RECENT NOVELS.*
MR. WALTER BESANT has of late displayed a fondness for out- of-the-way narrative motives which, though perfectly legitimate artistic material, can be used much more effectively, and, so to speak, convincingly, in the short tale than in the three-volume novel. In the former, the sense of improbability—of aloof- ness from all ordinary experience of life—is minimised by the mere necessity for conciseness of narration ; in the latter, the elaboration of explanatory detail becomes hostile, rather than friendly, to the feeling of lifelikeness. Mr. Besant assures us, on the authority of Dr. Squire Sprigge, that such a double life as is lived by the principal character in The Ivory Gate is an observed result of a recognised form of brain disease, and of course a lay critic is bound to accept the statement ; but as he proceeds on his journey through the three volumes, he finds that his stock of imaginative credence is rapidly diminishing, and before the end is reached, it has altogether vanished. We incline to think, however, that this result is due less to the nature of the story itself, than to Mr. Besant's method of telling it. There are cases in which it is wise for a novelist who has a secret to take the bold course of making a disclosure of it to his readers, while withholding such disclosure from the imaginary persons who are mainly interested in unravelling it ; but this is not one of them. By allowing us to discover, at a very early stage in the story, that Mr. Dering, the lawyer, and the mys- terious Edmund Gray who forges his name, are one and the same person, he lays his work under two separate disadvantages. In the first place, there is the inevit- able diminution of interest caused by the satisfaction of curiosity, and, coupled with it, a certain impatient irritation at the people who are blind to the obvious solution of the problem. In the second place—and this is the more im- portant matter—the possession of the clue gives the reader undistracted leisure for examining the machinery of the story, and discovering all its weak places. That there should be weak places is inevitable. Mr. Dering, like Dr. Jekyll, lives a double life ; but in the case of the former, the change made in passing from one life to the other is not to any degree • (1.) The Ivory Gate. By Walter Besant. 3 vols. London : Chatto and Windns —(2.) Cnildren of the Ghetto. By I. Zangwill. 3 vols. London : W. Heinemann.—(3.) Passing the Love of Women. By Mrs. J. H. Needell. 3 vols. London: F. Warne and Co.—(4.1 The Village Blacksmith. By Dar ey Dale. 3 vols. London: Hutchinson and Co.—(5.) The Peyton Romance. By Mrs. Leith Adams (Mrs. R. S. de Conroy Le.ffan). 8 vols. London : Ilegan Paul physical, but purely mental and moral. The cool-headed Conservative lawyer, with strong convictions as to the sacred- ness of property, and the fervid Socialist, Edmund Gray, with equally strong convictions of the wickedness of property, are both well known to numbers of people ; one of them may, indeed, be described as a public character, and the other as a very well-known private character. They make no mystery of their movements, neither of them being conscious of any need for mystery; and though both are known to numbers of persons in their separate characters, their identity remains for years undiscovered. The secret of a narrative scheme like this should be sprung upon us rapidly, and, if possible, unexpectedly, like the surprise of a conjuror's trick,—opportunity for examina- tion is fatal to the sense of pleasant illusion ; and in The Ivory Gate this opportunity is prolonged through two volumes. In other respects, the book is pleasant reading, though Edmund Gray's socialistic preachments are unduly prolonged, and the heroine lacks the charm of such predecessors as Phillis Fleming and Kitty Pleydell.
Mr. Zangwill has, we believe, acquired some fame as a producer of what is called the "new humour," but Children of the Ghetto does not strike us as being the work of an instinc- tive humourist. It is, however, very clearly the work of a close observer with apparently a somewhat cynical bent, though it may be that what looks like cynicism is really moral enthu- siasm, stirred to contemptuous anger by social and ethical conditions which stand in painful contrast to an appre- hended ideal. Mr. Zangwill's novel is a London story, and, as may be guessed from its title, it deals with the seamy side of Jewish life in the English Metropolis. Judging from internal evidence—the only evidence at our command—we should say that Mr. Zangwill himself is certainly a Jew, and one of the most irritating artistic defects of the book arises out of his lack of consideration for the pardonable, because inevitable, ignorance of Gentile outsiders. It need hardly be said that, had the author supplied his story with foot-notes, he would have made it terrible to look at, and trying to read ; but technical terms of Jewish custom and ritual are so un- sparingly scattered over its pages that nothing short of copious annotation or an elaborate glossary would make some of those pages wholly intelligible to the uninitiated majority. Nor has the story, quci story, that symmetry and steadiness of progression which the ordinary novel-reader not un- reasonably demands. For a long time the narrative proper obstinately refuses to put in an appearance, its place being occupied by a series of sketches, full of a vigorous realism, but lacking in composition and cohesion. It must, how- ever, in justice, be added that in both respects the book improves much as it proceeds. After the first volume, the tantalising technicalities become less frequent, and we see that a few characters are beginning to separate themselves from the crowd to play their parts in a little drama; though to the last the book is interesting rather as a picture of a community, than as a story of individual fortunes and experiences. Esther Ansell, Raphael Leon, Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, Reb Shemuel, and the rest, are living creations ; but their simple humanity—like that of the talkers at the club in Daniel Deronda—is secondary in interest to their intellectual value as representatives of Jewish aims, thoughts, and aspirations. Though Mr. Zangwill wisely refrains from being explicitly polemical, he makes it sufficiently clear that he is not a Mordecai. His view of the future of Judaism seems to be one that might be embodied in the words : "He that loseth his life shall save it ; " and the outward forme of ceremonial Judaic orthodoxy are to die, that the spirit im- prisoned in their husk may fertilise the world. Children of the Ghetto, like many another book by an able writer of deficient experience of the management of prolonged narra- tive, is a novel which is much better in parts than as a whole. It is not a satisfying work of art, but it contains some admirable episodes ; and it has interest of a kind to which ordinary works of fiction can make no claim.
