RECENT NOVELS.*
A WEEK or two ago, in our review of the latest novels of Mr. Zangwill and Mrs. Herbert Martin, we referred to the im- portance of the part played by " the artistic temperament" in a large number of noteworthy recent novels ; and in the latest book by the author of that clever story, Dr. Edith Romney, a possessor of this temperament takes the important title-role. Michael Daunt is a struggling young painter of genius, artistic to his finger-tips, and hopelessly unpractical in dealing with everyday affairs. Naturally, therefore, be chooses for a wife the beautiful and lovable Agnes Raymond, who, inexperienced as she is, has the makings of an extremely good housewife, but who cares nothing about art save as associated with her husband's material prosperity. In real life the union of two such strongly contrasted characters might turn out either very well or very ill ; but commonplace happiness seems to be rather unworkable material for fiction, and very early in the story we become aware that the stream of life is not going to run very smoothly for Daunt and Agnes. He thinks only of his ideal in art, she thinks only of paying the tradesmen's bills ; and when a bill is presented just when Daunt is in travail with a great conception, the result is uncomfortable. The author holds the balance between husband and wife with severe im- partiality, for it cannot be said that the one is wanting in tenderness or the other in tact, and the reader who has no strong prepossessions is likely to find himself sympathising alternately with the painter and with the wife and mother, while sometimes the claims seem so equal that to meet them with absolute justice of distribution looks exceedingly difficult- Of course to any one who thinks the thing out, the matter is clear from the first. By the voluntary act of marriage, Daunt has undertaken a new set of obligations, and has therefore forfeited the right to model his life exclusively for art's sake. Therefore, though the author rightly sees that her duty is not to state a case either for or against Daunt's line of action, but dramatically to present two sharply con- trasted temperaments, each seeing life exclusively from one point of view, the very truthfulness of the presentation achieves a finer effect than would have been achieved had the treatment been more obviously polemical and less artistic.
• (1.) Michael Daunt. By the Author of "Dr. Edith Romney." 3 vole. London: Hurst and Blackett.—(2.) Colonel Norton. By Florence Montgomery. 3 vole. London: R. Bentley and Son.—(3.) The Drift of Fate. By Dora Russell. 3 vols. London : Chatto and Windus.-30 Married to Order : a Romance of Modern Days. 2 vols. London: Horaoe Cox.—(5 ) Elizabeth's Pretenders. By Hamilton Aide. London: Chapman and Hal..—(6.) The Country Minister's Lone-Story. By Maria Bell. London: Hodder and Stoughton The narrative expedients which lead up to the crucial situa- tions are very skilfully managed. Specially good are the chapters in which Daunt, for his wife's sake, makes up his mind to accept the copying commission which will replenish the family exchequer by the sacrifice, for the time being, of all his hopes and aims, only to discover, when the worst of the pains has been endured, that he has accepted a renuncia- tion which is beyond his strength. But, indeed, the work- manship throughout is both strong and delicate; and though we are taken through some dreary places, we are finally brought to that cheerfully satisfactory conclusion which is dear to readers of old-fashioned tastes; so Michael Daunt is not merely a clever, but a comfortable book.
