RECENT NOVELS.•

WHIN Mrs. Gaskell died before the completion of her beautiful story, Wives and Daughters, the editor of the maga-

zine in which it was appearing was content to indicate in a brief epilogue the course which the concluding chapters would in all probability have taken. The literary executors of the late Mr. R. L. Stevenson have adopted a different method in dealing with his posthumous and unfinished

novel, St. Ives, and it may at once be conceded that they had considerable justification for employing the services of another band to complete the story. The outline of the remaining chapters had been communicated by the author to his stepdaughter and amanuensis, the tale was "within sight of its conclusion," and there can be little doubt that a far wider circle of readers has been secured for the novel by the treatment to which it has been subjected. If St. Ives had been its author's masterpiece, there would have been strong grounds for leaving it untouched. But the moat thoroughpaced Steven- sonian would hardly advance such a proposition. We know from the Vailima Letters that he was far from regarding it with satisfaction, and Stevenson, unlike many authors, was a pretty good judge of his own work. Lastly, the experiment is in great measure justified by results. Mr. Qniller Couch has acquitted himself of a delicate and arduous task with remark- able tact and skill. If the thing was to be done, no one could have done it better. As for the story, it is that of a French

soldier of noble birth, taken prisoner in the Peninsular War,

who makes his escape from the Castle at Edinburgh, but leaves his heart in the keeping of a fair Scottish maiden. The course of true love—for his love is returned—runs as in the proverb, for St. Ives has killed one fellow-prisoner in a duel and is accused of murder by another. Moreover, be is exposed to the deadly hostility of a rascally cousin who has been disinherited in favour of the hero by a wealthy émigré

grand-uncle, resident in England, and sticks at nothing in his desire for revenge on his rival. The story bristles with inci- dent, the narrative and dialogue have a great deal of Mr. Stevenson's habitual distinction of style, and there are some episodes—notably that of the old French officer who breaks his parole to rejoin his dying daughter, and dies himself on the journey—which strike an authentic note of sentiment. But in the main the story is feverish in its vivacity as well as artificial in its structure, nor will it stand the test of com- parison with the earlier and more " inevitable" products of Stevenson's brilliant and intrepid imagination.

The singular fascination exerted by Mrs. Oliphant in deal- ing with supernatural themes is manifested with unimpaired force in The Lady's Walk. It is the story of the familiar spirit of a Scottish household, the sound of whose footsteps is constantly heard on a certain path so long as all is well with the members of the family, the cessation of these soundsforeboding death or disaster. This simple theme is developed by Mrs.

Oliphant into a story so touching, so delicately illustrative of sisterly and filial devotion, and written with such exquisite dignity and simplicity of style, that it is little short of sacrilege on the part of a reviewer to attempt to sketch its outlines or analyse its peculiar charm. We may be permitted, however, to quote the fine passage in which the " sister- mother " of the Campbell family is portrayed

" She was not a girl, strictly speaking. She was in the per- fection of her womanhood and youth—about eight and twenty, the age when something of the composure of maturity has lighted upon the sweetness of the earlier years, and being so old enhances all the charm of being so young. It is chiefly among young married women that one sees this gracious and beautiful type, delightful to every sense and every requirement of the mind ; but when it is to be met with unmarried it is more celestial still. I cannot but think that this delicate maternity and maidenhood-the perfect bounty of the one, the undisturbed grace of the other— has been the foundation of that adoring devotion which in the old days brought so many saints to the shrine of the Virgin Mother."

The volume is completed by a short sketch entitled " The Ship's Doctor," slighter in texture and less exalted in senti- ment, but showing the author's acute yet sympathetic insight into the workings of the human heart. In both stories the

• (1.) at. Ives. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London : W. Heinemann.- 2.) The Ladp's Walk. By Mrs. Oliphant. London : Methn-n and Co.—(3.) What Maisie Knee. By Henry James. London : W. Heinemann.—(4.) Three Partners. By Bret Harte. With 8 IllustrAions by J. Gibich. London Matto and Windns.—(5.) Perpetua : a Story of Moses in A.D. 213. By S. Baring-Gould, M.A. London : Isbister and Co.—(6.) Jerome. By Mary R. Wilkins. London: Harper Brothers.—(7.) The Pomp of the Larottettes. By Gilbert Parker. London: Methuen and Co.—(8.) A Fair Deceiver. By George Paston. London : Harper Brothers.

portraiture is admirably natural, yet refreshingly free from that fatiguing research after "actuality" which lends to so much modern fiction the character of amateur photography.

