FIVE ONE-VOLUME NOVELS.* THE first idea suggested to ns by
the title of 'Twist Two Eternities was that the words were to be understood in the same sense as those of Tennyson's " Crossing the Bar "—" That which drew from out the boundless deep, Turns again home." But that this is not the author's intention is shown at the end, where the hero speaks of himself as standing between the two eternities of his past life and the future ; and as, what- * (1.) 'Twist Two Eternities, By Mrs. Canstou. London Routledge.—(2.) The Last Cruise of the ' Teal.' By L:3lith Ray, London : Digby, Long, and Co.— (3,) Claud Brennan. By John Term's. Bristol t Arrowsmith.—(4.) West Cliff. By E. icing. London : Digby, Long, and Co,—(5.) A Norseman's }Teeing. By Cecil Colo. London Digby, Long, and Co. ever the future may be, a person's past life certainly cannot be called eternal, we are somewhat puzzled to discover the applicability of the book's title to its contents. Oliver de Winton is a young man endowed with every gift of fortune, who bewails the wickedness of the world without feeling that he has any mission to make it better ; who, having nothing to quarrel with except his bread-and-butter, does that so literally that he cannot even get through his breakfast without startling his poor father by lamenting the degrading neces- sity of eating, because man thereby " resigns his birth- right as an intellectual being, abdicates his throne, and places himself on a level with the brute creation ;" and who is throughout too limp and flabby an. individual to excite any very keen interest as he oscillates between the brilliant and high-bred Lady Katherine, and the humble country clergyman's daughter, who are rivals for his affec- tions. All the dramatis personw are good and well-meaning, and more or less engaged in the various kinds of good works wherein fashionable society finds an outlet for its philan- thropic aspirations and energies. There is considerable truth to life in some of the sketches, as, for instance, in that of the great lady, sincerely anxious to help her fellow-creatures, who lends her drawing-room for a lecture upon " vital truths " to the upper and middle classes, and supplements her expres- sion of trust that great spiritual blessings may be the result, by the remark, " I shall put away all my best china if we are to have such a mob." Bat we are not quite sore that the description of her visit to a slum is equally lifelike ; would she have thought it necessary to take the butler, as well as her daughter, to carry the beef-tea and jelly upstairs P Though the book is by no means without merit, it suffers from superfluous minuteness of detail, and lacks salient feature ;—a study of ploughed fields will hardly constitute a very interesting landscape, however faithful may be the delineation of furrows and hedges.
In reading the early chapters of The Last Cruise of the Teal,' we came to the conclusion that it was only a chronicle of the almost painfully commonplace and uneventful holiday of three amateur sailors who went for a cruise on the Bast Coast in a small sailing-boat, and that the book, being a record of fact, could not properly be included in a review devoted to fiction. We began, however, to feel less sure of this in the eighth chapter, when the sight of a burning ship tempts the adventurers out to sea and their compass gets broken ; our doubt increased as we beheld them storm-driven for days with- out an idea of whither they were going, until they attained a temporary haven of refuge in some unknown country (it subsequently turned out to be Norway, by-the-bye); and by the time we had followed their thrilling and perilous experiences to the culminating point of a long-protracted voyage underground, we had no hesitation whatever in assigning the work a place in the regions of imagina- tion. A wrecked case containing hair-brushes and electro- plate tea and coffee services, is a novelty in the annals of castaways that harmonises well with the general sort of fin de eieele "Robinson Crusoeishness " of the rest of the story. And the stirring tale of sea-adventure which the book contains is told well and graphically enough to be very readable, not withstanding a lavish introduction of nautical terms that will sometimes puzzle a non-seagoer to compre- hend exactly what took place quite as distinctly as he may wish to do,—for it is not every one who can interpret the meaning of "swatch-way," " trapped halyards," " bowsprit- cranze," and such-like expressions. Is it from a whim of the author's, or the printer's, that whenever the words "on" and " to " occur together, they are united into one, and written "onto " ?
