RECENT NOVELS.*
THERE is some very delicate and beautiful work in Mrs. Clifford's new noveL And there is also a good deal of work • (1.) A Floes of Santa.,: the Story of a Simple Woman's Life. By Mrs. W. K. Clifford. 1 voL London : Methuen and Co.— -(20 The King of Ando/nom. By J. Mae:wren Cobban. 1 vol. London : Methuen and Co.—(3.) An Utuought Heritage. By C. G. Parley Smith. 2 'vole. London : Hurst and Blickett.— (4.) The Woman in the Dark. By P. W. Robinson. 2 vols. London: Ohatto atui Windns.—(5.) The Voice of the Charmer. By L. T. Meade. 3 vole. London Ghetto and Windus.—(6.) Married or Single? By B. M. Croker. 3 vols. London: Chatto and Windns.—(7.) The Education of Antonia. By P. Emily Phillips. London: Macmillan and Co.—(8.) The Yellow Wave. By Kenneth Mackay. 1 vol. London: Bentley and Bon. in it that is spoilt by the sort of commonness that borders on vulgarity and results in bathos. But this is only what one expects and almost always finds in novels which aim at ideal effects, while ignoring the sources of inspiration from which the ideal comes. A Flash of Summer, in spite of its brightly attractive title, is a tragedy remorselessly cruel and quite un- compensated; yet written, according to the author's own ac- count of the matter, without moral or controversial intention, —simply for the sake of the story. The question why Mrs. Clifford likes to tell so very sad and depressing a story is not without interest ; but as no one but herself can pretend to answer it, we pass it by for the other question which is entirely within the reviewer's province,—Is the story, as Mrs. Clifford has told it true to what most of us know of life P We think decidedly not. The character of Katharine as she was before her marriage we do not find unnatural. But we are very sure that Mr. Belcher would have been most unwilling to marry such a girl, and subject himself to the embarrassment of living constantly under her clear-eyed, uncompromising scrutiny. He might have done it of course for the sake of her money ; but if he did it for the money only, he would, being Belcher, have taken care to secure the money. And this he notably omitted to do. And Mrs. Clifford as notably omits to tell us how he came to be so stupid. Then we do not understand Kathaiine's conduct after her flight from her husband. The Right itself is easy enough to understand. But Mrs. Clifford must surely have forgotten that Katharine was still under twenty when she gave her courage to dash out into the world absolutely alone, and endowed her further with self-con- tainment to conceal the fact of her marriage from the delightful friends whom she found on board-ship. We do not forget what were ICatharine's reasons for keeping silence on this vital matter. But we utterly disbelieve in the possibility of a girl as innocent and nice-minded as Katharine is meant to be, keeping such a secret to herself, unless interests much dearer to her than her own safety would be endangered by speaking the truth. Again, there is to our mind much im- probability in the outcome of her relations with Jim Alford. His influence would, we think, either have helped her less or helped her more. But then it is impossible for us to believe that two people who had made so brave a struggle to do right under hard temptation would not have been helped still further. Katharine's complete collapse after Jim's death seems to us altogether improbable. And her suicide is totally out of her character. All through her former misery she had shown a rare power of keeping a serene and sweet outlook upon life. She could whisper to others who were tempted to seek death, that after all life was sweet at the very worst. And we refuse to believe that the girl who felt this could so quickly take the fatal and violent step Mrs. .Clifford ascribes to her heroine. But even if Katharine really did throw herself under the train, that act may end her life, but it can hardly be said that it makes a sufficient conclusion to the book. We want to know how her suicide affected Belcher, and how it affected her uncle. For without acquitting Katharine of responsibility for her desperate deed, we must yet hold these two largely answerable for it, or else there is not only no purpose but no point in the story. We began by saying that there is a great deal of delicate and beauti- ful work in the book. So there is, and some of this delicate work may be fairly called artistic. But taken as a whole, the novel is very inartistic, for it contains a great deal of material that is absolutely meaningless and unharmonised ; and a book only deserves to be called a work of art when every part of it contributes to the significance of the whole.
