RECENT NOVELS.*
Miss M. E. COLERIDGE—in whom we welcome a new and puissant wielder of the magic wand of romance—treats history with a free hand in her brilliant novel of Court life under Gustavus III. of Sweden. Adolf Count Ribbing, the central figure of the story, was a historical personage, exiled for avowed complicity in the assassination of his King, who was known in the salons of Paris, where he found asylum under the name of Van Leuven, as "le brave R4gicide." According to the French authorities, Ribbing had served while a mere boy with the French in America—an episode in his career of which Miss Coleridge is apparently ignorant, as she represents him as questioning his friend Fersen with regard to the campaign in America—and in his latter days he sank into obscurity, became a newspaper hack, and died in poverty in Paris in the early " forties." But we have no desire to take Miss Coleridge to task for idealising Ribbing or the King, for her deviations from the plain record of history, or for the anachronistic refinement of her pictures of Swedish manners a hundred odd years ago. One does not quarrel with Dumas for his distortions of fact, one simply surrenders oneself to the sheer enchantment of his narrative. And this is much the same attitude that The King with Two Faces is calculated to bring about in readers who love to escape from the tyranny of the man with the notebook. We despair of giving to those who have not read this beautiful romance an adequate impression of the delicacy and variety of its portraiture, the freshness, subtlety, and distinction of its dialogue, and the poignant • (1.) The Kmg with Two Faces. Be M. B. Coleridge. London : Edward Arnold. — 2) Over the Hills. By Mary Findlater. London : Methuen and Co.— (3.) The Son of a Peasant. By Edward McNulty. Loudon: Edward Arnold. —(4 ) The Witch Wife. By Sarah Tytler. London : Ghetto and Wimins.— Corteone. By F. Marion Crawford. London: Macmillan and Co.—(6.) Hu Ih Wynne. By S. Weir Mitchell. London Fisher Unwin.—(7.1 The Lion of Janina; or, The Last Days of the Janissaries. By Manrus Jokai. Trans- lated by R. Nisbet Bain. London : Jerrold and Bons.—(8.) His Grace of Osmonde. By Frances Hodgson Burnett- London: Warne and Co.—(9.) King Noanett. By F. J. Stimson. London: John Lane.—(10.) The Barn-Stormers. By Mrs. 0. N. Williamson. London : Hutchinson and Co.—(11.) Young Ntn. By F. W. Robinson. London : Hurst and Blackett.—(12.) A Welsh Sinyer. By Allen Bake. London Hutclinson and Co.
interest excited in the fortunes of the leading dramatis personx. There is, perhaps, nothing so thrilling in the whole book as the opening scene, in which Ribbing escapes from death at the hands of the King's enemies ; bat the atmosphere is sin- gularly exhilarating throughout. In the whole range of con. temporary fiction we know of no more picturesque royal figure than that of Gustavus as he is limned by Miss Coleridge. Her attempt to reproduce the table-talk of Madame de Stael could hardly have been bettered ; Tala is a most loyal, luckless, but loveable heroine ; the devotion of Count Axel Fersen, another interesting historical personage, to Marie Antoinette is infinitely touching. Above all, the book has to a quite exceptional degree the quality of glamour—the quality to be found in three poems by Miss Coleridge's illus- trious namesake and relative,—" The Ancient Mariner," " Christabel," and " Kubla. Khan." Fresh from its perusal, and still under the spell of its magic, we are fain to re-echo Schumann's historic greeting addressed to Chopin in a review of his earliest published pianoforte works, "Hats off, gentle- men ! A genius."
