NOVELS.
THE RIVER.* Mn. EDEN PinixPorrs, who made his mark at the outset as a high-spirited humourist, not untainted by a certain facetiousness, has apparently found himself as a serious novelist of West Country life. A whole volume might be written on the literary inspiration of Dartmoor. Few regions in the United Kingdom have been more potent to fire the imagination, and few are at the present moment better fitted to supply a wholesome antidote to the sophisti- cated psychological romances that are based on the study of hothouse humanity. The open-air novel is in its way almost as good for the modern mind as the open-air treatment for the modern body, and those purblind mortals who are condemned to live in crowds and cities for the greater part of their life are peculiarly susceptible, as Sir Walter Besant so admirably put it in his Eulogy of Richard Tefferies, to the healing influences exerted by writers who have the gift of interpreting the magic and mystery of moor and forest, mountain and flood, and unlocking the secrets of hearts that live in immediate contact with these mysteries. That Mr. Phillpotts has the gift of setting these scenes before the reader is, we think, sufficiently shown by the following passage, which describes the immediate surroundings in which the hero of The River grew to manhood :—
" But there is a region near her [the Dart's] sources, where the river winds under huge hills crowned and scattered as to their grassy undulations with stone. The high lands clamber round about to a wild horizon that is roughly hurled upward in mighty confusion against the sky ; and from the deep channels of the river's passage her music lulls or throbs at the will of the wind, and wakes or ceases suddenly as the breezes blow. Here beneath the conical mitre of Longaford Tor, in Dartmoor's central waste and fastness, she sweeps along the fringes of a primeval forest. Upon the steep foot-hills of the tor, crooked, twisted, convulsed by centuries of western winds and bitter winters, like a regiment of old, chained and tortured ghosts, stands an ancient assemblage of dwarf oaks : that wonder of the moor named Wistman's Wood. Grey lichens shroud each venerable bough, and heavy mosses— bronze and black—drip like wet hair from the joints and elbows of the trees, climb aloft within a span of the new year's leaves and fruit Transcendent age marks this ancestral wood and each hoary stock and stone within it broods abstracted, breathes the heavy air of eld. Here ancient meets with ancient and fashions a home and a resting place for night. Night, indeed, by taper of star and moon, moves familiarly through these dim glades, knows each stem and bough for a friend, wakens her secret pensioners in bolt and den. Now red foxes dwell in Wistman's Wood, and yesterday a mother wolf suckled her litter there. Here Time shall be surprised asleep; here the unchanging Serpent, roughly awakened shall uncoil her wheel, curled like a woman's necklet, and flow away over the rocks, in a sudden rivulet of ebony and silver and olive-brown. The trees laugh at their frail foot- stools of granite, for the transparent egg they hold aloft in a pigeon's nest is stronger than the stone. One bears the eternal, but these crystalline giants of quartz, felspar, and mica, are playthings for winter and the latter rain. The years nibble and gnaw each monstrous boulder; the frost stabs them ; the ages wait their attrition with patience. Yet this wood of Wistman indues its youth like a garment, and the second spring of the oak annually bedecks each leafy crown with rosettes of carmine foliage that glow against dark summer green. Acorns also yearly feed the • The River. By Eden Eunpotte. London: Methuen and Co. [6a.]
doves, or, sinking into earth, rise again and take the places of their fathers. Rowans are scattered through the grove, and their berries, lighting autumn-time, weave scarlet into the foliage of the oaks. Then, the lad leaf fallen, this forest sprawls in hibernal nakedness, like a grey web thing over the sere or the snow of the wintry hills. Descended from trees that formed the bygone Chase of Dartmoor, these old oaks still flourish and defy death. It has been conjectured that from the Celtic springs their name, for Wistman's Wood may haply have been nisg-maen-coed,
the stony wood by the water '—a description of the spot most just and perfect. Here, at least, these two immortals—the stream and the forest—continue to survey each other through the cen- turies, and, still flourishing in tho proper polity of green wood and living water, preserve a melodious and eternal tryst with time."
The hero of the story is Nicholas Edgecombe, a rabbit.
warrener, living a lonely life in his hut on the moor, "an uncommon man whom chance had made gentle though his calling was rough." "Every beast an' bird," as he puts it, "have got to die or be killed. But us as kills must do it decent. Cats an' such-like is taught to kill cruel, but men must kill kind." He was a man who lived in the heart of Nature, but whose material- ism was tempered by an absolute faith in the Bible,— the only book he know much about. Nicholas is neither a hermit nor a misanthrope, though his occupation and residence oblige him to lead a lonely life, and his temperament and interests enable him to live a self-sufficing life until his thirtieth year. Then the vindictive action of a neighbour- ing farmer, whom Ile has caught poaching, suddenly changes his whole outlook on life. Left for dead on the moor, he is discovered and rescued by the two women with whom his whole future career is inextricably bound up,—Hannah Bradridge and Mary Merle. Hannah is the village beauty, a rustic, Juno, fearless, wayward, and impressionable, while Mary, gentle, industrious, and affectionate, has everything to recom- mend her but good looks and charm. Hannah, who lives with her widowed mother and grandmother, the proprietress of a neighbouring inn, has already been flattered by the attentions of Timothy Oldreive, the poaching farmer, a handsome, reck- less wastrel with gentle blood in his veins, whose suit is encouraged by Hannah's worldly mother. Hannah herself plays off the old love against the new until Timothy's neglect impels her in a moment of pique to pledge herself to Nicholas.
But their engagement reveals unsuspected divergences of view. Timothy finds an unscrupulous ally in the girl's mother, and reasserting his old spell, and taking her heart at the re-
bound, persuades Hannah to marry him secretly on the eve of her wedding-day. She is all the while conscious of
the folly of her choice, and her forebodings are realised with startling suddenness. Timothy proves faithless, harsh, and cruel, and is goaded to insane jealousy by Hannah's appeals to Nicholas for protection. Nicholas saves her child's life, and finally rescues Hannah herself from the murderous hands of her husband after a struggle in which he is in- directly the cause of Timothy's death, and comes within an ace of losing his own. Meantime he has offered marriage to Mary Merle, who in turn offers to surrender her claim in favour of Hannah, and the story closes with Nicholas's choice.
We cannot acquit Mr. Phillpotts altogether of a touch of melodrama in his handling of the violent and savage scenes which form the climax of his story. We like his hero better in his meditative moods than when he is overborne by his passions. We cannot altogether feel that sympathy for Hannah which we are expected to feel, or admit that her inconsistencies are rendered convincing. But the book is lifted far above the average level by several notable qualities,—by its vivid and passionate love of the countryside, by its forcible and picturesque illustration of the play of the elemental emotions, and by the admirably racy dialogue of the frequenters of the Ring o' minor characters—Hannah's sordid mother and her clair. voyante grandmother; Mark Trout, the ostler; Mr. Chugg, the water bailiff; and above all, Sorrow Scobhull, the modern nympholept, who had "got the fear o' Dart in his veins 'stead of the fear o' God "—are as interesting and suggestive a set of talkers of their class as any that we have met in print out- side the novels of George Eliot and Mr. Hardy.
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