouraging, but when the reader has reached, the end of the book, he sees that its first seven chapters, which, during perusal, seemed like. a riddle to which no one would care to find an answer, are, in reality, a sort of prologue to the story proper, which only fairly begins with the chapter entitled, "A Sound from the Island," where, for the first time, the boy John Lane becomes recognisable as the character in which the interest of the story steadily centres. More aperienced writers than Mr. Dowling have felt the difficulty of making a beginning, and the first few strokes which he lays upon his canvas are tentative and in- determinate ; but the suppleness of mental muscle, which has doubtless been gained gradually, betrays itself suddenly ; the handling gains freedom and the touch precision, and we begin to feel that we are witnessing the growth of a work of art which,. howsoever faulty in detail, is, at any rate, an organism, with vitalised and harmonious members. At the point of which we have spoken the loose threads are gathered up, the narra- tive begins to travel steadily on to its appointed goal, the char- acters acquire a visible raisoa d'am, as well as a new reality and. individualism, and the style, though it never possesses anything like distinction, gains the strength and flexibility which only come when the pen is no longer a laboriously guided tool, but a living thing,—an extension of the fingers that hold it, as respon- sive as they to every message from the Controlling mind.

The Mystery of Kinard is called by its author "a novel,' we should be inclined to describe it as a romance, for many of the leading incidents, characters, and situations, while they

have the credibility of imaginative consistency, have none of the realistic vraiseniblance which the typical novel-writer generally endeavours to secure. The scene is laid on the south- west coast of Ireland,. and Mr. Dowling, who is evidently at home in the locality, manages to give his story the true savour of the soil, not by the cheap expedient of making his personages converse in that curious dialect, supposed. to be Irish, with which so many novelists and playwrights. have made us familiar, but by a really adequate render- ing, conveyed, in numberless minute touches, of the essential character of the life of the simple fishermen of Clare, and. of their wild picturesque coast, against which the Atlantic dashes, with its everlasting roar of onset and shriek of de- feat. The hero of the story, John Dale, is the son of a deaf mute, who lives by himself on a rocky and sterile- island, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. David Dale, the father, has inherited from his own parents both his congenital defect and his bare, desolate, island patrimony ; and at the very opening of the tale we hear of his making a mysterious pilgrimage into the mainland, for the purpose of finding and marrying a woman who is afflicted in the same manner as himself. Of this singular, and—to the super- stitious seafarers of Killard—unholy and uncanny union, a sou is born ; and the father appears to 'take a seemingly insane delight in the thought that in his son, as in himself and his wife, two avenues of intercourse with the world of men and women will be for ever closed. After the death, by cholera, of the mother, which takes place when the boy is very young, the father and son continue to occupy the barren island until the boy is about twelve years old, when a suspicion gradually grows in the heart of David which stirs his stunted and warped

nature to its depths. The island contains a treasure, the nature and whereabouts of which constitute the mystery which gives the book its title, and he has Worn° possessed by a monomaniacal belief that the preservation of the secret of the treasure, and indeed of the treasure itself, is dependent upon his son's in- capacity to hold ordinary converse with his fellows. The sus- picion is that his hope is to he disappointed, and his trust be- trayed; that his son, whom he has supposed to be altogether such an one as himself, is really allied less closely with him than with the alien and hostile world, in virtue of that fateful capacity for receiving "messages through his ears" :—

"Tom the Fool had told him it was possible to know at a great dis- tance that a gun had been fired, and that the knowledge came, not through the oyes or sense of touch, but through the oars. Nothin'g

