RECENT NOVELS.*

THE dreariness of most modern dreary novels is gratuitous. Now and again, however, one encounters a book like S cider- znann's _Regina; or, The Sims of the Fathers, in which the elements of disaster are inherent at the outset, and the 'characters march inevitably towards their doom, while the • (1.) Regina; or. The Sins of the Fathers. By Hermann Budermann. Trans- lated by Beatrice Marshall. London : John Lane.—(2.) The Lake of Wins. By Bernard Capee. London : W. Heinemann.--(3.) The Crook of the Bough. By Beni° Muriel Howie. London: Methuen and Co.—(4.) The Concert. Director. By Nellie K. Blissett. London: Macmillan and Co —(54 The Romance of Zion Chapel. By Itichard Is Gallienne. London : Jnhn Lane.— (6. The Last Lemurian. By G. Firth Scott. London : James Bowden.--17.) si Queen of Men. By Wilda.= (J'Brien. London : T. Tidier Unieln.-4) 405515 the sat Bias. By J. Blonndelle.Barton. London : 2dattinen and Co.

reader can hardly fail to experience that purifying influence by the means of pity and terror wherein Aristotle defined the essence of tragedy to exist. Regina is a beautiful, un- educated village girl, the servant and mistress of a Prussian nobleman, the Baron von Schranden, who employs her as his emissary in some treacherous negotiations with the French in the first decade of the century. On his death, his sort Boleslav, who has achieved distinction in the Army under an assumed name, returns to his native village to bury his father. At first he looks with loathing on the poor girl, who remains in the service of the family, but her devoted and dog-like fidelity gradually breaks down the barriers of his dis- like, and pity is in danger of yielding to a stronger feeling

as he learns how cruelly her ignorance and innocence were abused by his own father. Finally, a rupture between Boleslav and his mincing, affected sweetheart, the pastor's daughter, has already overborne his instinctive repulsion to a union with Regina, when she meets her death in the successful effort to

thwart a plot aimed at his life. Boleslav, having been excom- municated along with Regina by the pastor, buries the un- happy girl himself, and departs to the war. An English pseudo-realist would have made him commit suicide, but Sadermann, holding, perhaps, with Crabbe that-

" When all the blandishments of life are gone, The coward slinks to death, the brave lives on,"

merely observes that it is supposed he fell at Ligny. Painful though the book undoubtedly is, the author has handled his terrible theme with wonderful force and simplicity, and a com- plete avoidance of offence. No attempt is made to glorify Regina, who in some respects is infra-human, for her devo- tion to Boleslav is in many ways that of a dumb animal.

But she is none the less a strangely pathetic, and even heroic,

figure, while there is an elemental force in the passions— hate, love, avarice, and cruelty—of the various dramatis personx which lend them an impressiveness rarely encountered in a novel of English life.

Mr. Bernard Capes, the author of The Lake of Wine, is a welcome recruit to the ranks of the writers of fantastic

romance. He has an intrepid imagination, a keen sense of the picturesque and the eerie, and he has style. Sometimes his research for the sovereign word leads him into preciosity, but his phrases have a way of sticking in the memory, as when he tells bow his hero "re-entered the humming lists of life," or paints the glories of the Thames in a passage that recalls one of the finest of Mr. Henley's "Voluntaries " :—

"The muddy stream, as far as the view could reach, was all patched with sunshine, like a beggar's fustian with cloth of gold. Life was awake on the flood, but in such enchanted guise that for the moment his eyes filled with tears. Wherries shot the ripples, like bobbins traversing a loom of silver tissue ; bay barges, soft apple-green along the thwarts, and stacked high with yellow trusses, slid placidly past until the blue distance covered them with a haze like glass. From the happy shoreward mists, voices and anvils chimed in intricate harmony, but so subdued by distance as to seem the veritable bells of elf-land."