M. Bourget has given some admirable and fairly con- vincing reasons for the dominance in fiction of the passion of love, which he has little difficulty in showing lends itself with peculiar readiness to the effective treatment of character and situation. Still, though the mutual passion of a man and a woman will always be a favourite theme, there is no reason
Trench, Trabner and 00.—(6.) The Silent Sea. By Mrs. &lick dfac'eod. vols. why it should be an exclusive one ; and various recent London: R. Bent ey and Son.—(7.) Mona Ma,lean, M,dcal Sfndent. By Graham Travers. Edinburgh and London : W. Black wood and Sons, novelists have followed the example of Godwin, who, in Caleb Williams, produced an intensely interesting story from which not only love but women were excluded. Mrs. J. H. Needell stops very far short of such an extreme measure as this; but she has been 'sufficiently courageous to attempt a novel in which friendship rather than love shall provide the central topic of interest. We say "attempt" because we do not think that Mrs. Needell's achievement in Passing the Love of Women has been quite commensurate with her aim. Her friends are two [masculine creatures whom we know first as boys and ,rafterwards as men,—a bright, mercurial David, a silent, awkward, and undemonstrative Jonathan. The pro- blem how to exhibit their mutual affection in the most telling fashion has an obvious solution, and, hackneyed as it is, Mrs. Needell refuses to pass it by. Love for one woman comes between:Gilbert Yorke and John Cartwright and strives to separate them ; in each friendship rises in arms against the separator ; and in both friendship is victorious. This is a terribly- conventional motive, and, oddly enough, the most conventional motives of fiction are those which are least suggestive of real life. The game of battledore and shuttle- cock played by the loyal David and Jonathan, in which the shuttlecock is a young and lovely girl, has something more fatal than unreality ; for the moment we begin to consider it, we perceive that there is absurdity as well. Even Mrs. Needell seems to have had a dim suspicion of this, for at the crisis of the story she obviously loses herself, and the most curious:reader will never know why Margery Denison made her final choice. Of course, in the work of an ordinary novelist, things-of this kind do not greatly affect us, but then the author of Stephen Ellicott's Daughter is not quite an ordinary:novelist, and we are disappointed accordingly.
The kind of work represented by The Village Blacksmith may be bestydescribed as melodramatic comedy. The melo- dramatic element is not worth very much, though the plot is constructed with some care, and the sleep-walking incidents have a certain freshness ; but some of the comedy—especially that which is provided by the strong-minded washerwoman, Mrs. Canter—is distinctly good. To mention in connection with her name the great name of Mrs. Poyser would be to run the risk of damning the new character, not with faint, but with over- charged praise, for a comparison may be odious without being disparaging; and it is now well known that the best way to discredit a contemporary poet or novelist in the minds of all sensible people, is to say that he is like Shakespeare. The warm-hearted, sharp-tongued sister of the Baptist blacksmith, who has strong views on the utter wrong-headedness of wash- ing on Tuesday, and applying soap to flannel, is not a wit, as was the immortal mistress of the Hall Farm ; but as a woman and a humonrist, she may fairly claim to be of the Poyser lineage. The little clergyman, Mr. Ryot Tempest, with his priggish Protestantism, his fatuous family pride, and his cowardly knuckling-under to the unscrupulous woman who makes him her second husband, may be counted as success number two; and this pair of portraits would suffice to give brightness and interest to a much poorer novel than The Village !Blacksmith. Indeed, Darley Dale's novel is a book that it would be unjust to call poor, though it could easily be made to seem so by a clever and cruel critic skilled in the artful manipulation of weak passages and clumsy expedients.
