NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
THE trilogy of stories of the Franco-Prussian War begun by the MM. Margueritte with their fine novel, Le Desastre, pub- lished in 1898, is worthily continued in Les Troncons du Glaive, a volume dealing with the sequel to Sedan, and the work of the National Defence up to the armistice. The touching dedication, " A notre mere et u toutes celles qu'a fait pleurer l'annee terrible," recalls the fact that the father of the joint authors, the General Margueritte who bad done excellent work as an administrator in Algeria, was killed near Sedan in 1870. Mr. Frederic Lees, in a recent number of the Fort-
nightly, has given some interesting information as to the antecedents and methods of the two brothers. Victor, the younger, has a minute knowledge of military matters gained as an officer; both possess that military spirit which comes of being born of a military family and educated in military circles. They have collected and sifted materials for many years with the utmost care, and the result is a blending of realism with romance, of faithful historical portraiture with legitimate exercise of the imagination, which will greatly enhance the repute already enjoyed by the French as the best writers of military novels. In the volume before us the authors take a typical French family, or rather group of families connected by blood and marriage, and follow the fortunes of those members who are dispersed in the field, with the armies of the North, of the Vosges, of the Loire and the East, or shut up in Paris. Jean Real, the head of the house, is an old vine- grower in Touraine. One of his sons, a middle-aged doctor and bachelor, devotes himself to ambulance work ; the other, Charles, a married man with a family, is a mining engineer. Then we have Poncet, "le sorcier," Charles Real's brother- in-law, a distinguished man of science, who serves on the Armament Committee. Poncet's son Martial is shut up in Paris, where his experiences and privations are related in some of the most heart-rending pages of the book. Charles Real's eldest son, Eugene, has just married Poncet's orphan niece, before rejoining his regiment; his sister Amelie is married to an old soldier, the Commandant du Brea, who, on learning of his son's capture at Metz, offers himself—a one-armed veteran—to make good the loss of his son. Then there are other Reals, cousins ; a sailor, a forester, and a returned colonist, altogether a large inner dramatis persona., none of the leading characters occupying any im- portant position, politically or socially, yet all representative average types. Of the numerous historical figures which cross and recross the scene, the most notable is Gambetta, whose arrival at Tours in October, 1870, forms the opening scene of the story. To give any detailed account of the succession of striking episodes unfolded by the MM. Mar- gueritte would be impossible within the limits of space at our disposal. No one can read their novel without being deeply impressed by its essentially national spirit, its freedom from political partisanship, its dispassionate analysis of the causes of disaster, its acute and far-reaching psychology. The con- trast between the temper of Paris and the provinces is strikingly shown : the hideous scenes in the Hotel- de-Ville on the occasion of the abortive attack on the Government by the Belleville faction form a masterly pendant to the tragic idyll of Eugene Real s marriage feast. We can only say in conclusion that the authors have faith- fully fulfilled the aim expressed in the preface, wherein they profess themselves happy if by the means of a painful yet sincere picture they can inspire an abhorrence of war and of those who, doing violence to humanity, would again venture to bring it about. As a wholesome corrective to the literature of Jingoism this work may be commended at this moment without reserve to English readers, who cannot fail to rise from its perusal with a higher opinion of the great nation whose darkest hours are here so honestly recalled.
