RECENT NOVELS.* Mies. OLIPHANT'S long and honourable literary career, and
her unmistakable rank among contemporary writers, rightfully demand precedence for any work of hers which finds a place in a reviewer's parcel of fiction. The Prodigals and Their Inheri- &nee is, however, hardly a satisfactory example of the kind of work by which its author's well-deserved fame was long ago won. Mrs. Oliphant's wide and intimate knowledge of life is still in evidence, and the mere literary workmanship shows that the practised hand has not lost its cunning; but her usual good fortune in that not unimportant matter— a choice of theme—has for the time deserted her, and The Prodigals falls short of substantial interest and substantial attractiveness. Of the few leading characters in the story, the majority are simply disagreeable and repellent, and those who are clearly meant to be more winning lack the solidity and colour which are essential to positive charm. Two persons in the story—Miss Farrell, the companion, and Mr. Babington, the family lawyer—are in Mrs. Oliphant's best manner. They are genial in conception and delicately truth- ful in rendering ; but though the latter, towards the close of the second volume, plays an important part in extricating the bewildered Winifred Chester from the complication in which she had so fatuously involved herself, the relation of both to the main action is comparatively insignificant. Nor is it possible to say anything of Winifred's lover, Dr. Edward Langton, except that he is a very gentlemanly, discreet, and judicious young man ; and though in real life persons of this kind are very satisfactory—when one does not get too much of them—their possibilities in the way of giving interest to fiction are speedily exhausted. Dr. Langton, indeed, comes very near to being a bore, and as he was evidently not intended to be one, his boredom strikes a certain note of failure. There remain only the Cheaters, and it is not easy to extract much entertainment either from the varied moral obj ectionableness of the three men, or the amiable fatuity of the one girl. Mr. Chester, the obstinate, overbearing domestic tyrant, has exiled and disinherited his two sons, and left the whole of his wealth to Winifred on the condition that not a penny of it is given to either of her brothers. On the death of her father, Winifred impulsively summons the exiles home, and so when the poor, shiftless George and the loud, caddish Toni arrive at Bedloe each imagines that the sentence of disin- heritance has been cancelled in his favour. When the truth is dis- covered, poor Winnie, who has incurred her father's suspicion by her unfailing loyalty to the two scapegraces, becomes a target for the whining reproaches of the one, and the vulgar abuse of the other, and finds herself hunted into a cul de sac from which there seems no escape. Finally, Mr. Babington comes to her rescue; but the atmosphere of low sordidness which per- vades the second volume is very depressing. Still, to quote the remark of Mr. Stockton's Mrs. Leeks—or was it Mrs. Ale- shine ?—" flannel is flannel ; " and Mrs. Oliphant is always Mrs. Oliphant. We will possess our souls in patience, and the next book will probably be a renewal of the familiar delights.
Mr. Weyman has not been long before the public, but he has already convinced it of two things,—that he can create a character and that he is a superb teller of a story. Indeed, as a narrator, pare and simple, it is not too much to say that he has few equals and still fewer superiors among living 'novelists. His narration has a swiftness and directness that hurry the reader resistlessly along; a picturesqueness which compels vivid apprehension of every item in the march of inci- dents ; a grip of the essentials, as distinguished from the mere accidents, of the story to be told, which forbids fumbling, and -confers upon every sentence, indeed upon every word, the -value which belongs to the indispensable. Mr. Weyman's latest hero, M. Gil de Berault, is another "Gentleman of France," whose gentlehood has been a little—indeed somewhat more than a little—damaged daring an adventurous and not over-creditable career. As a professional gambler, and as a past-master in the fine art of murder by duel, he has an undesirable reputation which no one can say is undeserved, and yet—as the reader comes first to guess and then to see- • (1.) The Prodigals and Their inheritanes. By Mrs. Oliphant. 2 vols. Lon- don: Methuen and 0o.—(2 ) Under the Red Robe. By Stanley Weyman. 2 vole. London: Methuen and Co.--(3 ) The Queen of Love. By S. Baring-Gould. B vols. London : Methuen and 0o.—(4.) The Perfect Way of Honour. By G. Oerdella. S vole. London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co.—(3.) The Power of the Past. By EsnO: Stuart. 3 vols. London R. Bentley and Son.— {6.) Mary Fenwick's Daughter. By Beatrice Whitby. 3 vole. London: Hurst and Blacken.