Over the Hills, as we learn from the publishers' announce- ment, is by the sister of the clever author of The Green Graves of Balgowrie, but the newcomer is happily in need of no formal introduction to the public. The opening chapters make it agreeably:clear that we have to reckon with a writer of force and individuality, who can dispense with the Kailyard apparatus in a novel of Scottish life, and portray half a dozen well-contrasted types of feminine character without bringing in a single "new woman." The mainspring of the plot is the attachment of two young men—one the son of a poor Highland " squarson," and the other a noble- man—to a clever, fascinating, but absolutely callous girl, the niece and dependent of a gentle old priest. Annie Fraser reminds us by turns of Becky Sharp and of Colonel Enderby's wife in Lucas Malet's remarkable novel. She is absolutely without scruples, an incorrigible flirt, vivacious and witty, living only for admiration and enjoyment. Still, we own to a certain surprise at the supreme wickedness of her crowning exploit in first deserting her fiancg for his rival, the young nobleman, and then allowing the former to go to prison for a forgery she has herself com- mitted. A woman capable of this would be incapable of the remorse which she is represented as feeling at the close of the story. And, again, there is something weak and unnatural in the Marquis's strange behaviour on discovering Annie's treachery, while the "long arm of coincidence" has to be stretched rather severely to bring her two victims together on the field of battle. The strength of the book lies in the admirable portraits of the gentle old maid, "Jane Anne," who plunges into matrimony to escape the tyranny of an odious, purse-proud uncle ; and of Dinah Jerningham, her strong, self-reliant, and noble-hearted cousin, whose heroic elopement with Lewis Campbell in the emigrant-ship forms a most dramatic climax and conclusion to an original and in- teresting story.
The Son of a Peasant, like another Irish novel noticed in these columns a fortnight ago, sets forth in lurid colours —though less lurid than the ter 'Me witch-burning case which actually occurred a few years back—the tragical conse- quences of those superstitions which an admirable system of national education has failed to eradicate from the minds of the country-folk in remote rural districts. Clarence Maguire is a young man who has raised himself by his industry and ability to the position of a schoolmaster, but is practically disowned by his own grandfather as a changeling and a fairy. Mr. McNulty traces with graphic force the gradual spread of this belief, accentuated by the young man's delicate appearance and lameness, until it culminates in a cruel persecution, from which he is rescued by a strange stroke of fortune in the shape of a legacy from an uncle in America. Hostility gives place to sycophancy on the part of every one but his sole surviving relative,—the old, half-witted grandfather, who crowns his lifelong abhorrence of the innocent young man by murdering him in a singularly cold-blooded and deliberate manner. Although the story is in its main essentials suffused in tragic and sinister gloom, relief is afforded by a number of sentimental and humorous episodes. The picture of Constable Kerrigan, whose one aim is "to get on in the Foorce," and who in the pur- suit of that aim is prepared to double the roles of St.
George and the Dragon, is an extraordinarily clever, and at times diverting, study of a village tyrant. The divided household of the Flanagans, a soft-hearted publican with a cantankerous virago of a wife, is set before us with remark- able skill, the scenes between Flanagan and his little boy, who is cruelly bullied by his mother, striking a note of genuine pathos. The weak point in the story is the caricature —wholly unintentional, we have no doubt--of an impoverished landlord, Sir Herbert O'Hara, and his daughter. Sir Herbert sponges upon his tenants and bilks the shopkeepers, but is all the time consumed with caste vanity of the most snobbish kind. The mawkish sentimentality which he displays in his relations with his daughter, and their genteel and stilted style of talk, prove Mr. McNulty here, at any rate, to be out of his element. When an Irish landlord sinks to the level of a squireen he gives himself no airs in the company of his social inferiors. At any rate he does not converse in the style of a Baronet in a penny novelette.
Popular superstition is, again, the motive of The Witch Wife, though here the period is that of the late seventeenth century, and the removal of the cruel and horrible incident which forms the central incident of the story to so distant a date softens the sense of humiliation which the recital begets in the mind of the gentle reader. Alas ! the annals of witchcraft furnish instances of the merciless torture of innocent women in the British Isles a full hundred years later than the time chosen in the present story. " Sonsie Sibbie," the heroine and martyr of Miss Tytler's sombre romance, is a striking figure,—not one of the old crones whose withered appearance gave credit to the belief in their practice of unholy arts, and who, deserted and friendless, were often inspired by a genuine malevolence towards their fellow-creatures, but a hale and handsome widow, whose only sins were her love of animals, her extra- ordinary knowledge of herbal lore, her self-reliance, and her lack of kith and kin. We have no doubt whatever as to the accuracy of the general historical basis of this painful story, which might easily have been made a great deal more gruesome without deviating from documentary records of the trials of alleged witches in Scotland and England. All the same, it is not a cheerful subject for a novel, especially when, as in the present case, the subsidiary plot is of slender interest and lacking in the relief and brightness needed to lighten the depression and disgust engendered by this gloomy chronicle of rustic inhumanity and religious intolerance.
