RECENT NOVELS.*
GRUMBLING, like error, is natural to man ; but instead of complaining that the unparalleled success of Robert Elsmere has brought one imitator into the field, we ought perhaps to be thankful that, so far, there is only one, and not a score. Indeed, it may be unfair to speak of Mrs. Worthey's Positivist novel, The New Continent, as an imitation of its famous pre- decessor•, for though the success of the earlier work may have -suggested to the new writer the possibility of similar success for another story on the same lines, there are no signs that Mrs. Worthey has drawn inspiration from any source outside
• the range of her own experience. Indeed, such interest as The
• (1) The New Continent. By Mrs. Worthey. 2 vols. London : Macmillan and Co.—(2.) For the Lore of a Lass. By Austin Clare. 2 vols. London : • Chatto and Windus.—(3.) Dead Stripes. By J. Carmichael. 3 vols. London : Chapman and Hall. —(4.) The M.F.B.'s Daughter. By Mrs. Robert Jocelyn. 3 vole. London: N. V. White and Co—t5.) Midst Surrey Hills. By A. C. .Bickley. 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—(13.) Cast Out. By Morice Gerard. 2 vols. London : Hurst and Blackett.—(7.) The Romance of a Station. My Mrs. Campbell t'raed. 2 vole. London : Trischler and CO. New Continent possesses—and it possesses a good deal—is largely due to the fact that it leaves upon the mind of the reader the impression that it is not, like Robert Elsmere, a simple " novel with a purpose," but a disguised autobiography, which has been arrayed in the garb of fiction for the sake of attracting a larger public than could otherwise have been reached. Mrs. Worthey probably distrusts her skill in the sphere of invention, for the narrative scheme of her story is severely simple, all embarrassing complexities of situation being studiously avoided. We are introduced to the heroine, Laura Bell, the second child and elder daughter of a widowed mother, when she is but fourteen years of age; so the story of her mental development, to which the novel is devoted, begins at the beginning. The record of a schoolgirl's life can hardly be made very interesting to adult readers, and Mrs. Worthey wisely abbreviates it, making the true story of Laura's intel- lectual development open with her course of study at Queen's College, Harley Street, where she comes under the influence of Mr. F. D. Maurice. The impression that the novel is largely autobiographical is heightened by the frequent mention of real names, both of men and books, though, so far as the latter are concerned, the verisimilitude of the story is somewhat marred by the fact that Mrs. Worthey's heroine is represented as being powerfully influenced by works which, at the period dealt with in the novel, had yet to be written. During her period of studentship at the Queen's College, the ordinary orthodoxy in which she has been trained develops into what may be described as a modified and intelligent Broad Churchism; and this is her mental condition when she pays a visit to France, and makes the acquaintance of a young French Protestantpasteur whose views and sympathies are largely one with her own. The young man and the girl are mutually attracted, and each recognises the feeling of the other, but no decisive word is spoken ; and for many months after Laura's return to England, they hear little or nothing of each other. Both, however, in solitude, are treading the same path ; both gradually lose their early faith ; and both are brought to believe that they have been rescued from an abyss of blank scepticism by the Postivist Philosophy and the Religion of Humanity. The joy of each in the discovery of this "new continent" is, however•, shadowed by the fear that it means separation from the dear one who is left behind in the old world ; and great is the rapture of the pair when, at the meeting which is prac- tically the last incident in the story, they find that during the darkness they have been sailing side by side, and that they have both anchored in the same port. The book is pleasingly written, and it is not without interest of a kind, but it is profoundly and irritatingly unsatisfactory. As a mere story, The New Continent is too slight for criticism, and as a contribution to polemical fiction it seems to us utterly ineffective. To make the demand made by some critics of Robert Elsmere, that the writer of a book of this kind should burden it with a body of formal argument, is, we think, unreasonable. A story is a story, and in it formal logic is out of place ; but we may fairly demand that an author shall make a situation real, even if she does not prove a pro- position to be demonstrable. Now, this is just what Mrs. Worthey fails to do. She does not make us see the something that Laura Bell and Arthur de Varenne found to be wanting in Christianity and present in Positivisim ; nor• are we made to feel the inevitableness of the passage from one to the other. The nearest approach to a clear indication is given in the story of Laura, who, just when she is about to throw over her early creed, comes across a believer in the doctrine of sanctifi- cation by faith, and determines that she will retain her• belief in God until she has tested his will and ability to free her altogether from the power of sin. If he can do this, he must exist ; if not, the last prop of Christianity is cut across. Of course the test fails, as in such conditions it was bound to fail, and for Laura the great question is at once solved; but here and all through it is impossible not to be impressed by the extraordinary inconsequence of the various steps taken in her spiritual progress to the " new continent." It may be added that some of the utterances of the Positivist prophet read like veiled satires upon his system ; but this effect is doubtless due to the author's noteworthy lack of any sense of humour.