the root of a really noble chivalry is not dead in the man, and when certain gentle warm rains descend upon it, it can put forth shoots and leaves. The gist of the story is that De Berault, in order to save his forfeited life, undertakes for the great Cardinal de Richelieu a service which will certainly be one of danger, and which will probably be what must seem to a man in whom gentle instincts still survive, one of dis- honour also. The risks are all after his own heart; and the records of his various grappling with them suffice to make Under the Red Robe one of the best stories of adventure that have appeared for many a long day. But when the noble ladies whose happiness he has set himself to destroy by spying and treachery, treat him with a generous hospitality and still more generous trust—when with an eager all-believing effusion of confidence they voluntarily make him a sharer in the secret which he has plotted to surprise—the dishonour of the thing is too much even for the accommodating conscience of the desperado. It would be unfair to hint at the details of the story, but such is its general scope, and it is not more attractive as a narrative of admirably invented in- cident than as a really fine study of the development of a curiously complex nature. There is nothing sudden, forced, or melodramatic about De Berault's conversion ; he " gets liberty," to use the revivalist phrase, only after a hard fight and some nasty falls ; the whole story has the convincingness of life. Some of the single episodes too are perfect ; but we hope we have said enough to send readers to an admirable romance.
The Queen of Love is to Mr. Baring - Gould's best novels what a piece of drapery worn in fabric and faded in colour is to another piece from the same loom' which retains its original stoutness of texture and richness of tint. With materials similar in general character to those that are utilised in his latest book, Mr. Baring-Gould has produced stories of very remarkable imaginative force and impressiveness ; but The Queen of Love, though not deficient in narrative interest, or in the picturesque effects of which its author is a master, is sadly wanting in that rich vitality so largely present in the three or four stories by which we believe he will be long remembered. Queenie Santi, the young circus-rider, who after her father's death comes under the guardianship of the narrow pragmatical tyrant, Jabez Grice, was, we are sure, intended to be a heroine of the type of Mehalah and Urith,—gentler perhaps, and more winning than they, but still with something of their wild force of personality and character. Unfortunately she is nothing of the kind. She has a certain charm, and she would have a good deal of freshness if she did not so constantly remind us of her distinguished predecessors ; but she is moonlight to their sunlight, water to their wine. Once or twice Mr. Baring- Gould seems about to rise to the level of his intent, but somehow he just stops short of it. And while Queenie is, so to speak, a failure of under-emphasis, most of the other characters are failures of over-emphasis. Jabez, the obstinate, unscrupulous bigot ; Andrew, his fatuous son, who accepts his father's will as if it were an irrevocable fate; and the youthful termagant, Ada Button—who becomes Ada Grice—are all examples of that violent exaggeration of portraiture which is the besetting sin of the author's least happy hours. Still, however one criticises Mr. Baring-Gould's books, one cannot help reading them ; for they have that quality of " go" which atones for a great many sins; and in The Queen of Love he makes capital use of the descriptive and narrative material found in the new territory of the Cheshire salt district. The two chapters in which the brine geyser, Roaring Meg, plays a, part, are not soon to be forgotten.