The fortunes of the house of Saraeinesca once more furnish Mr. Marion Crawford with materials for an exciting tale of modern Italian manners. Sant' ilario's union with the beautiful Corona has been blessed with four sons, two of whom—Orsino and Ippolito, the latter a young priest—play prominent parts in the present story. The wicked Prince Corleone, who wrecked Bianca Campodonico's life, is dead, and his inheritance has passed to his nephews, three Sicilian " squireens," who have long been in league with the brigands. Two of the brothers come to live in Rome with their mother and sister, while the third lives on in Sicily. The brothers have a very bad reputation, but the sister, Vittoria, who has been educated away from home, is a charming girl, and captivates the melancholy Orsino. Foreseeing objection to the marriage from his parents, Orsino and Vittoria do not announce their engagement, but determine to play a waiting game. But their hands are forced by a terrible tragedy. Orsino goes out to Sicily with his cousin, San Giacinto, the financier, who has purchased the Corleones' estate, and is about to lay down light railways through Ur- district, and immediately on arriving at their destination they are attacked by an ambush and forced to fight for their lives. In the mglie Orsino shoots a man who turns out to be Vittoria's brother Ferdinand°. On his return to Rome to explain matters and vindicate himself, Orsino finds Vittoria loyal to him, but her mother curses him as an assassin, though the brothers publicly disclaim all relationship with the dead man. Matters are still further complicated by a fresh tragedy, for on Orsino's going back to Sicily with his brother Ippolito, the young Prince Corleone, maddened by jealousy, murders his only surviving brother, Francesco, at the altar, and having con- fessed his crime to the young priest, immediately denounces him as the murderer! But the cup of his iniquity is not yet fall, for he crowns all by basely betraying his friends the brigands. They retaliate by conveying information as to the identity of Francesco's murderer, and the priest is exculpated, while the apparently insuperable objections to Orsino's marriage with Vittoria are annihilated in a moment by Corleone's death-bed confession that she is not his sister at all, but the kidnapped daughter of the Duca di Fornasco. Thus rudely outlined the story may seem extravagantly melodramatic, and the clgnouement is certainly rather artificial. But it must never be forgotten, as one of the canons by which Mr. Crawford is governed in his delineations of modern Italian life, that in most cases you have only to scratch a nineteenth-century Italian to find a fourteenth-century bravo. Moreover in Sicily anything is possible. For the rest, the story is told with a discretion and an air of authority which carry conviction even in the most startling developments of the plot. The glories of the Sicilian landscape are admirably painted, and the book is enriched by a good deal of illuminative commentary on the peculiarities of the Italian and Sicilian temperament. In fact, if not in the first rank of Mr. Crawford's Italian novels, Corkone, had it come from any other pen, would have been rightly greeted as a brilliant and engrossing story.
Dr. Weir Mitchell, a distinguished alumnus of Harvard and Edinburgh Universities, has given us in Hugh 1Vynne a really admirable story of the War of Independence, as narrated by a disowned member of the Society of Friends belonging to the sect of the "Free Quakers," who held that active resistance, even to bloodshed, was justifiable, and in many cases put their doctrines into practice. The gradual development of the spirit of revolt in the breast of the hero, owing in great measure to the harsh repression exerted by his father, an honest hut fanatically narrow-minded merchant, is most skilfully drawn; while the minute and circumstantial descriptions of the social usages of the time betoken a faithful and exhaustive research amongst contemporary recorda. Once Hugh quits his father's roof there is no lack of moving or exciting episodes, while his courtship of his old school- mate, Da.rthea, is thwarted at every turn by the rivalry of his unscrupulous cousin. The portraits of the narrator'. mother, a sprightly French Quakeress, and of his paternal aunt, a bold, masterful, but warm-hearted Amazon, are both admirably executed, and it may be noted that to save his hero from appearing in the light of a miks yloriusus, as BO often happens in autobiographical fiction of the romantic sort, Dr. Mitchell employs the ingenious device of making him quote from time to time from the diary of a dead friend and cm. panion- in. arms.