Mr. Austin Clare has put some good strong work into his new romance, For the Love of a Lass, which is a story of rural life in Tyndale immediately after the Battle of Culloden, when even the humblest of the followers of the luckless Earl of Derwentwater were being hunted down by the soldiers of Cumberland. The book, however, is not a historical novel, the only link between the stirring events of the time and the humble lives with which the author deals being found in the fact that Hugh Fenwick, the favoured lover of pretty Phyllis Dobson, is known by his passionate, jealous rival to be one of the fugitives. It will be seen that the situation is one of fine possibilities, and it cannot be said that Mr. Austin Clare fails to do them justice. Phyllis, with her beauty, her whims, her love of admiration, her girlish delight in her power to coax or to tease, and, underlying all these things, her capacity for pro- found found passion, was just the girl to rouse to madness a morbid, unballasted nature like that of Mark Teesdale, who had wooed her for years, only to find himself at last supplanted by a new-comer, to whom the fortress which he had so long beleaguered had surrendered at the first summons• The story of Mark's moral disintegration is admirably told. When the struggle on the lonely moor is abruptly terminated by Fenwick's accidental fall down the disused shaft, and Mark feels himself to be a murderer, in fact if not in intent, our pity for him is almost abreast of our blame. But with his resolution to keep his ghastly secret, and to persuade Phyllis that her lover has deserted her, his true fall begins ; and when the rival whom he has thought dead suddenly reappears, he is prepared for a deed of Judas-like treachery from which in earlier days he would have shrunk with abhorrence. Some of the scenes and situations in the second volume are excep- tionally powerful; but the book is good all through.
Another very readable and capable story, dealing mainly with lowly life in the North of England, is the novel which Mr. Carmichael calls Dead Stripes,—a somewhat unfortunate title, we cannot but think, as even in Lancashire not one reader in a thousand will know what it means. Dead stripes, or " strips " as the weavers call them, are extra stripes or ribs which run through a flowing pattern and break it up, and for the introduction of which into a fabric the loom has to be stopped and its mechanism readjusted, the worker getting no additional pay for his additional labour. The reader gets no clue to the mystery of the title-page until the last chapter, in which the hero, George Lomas, a young Lancashire mill-hand, compares to these " dead strips " the follies, sins, and misfortunes which he has gratuitously brought into his own life by senseless doubts of the loyalty of his sweetheart, Liz Davis, whose love and devotion have never failed him. Like the novel just noticed, Dead Stripes deals largely with the passion of jealousy; but, apart from this, the only thing they have in common is good workmanship. Liz and George are both employed in the mill owned by young Mr. James Heathcote, locally known as " Jimmy 'E'thcote's shop." The young man, in his fiery, tempestuous way, is very much in love with the girl; and though her love for him is the depth rather than the tumult of the soul, it is really the stronger and more constant passion. Liz's beauty and charm of manner have caught the eye of her employer, who pursues her with attentions which, though in the ordinary sense of the word " honourable," are very distasteful to her. Heathcote, however, persists in throwing himself in the girl's way. George sees them together, and, with the madness of his jealous tribe, makes up his mind at once that Liz is faithless to him. His originally ill-balanced nature altogether loses its equilibrium under the shock of his sup- posed discovery, and in his recklessness he throws up his employment, and joins a band of poaching desperadoes ; while Liz also leaves the mill, to become the maid of Miss Portwood, a girl in whose nature strength and refinement are blended, and to whom, after his uncompromising rejec- tion by Liz, James Heathcote has engaged himself. The course of the story must not be disclosed; and we will simply
say that Dead Stripes is an admirable tale of factory life in Lancashire that, had it a little more of the salt of humour, in which it is somewhat deficient, would be worthy of a place beside the work of Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, and Mr. William Westall.