The title-role of Claud Brennan is given to a highly talented young man who was by no means of the Psalmist's opinion that "All man's thoughts perish." And as Claud was unalterably convinced of the infallibility of Modern Thought (whose thought is not specified, but presumably his own) and of the puerility and narrow-mindedness of any sort of belief in revealed, religion, it was most unfortunate for him to have fallen in love with, and for his affections to have been reciprocated by, a girl whose conviction of the truth of that religion was equally unalterable. Tinder these circumstances, both believers being of the transcendental and intolerant order, and utterly rejecting all idea of possible agreement on other terms than unconditional surrender of the opposing creed, a happy union of their souls in matrimony is no more likely than the merging into one of two parallel lines of rails without a connecting point between them ; and consequently heartbreak and a tragical termination are inevitable. There is very little incident ; and we fancy the author has more turn for writing sermons, or essays on some " improving " subject, than novels, as he appears to want lightness and vivacity for a work of imagination. The most remarkable feature in the volume is, perhaps, the singularity of Edith's never discover- ing the deadly antagonism between her belief and Claud's until a perusal of his book revealed it to her. We should not have thought it possible for so marked an element of discord to have lain perdu during all the exchange of thought and feeling of their previous intercourse.
One naturally expects to find a somewhat rugged and primitive type of human nature depicted in a work which professes to be a romance giving a sketch of Portland Isle and the manners and customs of its inhabitants in 1817-19 ; and this expectation is not disappointed in West Clzif, where the aforesaid avowed object is kept in sight throughout with laudable conscientiousness. But as the author's own recol- lections are hardly likely to go back to so remote a date, his materials must necessarily have been gathered chiefly from what he had heard from other people; and a description from hearsay, compared with one from personal observation, is at the same disadvantage for likeness to life, as is a picture from a photograph compared with the original whence it was taken. And this may perhaps account (to some extent at any rate) for a perceptible lack of vigour and vitality in Mr. King's performance, which makes us almost inclined to call it namby- pamby, and to say that his personages are too gentle to be qualified to act their appointed parts satisfactorily. Their ruggedness is too much polished; their sturdiness is not sturdy enough ; their provincialism lacks raciness ; and they never give the genuine " 'Eave 'arf a brick at 'im " impression which they ought to do, to match the intense prejudice against Kimberlins (as strangers not belonging to Port- land are called) that is insisted on as one of the strongest and most deeply ingrained insular characteristics. There are some quaint rustic sayings and ideas, as, for instance, Becky Pearce's notion of what constitutes a birth-right, tinder which term she includes husbands (p. 216). If, as we imagine, the book is a first attempt at fiction, it is too praiseworthy and painstaking an effort for us to wish to say anything to dis- courage Mr. King from another venture. The story part, however, is poor, and an oft-told tale, and concerns the betrayal of a pretty peasant maiden by an unprincipled young gentle- man, "tall and straight as a Grecian ideal, with his dark hair tossed carelessly back from his well-shaped forehead," and whose irresistible personal attractions are enhanced further by "the hall-mark of society upon him, and of fashion also, with his well-fitting cut-away coat and velvet collar, the high shirt-collar and cravat just coining into favour."
The principal obstacle to performing the duties of a critic towards A Norse»zan's Wooing is,, that whilst it is a pleasant, readable little tale enough, as far as it goes, it is so extremely slight and short as hardly to supply sufficient material for either praise or blame. The theme is the love-making of a young Swedish musician existing in cheerless solitude in London lodgings, who suddenly has the luck to be admitted to intimacy with a family of merry, homely brothers and sisters, and thereupon proceeds instantly to lose his heart to one of the latter, and wins hers in return. There is no hitch or objection to the match on either side, and nothing whatever to make the course of true love behave as is proverbially required of it, except a fit of mistaken jealousy excited by the other sister's sweetheart, which serves to introduce dim hints of possible calamity, and almost drives the despairing lover into exile. A brother comes to the rescue in the nick of time, heroically sacrifices his lunch, and by help of a Bradshaw and energetic measures in the way of stimulating tips to cabmen and porters, succeeds in overtaking the fugitive swain before he has got further than Liverpool Street Station, and bringing him back to a happy reunion at the family afternoon tea-table, where an ample supply of cake and hot buttered toast make amends for the lost lunch, and the exalted heroism displayed in foregoing that meal is acknowledged with a gratitude that seems rather ludicrously inconsistent with the insignificance of the provoking cause. Music is the chief feature of the
book as far as any serious business of life is concerned ; and the story appears to us better suited for a magazine article than for a whole volume to itself.
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