RECENT NOVELS.* MRS. LYNN LINTON, in the persistency of her
attack upon the New Woman, is, to say the least, in danger of over- shooting the mark and seriously injuring the cause which she professes to have at heart. It may, we suppose, be taken for granted that some measure of caricature is essential to the effectiveness of the polemical novel, and therefore to grumble at its presence would be unreasonable. It must, however, be caricature proper,—a heightening and accentuation of features which do exist ; not mere travesty, which is the horse-play, as opposed to the art, of intellectual falsification, and is related to true satire as the bludgeon is related to the rapier. Mrs. Lynn Linton's One Too Many was an impeach- ment of what is called the "higher education" of women, and the girls who had been subjected to the new culture were represented as being either victims of an unwholesome sentimentalism or proficients in cigar-smoking, dram-drink- ing, and the ready use of music-hall and stable slang. Those who knew the real thing somehow failed to catch the likeness, and another failure is in store or them as they read the volumes of In Haste and at Leisure, where the members of the Pioneer and other propagandist feminine clubs are treated as were the students of Girton, Bedford College, and Somerville Hall in the pre- ceding story. Our own opinion of the associations satirised is that they are in a few respects useful, in many respects silly, and in almost all respects harmless,—indeed, service- able as intellectual and emotional safety-valves. Mrs. Lynn Linton, however, will have nothing to say to any such Laodicean discrimination of judgment. To her they are nothing less than centres of social and moral contamination, and so, as one of her Girton girls would say, she "goes for them blindfold." The story deals mainly with the doings and misdoings—especially the latter—of one Phcebe Barrington. At the opening of the story she is simply a feather-headed girl of sixteen, who is silly enough to run away from home in order to be married to a boy who has not attained his majority. The young husband—a worthy though foolish fellow—is packed off to Africa for six years by his angry parents, and during his absence the child-wife is induced to become a member of the Excelsior Club. It is at this point that Mrs. Lynn Linton rises to the height of her great argument, and never once does she sink to the commonplace ground of observed fact. Phcebe, under the influence of the Excelsiorites, is rapidly transformed from a silly girl into a perfect—and utterly incredible—fiend of a woman ; but her fiendishness is so utterly unnatural that, instead of its being revolting, it is almost farcical. Neither Phcebe's public nor her private appearances have the stamp of reality ; she is simply a marionette playing the part assigned to the New Woman by the comic papers ; and we can see the jerking of the wires which produce each contortion. This is a pity, for the new developments of militant femininity provide material for good satire; and unfortunately the book consists not of satire, but of clumsy invective.
Mr. Grant Allen provides much pleasanter reading when he is bent simply upon telling a story, than when he is endeavouring to solve a social problem ; and people who fought shy of The Woman Who Did, need not fear to find anything but very capital entertainment in Under Sealed Orders. It is one of its author's most interesting stories, and though one might have said beforehand that Nihilist plots, considered as narrative material, are in some danger of being overdone, the latest story of this kind adds to its other merits the merit of inventive freshness. The head of the firm of Mortimer and Co., the well-known Bond Street photographers, who calls himself Mr. Hayward, is really Prince Rune Brassoff, an exile from Russia, and head of the great Nihilist organisa- tion. He has for ward a young Russian who is known as Owen Cazalet, and he has arranged for this youth a diplomatic career which is to find its crown and climax in the " removal " of the Czar. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Owen falls in love with a charming young Greek lady, who has little difficulty in persuading him to forego the doubtful honour of figuring in the list of patriotic assassins ; but • (1.) InHaste andat Leisure. By B. Lynn Linton. 3 vols. London W. Heine- niann.—(2.) Under Sealed Orders. By Grant Allen. 3 vols. London : Chatto and Windus.—(3.) A Great Beeponsibility. By Marguerite Bryant. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett.—(4.) Lucille an Baperisnent. By Alice Spinner. 2 vols. Loudon: Began Paul, Trench, TrObner, and Co.—(5 ) The Banishment ofJessop Blythe. Br Joseph Hatton. London: Hutchinson and Co.—(6.) The Intended. BY H. Be Vero Stacpoole. London : Riehard Bentley and Son.
