RECENT SHORT STORIES.* THERE is probably no department of literature

in which women compete more formidably with men than that of the

• (1.) In the Permanent Way, and other Stories. By Flora Annie Steel. Lon- don : W. Heinemann.—(2.) Human Odds and Buds. By George Gluing. London : Lawrence and Bullen.—(3.) A Creel of Irish Stories. By Jane Barlow. London: Methuen and Co.—(4.) The ' Paradise ' Coal Boat. By Onteliffe Hyne. London: James Bowden.—(5.) A Browning Courtship, and other Stories. By Eliza Orne White. London : Smith, Miter, and Co.—(6.) In Sumner Isles. By Barton Dibbs. London : W. Heinemann.—(7.) A Dozen Ways of Loos. By L. Bengali. London : A. and 0. Black.—(8.) Love in Old Cloathes. and other Stories. By H. O. Banner. London : Downey and 0o.—(9.) The Express Messenger, and other Tales of the Bail. By Oy. Warman. London : Cluitto.aud Windus.—(10.) The Wisdom of Fools. By Margaret Deland. London : Long.. mans and Co.—(11.) The Three Disgraces, Jr. Jintin McCarthy. London Ohatto and Wind:ie.—(1t) An Electri,Shock, and other Stories. By E. Gerard (Miniame de Laszowska). London : W. Blackwood and Sons. short story. In the ouvrage de longue kaleine the balance still inclines to the sterner sex, but in the short story our leading Amazons of the pen, even where they challenge comparisons with the most ambitions masculine achievements, need not be seriously troubled as to the result. Take, for example, Mrs. Steel's new collection of studies of Indian life, In the Per- manent Way. Here it is perhaps enough to say that, while her only rival in this field of fiction is Mr. Kipling, her work,

if it lacks his vivid virility of style, is marked by an even subtler appreciation of the Oriental standpoint—both ethical and religions—a more exhaustive acquaintance with native life in its domestic and indoor aspects, and a deeper sense of the moral responsibilities attaching to our rule in the East. Indeed, if Mrs. Steel shows any partiality, it is not towards Western modes of thought. Thus she speaks of the heroine of one story, the member of a community older than Brahminism itself, as having the advantage of being able to "look back through the ages to a more inspiring and stimulating progenitrix than Mother Eve." Mrs. Steel then continues in an acidulated strain :—

" For despite the pharisaical little hymn of Western infancy bidding us thank goodness for our birth and inheritance of knowledge, one can scarcely be grateful for a typical woman simpering over an apple, or subsequently sighing over the diffi- culties of dress. The fact being that our story of Creation only begins when humanity, fairly started on the Rake's progress, felt the necessity for bolstering up its self-respect by the theory of original sin."

Such lapses are happily rare in Mrs. Steel, who as a rule practises an artistic self-effacement, and seldom succumbs to

the temptation to say something smart simply for the sake of the smartness. Turning to the stories themselves, that from which the collection takes its name strikes us as one of the least convincing and most melodramatic in the collection. The fakir who persisted in squatting between the rails is a grotesque rather than a striking figure, and the tragic catastrophe is decidedly artificial. But here adverse criticism may end. "The Second Storey" is a terribly sombre yet fascinating tale of a highly educated young Hindoo who sought to cut himself adrift from his theological and social moorings, and made shipwreck of his life in consequence. "At the Great Durbar " is a profoundly touching sketch of a poor old farmer who trudged on foot all the way to the centre of government to lay his case before the Viceroy. "The Blue Throated God," again, may be singled out for the exceptional skill with which the element of the supernatural is handled, as well as for the salutary moral involved in the disaster which befell the sacrilegious Bannerman. Nilkunta, the bridge-diver, with his uncanny resemblance to Siva, is a haunting figure, full of the magic of the monstrous East.

Lastly, we may note as a happy specimen of Mrs. Steel's genius for dealing with still life, the beautiful picture of self- sacrifice given in " Glory-of-Woman," " a story of a back- water," the scene being laid in an almshouse for Mahommedan women. But the book is profoundly, at times painfully, interesting from beginning to end.

It would be difficult to find a more effective contrast to

Mrs. Steel's book, alike in landscape and in temper, than is afforded by Mr. George Gissing's Human Odds and Ends. Here is no sunshine or colour, no romance or heroism. Mr.

Gissing is a, dry-eyed pessimist who sees life steadily but sees it foul. His purview is almost exclusively confined to the drains and dustbins of humanity, from no morbid delight in

squalor, but simply from a sincere conviction that pretty nearly everything is for the worst in the most highly civilised of worlds. Indeed, so genuine is this conviction that on the rare occasions on which he deviates into comparative cheer- fulness his sentiment rings false, his incidents are artificial, and his gaiety is as that of one "laughing with alien jaws."