Miss Florence Montgomery is beat known by Misunderstood, a children's story, which, while quite unpardonably dismal, has a certain charm which, we suppose, suffices to account for its success. Colonel Norton, an ordinary three-volume novel appealing to adult readers, is not at all dismal, and though it is a very loosely-constrocted, indeed shapeless, piece of work, we incline to think that it has the elements of popularity among that large class of readers which regards the tendency " of a novel as a matter of supreme importance. We cannot, perhaps, better describe Colonel. Norton than by saying that it is the kind of book which might have been written in a careless mood by the lady who chooses to be known as Edna Lyall. Miss Montgomery is not aggressively didactic, but one cannot help feeling that her novel owes its existence not so much to unconscious play of the imagination, as to the writer's desire to embody certain sentiments, certain modes of regard- ing life, in a concrete narrative form. Her main object seems to be to show what a profound and permanent effect may be produced on character by a single impressive experience, revealing unsuspected depths in an apparently shallow nature, and giving to that nature a new direction and a new aim. When we first see Maud Egerton, she is, to all appearance, a hopelessly frivolous girl, actuated only by that passive selfishness born of an incapacity for any kind of serious thought. Then we lose sight of her for some years, and when we meet her again, she is Lady Manorlands, a wife and a mother, and one of those sustaining, helpful, inspiring women who have been celebrated in some of Wordsworth's loveliest verse and of Mr. Ruskin's most eloquent prose. We ask the secret of the transformation, but ask in vain until we are well on into the third volume, when Lady Manorlands tells to Colonel Norton the story of the great sacrifice which made her the subject of a true vicarious redemption. A more awkward narrative method could hardly have been hit upon. Fur the greater part of the book Lady Manorlands is an enigma and we are kept waiting so long for the answer to the riddle that when it comes it falls terribly flat. Of all manners of telling a story this retrosr,?ctive manner is the most irritating, and it would go far toiN.irds spoiling a more finely finished work than Colonel Norton. For though the tone of the book is refreshingly wholesome, fineness of finish cannot be attri- buted to it by the most sympathetic critic. The conversations in which the talkers introduce " elegant extracts " with verbal precision are quite impossible, and the book is studded with little errors of detail—other than those named in the corri- genda—which are very annoying. The novel certainly pro- vides an opening for the time-honoured criticism that the writer would have succeeded better if she had taken more pains.
It is, unfortunately, impossible to say that Miss Dora Russell is improving. The Drift of Fate is a rather absurd title, but the book itself is a good deal more absurd ; and there is nothing in the telling of the story that does anything to reconcile us to the story itself. Miss Russell begins with a variation upon the " Auld Robin Gray " motive. Nell Drummond's father has mortgaged his estate to that middle- aged and generally objectionable person, Mr. Montgomery, who threatens to foreclose unless Nell consents to become his wife. As we have been long famili ir with the duties of a heroine of fiction, we know, of course, that the girl will sacrifice herself upon the family altar; but as she prepares for the sacrifice by the purchase of a long knife, inclosed in a case, we begin to think that Mr. Montgomery is not what the insurance companies call " a good life." Much to our surprise the knife remains in the case, and Nell seems to forgo all about it. Indeed, its purchase seems
to have been altogether a superfluous expense, as in a milder moment the resourceful young lady has sentenced Auld Robin Gray Montgomery not to death, but to desertion. Having made herself the possessor of a suit of masculine clothing, she attires herself therein, and oa the afternoon of her wedding-day she leaves the hotel in which the unsuspecting bridegroom has arranged to spend his honeymoon. Those who yearn for acquaintance with the story of her after- adventures, can put The Drift of Fate upon their library list, for we will not do Miss Russell the injustice of revealing the nature of her narrative resources. We will only remark that the middle and end of her novel are worthy of the beginning, and there are possibly readers for whom this general verdict will suffice.
Miss Esme Stuart never writes a novel which is devoid of attractiveness, and Married to Order has a special interest as an attempt—which is largely successful—to infuse a strong element of pure romance into a story of contemporary English life. The opening is certainly very successful. A young man wandering after nightfall in a North-country dale loses his way, but having the good fortune to come across a guide, is conducted by him to the palace of the King of Rothery, the descendant of a far-away ancestor upon whom the countryside had conferred the regal title in acknow- ledgment of his prowess in repelling a hostile raid. The surroundings are curious. The palace is a ruinous mansion, but meals are served with dignity upon antique silver; the King and his son are rustic boors, but the King's brother, the Duke of Greybarrow, looks and speaks after the manner of a French nobleman of the ancien regime, and as for the young, beautiful, and stately daughter, she is a Princess indeed. The wanderer, after a night which seems Arabian rather than English, goes his way with no expectation of seeing again the beautiful Princess or the strange palace of the dales ; but of course the genius of romance has decided otherwise, and the fortuitous meeting is but the first of a long series of adventures of incident and emotion. We read how the Princess, dominated by the family pride which is her ruling passion, goes with her uncle into the great world that, by a wealthy marriage, she may retrieve the fallen fortunes of her house ; how in that world she learns that there is a passion more imperiously dominating than any pride ; how, in spite of her new and moving discovery, she surrenders to the will from which she has never rebelled ; and how, when retreat is impossible, she makes the further discovery of the full meaning of what she has done. The story is in many portions frankly impossible, but save for a few passages in which the Princess seems to lose possession of her true self, it is always made credible to the imagination, and this is the one thing needful.