But Mr. Capes can do much more than merely paint grace- ful word-pictures. He is not less successful in the framing of his plot, the invention of incident, and the discreet applica- tion of the great law of suspense. The Lake of Wine might

not be unfairly described as a blend of Le Fanu and Steven- son. It has the "creepiness" of the former, and the grace of style, the literary finesse, of the latter. Where a novel hinges on a "mystery," a sympathetic reviewer should practise re- ticence in treating of the story. Suffice it to say, therefore, that the "Lake of Wine" is a famous ruby, stolen from its rightful owner by a notorious highwayman, who expiates his crimes at the hands of his confederates, and that the efforts of these same confederates to discover the lost gem, and of Sir Robert Lynne, alias Mr. Take, to forestall and baffle them, form the staple of a most exciting narrative. There is good portraiture, again, in the raffish Baronet, sobered by his gambling losses, and striving manfully to combat the mysterious and deadly agencies by which he is hemmed in on every side; in the timorous serving-man and his half-crazed sister; in the country squire and his minx of a sister ; in the desperate villains who have devoted their lives to the ruby hunt ; and in the lovely Betty Pollack, the landlord's grand-

daughter, with whom the hero contracts a heroic and altogether justifiable mesalliance. The time is 1800, and Mr.

Capes, without lapsing into the Wardour Street lingo, con- trives to give his narrative and dialogue a pleasant old-world flavour. He ought not, however, on the opening page to have spelled " Brooks's " wrong.

Islay Netherdale, heroine of The Crook of the Bough, and sister of George Netherdale, a hard-working, meritorious, but somewhat angular young Member of Parliament, was herself a hard-working, type-writing, fountain-pen-using, but dowdily dressed sort of girl until she went out on a holiday trip with her brother to the Near East. There two things happened to her ; she was inoculated with the love of finery by a wicked French Countess—a "lace and open-work kind of woman "- and she inspired affection in the bosom of a handsome and enlightened young Turk. Unluckily, Colonel Hassan fell in love with her, not because she was ornamental, but because she was intellectual and useful. And accordingly, when he came over to pay his English friends a visit, he found that Islay, who had in the interim taken to open-work stockings— there are scenes describing Islay's toilet almost worthy of the chaste pen of Mr. Le Gallienne—heliotrope corsets, and other delights, had disappointed his ideals. So he went back, and she, not at all imprudently, married a barrister. There is a good deal of cleverness of a hard metallic order in this study in international attractions and repulsions. The situation is neatly summed up by the heroine when, in giving her lover his congg, she observes ; "Even when the East and the West go towards each other, they do not meet. How strange, how strange it is,—they pass on the road." So, too, the contrast between the useful and ornamental woman is cleverly hit off when the author says :—" To Grahame her body was but her engine ; to Islay hers had become the airy, shining temple of her hopes." Side by side with flashes of insight, expressed with pungency and even distinction, one meets with frigid facetiousness, acid sneers at the Universities, and, to quote the author's own expressive phrase, a good many "lace and open-work kind" of allusions. The book bristles with inept actualities—we are even told the name of the shop where Islay bought her petticoats, and the hour at which her French hairdresser used to come to dress her hair—and we have found it, for all its coruscating cleverness, strangely devoid of the qualities of surprise or refreshment.

In The Concert-Director we have an excellent specimen of the melodramatic musical novel, with a marvellous prima donna, two superlative pianists—one an adult, the other a "wonder-child "—a voluble and persuasive impresario, and finally the concert-director himself filling the chief roles in the piece. It all began with the desire of Spada, the Viennese impresario, to lure the Princess Tarasca back to the operatic stage. This wonderful Russian girl at the age of seven- teen had taken the world by storm with her angel's voice—it reads like one of Colonel Mapleson's prospectuses, but we are really not inventing—married Prince Antonio Tarasca a few months after her first appearance, to the " unspeak- able horror of his own family," and was left a widow in three weeks ! So Spada offered place and pelf to his friend Israel Scaramanga, if he could induce the Princess to return to the boards; and Israel Scaramanga, alias Levi, basely deserting Rhoda Katrios, alias Levi, the mother of his child, after a brief campaign married the Princess, and set up a concert-direction in London. Of course Tarasca repented of her marriage, flirted with heroic tenors, and finally lost her heart to Ronbetsin, the famous plus quam-PaAierewskian pianist, who had adopted Spiro Katrios, the son of the concert-director. Complications naturally ensue, and the concert-director is ultimately shot by his unwilling son at the second attempt. "The prodigy watched him fall with an unmoved face," and lived "very comfortably" ever afterwards. This is, in truth, a, very absurd book, eminently calculated to confirm the Philistine view of musicians as irresponsible creatures; but its naivete and enthusiasm are infectious, and its only obvious moral, that prodigies, when suffering from brain-fever, are not to be trusted with loaded pistols, is quite unimpeachable.