When the word " romance " enters into the title of a story, we prepare ourselves for something more exciting, probably something more incredible, than the homely realism of life. The one thing for which we are not prepared is the dullness of commonplace:which pervades Mrs. de Conroy Laffan's latest performance in fiction. The Peyton Romance is a shapeless story which meanders on from place to place, from genera. tion to generation, and from one group of characters to another, in a way which would utterly destroy the interest were there much inteiest to destroy. As a matter of fact, it is so veryjattennated that when, for a time, it sinks in a morass of wearisome description or sentimental reflection, we hardly feel the loss of it. There is not one among the crowd of characters in the book who stamps any definite im- pression upon the imagination ; there is no single dramatic crisis which it would be possible to describe as a situation. It would be incorrect to say that the novel is badly constructed, for it has no construction at all. One group of people dis- appears in the second volume, and though some members of it reappear in the third, the two halves of the book have no common centre of interest. As a hint for the author's future use, it may be noted that the titles "Lord St. Isles" and "Lord Claud St. Isles," cannot possibly belong to the same person. A Lord St. Isles must be either a peer or an eldest son ; a Lord Claud St.;Isles must certainly be the younger son of a duke or marquis. Such an error is, of course, trifling in itself; but it is an example of the general want of fidelity to the fact which characterises a certain class of fiction.
Of the numerous recent Australian novels, The Silent Sea is decidedly the best. Victor FitzGibbon's love-story, and the other story of his experiences as purser of the Colmar mine, are combined rather clumsily ; but this is the only structural defect worth mentioning, and we have nothing save praise for the general handling of the plot, or for the admirable literary style which makes Mrs. Macleod's work so pleasantly satisfying. The rough, strangely assorted society of a mining village is sketched with picturesqueness and humour, a real distinctness and vitality being given to such comparatively subordinate persons as Oxford Jim, the scholar and gentle- man who has drifted and "gone under," and the good-natured, unstable 'Zilla Jenkins, whose life oscillates between spells of heavy drinking and seasons of severe propagandist teetotalism. The most successful, as well as the most highly finished, of Mrs. Macleod's portraits is, however, that of the manager Tregaskis, who, embittered by misfortune, and racked by an apparently futile ambition to regain the wealth and station that he has lost, is assailed by the terrible temptation of the hidden gold. In the story of the fall of Tregaskis there is real power, just as in other portions of the book there is real beauty. Perhaps Doris Lindsay has hardly enough of palpable flesh-and-blood, but her winning and pathetic figure stands out well against the bare, unlovely background of the great Australian plain that gives a title to the book. TheSilent Sea is good in itself, and its unlikeness to Mrs. Macleod's previous tale, An Australian Girl, seems to indicate considerable versatility of endowment.
It will be seen that we have not arranged the novels on our list in order of merit or, perhaps, in any order at all ; but we may perhaps achieve something of an effect of climax by reserving our bonne bouche until the last. Mona Maclean, Medical Student, is the cleverest novel we have read for a long time, and yet it is thoroughly enjoyable as well. To the hasty and careless reader, this last sentence will seem merely a weak imitation of one of Mr. Oscar Wilde's paradoxes, but. there are others who know from painful experience that our anti- thesis is anything rather than paradoxical. Cleverness is, of course, an attractive quality per se, but it is so often combined with other qualities which are the reverse of attractive—such, for example, as flippancy, cynicism, or affectation—that when a critic begins by praising a novel as "clever," astute persons guess that he is girding up his loins for a more or less vigorous "slogging." Perhaps the kind of cleverness which demands this treatment would be better named "smartness," and in all mere smart- ness there is a good deal of vulgarity. There is plenty of brilliance in Mona Maclean, but no smartness whatever ; it is intellectual comedy which can dispense with catch-penny pointmaking ; it affects us in the same way in which we should be affected by the conversation of an able and cultivated woman speaking in a happy mood upon a congenial theme. There are several such women in Graham Travers's novel, and though most of them have much in common—youth, culture, and intellectual enthusiasm—their subtle but dis- tinct difference is a triumph of delicate art. The episode of Mona's half-involuntary masquerade as assistant in a Scot- tish village shop, which is the key-stone of the story, provides a comedy within a comedy, with truth of character, freshness of dry humour, and brisk effectiveness of dramatic situation. Nor is the book the less but the more charming in virtue of the fact that its simple entertaining quality does not exclude a cer- tain fine seriousness of intent which gives it an intellectual and. moral, as well as a merely narrative or dramatic, interest. One insignificant fault may easily be corrected in a second. edition. The conversations of the feminine medical students. in the third volume are probably true to nature, but they are too " ehoppy " for art, which, in its treatment of such matters, must needs conventionalise a little, and be broadly representa- tive rather than pedantically accurate. Were there, however, half-a-dozen such faults instead of one, Mona Maclean, Medical Student, would remain a novel with merits to outweigh them all. The reappearance on a title-page of the pseudonym "Graham Travers" will be something to look for.
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