NOVELS.
SWEETHEART MANETTB.* ENGLISH readers are excusably inclined to regard modern American fiction as falling under three heads,—historical romance, studies of city life, and New England idylls. This rough-and-ready classification, however, takes no account of a variety of interesting forms of American fiction, notably those novels which deal with Southern and Western life, to which category Mr. Thompson's sentimentally named Sweetheart Manette largely belongs. We qualify the ascription because, although the scene is laid throughout on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, and the atmosphere and mode of life are essentially Southern, the majority of the leading. dramatis personae come from Boston or the Western States, while of those in whom the reader is chiefly interested all
but two are practically cosmopolitan in their outlook on life. Yet it would be idle to deny that what lends
this unconventional and entertaining comedy of courtship its chief charm is not the culture of Boston, or the buoyant energy of the " hustler," but the "balmy air, the old-time exclusiveness, and the sleepy activities " of the out-of-the-way Creole town in which the various characters are brought into contact. Whether Mr. Thompson is a Southerner or not we know not, but that he has a vivid appre- ciation of the picturesque and romantic side of the guewse parfumee of America, and that he can convey that sense without bedaubing his canvas with local colour, must be readily admitted by any reader of his pages. Many American
writers run to prolixity in description or analysis. Mr. Thompson is chary of both, but always illuminative. As an example of his ability to set a scene before one in a few words we.may quote his picture of. Bay St. Louis as seen from the moorings of the hero's yacht :—
"From where the yacht Sweet Sister lay at anchor not far out in the bay the view along shore was one to remember. It was a place where the true summer hovered, hot, insistent, imperious, and yet dreamy, breezy, tree-shaded, moss-fringed. An old gray stuccoed church with a dispropor- tionately tall spire and stupid-looking windows stood in a grove, flanked by low, broad-roofed houses, a convent, and a school. Live oaks shaped like enormous apple-trees clasped everything in their gnarled and wide-reaching arms. Palms lifted their feathery tops here and there; fig-trees of nearly a century's growth made dusky blotches against orange orchards and weather-stained walls ; and as far as the eye could reach up and down the shore-line picturesque summer-houses peeped with their dormer windows through rifts in tropical foliage or over rose-gardens and oleanders. It looked like a place wherein a troubadour might still be invading the inexorable realism of our
age
The story arises out of a yachting trip taken by a curiously ill-assorted pair of friends,—Hatch, a Boston millionaire,
and Woodville, a disappointed realistic novelist. Woodville is a man of humble origin, considerable though perverted literary talent, and a certain personal magnetism ; but the bond that unites him to his generous patron is artificial, and though Hatch is considerateness itself, Woodville frets not a
* Sweetheart Manette. Maurice Thompson. London : John Macqueen.
[Ss. $1.]
little under the consciousness of his obligation. On their arrival at Bay St. Louis, Hatch discovers that Roache, a railway promoter, to whose wife he (Hatch) had once been engaged, is staying there on business with Mr. Pembroke, a Southern gentleman of decayed fortune but considerable local influence. Pembroke's sons all fell in the war, but he has one daughter, Manette, a girl of great beauty and charm, fated, without being in the least a coquette, to enslave every man who meets her. To begin with, there is Roger Garcin, an angular Southerner, taciturn yet chivalrous, a distinguished yet somewhat forlorn figure. The novelist, after a momentary pretence of wishing to shun society and play the anchorite, succumbs to Manette's attractions ; Hatch is simultaneously smitten as with a thunderbolt ; and the last of the victims of this innocent siren is Mr. Starnes. of Colorado, a handsome, genial giant, whose masterful directness, coupled with his high spirits and boyish manners, render him a very formidable candidate. The widely different modes of courtship affected by the different suitors afford a most entertaining study in contrasts, and Mr. Thompson indicates with no little skill the difficulty felt by the ingenuous, inexperienced heroine in coming to a decision. She is fascinated by the subtle flattery of the interesting literary man ; she is charmed by the graceful address of Hatch ; she is carried off her feet by the tremendous vitality and energy of the Westerner ; she cannot bring herself to discourage the unobtrusive devotion of her old play. fellow. Then the situation is further complicated by the fact that the part of Dragon is played, not by her mother, a faded, weary woman whose heart is wrapped up in her dead sons, but by Mrs. Roache, who, though on excellent terms with Hatch, cannot altogether reconcile herself to the whole-hearted furtherance of his suit. As the author puts it, "it is probable that there never was a woman too good to remember her old love affairs with a sense of having conferred a vast favour on the men she made miserable. Certainly Mrs. Roache found it impossible to evade thinking that by some roundabout title Hatch's destiny belonged to her." So much for the materials for the romance ; for the development of the plot and its perfectly legi- timate denouement we must refer our readers to the novel itself, in which the contact and clash of cosmopolitan and primitive types is very happily contrived amid the most picturesque surroundings. As we have said above, Mr. Thompson does not lay on his local colour too thick, but every touch tells. There is a delightfully characteristic picnic at which the Colorado man and the Southerner, already spoiling for a fight, indulge successively in a display of fancy marksmanship, —partly for parade, but chiefly by way of mutually intimidating each other. Another curious Southern trait comes to light in the episode of the yellow-fever epidemic. Mr. Pembroke moves his wife and daughter out of town to his country estate, and in order to guard them from the possi- bility of infection, stations coloured servants with orders to shoot any one who might attempt to enter the grounds. But one almost acquiesces in this cruel precaution when, in the issue, the only person who suffers from it is the unwholesome novelist. Mr. Thompson, we may note, though he can write charmingly at times, has evidently a wholesome contempt for prixieux, pedants and all the devotees of what the French call literal arias, or the morbid fetish-worship of letters.
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