Mr. Tracy's audacious fantasia, The Invaders, does not possess the ethical or psychological value of a serious historical
• (1.) Les Tronynns du Maim (Difense Nationale, 1870-1871). Par Paul et Victor Marguerit . Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie. [3 fr. 50.]—(2.) The Invaders: a Story of Britain's Peril. By Louis Tracy. London : C. A. Pearson [6s.] —(3.) The Bishop's Gambit. By Thomas Cobb. London : Grant Richards. [6e,]—(4.) Straight Shoes. By G. Chatterton. Loudon : John Long. re.] —(5.) Free to Serve. By E. Rayner. London : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 6s.] —(6.) The Conscience of Gilbert Pollard. By Adeline Sergeant. Lon on : Hodder and Stoughton. [6s.]—(7.) The Cross Triumphant. By Florence H. Kingsley. London Ward, Lock, and Co. [3s. 601.]—(8.) The Leaven of Lore. By Beryl Goldie. London : Routledge and Sons. [6s.]—(9.) Shylock of the Boyer. By Fergus Hume. Loudon : Digby, Long, and Co. [6s.]—(10.) The Plunder Ship, By Headon Hill. London: C. A. Pearson. [6e.] military romance like that of the MM. Margueritte, nor does it show any of the scientific imagination of such a forecast as Cap. tain Cairnes's The Coming Waterloo, noticed in this column last week. It is simply a spirited but rather gratuitous specula- tion as to the consequences of a highly irregular invasion of England by the Germans and French. That is to say, without any formal declaration of war, and before their Ambassadors had received their passports, a number of German and French soldiers make their way into England in mufti and seize and sack Liverpool and Birmingham ! In other words, the great war begins with a sort of Jameson's Raid in excelsis. At first the tide of invasion bids fair to submerge the bewildered Britishers altogether; but in the first naval engagement, though fighting against heavy odds, the English inflict a crushing blow on the enemy, America comes to our aid with illimitable supplies of food, guns, and ammunition, and finally —thanks in great measure to the preternatural sagacity of the under-boots of a Liverpool hotel—the invaders are routed after a campaign of six weeks, during which Lord Rosebery, Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and Sir Edward Clarke join the Unionist Cabinet. The peculiarity of the war is that, though forced on by France and Germany, the German Emperor strenu- ously opposes any hostile movement against Great Britain, only yields to his Ministry and military advisers to avoid a civil war, and ultimately conducts a " stop-the-war " campaign to a successful issue. The whole situation is so delightfully absurd as to relieve the author from the imputation of wilfully pandering to the spirit of Chauvinism. We are not prepared to say that Mr. Tracy's military science will command the respect of the expert, but the account of the first naval engagement is certainly a most exciting piece of narrative.
The opening of Mr. Cobb's new story, The Bishop's Gambit, reminds one of Anthony Trollope, but the development of the plot speedily effaces this initial resemblance. Having intro- duced us to the family of a blameless Bishop, whose eldest daughter is engaged to a promising but impecunious young barrister, Mr. Cobb proceeds to hurl a bombshell into the midst of this tranquil household. The fuse goes on fizzling for a long time, and eventually, when disaster seems imminent, the shell proves to be a dummy. To drop metaphor, the barrister expiates a wholly innocent indiscretion by being implicated in divorce proceedings, while the real culprit—an unscrupulous M.P.—is en- couraged as a suitor for the hand of the Bishop's younger daughter. Now this other daughter has fallen in love with a brilliant and attractive young artist, but reluc- tantly acquiesces in his dismissal on the discovery of his parentage,—he is the son of an "h"-less undertaker. However, when the artist has supplied the clue which enables the barrister to establish his innocence, the stigma of the former's birth is overlooked, and all ends as happily as in an early Victorian romance. Mr. Cobb cannot altogether be acquitted of making capital out of the somewhat cheap device—so common among writers of farce—of placing a minister of religion in a series of not altogether dignified positions. Otherwise the handling of a rather gratuitous plot is at once ingenious and void of offence. There is really very little thin ice in The Bishop's Gambit, and Mr. Thomas Cobb is the lightest and nimblest of skaters.
