NOVELS.
THE NEW JUNE.*
AN historical novel from the pen of Mr. Newbolt is a thing to be welcomed with more confidence than is inspired by the great majority of these ventures, and for excellent reasons. He has a 'generous and wholesome outlook on life, he is a scholar, and he is, to avoid all exaggeration or comparison, a poet who has never descended to mediocrity. Then be has
been happily guided in his choice of a tlieme,—a choice to which he may well have been prompted by his studies of
Froissart, for the time is that of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and in helping us to realise the pageantry and decorative side of the period Mr. Newbolt has drawn freely and fruitfully upon the great chronicler, To a poet, again, Richard IL must always make a special appeal, not merely in virtue of the vicissitudes of his career, but in view of the portrait of the "gentle Richard"
fixed for all time in the wonderful soliloquy of Shakespeare ; and Mr. Newbolt, with a daring not unjustified by results,
has not hesitated to set this most romantic King prominently amongst his dramatis personae, and to enlarge on his variable and engaging traits. The general and safer practice of writers of historical romance is to assign the chief roles to imaginary personages, and keep the historical characters in the background, or only let them pass rapidly across the stage. Mr. Newbolt essays the more arduous path. Indeed, as he tells us in his interesting preface, only one of the characters is invented, "she History of England has nowhere been tampered with, and the Heraldry and Genealogy will be found strictly correct." But this is not the only or the most remarkable deviation from the accustomed practice of his rivals in this genre of fiction. Mr. Newbolt declares himself to be on the side of humanity against archaeology, and one interesting feature of his revolt is the complete abandonment of all effort to reproduce or suggest the mode of speech which prevailed five hundred years ago. In so far as this involves the elimination of the Wardour Street element—the "tushery " which Stevenson so happily ridiculed—there is no ground for cavil. And Mr. Newbolt is too much of the artist to push his method to extreme lengths, and be guilty
of the anachronism of using slang or the colloquial phrase- ology of to-day. Yet while the result is charming in itself, as a picture of the "old, unhappy, far-off things" it is a little disconcerting. Take, for example, the meeting of Lord Kent's son and his squire with the Lady Joan Stafford and Margaret Ingleby on the moors :—
" They sat this time in a hollow among the high bracken, out of which Margot made four wide-brimmed hats. • We are almost unrecognisable,' said Tom, as he fitted one on and looked at the others. Very true,' replied John; • I doubt if our best friends would know us.' Margot gave him a quick glance of under- standing, but Tom ignored the remark. He was settling himself very comfortably in a kind of cushioned seat among the heather tufts. 'This is about as good a day as I have over seen,' he said.
That, too, may prove to be very true,' thought John : this time he did not say it aloud, for Margot's grey eyes were already speaking to his, and a. very faint smile lit them for a moment. Sho looked away and a cloud followed : John wondered whether she was really thinking his thoughts, which included a consider- able amount of misgiving. The company was well met, but the future lay in harder hands than theirs : it might be wise not to The New June. By Henry Newbolt. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. Lesa run on too fast. • I don't see,' remarked Torn, looking up into the cloudless sky, why we shouldn't do this every day.' Phe LOY Bienvenue left the reply to her hostess. Margot laughed a little consciously. 'Don't you P ' she said ; 'I'm afraid I do. I know this moor better than you. After these two days there will be nothing on it till some kind neighbour has put the birds back again. Besides,' she added, 'you forget you are engaged to the Colvilles for to-morrow.'" These are delightful young people, and we follow their fortunes with keen interest, but they talk and act so like the young people of to-day that when we turn a page and come across a date-1397 or 1399—it makes us jump. Human nature remains the same, Mr. Newbolt would reply, and the question of literary expression is immaterial. The argument has it weight, but a writer who claims to have a "perhaps exaggerated respect" for those who have once lived, and for whom "the past is no box of puppets," cannot escape the charge of inconsistency in attributing such singular refinement, such an ethereal modernity, to the men and women of 1400. The sense of bewilderment, to which we have already referred, is mostly aroused in the scenes which deat with the younger dramatis personae. In the portraits of the elder men— notably those of Huntingdon, Kent, and the villain of the plot, the truculent squire Roger Swynnerton—the element of Machiavellian virtir. is much more manifest. Speaking for ourselves, we are not greatly concerned to impugn the truth of Mr. Newbolt's psychology in view of the charm and eloquence of his presentation. He has set before us many of
the most dramatic incidents of a highly romantic reign in an engaging guise without doing violence to its main historical outlines, and personally we have found his account of the tournament at Calais quite as vividly exciting as the best report of the Boat-Race or the University sports.
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