We cannot but think it rather a pity that Mrs. or Miss G. Cardella, whose first novel, A King's Daughter, was an alto- gether pleasant and wholesome book, should have written the dismal third volume of The Perfect Way of Honour. We would not be unjust even by implication, and therefore we hasten to say that even the pages which we think a mistake, are perfectly free from those offences against refinement and good taste so often found in the novels of women who delight, to treat unpleasant themes in an unpleasant manner. Still, as the author has shown herself able to write a really in- teresting story without availing, herself of one special kind of narrative material, we think she might have left such material to the less fortunately endowed novelists who are, apparently, unable to dispense with it. Mary Carruthers's discovery that her husband has an unacknowledged son whose claim upon him is older than that of her own boy Ronald, her determination that such claim shall be acknow- ledged and acted upon by Anthony, and her death from small-pox caught in performing a mother's duty for the nameless waif, are not merely uncomfortable constituents in an otherwise pleasant story; they seem to us to be en- tirely deficient in appropriateness, and therefore their presence is an offence against imaginative unity. We do not think of Anthony Carruthers as a man of exceptional high-mindedness, but through the first two volumes he is certainly represented as having a character that is both kindly and honourable, and the turn of the story which, without any preparation, compels an entire revision of our judgment, is surely an artistic blot. Indeed, the whole book, in spite of various merits—for such it undoubtedly has—bears upon it the marks of careless and hasty workmanship. The distinguished actor, Grantley, is introduced with so much elaboration that we look upon him as certainly cast for an important part in the narrative drama; but just when our expectations are, so to speak, on tip-toe, he drops out of the story, and we see him no more. Nor is this the only broken thread ; the loose ends are everywhere. The author has much sympathy, some insight, and two or three other good gifts ; but she has yet to learn that if a novel is not an organic whole, it is more or less of a failure.
Miss Dane Stuart, in The Power of the Past, is altogether too heavy-handed ; the book is full of that sentimental exaggeration which sacrifices genuine vraisemblance to facti- tious vigour. It is, in short, of melodrama all compact. Sometimes the melodrama is rather good, sometimes it is rather poor, but we never escape from it ; we never feel the grip of reality. An untrained, high-spirited girl, chafing under the restraints of an uncongenial home, fancies herself in love with a fascinating stranger, and before she has got over her fancy, she writes to him what seems to be nothing more than a gushing and injudicious letter. Some years after- wards, she becomes betrothed to a very different sort of man, whom she really loves, when the fascinating stranger reappears and threatens to show the letter to the girl's fiance, his pos- session of this document being the justification for the high- sounding title of the book. He flaunts the letter in her face in true histrionic fashion; she threatens him with a loaded revolver which lies at hand; and there is a struggle, in which the revolver goes off, and he is mortally wounded. A long time afterwards, Inez makes a full confession to her husband, a terrible prig, whose conduct is such as to drive her to despair. In her despair she drinks half a teacupful of laudanum ; but immediately after committing this "rash act," as reporters call it, she receives an affectionate letter from the prig, and resolves to walk off the effects of the opiate. The concluding sentences are rather vague, but we infer that Inez is successful in her undertaking, and that she and Basil live happily ever afterwards. From this summary of the story, it will be inferred, and rightly, that The Power of the Past is a poor thing.
Mary Fenwick's Daughter is not melodramatic, but it is terribly dull. Miss Whitby's frugality in the matter of inci- dent is really extraordinary; she gives us hardly anything but a carriage accident and the snowing-up of a rallway-train; and the three volumes are devoted to the sayings and doings —if doings they can be called—of some of the most unin- teresting people that we have ever encountered in fiction. And yet if one were to say this, and nothing more than this, one would be doing a grave injustice to an exceedingly careful and conscientiously executed piece of work. The surface portraiture is excellent ; it is really impossible to lay a finger upon a single situation or a single sentence and say, " This is untrue," or even, " This is inadequate." It is only when one regards the book as a whole that one has a feeling of inadequacy,—a sense of the lack of that all-round execution which is essential to interest. We are inclined to think that Miss Whitby's compara- tive failure is due to the fact that she has attempted the difficult and perhaps impossible task of giving lifelikeness to the portrait of a girl who is thoroughly healthy both in mind and in body, but who is nevertheless absolutely incapable of any emotion warmer than genial camaraderie. Many girls in fiction have become engaged to men whom they did not love, because they have yielded either to pressure from without, or to the inner prompting of pity, pique, avarice, or ambition. In
Bab Fenwick's case there are none of these incitements, and therefore her two betrothals are up in the air. Jack Holland and Stanhope Peel—decidedly uninteresting young men—are regarded by Bab with very friendly feelings ; but she does not desire either of them for a lover, and yet she accepts them both. This is a kind of story which only very bright humour or exceptional literary skill can render attractive; and Miss Whitby has no humour to speak of, while her style, though good enough in its way, lacks vivacity and lightness of touch. She has written interesting novels before, and we hope she will write them again, but in Mary Fenwick's Daughter she handicaps herself too heavily.
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