this decision only removes one danger to introduce another, as the young man by abandoning his mission has exposed him- self to instant death at the hands of the Nihilists. Hayward advises, or rather orders, him to escape their vengeance by a suicide Tidal* shall have the look of accident, and to this extraordinary proposal the young man—who thoroughly enjoys his life, and has just become betrothed to a beautiful and noble girl—assents with a perfectly incredible readiness. At this point, even Mr. Grant Allen's skill is powerless to compel our belief, though Mr. Hayward's wild scheme prepares the way for a couple of really powerful and ex- citing chapters, from which the story hurries rapidly to a denouement, the nature of which it would be unfair to indicate. Nihilist novels are inevitably somewhat sombre affairs ; but this particular novel is brightened most pleasantly and admirably by the story of an experi- ment in co-operative housekeeping made by Sacha Cazalet and a couple of girl-friends, with the assistance of two of the inferior sex who, so to speak, act as hewers of wood and drawers of water. This part of the book is full of good humour in both senses of the epithet ; and though Mr. Grant Allen is often painfully "new," he is good enough to make a concession to Philistine weakness, in the shape of an old-fashioned, cheerful close. For this relief, and for a story which is bright and readable all through, much thanks.
A Great Responsibility is a very clever and agreeable narra- tive comedy ; and if Miss Marguerite Bryant be a young novelist (her name is certainly new to us), she is a writer from whom something good may reasonably be expected. True, the story drags a little here and there, perhaps because Miss Bryant has introduced too many subordinate, non-essential characters, and we are strongly of opinion that it would have been a more nearly faultless book had it been compressed into two volumes instead of being expanded into three ; but then this may be said of novels written by authors with ten times Miss Bryant's experience, so it does not count for much. The general outlines of the story are fairly familiar. Sir Cecil Lestrange is bitterly disappointed when the posthumous child of his only son turns out to be a girl instead of a boy; but being a brave and resourceful old gentleman, he sets himself to do the best he can to mend matters. If the last of the Lestranges is unfortunately feminine by nature, she shall at any rate be made, as far as is possible, masculine by training ; and so when the girl reaches the age of sixteen, he engages not an elderly governess or chaperon, but a youthful tutor who, during hours of work, is addressed by his pupil as "Mr. Treconner," but in hours of re- creation more familiarly and comradely—if we may invent an adverb—as "Arthur." Of course there is only one possible end to a novel with such a beginning, so we wait serenely and patiently for the inevitable wedding at the end of the third volume ; but the book is made interesting not by mere sequence of incident, but by one admirable piece of portraiture. In Cecil Lestrange, Miss Bryant has been wonderfully successful in depicting the triumph of nature over education, and yet in representing that triumph as partial rather than complete,—just as it certainly would be in real life. In tastes and habits Cecil is much more of a boy than of a girl—for example, she is much more interested in horses than in county gossip—but at the centre the essential feminine nature remains not merely unspoiled, but practically unchanged. The mental attitude of the country-bred girl, with her exceptional training, towards the sophistication and unreality of fashionable London society, rather reminds us of the delicious naivete of Mr. Besant's most charming heroine, Phillis Fleming ; but Cecil has a fine individuality of her own, and she would confer attractiveness upon a much poorer novel than A Great Responsibility.
The first book of the lady who chooses to be known as "Alice Spinner," published some months ago in the "Pseudonym Library," testified to the author's intimate knowledge of West Indian life, especially the lifa of the coloured half-breeds who form such an important part of the population of the larger islands. A Study in Colour was, how- ever, little more than a series of clever sketches, but in Lucilla the writer tries her hand at a novel proper with a very fair measure of success. The " experiment " of the sub-title is made by Miss Lucilla St. John, who has gone out from England to San Jose: to undertake the musical education of
the feminine coloured pupils of the Grove Hill College, an educational institution tinder the control of the Colonial Government. Lucilla herself is not in the least interesting, nor is she meant to be so. She is simply a narrow-brained, shallow - hearted, indolent, and ill - conditioned girl, who finds it impossible either cheerfully to reconcile herself, or uncomplainingly to resign herself, to the conditions of her new life ; and so when at a Government ball she meets with the vain, showy, talkative, and fairly wealthy half-breed Da Costa, whose one ambition is to contract a "white" alliance, we know what the nature of her experiment will be. The story of Lucilla's marriage, and of what followed upon it, is certainly dismal enough, but it is not less certainly interesting, and it has the merit of being instructive as well, for probably not one in a thousand English readers has any conception of the nature and in- tensity of West Indian race-antipathy, or of the social penalties which fall upon the head of any one—especially of any woman—who is bold or reckless enough to pass from one to the other of the hostile camps. The pictures of West Indian society in all shades are exceedingly clever, and the love-story of the middle-aged Miss Gale and the elderly numismatist, Mr. Ferguson, pleasantly relieves a tale which without it might have been a little too grim for perfect pleasure.