The scene of Mr. Gissing's sketches is, to quote a phrase of his own, almost always "in the thick of obscure London," and his characters are almost invariably drawn from the middle or lower classes. It would, however, be rash to infer from this that, the upper classes, in Mr. Gissing's opinion, enjoy a monopoly of virtue or of the more engaging qualities of humanity. As a matter of fact, Mr. Gissing introduces us to one noble- man, Lord Dunfield, concerning whom he remarks that it was "most interesting to observe the revelation of natural black- guardism in one who had hitherto been raised above himself by the force of social example." Personally we have found the "revelation" singularly uninspiring. Even where Mr.

Gissing gives us a glimpse of a character which we can respect he is careful to add, as in the last sketch of all, that it is " a type of a vanishing virtue." Viewed merely as works of art these stories exhibit the author to far less advantage than his novels. But then it is far easier to convince the reader of the absolute necessity of a miserable ending in a book of the regulation length than in a sketch of ten or twenty pages. We may conclude these notes on Mr. Gissing's volume by observing that the only sketch which deals with the holiday- making side of the lives of the working classes winds up with the drowning of the father and his little boy, and the death— quite independently—of the mother. No one has inverted the convention of the happy ending quite so consistently as Mr. Gissing.

Miss Jane Barlow is assuredly no optimist, but her attitude is innocent of &eva indignatio, her landscape unclouded by the smoke and reek of city life. Her sadness—for she is not an exhilarating writer—is of a tender elegiac vein, and though she has a keen sense of humour, she hardly ever displays it in proprid persona—her narrative and reflective style being studiously sedate, deliberate, and even old-fashioned—but in the mouths of her dramatis persona'. We have said that Miss Barlow is not an exhilarating writer, but it is only right to add that several of the stories in the present collection are decidedly amusing. Thus " McNeill's Tiger-Sheep " is a most diverting account of the settlement of a long-standing family vendetta. The method of wounding the feelings of an enemy by painting one of his sheep in stripes may seem strange, but the writer of this review knows of a case in which a pig was painted green to serve a similar end. The tales of the " Three Pint Measures," again, and "An Account Settled" are both concerned with the comedies of Irish peasant life. But after all, Miss Barlow is at her best in the delicate and pensive idyll which opens the volume. Given such a nature as that of Eileen Fitzmaurice, generous and highly strung, given her lack of companionship, and one can readily believe bow a childish and fantastical belief could have lingered on till the dawn of womanhood. Very touch- ing, again, is the tale of unexpected self-sacrifice on the part of the tramp entitled " A Deserted Child," while a note of genuine tragedy is struck in the sombre story of the half- witted peasant in " The Shortest Way ; " but we would remark in conclusion that there is a freshness and purity of treatment about all Miss Barlow's work which lends it a peculiar charm. She evidently fails to see any amtbetic value in the exclusive portraiture of the squalid, the mean, and the ignoble side of life.

The gulf between Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne and Miss Barlow is as broad as that which separates Mrs. Steel from Mr. Gissing. Miss Barlow never strays from one corner of Ireland ; Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne is a veritable literary globe-trotter, roaming from Florida to Lapland, from Cannes to the Cape, from Majorca to Lagos, from the Alleghenies to Peru, and this constant change of scenery naturally involves the introduc- tion of widely divergent racial types,—Pernvian guerillas, Egba chieftains, Missouri belles, and so forth. But in spite of this international diversity of the dramatis personae the central figure is generally the same,—the Englishman of birth and breeding who is impelled by financial embarrassment or mere restlessness to forsake the cushioned ease of clubland for a life of privation and adventure in distant lands. Thus Carnegie, the Adonis of Piccadilly, goes elk-shooting in Northern Norway, and marries the daughter of an old Lapp chieftain. Charlie Vatchell, of Eaton Square and Walborough Castle, Yorkshire, buries himself in Equatorial Africa, and marries into a cannibal tribe. Charlie Rawdon, another dandy of the London clubs, turns up as " donkeyman" on a Portuguese "tramp." Mr. Hyne, in short, is overfond of these strange somersaults, and there is a certain monotony in the genius for Quixotic self-sacrifice or self-effacement in- variably developed by his ex-dandies ; but he is evidently familiar with the outlandish scenes in which his stories for the most part are laid, he has a thorough knowledge of rough seafaring life, and, above all, he can spin a rattling yarn.

Two of Miss Eliza Orne White's stories are, as we gather from an author's note, republished from the New England Magazine, and it may at once be admitted that though not so racy of the soil as the work of Miss Wilkins—the dramatis persona belong, almost without exception, to the educated classes—these pleasant little comedies have a distinct flavour of the New England humour about them, which, we need hardly add, is a very different thing from the "new humour" of England. In "A Browning Courtship" that form of American pseudo-culture which reached its nadir in the epidemic of Trilby-mania is very happily satirised. The description of the proceedings at the Browning class, and the doinoilment, in which the double confession of im- posture takes place, is quite delicious, while the writer's thorough familiarity with Browning himself is throughout turned to excellent use. A somewhat similar motive is developed rather less divertingly in "A Bismarck Dinner ; " and some gentle ridicule is poured on a peculiarly American form of self-inflicted social martyrdom in " The Queen of Clubs." " There are eighteen clubs and classes at Riverside," so the story begin; " and my sister Eleanor was asked to join thirteen of them, but compromised on eight." The younger sister's point of view—devoted yet critical—is ad- mirably kept up throughout this pretty sketch. In "Com- monplace Carrie " and " A Faithful Failure " Miss White strikes a more serious note, but she does not deal in unmiti- gated gloom; and though Carrie's disappointment may cause the gentle reader a pang, it is impossible to be deeply harrowed by the failure of the conscientious journalist of whom his prosperous brother observes : " He is the kind of man who always puts the largest strawberries in the bottom of the box."

