INCOGNITA.*

THE work of the critic would be much pleasanter, and the life of the habitual novel-reader much less monotonous, if our minor novelists would, in one very important matter, follow the ex- ample set by Mr. Henry Cresswell in the three volumes of Incognita. Its intellectual construction and literary style, though in many ways meritorious, are by no means faultless, and any reviewer who believes with Edgar Poe, that criticism exists to point out blemishes rather than beauties, will find that Mr. Cresswell's pages supply him with a fairly satisfying amount of raw material ; but we prefer to dwell upon one broad charac- teristic of the book, which is so refreshing that its presence inclines us to forgive for its sake a far greater number of small sins than can fairly be charged against its author.

The principal vice of contemporary fiction (we refer to English fiction alone, for across the Channel our criticism does not hold good), is contented imitativeness — a lack of imaginative originality. In the conception both of character and situation, especially the latter, our story-tellers .are, for the most part, satisfied to travel along well-worn ruts, and to regard invention as a thing of comparatively little moment, the original element of their work residing in the manner rather than in the matter,

• incognita. By Henry Creswell, In 3 volt. London: Hurst and Blsokett.

in the presentation rather than in the thing presented. The crimes, the coincidences, the entanglements, and the misunder- standings which are dealt in so largely by the novelists of the day resemble nothing so much as the contents of the window of a shop doing a poor business,—the daily or weekly varia- tion in the arrangement of the goods does not hide from the observant passer-by the fact that the stock-in-trade remains unchanged. Our novels, in short, belie their name by their deficiency in novelty, and the singular popularity of such

a book as Called Back, which, though good in several ways, is remarkable only for its inventive skill in the matter of new

situations, seems to show that the slow-sighted public has begun to perceive this deficiency and perhaps to resent it.

There is no mystery in Incognita, and such curiosity as is aroused by the opening and maintained by the progress of the

story is a curiosity concerning developments of character rather than combinations of incident. The opening chapters place the principal persons as the pieces are placed in a chess problem, and the interest lies in the observation of the process by which certain curiously strained and complicated relations are re- duced to simplicity. At the beginning of the first volume, the main situation is led up to by a conversation between

Leonard Ravenhill and Cecilie Danvill, who are betrothed to each other. Ravenhill has heard that his fiancée has in some way compromised herself with a certain Major Layers, and demands from her a contradiction of the story that has come

to his ears. Cecilie cannot deny the facts, but attempts an explanation which Ravenhill rejects as inadequate, the con- sequence being that the engagement is there and then broken off. In the course of a few days it becomes known to Ravenhill that Major Lavers, with the heartlessness of the habitual profligate, is working upon the fears of Cecilie, and that she is on the point of flying with him simply to avoid an exposure of her indiscretion. A look of anguish which he sees for a moment upon her face inspires him to make a sudden resolution. He knows that within the few next hours Major Lavers will be walking through an unfrequented wood, and that it is his habit to carry a swordcane. Ravenhill takes down from the wall of his own room a similar weapon, and goes in search

of the Major, intending to force him to a duel and kill him. He is possessed by none of the passions which ordinarily prompt a man to murder. He does not love Cecilie, does not even hate Major Layers; but he feels called upon as a man to rescue the one, and to his mind this can only be done by killing the other.

It is simply a business which has to be gone through, disagree- able no doubt, and certainly dangerous, but necessary and un- avoidable. We will not stay to discuss the question of the dramatic veracity of this part of the story, which seems to us more than doubtful ; but we are bound to allow Mr. Cresswell to choose his own foundation for his imaginative superstructure, or we cannot judge the superstructure itself with anything like fairness. Ravenhill is successful in finding the Major, in com- pelling him to fight, and in compassing Cecilie's deliverance by running his weapon through the heart of her persecutor. He is walking away from the scene of the conflict, when, turning his head to take a last look at his victim, he sees, standing beside the body, a tall girl in a black silk mask, whose eyes are fixed on himself. They look silently at one another for a moment, and then she speaks :—

"'You have been fighting, Mr. Ravenhill ?' Her voice had just a touch of hesitation. The handkerchief muffled it. It was some seconds before he replied, As you see.'—' You have killed him. Why did you do that ?' asked the girl with a plainness which was itself dignity. Ravenbill's eyes caught hers.—' Why should you ask?' he inquired.—' Because,' answered the Incognita slowly, 'I know who

that is. That is '—her head moved thoughtfully—' was, Major Lavers of the —th. And there—was there a lady—Mr. Ravenhill ?' With bow strange a gleam in her dark eyes she asked it. And pro- bably she read affirmation in his face, for, before he had time to answer, she added a long significant ' Ah !' Bending, she looked at the dead man. Then she recommenced her questions. 'And you fought her battle ?'—' I fought her battle.' ' The girl stood gazing at him, surely with some admiration.—' I thought the men like you were all deed,' she said, slowly, admiringly, 'the men who fought our battles. I congratulate you. Have no fear of me. I shall not betray you. But you should be gone, you are only running risks by remaining here.' Again she bent over the dead man, taking a longer look. Raising herself she repeated, Fear nothing from my having seen you. I will not betray you. Making him a bow, she turned to go, as he returned the salute."