In Mud Maisie Knew Mr. Henry James presents the unedifying spectacle of a man of great talent and subtlety, whose sympathies are obviously on the side of the angels, toiling with unflagging persistence and desperate attention to detail over the portraiture of half a dozen as unlovely and squalid souls—spite of their fashionable sur- roundings and showy exteriors—as it has been our misfortune to encounter in the range of modern fiction. It reminds us of nothing so much as a beautifully dressed child making an elaborate mud-pie in the gutter. The mud-pie is a regular work of art, and the child continues to keep its own hands and dress unsoiled. But when all is said and done, the result is only a mud-pie and nothing more. Maisie is the only child of thoroughly disreputable parents, who have just been divorced at the opening of the tale. According to the arrangement, Maisie spends her time alternately with her father and mother. Governesses are provided, and her father marries the younger, handsomer, and incomparably more worthless of the two. The mother also marries again, her second husband being a feeble, invertebrate creature called Sir Claude. Then Maisie, who all the time is tossed about. like a shuttlecock between this disreputable quartet, is the innocent means of bringing her new stepmother and stepfather together, with results that can be easily imagined from their antecedents. Mr. James, it is true, refrains from the crowning feat of making the father and mother marry each other again. That would have exposed him to the charge of attempting to enter into rivalry with the hideous finale of Jude the Obscure. But it could not have rendered the hook more disagreeable than it is. The elaborate ingenuity with which this wretched little child is hemmed round with undesirable relatives in our opinion entirely robs the figure of its intended pathos_ Maisie escapes in the end, thanks chiefly to the dogged determination of the ugly governess, and to the gradual emergence in the child of a moral sense. There are a great. many passages in the book which are evidently meant to be humorous. This, for example, from the description of the divorce proceedings :—" The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, bad made good his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her; it was not so much that the mother's character had been more absolutely damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady's complexion (and this lady's in court, was immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the spots." For the life of us we fail to see where the fun comes in, though no doubt this strenuous facetiousness has its admirers. We note, in conclusion, that some of the names—Wix and Meddle, for example—remind one of Dickens. But we hasten to add, in justice to Mr. Henry James, that there is absolutely nothing else in the book which the most fanatical plagiary-hunter could indicate as recalling in the faintest way the manner or matter of the immortal "Boz."

It is an ungrateful task to find flaws in the work of a writer who has given us so much delight and amusement as Mr_ Bret Harts, but whether it is that familiarity breeds, we will not say contempt, but satiety, or, as we are inclined to think, that a real deterioration has taken place, Three Partners seems to us a sad falling off from the brilliant sketches and short stories of twenty-five years back. No doubt the actual conditions of that unconventional life which Bret Harte still continues to delineate have greatly changed. The Wild West has become somewhat sophisticated ; the very name now con- notes a circus. Poker Flat has, we doubt not, its monster hotel, and Roaring Camp its golf-links. The bowie-knife has become extinct, and promiscuous shooting ceased to affect the death-rate. So, too, with Bret Harte's books. His work, even at its best, was always inclined to be melodramatic, but it was formerly redeemed by its brilliancy and pathos. Three Partners, on the other hand, is a distinctly tawdry romance. The central character is an amiable enthusiast, who can best be described as one in whom the milk of human kindness has been turned to batter. George Barker's blind adoration of his worthless wife is trying enough, but a grotesque climax is reached when, after avowing his love for the handsome wife of the villain of the plot, he allays her scruples in the following astounding speech :- " No,' he said, his whole face suddenly radiating with hope and youthful enthusiasm. No ! Kitty [his wife] will help us; we will tell her all. You do not know her, dearest, as I do—how good and kind she is, in spite of all. We will appeal to her ; she will devise some means by which, without the scandal of a divorce, she and I may be separated. She will take dear little " Sta " [their only child] with her—it is only right, poor girl; but she will let me come and see him. She will be a sister to us, dearest.' "

It is melancholy to think that Mr. Bret Harte should be capable of " slopping over " to such an extent as this.

Writers of fiction have latterly occupied themselves a good deal with the sufferings of the early Christians, and Mr. Baring-Gould's contribution, if it falls short of the wonderful energy and brilliancy of Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis ? is laudably free from the vulgar melodrama and hysterical sentiment associated with recent excursions into this field of romance by native authors. Perpetua is the story of a beautiful Christian girl, saved by the intervention of a young lawyer from being offered as a human sacrifice to the guardian deity of Nemausus (Nimes), only to perish under cruel tortures in the arena. Mr. Baring-Gould is not prodigal of horrors, but when the occasion

arises he is not minded to spare his readers. What lends the

book a distinction rarely encountered in works of this sort is the unconventionality of its portraiture and the vivid use to which the author turns his historical, antiquarian, and geo- logical knowledge. Mr. Baring-Gould; we may add, is no un- compromising eulogist of the early Christians, but discusses

their shortcomings with the utmost candour.