In The lif.P.H.'s Daughter there is less about horses, dogs, and foxes than might have been expected from the title, these animals providing the sauce rather than the substance of the very pleasant and wholesome repast which Mrs. Robert Jocelyn sets before her readers. The story of the charming Dolly Vernon and her three lovers—the noble, manly, alto- gether likeable Lord Venthor ; the fascinating Jack Denham, whose devotion to Dolly vanquishes his sense of honour; and poor Captain Dasher, who, in his goodness and his awkward- ness, reminds us of another military hero, William Dobbin—is told with a vivacity which makes it very agreeable reading; and to all but the very shrewdest readers, the d‘mouement will be a matter of question and curiosity. Even when Dolly becomes actually engaged to Captain Dasher, we feel "in our bones" that he is not her destined mate, but it is not so easy to guess which of the other two men will be the favoured wooer ; and though the heroine's final decision may not win the reader's entire sympathy, he feels that Dolly, being Dolly, could have made no other choice. The conclusion does not, perhaps, conform to what is ordinarily considered poetic justice; but it is in conformity with true imaginative justice, which is a much finer thing, and, it may be added, a much rarer thing as well. In this, as in many other respects, The M.F.H.'s Daughter is a really pleasant and satisfactory story- The very awkward choice of the preposition in the title Midst Surrey Hills (though, indeed, save as an abbreviation, " midst" is not a preposition at all, but a noun), testifies to a literary ineptitude which manifests itself still more noticeably in the course of the story. It would, we think, be unfair to describe Mrs. (or Miss) Bickley's book as a bad novel ; but it may accurately be described as a book which might have been a good novel, but which is largely spoiled by want of knowledge, and want of the faculty of adequate expression which manifests itself in style. The author has some measure of dramatic imagination ; she is able, so far as her own consciousness goes, to give reality to her characters and the situations in which they find. themselves ; but she is unable to give them the same reality in the minds of her readers, because she has not acquired that knowledge of life which is essential to vraisemblance in the delineation of those details by means of which alone any picture of life is made really lifelike. Her Surrey villagers, for example, speak in a conglomerate dialect which is unknown to any English county, and though the person who may be called her hero is a Wesleyan minister, and her heroine a Wesleyan minister's daughter, several of her references to the organisation of the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion only serve to display her ignorance of the subject concerning which she is writing. Then, too, many of the conversations, both of her gentlefolk and her rustics, are so manifestly impossible that the book, as a work of art, must be pronounced a failure; and yet, in spite of these grave faults, the author does somehow manage to interest us in her characters and in what happens to them ; and the fact of our interest testifies to another fact,—that what she lacks is not the imagination which sees, but the literary faculty which records. This, how- ever, is a sufficiently serious deficiency.
Mr. Morice Gerard appears to be a new writer—at any rate, no names of previous works from his pen appear upon his title-page—and Cast Out is a novel which has both promise and performance. Though Mr. Gerard is by no means un- skilful in the delineation of character, his story is one in which plot-interest is predominant ; and for the production of a successful novel of this kind, the two things most needed are the two things which the writer possesses in considerable measure,—careful ingenuity of construction, and bright direct- ness of narrative style. In the plot-scheme of the work, there are only two obvious defects. The writer does not supply any sufficient reason for Sir Jermyn Falconbridge's neglect to acknowledge during his lifetime the heroine of the book as his legitimate daughter; and the mere fact that Margaret Lawrence was a somnambulist is not sufficient to account for her finding of the missing documents, seeing that she is alto- gether unacquainted with Saitcombe Grange, and has had no connection with the Falconbridge family. These are slips which a master like Wilkie Collins would never have made; but in the work of a beginner, where they stand practically alone, too much account must not be taken of them. Apart. from them the story hangs well together; and as the style has vigour, and the narrative rapidity, Cast Out is a very satis- factory specimen of the class of fiction to which it belongs.
Mrs. Campbell Praed, though she has more than once exhibited a certain lack of discretion and good taste, is a really able writer ; but she has never done anything quite so good as The Romance of a Station. True, the story, as a story, is some- what loosely jointed, and the "romance," for the sake of which, we suppose, the book exists, does not begin until we are well on into the second of the two volumes ; but no reader will be unduly impatient for the drawing-up of the curtain while he is being entertained by such a bright and pleasant overture as that provided by the record of the experiences of young Mrs. Ansdell and her husband on the Australian island which the latter has purchased as a cattle-breeding station. It was hardly necessary for Mrs. Campbell Praed to inform us in her preface that this portion of her book is a transcript from memory rather than an achievement of imagination, for every page bears witness to the fact that she is writing of a life every detail of which has been made familiar to her by intimate personal experience. The story of the manner in which that genial general-utility man, Captain Loftus Ansdell, R.N., circumvented the cantankerous Mrs. Tillidge, is full of quiet humour ; and another episode, the story of poor Line Sabine, is not less rich in unstrained pathos. The brief romance of which the fascinating, inscrutable Weeta Wilson, "the veiled princess," is the heroine, and the poor, weak, impressionable Archie Thurston the very unheroic hero, is a singularly powerful and interesting piece of writing,—indeed, Weeta herself is a veritable creation, whose presence in any book would suffice to make it notable. The Romance of a Station is, in short, a thoroughly bright, interesting, and healthy story; and we hope Mrs. Campbell Praed will give us other books that we can praise as heartily and unreservedly.
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