THREE NOVELS.* IT is rarely tbe privilege of the reviewer
to give unmixed praise to any work ; how greatly that privilege is esteemed when it does
• (1.) A Border Shepherdess. By Amelia E. Barr. 1 vol. London James Clarke and Co.,—(2.) The Bride of a Day. By Fortune du Boiagobey. Tram- lated from the French by Henry Llewellyn Williams. 1 vol. London : George Routledge and Sons.—(3.) The Gay World. By Joseph Hatton. 3 vole. London: Hurst and Blaokett. occur, authors who suffer under the lash of their critics would find it hard to believe. To those of the public who like stories of a serious nature we can heartily recommend A Border Shepherdess. It is to the authoress herself that we have some complaints to make and suggestions to offer for future use. The tone of the book is high, the characters have most of them strong and marked personality, especially Faith, and her old servant Fhemie. The scene of the story is laid in wild, open country, very beautiful and very well described ; and Faith, a brave, beautiful woman, is a very fit heroine for such surround- ings. Her dignity and gentleness are strongly brought out in all her encounters with the stormy and passionate Terres Graeme, and as a daughter, sister, aunt, and finally as the betrothed of Lord Graeme, she is almost faultless and most charming, without oppressing us with her virtues. So much for the public; now for a few words to Miss Barr, who makes several blunders in A Border Shepherdess which she may be able to avoid in future if they are pointed out to her. First, then, she holds up the stern, hard, uncompromising character of the typical Covenanter as the true Christian character, while it is, in fact, very far indeed from attaining any right to such a dis- tinction; and when, as is generally the case—and it is so in the present instance—its very virtues are upheld by a supreme self- satisfaction and self-glorification, it is the exact opposite of the Christian character. It has the virtues of the proud Stoic, not those of the humble Christian. Old Matthew Harribee, when dying and pronouncing on himself the final sentence that God has tried him and found him "not wanting "—in com- plete forgetfulness of his cruel self-righteousness in casting off his daughter, and leaving his wife to pine away in grief, uncomforted and nnsympathised with—is a most self- deceiving person. And his selfishness is great in accepting from Faith—his daughter—the promise, however willingly given, that she will hold all her own interests, her love, her lover, all she has or ever will have, in abeyance to the interests of his only son, a favourite child, a beautiful but mind- less boy of seven. Faith, too, we cannot exonerate from blame for her conduct towards Archie Renwick, her lover, whom she sets aside, for years, for the sake of this same child, not only after, but also long before the promise given to her father; and we must consider her in a great measure responsible for the ruin of a character, never at any time strong. Again, what is Miss Barr thinking of when she represents Faith as inclining her heart towards Lord Graeme—whom she has hitherto steadily rejected, as being one of the wicked and unregenerate of the earth —at the very moment when she has discovered his crime, which would have hardened the heart of any good woman against him ? A fault in the construction of the story is that it is spread over such an exceedingly long period; there is not nearly rapidity of action enough ; years count as nothing, and the patience of Faith's lovers surpasses even Jacob's in their long-serving; for instance, we hear, quite casually, of one of them that " several years passed before Lord Graeme saw Faith again," and yet his passion suffers no diminution. Suggestions of coming evil are constantly being made by our authoress, and then passed over with no result ; and it is the height of absurdity to suppose that a nobly born, highly educated young man like Roland Graeme would submit to having his estate appropriated by his uncle, and himself declared to be illegitimate, while holding proofs to the contrary, just because he preferred his own free life, and thought the position given him by his uncle's crime better suited to that life, than the position of a nobleman and landed proprietor. But when all is said and done, A Border Shepherdess remains a very good story, very well worth reading by lovers of serious fiction.