Mr. Hamilton Aide's Elizabeth's Pretenders has a narrative scheme which we think has been previously utilised, though with somewhat different treatment. Elizabeth Shaw is eighteen years of age when she is left an orphan and an Heiress under the charge of her uncle and her aunt by mar- riage. She is wooed by a bankrupt profligate, one Colonel Wybrowe, and has promised herself to him when she stid- lenly discovers that she has been the victim of a hideous plot to enrich with her fortune the scoundrel who is her aunt's secret lover. Immediately upon making the discovery, she 'eaves her uncle's house and hides herself in a middle-class Paris pension, devoting her time to the study of art, which has always been to her the object of supreme in. wrest. Here she is annoyed by the attentions of a young decadent poet, and is moreover tracked down by a duple of English suitors ; but her single unfortunate ex- perience, acting on a temperament not naturally inclined to xmfidingness, has left its result in undiscriminating distrust of masculine humanity. The first half of the book is devoted to the birth and growth of Elizabeth's ungirlish cynicism; the latter half to its gradual melting away under the influence of the not specially genial but thoroughly genuine American painter, Alaric Baring. Mr. Hamilton Aide tells his story in a studiously businesslike and matter-of-fact manner, with no epigrams, no " gush," no airs and graces ; but we are inclined to think that this simplicity renders it more instead of less effective. The author of Elizabeth's Pretenders adds to a keen eye for character great skill in the unpretentious but adequate rendering of what he sees, and his portraiture has never been more successful than it is here. It is the
portraiture of keen observation rather than of imaginative insight, but as such it is excellent.
The name of Miss Maria Bell is new to us, and it would be an exaggeration to speak of her as a writer from whom very great things are to be expected; but The Country Minister's Love-Story has a grace and a prettiness which to many readers may prove quite as winning as more ambitious qualities. Miss Bell, like one or two popular predecessors, takes us to Scotland, but she gives us none of the dialect which has been found a stumbling-block by certain admirers of Mr. Crockett and "Ian Maclaren." The Rev. Henry Millie is the minister of a seceding Kirk, in a little town on the Ayrshire coast, and apparently a graduate of Oxford, which is, we venture to think, a somewhat improbable com- bination. Lochtown is good to look upon from the outside, but its population is not interesting ; and the young minister, who is perhaps rather too fond of quoting Brown- ing and Christina Rossetti to a congregation of small shopkeepers, naturally feels rather like a fish out of water. There is just one inhabitant of Lochtown who is capable of appreciating the quotations, and she also has a feeling of being out of harmony with her environment, so what more natural than that Henry Millie and Jane Frederick should come to the conclusion that they were made for each other ? In fact, the minister comes to it at once, and the girl might have arrived at it sooner or later had it not been for the arrival upon the scene of Francis Hay, a quietly fas- cinating cousin from India, who, though a much more commonplace man than his rather romantic rival, wins the prize with almost provoking ease. This is really the whole story, which, it will be seen, is slight and ordinary enough. The charm of the book—for charm it has—lies in its tranquil, out-of-the-world atmosphere, and in the tenderness or humour of Miss Bell's character sketches. The minister himself strikes us as being somewhat deficient in flesh-and-blood vitality, and even the victorious Hay is little more than an agreeable walking gentleman ; but the dear old lady, Mrs. Frederick, the fussy Miss Kennedy, and that terrible girl Nelly McCulloch, are unmistakably alive. If there is nothing striking in Miss Bell's story, it is at any rate very pleasant.
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