The charm of the Samoan landscape, the peculiar grace of the natives, and the almost invariable disaster that results from the union, whether legitimate or otherwise, of whites and islanders,—these form the themes of the very attractive and, we are inclined to believe, faithful sketches which Mr. Burton Dibbs has collected under the title of In Summer Isles. In "A Lotus-Eater" we have a really pathetic story of an Englishman of good family who, though softened, was not demoralised by his adoption of native ways, but lost home, wife, and child by the vindictive interference of a fellow-country- man. The longest and most ambitious story deals with the lapse of an over-energetic missionary, hampered by a shrewish wife, and contains an elaborate portrait of the native temptress, a girl more sinned against than sinning. Mr. Dibbs, we may observe, appreciates the fine qualities of the Samoans as heartily as the late Mr. Stevenson, and is highly successful in enlisting the sympathies of the reader in their behalf without having recourse to the ghastly tales of white men's wickedness and ferocity recounted by Mr. Louis Beoke.

How deep is the divergence between Miss Dougall's treat- ment of her theme and that of the ordinary romancist may be gathered from the first story in A Dozen Ways of Love. Here we have a group of middle-aged men and women gathered round the death-bed of a very old Scottish lady whose mind has recurred with strange persistence to the visits paid to her father's house in her girlhood by a suitor whose very name is now unfamiliar to her own elderly children. The old lady is tormented by their ignorance of what is now her one idge fize. The situation is saved by the address and tact of a new servant, who humours the old lady, and by adroit questioning elicits the necessary in- formation as to the lover of her youth. Another tale tells how a curate breaks off his engagement with a girl because he detects in her traces of an inability to distinguish between meum and team inherited from her mother, a pious klepto- maniac. In a third an impending engagement is broken off because the young minister discovers that his ladylove firmly believes that a cow has been bewitched, and has taken part in the rites to free the animal from enchantment. From begin- ning to end of the collection there is not a single conventional love-story. But although some of the motives are strangely fantastic, there is a decided fascination about their unreality. Indeed, the farther Miss Dougall deviates from the conditions of the ordinary workaday world, the better pleased are we with the results. Her occasional incursions into the realm of prosaic actuality are curiously unconvincing.

Mr. H. C. Burner, the late editor of Puck, the New York Punch, who died recently on the threshold of middle age, had a delicate humour and a genuine gift of literary expression. The sketch which gives its name to the collection, Love in Old Cloathes, is a really brilliant little tour de force, being the story of a romantic modern courtship told in the epistolary style of two centuries back. The social conditions are those of to-day, while the narrative and dialogue are cast in an archaic form both as regards spelling and structure generally. It is, in short, one of those feats which, if not done well, would be unendurable; but Mr. Burner has done it to perfection. For there is more familiarity with the literary spirit of the age in these twenty- three pages than in the whole of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's two novels written in pseudo-Tatleresque. Mr. Bunner's other stories are well worth reading,—notably that of the young journalist who indulges his fancy in a forecast somewhat after the fashion of Charles Lamb's wonderful "Dream-children." But there is a graciousness about the whole of this little book which makes one keenly regret the premature removal of its accomplished writer.

The limitations of space must be our excuse for dealing summarily with the volumes of Mrs. Deland, Miss E. Gerard (Madame de Laszowka), Mr. Justin McCarthy, and Mr. Cy Warman. Of these by far the most striking are the collection of railroad stories by the last-named author, dedicated " to the Great Army of Enginemen, the silent heroes who stand alone and bore holes in the night at the rate of a mile a minute." They form a singularly effective rejoinder to Mr. Ruskin's familiar denunciations of railway traffic, the story of the unhappy Swedish engineer and his locomotive being far more genuinely romantic than many a modern love-story. Mr. Warman writes of engines as if they were human beings, and his enthusiasm is backed by an exhaustive technical knowledge. The four stories to which Mrs. Deland gives the collective name of The Wisdom of Fools deal with various social problems in the thoughtful and sympathetic fashion characteristic of the author of John Ward, Preacher. Mr. Justin McCarthy's The Three Disgraces seems to us the weakest and most artificial work that has ever proceeded from his genial pen, and the same remark, mutatis mutandis, applies to An Electric Shock. The last story in Miss Gerard's volume—" The Price of a Necklace "—which deals with a singularly painful episode in the life of a surgeon, shows a carious lack of taste alike in the subject and its treatment.