We pass with a sense of relief to Mr. Cobban's most original and refreshing story, The King of Andaman. Cast in the form just now so popular, which combines an extravaganza plot with characters and incidents of real life, it combines the homely interests of an everyday story with the excitements of romance. But the supreme charm of the book lies in the genial humour with which the central character is conceived. James Hutcheon is a personage whom it is good to know and im- possible to forget. We do not know what we like best about him ; he is beautiful within and without, whichever way we take him. It seems to us a triumph of something more than skill on the part of the writer to have carried this simple and noble soul with unimpaired dignity through the ordeal of the inonstrons practical joke his treacherous comrade phiys upon his credulity. James Hutcheon, the Master of Hutcheon, as he likes to be called, is the descendant of a family of Jacobite lairds who were outlawed and attainted after Calloden. He is an employer of hand-loom weavers in the place where his ancestors were noblemen. But the principle, noblesse oblige, is the breath of life to him. He feels a feudal responsibility towards his people, and his heart is wrung when the incoming of steam-power and machinery robs his hand-weavers of work and wage. In humorous con- trast with the simple Scot is the shrewd and whimsical character of Baillie Lepine, a French weaver of Lille, who came to Edinburgh forty years before the story began, as a prisoner of war, and has by commercial ability and industry become master of the steam-mills that are killing the hand. weaver's trade. The relations between Hutcheon and Lepine are intricate and entertaining. But it is in relation to the villain O'Rhea that the heights and depths of Hutcheon's character are shown, and with the boy Hamish—another delightful creation—that his full tenderness comes out. The episode of Hamish's truancy from school, and chance coming upon the Highland regiments returning from the Crimea, is one of the best things in the book ; and another is the com- position of the letters to the Queen begging leave to carry off all the hand-loom weavers of Ilka.stane to the Island of Anda- man, where Hutcheon, cunningly misled by O'Rhea, believes that a new life may be begun by them under happier auspices.
In An Unsought Heritage we find a great deal of cleverness and brilliancy of a rather commonplace kind, also a consider- able amount of really good stuff and wholesome intention,— but, on the other hand, an oppressive excess of detail belong- ing to the daily life of the woman-worker—a very different person from the working woman—of modern London. The machinery of the spinsters' fiat is laid too bare for beauty. Alison Brand and her chum Toby are substantially very good characters ; and the difference is well pointed between their lives of real work and honest purpose, and the fraudulent cant of Theo Petigrue, who poses as a fine soul and is really a very vulgar one. All the Petigrue family are well done. And Theo's artful snaring of Alan Mayor is natural. Whether Theo's sub- sequent experiment in murder is equally natural, we are not sure. But we like it ; it is always satisfactory and wholesome when the deceitful woman in a book turns out worse instead of better than might have been expected. Now and again the book rises above its usual level of prosaic detail, and has a scene of real tenderness and poetry. Such is the moment in which Toby finds her woman's soul, and that in which Alison and Mayor, long at cross-purposes, come to a full under- standing.
A satisfaction of the same kind that is afforded by the development of Theo Petigrue's character in the novel just noticed may be found in the crime committed in The Woman in the Dark; which in every other respect seems to us a. gratuitously horrible story. The mystery is kept up with Mr. F. W. Robinson's usual skill and dramatic effectiveness ; but the book has no other kind of interest. Muriel Reeves is not an attractive heroine, and her lover, Oliver Toope, is, to us, almost as offensive a person as he was to hysterical Mrs. Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell is a scoundrel, and his sister-in-law's insanity, as well as her antecedent relations to her limp husband, want more emplaining. But for those who like a thoroughly sensational story, here is certainly a very vivid and readable one.
Though we are not very fond of the introduction of hypno- tism into novels, we must confess to having enjoyed the vigorous directness with which the author of The Voice of the Charmer has expressed her sense of the wickedness of her hero and of the awful nature of the bargain his girl-wife makes when she consents to be his instrument. The story certainly wants subtlety, but it has plenty of incident, some well-defined characters, and a plain moral. On the other hand, it suffers by one great omission. John Ward, the diabolical hero, might have been allowed to fascinate his wife, his patron and familiar friend, and the two ladies he swindles out of their property and position. But the author should have provided one character whose especial business it was to distrust him through all. In real life there is always such a person ; and the want of him or her in the book robs the reader of the support and sympathy he is entitled to. It becomes difficult to be sure at all times that Ward is as bad as he appears to be. But there is no real doubt that the author means him to be very bad. Re has the command of what is called "will-power," by means of which he reduces his wife— a naturally good woman—to a state of submission, in which
she becomes his catspaw. Between them they pass off a fraudulent will as a genuine one and take possession of an inheritance they have no right to. The wife suffers mental tortures until she succeeds in "killing her conscience." Then for a short time she is perfectly happy ; but her happiness is of such an uncanny and inhuman nature, that her husband shrinks from her and declares her mad. A great catastrophe suddenly reawakens her conscience, and then, with a heroic effort, she throws off her husband's evil influence and makes confession of all the wrong they have wrought together. She has declared before that she has "sold herself to the devil;" and now her cry is :—
" I cannot stay in the dark any longer. I must somehow get back to God, and there is, I know, no other road. Perhaps it is all useless,—perhaps I have really sinned past pardon ; but at least, at the eleventh hour, I make restitution."
And restitution being made, husband and wife are swept away by a flood ; and so the story ends.