In Jerome we welcome the return of Miss Wilkins from her recent deviation into the realm of sensation and melodrama to those rural scenes which she portrays with a grace and distinc- tion that are all her own. There is a good deal of American literary enterprise which is on a par with the achievements of the New York Journal and World. Miss Wilkins, on the other hand, shows us that in the qualities of artistic reticence, nobility of sentiment, and grace of treatment the Old World has nothing to teach, but rather something to learn from, the New Englander. Jerome will hardly bear comparison in point of construction with some of Miss Wilkins's earlier and shorter stories. Her delicate method hardly lends itself to a work de longue haleine ; she does not specially shine as a weaver of plots, and the march and movement of the narrative suffer from the long period of years over which it is spread out. There is perhaps something almost superhuman in the Quixotry of her hero. But with all deductions, Jerome is a

festinating study of character, or rather of half-a-dozen characters. The central figure is the son of a struggling farmer whose sudden disappearance throws the burden of domestic responsibility upon the lad at the age of twelve, and the story is concerned with his long and heroic struggle to extricate his invalid mother from financial troubles, and his love for the daughter of his benefactor, Squire Eben Merritt.

Lncina, if not so striking as Jerome, is a delightfully picturesque figure ; one cannot help regretting that Mr. Randolph Caldecott did not live to draw her portrait as well as those of the Squire and that chivalrous and admirable old soldier, Colonel Lamson.

Mr. Gilbert Parker has done nothing better than The Pomp of the Lavilettes, a rural tragedy of French Canada at the time of Papineau's abortive rebellion. It is worthy of notice, however, that admirably drawn as are the characters of the native dramatis persona—especially the two sisters and the

old notary—by far the most striking and original portrait is that of the Irish adventurer, the Hon. Tom Ferrol, who marries Christine Lavilette, and steals away the heart of her married sister Sophie. Ferrol is still a young man, bankrupt in purse, in reputation, and in health, but possessed of indomitable courage and irresistible personal charm. He is not merely labelled with these qualities ; they gradually impress them- selves on the reader as his character is revealed in his actions,

his conversations, and his soliloquies. The fascination he exerts over the gentle Sophie, the passion he excites in the fiery

Christine, are perfectly intelligible. As his compatriots say, he " has such a way with him." And yet dangerous and un- scrupulous as he is, Ferrol is no vulgar seducer. His sins and crimes are never wholly sordid. An inextinguishable sense of humour irradiates his darkest hours. With him patriotism is -still a ruling instinct, and if he plays the highwayman, it is to get money to relieve the needs of his sister. Again, there is something pathetic in the spectacle of this brilliant humorous ne'er-do-well, dying by inches of consumption, fully aware of his doom, yet beguiling himself at times with the fond hope of recovery. The gradual but ultimate growth in his heart of a sense of remorse is finely indicated, and his Quixotic, if theatrical end brings a deeply interesting story to a thrilling conclusion.

The plot of .A Fair Deceiver is not remarkable for its novelty. The lovely coquette who captivates every one, includ- ing the middle-aged professor who ought to have paired off at the outset with her staid elder sister, is a tolerably familiar figure in modern fiction. But George Paston's treatment of a somewhat hackneyed theme is so unconventional, his style so fresh, and his humour so genuine, that we have little to complain of in his novel, save the unexpected and somewhat gratuitously tragic ending of what promised to be a refreshing comedy of sentiment. Lesbia is an in- corrigible flirt, but almost everything can be forgiven to her in virtue of her sunny temper, her loveable ways, and her whimsical talk. The situation is admirably summed np in the closing sentence of the passage which describes her appearance :—" A feathery red and white spaniel was leaping joyfully at her side ; it was Magda's dog, but it loved Lesbia best." The early chapters are full of diverting scenes, notably that between Lesbia and the discontented parishioner whom she keeps within the fold of orthodoxy by a timely promise to trim her bonnet with a green and yellow bird, adding " only it's a Church bird, mind, so I can't have it taken to chapel." Lesbia's method of teaching Old Testament history, again, is simply impayable. In short, A Fair Deceiver, spite of an occasional touch of bitterness, and the abrupt tragedy of the dinouement, is a most entertaining and brilliantly written story.