came to him through the ears. They were like fingers ; they possessed

feeling; nothing more His father had married a wife who got no messages through tho ears ; he had married a wife like him- self in this respect ; here was his boy now unlike him. His father had told him the gold could not be kept by any one who could send or receive news by the ears, hence he had married a wife like Lim, David, and be himself one like himself. The woman never knew of the gold, and could not tell any one ; his father had told him, and made him promise to marry a wife such as she that had died of the cholera, and to-communicate the secret only to a son, and to a son who could neither know nor make known through the ears. Every one else was to be kept in darkness, for if once the secret of the gold came to be known, it would be useless to them, and they would all perhaps be slain, for his own father did not know the penalty. Now, here was the traitor, come in the person of his -own boy. The boy he loved with all his heart and soul. Hero was a traitor in his own house; one who, as soon as he knew of the secret, would send it abroad and betray his own father unto death. Yes, this son, for whom he would freely have died, could not, on account of his accursed ears, help betraying his father. He would do if as a matter of certainty, as soon as he knew. Here, lying before him, was the only being on earth he cared for, and this being would hurl his father to destruction, on the very first opportunity. The boy would turn his own father off the Bishop's, tear up the island, and give his father to the police, not because of any want of affection, but because he was cursed with ears that felt, and could send messages to other ears."

Novels are so apt to. belie their name by running in the most well-worn of ruts, and by exhibiting a striking deficiency of

novelty, that we welcome with special eagerness any outcome t)f real imaginative invention ; and the conception of the siriginal situation, the nature of which is sufficiently indi- cated here, amply proves that Mr. Dowling possesses a large measure of genuine creative power. The chapter from which our extract is taken is throughout a singularly impres- sive piece of writing. Nothing could better testify to the author's possession of a.peculiar kind of imaginationwhich is rare anywhere, but is, we think, particularly rare in English fiction, than the description of the birth of suspicion in David Lane's mind. ; of the circumstances which feci and fostered it ;

of the scheme, devised with the characteristic cunning of incipient insanity, by which he resolved to bring it to the test ; of the carrying-out of the great experiment on which so much depended.; and. of his conflicting emotions, but unhesitat- ing and. decisive action, when the trial had been made, and

there is no longer any room for doubt. The situation is one which, had it occurred to such a novelist as Victor Hugo or our own Charles Reade, would have been eagerly welcomed as an artistic motif; full of fine possibilities ; and. though we should not think of classing' Mr. Dowling with these great masters, we are by no means sure that either of them could treat it with more imaginative veracity of conception, or incisive force of present- ation.

Perhaps the most noteworthy and romemberable chapters in the book, with the exception of that of which we have spoken, are those which describe the surreptitious midnight visit to the island of a certain Christopher Cahill, who is led on by an in- satiable curiosity to learn the secret of the treasure, but dis- tracted by an almost overmastering fear of David Lane's re- puted supernatural allies, the unknown powers of darkness. Suddenly, just at the time when his fear was strongest, he re-

members that Lane had a gun. "Strangely enough," writes 31r. Dowling, "the thought rather calmed him than other- wise "

"A gun was a purely human weapon, that any one might buy and use. It had to be charged with powder and lead. There was nothing hidden or supernatural about a gun ; and if David Lane wanted or kept a gun for defence, was it not a sign he relied, and had to rely, on purely human agencies for his protection ? On the mainland, the idea that a man angered against him possessed a gun, and resolution to use it, would have been terrifying ; but after torturing the imagination with all kinds of supernatural dreads in connection with this man and this island, a gun seemed no more than a stick or a stone ; it sank to the level of a weapon common to mankind, and easily evaded. What was a gun, which might miss its mark, compared to the infallible and impenetrable operations of Darkness ? Nothing!"

This gleam of light thrown upon the mental perturbations poor Cahill seems to us a veritable flash of genius. One

such passage almost suffices to raise a whole book above the level of the common-place, and, indeed, after the first few chapters, there is nothing common-place about The Mystery of Killard. It cannot be placed in the first rank of fiction, for it has many and obvious defects of conception and construction. A Mr. Heywood, for instance, begins as a humbug and ends as a guardian angel ; and Cahill, who is introduced as if he were intended to be a villain of some magnitude, turns out to be a every second-rate Paul Pry. Such lapses as these, however, are

wont to mark the 'prentice-stage of novel-writing, and in a first novel we expect to find them, but we do not expect to find such masterly strokes as those which are to be discovered here and there in Mr. Dowling's Irish romance.