Married or Single ? is the third novel we have read this week in which a young wife finds it necessary to get rid of her
wedding-ring, and resume her maiden name. The reasons for these actions are different in each case ; but it seems to us to argue an imperfect estimate of the part played by instinctive truthfulness in the character of a girl entitled to love and re- spect, that all these heroines adapt themselves with startling facility to these false positions. However, Madeline West, the heroine of the novel now before us, is intended by the author to represent the character that easily adapts itself to any circumstances. So, in her case, there is more justification than in the others. When we are first introduced to her she is behaving admirably in the painful position of a persecuted pupil-teacher at a fashionable boarding-school, where a few months earlier she had been the most petted, because the richest, of the young lady boarders. Next we see her, still behaving well, as the wife of a young barrister who had married her with chivalrous imprudence, when the spite of her school- mistress had placed her in a compromising position. With a sick husband, and an almost starving child to nurse, she is good, and even heroic. Then her father—reported ruined and dead—comes home, a jolly millionaire—from Australia; and because he has written that he will cast her off if she marries a poor man, she conceals her marriage altogether and, drifting from deceit to deceit, practically deserts husband and child to live in luxury and fashion in her father's house. We must not tell the plot, but we may say that there is so much insistence upon the splendours of Aladeline's life as a fashionable heiress, that at times one almost suspects the author of thinking it a pardonable and even amiable weakness in a pretty young woman to prefer diamonds and flattery to the company of a kind husband and a delicate child.
We have seldom read a more exhausting novel than The Education of Antonia. Though it makes only one volume,
the volume is a very thick one, and its pages are closely printed. It is a book that is evidently the safety-valve of a great deal of confused thinking about life, as well as the out- come of such direct study as novelists aiming at realism now make habitually. Essentially a woman's book, it is written in the main from the standpoint of impotent sympathy with the sufferings of women who, handicapped by disabilities of sex, have to compete with men in the struggle for life. It is very often bitter, still oftener flippant, and on the whole in- conclusive as an argument for or against the emancipation of women. But it treats not only of the sorrows of woman.
The claims of labour, the ideals of art, the futility of the Churches, and the mysteries of heredity are all discussed and exemplified. Then it has a great many characters, and all the important characters are highly complex— the explanation of their complexity lying in the sins committed and the wrongs suffered by their forebears. Hence it becomes frequently necessary for the narrative to make excursions into the past. And as the tales of the time before us are told quite as fully as the events of the time present, it is not always easy to distinguish between the back- ground and the foreground of the picture. Indeed, a total want of proportion and perspective is a fault that runs through the whole book, and makes it extremely difficult reading. Another omnipresent fault is that inartistic excess of details of minor feminine experience of which we have complained above when speaking of another novel. None the less, there is evidence in the book of a very real power of imagining and describing strong and original character. On the whole, the men are much better done than the women,— they are treated more broadly and imaginatively. John Tenterden, the hero, is a really original and interesting person, — one who, had his surroundings been sketched with more art and more simplicity, would have stood out with memorable effect and vigour. It may be questioned whether some passages of his boyhood are not touched rather too brutally. But as a man, he is intelligible, if not always attractive, and he plays the lover with a force of genuine passion which leaves one wondering how the same writer who invented him could also invent the very unsatisfactory heroine who gives her name to the book. But then Antonia is that predestined failure of fiction, the personage who has to go through all the experiences the writer is overcharged with, and to express, in season and out of season, the author's views upon all subjects under the sun. Needless to say, she is an intolerable prig, alternately flippant, bitter, and facetious, but in every mood and all circumstances sen- tentious and artificial.
The history of Australia carried on to the year 1954—that is to say, about sixty years hence—is the subject of Mr. Mackay's new novel, The Yellow Wave. Russia, allied with China, is at war with England, and an invading wave of yellow men sweeps terribly over Australia. Some of the later chapters, which describe battles and sieges, are extremely powerful. And towards the end of the book the author succeeds in welding together the two elements of his story,— the romance of love and manslaughter, and the history of the Chinese invasion. And from this point onward the story is both interesting and exciting. But until about three-quarters of the novel have been got through, it is impossible to feel that there is any but an arbitrary connection between the strange episode of hypnotism and crime with which the book opens, and the campaign which is the great matter of the story. Heather Cameron wants individuality through the greater part of the book, and Dick Hatten is made rather too much of, seeing that after all he was not to win the heroine. Altogether, the love-romance is the weakest part of the story ; and it is only after Philip Orloff and Heather have met again amid the horrors of war, and Heather has realised that her quondam lover is now the General of the Mongol army, and the enemy of herself and her people, that we begin to believe in her love for him. Too evident symptoms of study make another fault of this novel, which, judged as a whole, is very much less good than many of its parts. But in spite of its faults, it is interesting and full of instructive sugges- tion.
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