NOVELS.
A BLIND BIRD'S NEST.* Tag name of Miss Mary Findlater is associated with such excellent work, whether as an independent writer or in collabora. tion with her sister, that the appearance of a new novel from her pen is a matter for congratulation for readers and reviewers alike. Her work has charm both of style and con- ception, and her outlook on life is kindly, if far from rose- coloured. She does not shirk hard facts and painful problems; but, on the other hand, she does not deal in unnecessary realism, or revel in the abasement of inefficient virtue or the exaltation of unscrupulous selfishness. The life that she pictures is interesting rather than exhilarating, and the sun- shine which illuminates it has in the main an autumnal radiance. But though this is true of the prevailing tone and temper of Miss Findlater's work, there is enough contrast to give the needful relief. For instance, in the book before us there are at least two characters of an indomitable cheerful- ness—the sort of people who raise the vital temperature of any company they may happen to join—and in spite of the terrible handicap with which she starts on the race of life, the heroine wins her way ultimately into a haven of prosperity and happiness.
How great that handicap is may be gathered from an out- line of the plot. When Agnes Sorel was a baby her father in a moment of passion had taken the life of a man who had dishonoured his sister, and at the opening of the story we find Agnes living with her widowed grandmother in the West of England. Her father is still in prison, and the domestic tragedy is only heightened by the fact that the woman whose wrong Austin Sorel had summarily avenged was and remains wholly unworthy of sympathy or compassion. Clare Sorel, utterly selfish and ungrateful, filled with abiding resentment against her brother, sponging on her relations when not engaged as a companion on the Continent, is the very incarna. tion of mental and moral slackness, alongside of whom her grim old mother, bearing her sorrows with stoical reserve, is a dignified and even noble figure. Agnes, when we first meet her, is a girl at school, already dimly conscious of the gulf that divides her from her happier schoolmates, but as yet ignorant of the details of the family tragedy. The first kleam of sunshine comes into her life through contact with the aunt of one of her school friends,—a radiant American lady with an only son, a boy little older than herself, whose chivalrous kindness kindles her passionate gratitude. This boy-and-girl friend- ship gradually ripens into a genuine mutual attachment, which stands the test of Agnes's disclosure of her father's crime. But on learning by chance that Terence's mother views their attachment with misgiving, Agnes, already left homeless by the death of her grandmother, engages herself to a man old enough to be her father, and then breaks off the engagement when Mrs. Woods and her son have returned to America. Meantime her father has been released from prison and slunk away into the wilderness to hide himself, Agnes being conscious, to her shame, of an immense relief. For a while she takes the post of companion to an elderly spinster, a lady "always ill but just never dead " ; who "had not got a temper or anything but only symptoms"; till, hearing that her father is ill, she goes out to America to nurse him, with results that the expert novel-reader may be left to divine.
As often happens in the works of women novelists, the book is stronger in characterisation than in construction. We do not quite understand, for instance, why the generous and kindly cousin should never have come to the rescue in the early stages of the story. Again, the brutalisation of the father by his long imprisonment, considering that he had once been "a prince among men," is by no means convincing. As a matter of fact, to judge from the details of his story, it seems most unlikely that his sentence would have been more than five or ten years at the outside. Indeed, the intro- duction of the father on the scene is artificial and perfunctory, and constitutes the most serious blemish in what, with all deductions, is a very interesting, and at times impressive, study of the relations of the rising and the passing generation. A word of praise is due to the charming illustrations, which indicate new possibilities in the application of photography to fiction.
A Blind Bird'. Nat. By Nary Radiator. London Methuen and Co. [Si.]
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