There is an excellent though somewhat obvious moral to Straight Shoes,—viz., that vicars' daughters or adopted daughters should not flirt with penniless artists. The artist in The Bishop's Gambit was prosperous, although the son of an undertaker, but in Straight Shoes Philip Brabazon, though the nephew and heir of a Baronet, found it impossible to make a decent income by his pencil. Worse than that, he was already engaged to an heiress. So when the uncle on his deathbed held him to his promise, he had no choice but to desert the vicar's daughter, who in turn married another vicar, an excellent though not exactly ornamental personage. Then Philip loses his wife and meets his old love, and the inevitable complications are on the point of being cleared up by the manly behaviour of the vicar when his wife is struck dead by a flash of lightning. The note of tragedy is struck with rather jarring abruptness in a story up to that point gently sentimental in, tone, but many readers will prefer that the more or less inevitable disaster should have been reached without the intervention of any long-drawn recital of domestic infelicity. Of novels of old New York it may be said that the cry is still they come. This week's specimen, Free to Serve, takes us back two hundred years, instead of the more common jump of a single century. Mr. Rayner has written an interesting story, dealing with the practice of selling the labour of white bond-servants for a limited number of years. Under these conditions the heroine, Aveline Nevard, an English girl, is sold for a period of bondage to provide the passage money to America, which her very detestable brother has neglected to supply. Fortunately for Aveline, she falls into admirable hands, and the very readable sequel incidentally throws a good deal of light on the manners and customs of Colonial New York. This is a book to be decidedly recommended.
Miss Sergeant's new story, The Conscience of Gilbert Pollard, deals with " business people," and shows the incon- veniences of stifling the pangs of what the hymns call "the inward mentor." Needless to say, this is an exceedingly moral work, in which the wicked do not prosper in the least, and it proves honesty to be far and away the best policy. But in spite of its resemblance in this respect to nursery lore, the book—as may be expected from so skilled a practitioner as Miss Sergeant—is never dull, the opening is decidedly striking, and the theme worked out with the author's habitual fertility of resource and fluency of style.
Another book with a striking beginning is Miss Kingsley's The Cross Triumphant. The first chapters describe the effect on a young Jew, bred as a Nazarite, of the stories of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth some sixty years before. It is, of course, an inexhaustibly interesting subject, and Miss Kingsley's treatment is thoughtful and suggestive. In the later parts of the book she is not so successful. So exacting a theme as the fall of Jerusalem demands for its adequate treatment higher qualities than Miss Kingsley has at her command. But with this reserve she has given us an excellent example of the semi-religious type of historical novel.
The Leaven of Love is a semi-mystical, semi-sensational story, in which an Indian gem, an Indian Prince, hypnotism, and the transmigration of souls are all mixed up with every- day life in London. The result is readable, and a certain Oriental glamour is cast even over Half Moon Street by the mysterious " Chrysa Ledra," about whomlthe reader has an eerie feeling that she is not a woman at all. It is a pity that a novel so essentially different both in plot and treatment should contain an Indian scene dealing with the restoration of the jewel so closely resembling the Indian scene at the end of The Moonstone. There is no suggestion of Wilkie Collins's book in any other part of the story, but these two scenes resemble each other more closely than is artistic.
There is a really original idea in Mr. Fergus Hume's latest murder story, Shylock of the River. The murderer, after many false clues and meanderings, turns out quite unsuspectedly to be—but on second thoughts it would be most unfair to reveal the secret. It is enough to say that even the most astute amateur of enigmas will not fathom the mystery till near the end of the book.
Homer Ferrara, the villain of The Plunder Ship, was not only the son of a Peer and an unscrupulous financier, but he was —mirabile dicta—a tall hunchback. In so abnormal a physique one naturally expects an equally abnormal mind, and Mr. Headon Hill is equal to the expectation. Homer Ferrars having organised a company and chartered a ship to fish up imaginary treasure in the Maldives, sends out his brother as captain of the expedition. For a while Captain Ferrara amused himself by fishing up jettisoned curios as a basis for fraudulent tele- grams to the directors, and then took to searching for treasure on his own account, turned pirate, attacked an island, killed an English lady and several natives, and in turn had his ship blown up by a torpedo. Confronted with the evidence of his fraud, the tall hunchback is struck down by paralysis, and, in Mr. Headon Hill's elegant phrase, goes to join " the con- course of dead-and-gone company-promoters who in making this world too hot to hold them have, in all probability, found a hotter." Mr. Headon Hill has done much better work than The Plunder Ship, in which the quest of sensation has landed him in something perilously near the grotesque.
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