With this striking and novel situation the real action of the story begins, and it will be seen that the author has all the materials for a novel—or rather a romance—of strong though somewhat morbid interest. We can imagine how Hawthorne

would have revelled in such a motif, and what fine imaginative use he would have made of it; bat Mr. Cresswell is not a Hawthorne, and there are very few chapters in Incognita which are either conceived or executed up to the level of this bold opening. We find much that is good, not a little that is very good, but we cannot help feeling that we have a right to expect something supremely good, and are proportionately disappointed at not finding it. Almost from the very beginning Ravenhill's guilt is known to three persons, for he confesses it to Cecilie, and there is something very like genius in the pages which tell how she received the confession ; but to the world at large he is an unsuspected person, and, some of the most striking passages in Incognita are those devoted to his mental and emotional experi- ences during the weeks immediately subsequent to the commis- sion of the crime. Here is one of them :—

" He had been concerning himself singnlarly little about the demise of Major Lavers. The event in the wood, indeed, hung about, almost always present in the background of his thoughts, but it rarely pre- sented itself to nearer view. It received no encouragement to do so. Only now and then it lent him odd sensations and unaccustomed. He had, for example' found himself more unlike other folks than he had been before. Perhaps he had more than the common allot- ment of vanity, and perhaps not; but the discovery afforded him something which was not dissatisfaction. This was his first and most general impression. The next was different. He was aware of a certain dry drollery in being addressed, as men will address one another, in a strain of imputed righteousness. A thing that more often struck him was the phenomenon of his own indifference. So much has been written, and so well, about the remorse that follows murder—especially a first murder—of the terrible blood-guiltiness, and the utter irretrievableness, and the unrest and disquietude— that no educated man can be ignorant of these themes. Since his crime, in odd moments, Godfrey Ravenhill had a good many times morally probed himself to feel how his case stood in all these familiar respects; en every occasion to find the answer very much at cross-purposes with generally accepted opinions. What he really felt was—he saw fully the significance of the co- incidence—exactly what. Klytaimnestra expressed after killing her husband—that his right hand had done a righteous deed.

To have killed appeared to him in some degree a moral and intellectual advance. His mind strolled in a world in which the lights had suddenly shifted, conveying new appearances to every object, down to the simplest. Previously some thoughts that now stirred in him had been impossible. He had made a step towards an emancipation, and experienced some expansion of soul quite out of proportion to any assignable cause. Life seemed now wider than it used to seem."

We have mentioned Hawthorne, and some of the latter sen- tences in this passage will recall to many the experience of Dona.tello, in Transformation. But there is a difference. Sir Joshua Reynolds, according to a well-known story, after standing for some time before a much-admired picture, exclaimed, with a snap of his fingers, "It wants that." Now, this passage just wants the something which even Sir Joshua could only express by an eloquent gesture,—the touch of genius, the breath of life. - It has not the irresistible persuasiveness of clear imaginative vision : we do not accept ; we question. And even if in the end we conclude that Mr. Cresswell's analysis is accurate, it is still unsatisfying when set beside the work of a great seer which does not even suggest questioning but compels acceptance.

There is a faculty which is to imagination what keen observa- tion is to sensible perception,—which conquers credence by the sheer force of realisable details. There is one such detail here, in the sentence describing Ravenhill's feelings on being addressed "in a strain of imputed righteousness ;" but the rest of the passage, in spite of its clever shrewdness, is tentative and indecisive.

We have devoted so much space to one feature of Incognita, that we are unable to do justice to it as a whole ; and this we regret, for it is really a noteworthy book. The subject

is one which, as we have said, lends itself readily to morbid treatment, and yet on the whole the story is singu- larly free from morbidity—a freedom due, it may be, to that very lack of perfect vision of which we have been speaking. The weakest part of Incognita is that which is devoted to the relations between Ravenhill and the masked witness of his crime, with whom he is afterwards brought into frequent con- tact, but whose identity is not discovered by him until nearly

the close of the story ; though even here Mr. Cresswell shows his freedom from the vulgar commonplaces of fiction by refrain- ing from making them the hero and heroine of a love-story—a motif which would have had an irresistible attraction for an in- ferior novelist. But the book is full of good things. What, for example, could be more neatly put than the remark of Dr. How.

denthat "Guilt is power, as too many people have discovered to their cost; and before aman commits a crime he should assure

himself that he is one of those superior men who can possess power without displaying it "? Or how often do we come across a little bit of analysis more subtly and searchingly true than that contained in the following sentences ? The italics, of course, are ours

"'What is the time, Cuthbert?' she asked.—He named it, and added, 'Should you sit at this open window ?'—`I am not in theleast cold, and to-night the moonlight seems—I cannot tell what.' That was true. Cecilie Danvill seldom could tell what anything seemed. There are con sciousnesses that stop at the fact of seentingnese

We have not cared to dwell upon certain inconsistencies of matter and slovenlinesses of manner which are of little conse- quence, and which every reader can discover for himself. Incognita is worthy of careful reading, for Mr. Cresswell has constructive skill, fine grasp of character—Ceeilie is a master- piece of delineation—and no inconsiderable gift of true humour, which is, however, once or twice dangerously near degeneration into farce. In future novels we should recommend him to keep such characters as Peepy Malmaison well in hand. The record of his performances as a public prosecutor is certainly funny, but a little too incredible.