It was once cleverly said of a well-known living novelist— and there was as much truth in the saying as is generally to be found in any mot of epigrammatic satire—that he "always writes at the top of his voice." We have been more than once reminded of this criticism in reading Mr. Joseph Hatton's latest novel, The Banishment of Jessop Blythe. It is a Derbyshire romance, in which some good raw material is skilfully and entertainingly manipulated, but its style is to that of ordinary literature what the style of the Daily Telegraph is to that of ordinary capable journalism ; it is a style which reminds us a little too often of the " interview " and the "descriptive article." This would not matter much if these idiosyncrasies only affected the sensibilities of literary connoisseurs, but not unfrequently they obviously impair the lifelikeness of the narrative in a manner which can be immediately detected, even by the uncritical novel-reader. For example, in the attempt to give vivacity and colour to the early love-pas- sages of Geoffrey Lathkill and Adser Blythe, the man is made to talk like an emancipated '.Arry and the girl like a rustic 'Arriet, Mr. Hatton's intention all the time being to represent the former as a chivalrous gentleman, and the latter as a girl endowed with Nature's own inimitable refine- ment. Indeed, the conversations are generally weak, and the point is that their weakness is due to the attempt to make them strong ; Mr. Hatton has tried so hard to be effective that he has overstepped the mark, and has become strained and unreaL Still, the story has that vivacity which atones for a good many sins, though from a trained workman like Mr. Hatton we expect something of finish as well. Whether the socialist community of rope-makers in the Peak Cavern is an invention or a discovery, the present writer cannot tell, for his knowledge of Castleton was acquired in one day's hasty visit a good many years ago ; but whether imagined or found, it makes capital material. Indeed, it is rather too good, because it provides an opening which it is difficult to write up to, and Mr. Hatton does not quite over- come the difficulty. Consequently The Banishment of Jessop Blythe is not one of its author's best books, but Mr. Hatton, even at his second or third best, is never dull.
The Intended—and we may remark in passing that the title seems a conundrum with no possible answer—is simply a literary nightmare ; and we are inclined to think that the literary nightmare has no possible justification save when, as in some of the creepy stories of Edgar Poe, it has manifest genius behind it. There is no genius behind Mr. Stacpoole's wild invention, though there is a good deal of cleverness, which, we venture to think, might have been exploited to much better purpose. A young man suddenly finds himself penniless, and is in consequence contemplating suicide. In his despair he is persuaded to exchange identities with an apparently wealthy stranger who bears an extraor- dinary personal resemblance to himself, speedily making the discovery that the stranger is his own half-brother, and that in assuming his name and position he has saddled himself with a burden of the most horrible infamy. Mr. Stacpoole certainly manages to excite our curiosity as to the manner in which Roger Jeffries will extricate himself from the net in which events have entangled him ; but the story has not that minimum of imaginative coherence and credibility which is essential even to the most fantastic work of invention. Most of the reflective °biter dicta with which Mr. Stacpoole embroiders his narrative are pretentious and valueless, though occasionally he hits upon a good thing, such as the remark that "the man with a fixed idea becomes either a lunatic or a power." The Intended strikes us as being one of those crude, clever, juvenile performances on which it is very unsafe to hazard a prediction of the author's future. Mr. Stacpoole may do much or he may do nothing ; and in neither case shall we be surprised. If a hopeful enthusiast says that the chances are in favour of the "much," we will not take the responsibility of contradicting him.
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