Mr. Nisbet Bain gives us in The Lion 4 Janina a spirited translation of one of the most striking of Jokai's Turkish stories, published no fewer than forty-five years ago, and marked by a full measure of that tropical luxuriance of imagination which is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the inexhaustible genius of the Hungarian novelist. The central figure of the story is Ali Pasha of Janina, the central figure of so many klephtic ballads, and for the rest the most picturesque monster to be met with in the entire course of Turkish history. Hideously cruel though he was, Ali was nevertheless absolutely fearleas, and capable at times of a sort of perverted chivalry. Transmuted in the crucible of Jokai's glowing imagination, his career takes on the magic of an Arabian Night's entertainment. But for all its brilliancy and wealth of exciting incident, the book is decidedly repellent. The characters are more like splendid wild beasts than men and women ; there is always the scent of blood in the background ; the atmosphere is that of the purple East. Mr. Nisbet Bain speaks in his preface of Jukai as an absolutely impartial observer, and Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett would probably regard him as occasionally unsympathetic in his estimate of the Osmanli. Most readers, however, will be more impressed by the callousness and savagery of the dramatis personz than by their occasional manifestations of magnanimity. But there is a good deal of the Oriental in Jokai, and it is typical of the man that he should have been specially photographed for this edition in the rich Hungarian dress which he is entitled to wear as a member of the Hungarian House of Magnates.
His Grace of Osmonde deserves a passing word of notice, inasmuch as it marks a curious new departure in fiction, being a complementary or alternative version of the same author's A Lady of Quality, published a couple of years ago. Nut only do the same characters reappear, but a good deal of the ground is actually covered a second time. Those readers, therefore, who appreciated the luscious sentiment
and Fancy Fair archaisms of the original story will doubt- less find ample entertainment in this new version of the astounding exploits of Clorinda Wildairs and her adorable Duke. The reticence of Mrs. Burnett's style may be illus. trated by a single quotation : "With tears in his lion's eyes he kissed her hands a thousand times." Indeed, if we may be pardoned the homely expression, Mrs. Burnett's apotheosis of the peerage is too rich for the blood of an untitled reviewer.
Another agreeable American historical romance is Mr. Stimson's King Noanett, which deals with the adventures of sundry Devon settlers in Old Virginia and Massachusetts Bay towards the close of the seventeenth century. The story is gracefully told, in a manner recalling at times Westward Ho! and more often the earlier manner of Mr. Blackmore ; but the characterisation is distinctly modern, and the whole temper of the book more remarkable for sweetness than for strength- -Mrs. Williamson's The Barn-Stormers should be read as an antidote to Edna Lyall's recent eulogy of the theatrical calling. The squalid actualities, as well as the humours, of everyday life in a touring company in the States are here set forthwith considerable vigour and vivacity. The strange beginning of the heroine's friendship with Della Thomas, the Cinderella of the company, is described in a really touching chapter, which at once endears the former to the reader, and fully accounts for the dog-like fidelity shown to her by the latter. This is decidedly a wholesome book for stage-struck amateurs. —Yet another novel with a histrionic setting is Mr. F. W. Robinson's Young Nin, a powerful but decidedly lurid melo- drama of Bohemian life. The heroine is a divette of the music-halls, bred in the South London slums, who marries an invertebrate Peer—a sad falling-off from Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's robust and leonine Duke—loves and is beloved by a gifted pianist with an ample white forehead, and solves the problem of life by leaping into a pond known as the Silent Pool. The defects of Mr. Robinson's qualities are all accen- tuated in this morbid and nnmodulated tale.—The opening chapters of A Welsh Singer arouse anticipations that remain unfulfilled when the scene is shifted to London, and the hero and heroine, whose childhood amid the Welsh hills is so picturesquely described, suddenly leap into the forefront of the artistic world. That three heaven-born geniuses, two sculptors and a singer, and all of the humblest origin, should have come from the same parish is hardly in accordance with the law of averages. One Giotto is enough for a generation.
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