The Bride of a Day is undeniably an interesting story, and cleverly worked out, but it deals with the most rascally set of personages conceivable. What induced Mr. Williams to give himself the trouble of translating a mere sensation novel from the French into the worst possible English, it is difficult to imagine. It is impossible not to follow the fortunes of the virtuous Therese with interest; and the kind-hearted, faithful Caradoc—the simple-minded soldier, who is the dupe of every knave he comes across—excites our sympathy ; but the volatile though generous and good-natured Captain de Parentis—who murmurs to the "bride of an hour," whom he has never before seen, that he "adores her "—is scarcely worthy of the position given him in the tale. As for the rest of the company, we can only repeat that they are knaves and scoundrels and "light ladies," as they are styled. Mr. Williams may claim some merit as a trans-
lator for the thoroughly slangy effect given to the talk carried
on by his dramatis personm, which is, no doubt, a very faithful reproduction of the original ; but his own English, where no conversation, if such it can be called, is going on, is miserable. On the whole, and in spite of its interest, we think that The Bride of a Day had better have been left to adorn the libraries of a country which is notorious for the levity of its fiction ; we could have "got along," as the Americans say, with our own sensational novels, without Mr. Williams's addition to our stock.
Like many another book of its kind, The Gay World begins very well ; there is something unique about the first part of the first volume, which promises considerable interest; but, un- fortunately, this interest soon collapses. The plot is too slight to bear the long delay in its culmination. The great diamond and other robberies are very well and graphically narrated in the first fifty pages or so of the first volume; but as nothing remains for the whole of three volumes, but to witness the exposure of the thief—who is clearly pointed out to the reader from the first—the long-drawn-out chapters from the middle of the first volume to the middle of the third, and the long trial, given in detail, are very tedious. The interest which the characters excite is feeble. We certainly experience a mild and somewhat sceptical hope of ascertaining how the hero will reveal, in his own person, all the wonderful and exceptional virtues which his friend and biographer has attributed to him, but it is scarcely necessary to say that he never does reveal them ; the nearest approach to doing so is in the calm and stoical manner in which he takes leave of his love, and sets out on an exploring expedition in Central Africa, in fulfilment of a determination taken before his engagement. Now, as far as we can judge, he would have been more than justified in marrying the lady before taking leave of her, as thereby he would, we are told, have taken half the pain from the parting; but we have a strong suspicion that this valiant but unnecessary deed was done in order to prove the exceptional courage for which.his biographer had vouched on his behalf, like a true moral sponsor as he was. The inevitable announcement of his violent death comes in due course, and in the usual vague but convincing form, and enables the heroine, in her turn, to exhibit her high courage, going about her accustomed work like a marble statue. Few will be taken in by the report of Godfrey's death, and all experienced novel-readers, we venture to predict, will be prepared for his reappearance at the end of the third volume. Mr. Hatton places among his characters several mem- bers of the upper ten thousand, and seems to think that keeping desperately late hours, and consuming an unlimited amount of wine and spirits and the best cigars are the stamps which mark the true blue-blooded aristocrat, as a calm and stately demeanour marked the Vere de Vere. Our author's " detective " is a very lamb-like creature, in spite of the curious snap which he gives with his jaws in moments of great excitement, and his apology to the biographer for venturing to capture the wealthy thief—who has, since his introduction, become a friend of the Hon. Eric York's (i.e., the biographer's)—does not redound to his credit, and is made, apparently, for the very insufficient reason that Mr. York is a "real gentleman." Mr. Hatton seems to think that friendship, or even good-fellowship, should regulate the conduct of men in dealing with criminals and in conniving at crime, and that neither a sense of right and wrong nor obedience to the laws of the land should prevent this. Our author's grammar is by no means faultless, as will be seen by such a sentence as the following: "He said this prior to he and I taking our leave." Words are often used carelessly,—not expressing what it is evi- dently the author's intention to express; Andersen, the fairy-story
teller, is not Anderson, nor Benedick, Beatrice's lover, Benedict. The little estate of "The Gables," no matter bow small, would find it a hard task to squeeze itself in between the high and rooky cliffs of the Derbyshire Valley of the Dove ; and even the "forest trees and their shadows," under which Mr. York had "dreamed away many a summer hour," would look askance at the narrow and stony quarters provided for their accommodation in that same Dale. To skim through upon a journey, or on a very hot summer afternoon, while reposing under the shade of the "forest trees of Dove Dale" (or under some others, if you were not fortunate enough, like our biographer, to find forest trees exactly there), it might perhaps do very fairly; but it is Rot a good novel.
Previous page