The Rev. Theophilus Londonderry, who combined the duties of a clerk in a cotton-office in Coalbridge, a small provincial town, with those of lay pastor at Zion Chapel, was a handsome and enlightened young man, who read Tolstoi and Zola, lectured on Walt Whitman, and being engaged to Jenny Talbot, the daughter of his landlady, philandered with Isabel Strange, a wonderful reciter from London, who was really twenty-eight, though she gave herself out to be twenty- five. Jenny discovered her faithless lover's secret, and very considerately died of galloping consumption. But Theophilus, being a miserable, wobbling sort of creature, neither boldly vicious nor genuinely conscience-stricken, but altogether contemptible, after an odious but futile attempt to console himself with a Gaiety burlesque actress in whom he detected a wonderful resemblance to his lost Jenny, was also smitten, to the present reader's great satisfaction, with consumption; so he telegraphed to the reciting woman, who came by the next train, and, after a final feast of grapes and wine, gave him and herself poison from a small bottle of green crystal, and "the room became a heaven of silence." We cannot refrain from quoting the final sentence of this egregious romance Whoa° would say of these two lives How sad !' let him consider the quality of his own happiness ; and whoso would regard the life of Theophilus Londonderry as a failure, let him, too, consider the value of his own success." The minauderies of Mr. Le Gallienne's style are as pronounced as ever in A Romance of Zion Chapel, but the sentimentality is not quite so rancid as in The Quest of the Golden Girl.

In The Last Lemurian we have a miraculous romance of adventure very much in the earlier manner of Mr. Rider Haggard, only that the scene is laid in Australia instead of Africa. For the rest, there is untold gold, guarded by a gigantic Yellow Queen—who radiates a phosphorescent light from her person—and a race of pygmies in their mysterious treasure city in the heart of a distant mountain range. Thither Sir Claud Digby, alias The Hatter, a magnificently handsome Baronet with a past, guides his chum Dick Halwood; there he slays the " bunyip," a horrific man- crocodile ; and thither he returns consumed by passion for the Yellow Queen. From this disastrous mesalliance—for Tor Ymmothe, apart from her phosphorescent complexion, was a most undesirable mate even for a déclassé Baronet—he is rescued by Halwood's intervention, but perishes in a. volcanic eruption. Ultimately Halwood returns to England, and after an attack of brain-fever marries The Hatter's long- lost daughter. No adequate reason is assigned for this rash act.

Another highly-coloured Queen is to be encountered in Mr. William O'Brien's novel of Galway in the time of Elizabeth. The "Queen of Men" is none other than the redoubtable Graun'ya Uaile, whose attractions and achievements are set forth in a style which leaves the worst excesses of the Keil- yard school far behind. It is only right to say that Mr. O'Brien generally gives the translation in brackets, but occa- sionally this assistance is withdrawn, and the hapless Sasse- nach is left to grapple with such expressions as " Mwirea mosha!" or to puzzle out the identity of " isgaba'ha " with " usquebaugh." There is a good deal of Spanish, too, in the text, for the heroine was skilled in that tongue, but for the most part the dialect is of the familiar pseudo-archaic kind, richly besprinkled with ornamental objurgations—"Ecod ! " "'ode swords and bombards ! "—and such time-hallowed phrases as "tush," " prithee," "mine ancient friend," "peace, fellow," "in good Booth." The author is obviously consumed with enthusiasm for his heroine, who after a chequered but brilliant career ends her days amid the ranks of the Grey Sisters, but we have found the task of penetrating the jungle of Mr. O'Brien's exuberant and polyglot phraseology even more arduous than in his previous novel.

Mr. Bloundelle-Burton's Across the Salt Seas, "a romance of war and adventure," admirably fulfils the promise of its title. The period is that of Anne, the siege of Vigo forming as it were the historical c/ou of the narrative, and Marlborough, Hopson, Rooks., and many other Commanders figure in the dramatis persona. Spanish galleons, disguised filibusters, and an adorable senorita—whose travestissement as a boy imposes on the gentlest reader for the space of about half a page, but is not fathomed by the ingenuous hero until twelve chapters later on—form the principal ingredients in an ex- cellent romance of the capa y espada order, the scene being chiefly laid in the Peninsula.