NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* THE last time, if our memory
serves us aright, that Mr. Andrew Lang collaborated in a work of fiction was in The World's Desire when his partner was Mr. Rider Haggard. He has now joined forces with Mr. A. E. W. Mason in a historical romance of the years following the '15, and the results are so excellent as to indispose us to indulge in any speculation as to the division of labour, of invention, and of credit between the joint authors of Parson Kelly. It is enough for us that Mr. Lang, besides being a most accom- plished literary craftsman, is deeply versed in the inner history of Jacobitism; that Mr. Mason, though he has already won his spurs in several brilliant incursions into the domain of adventurous romance, has not yet outgrown the freshness of youth, the fougue de vinyl arts, as De Russet calls it. Messrs. Mason and Lang have adhered to the principle adopted in the main by the great masters of historical romance; they have entrusted the leading rZiles to imaginary persons or persons of whom but scant mention is made in history, and assigned the minor rilles to the great, or famous, or notorious personages of history. Thus the central figure and evil genius of the plot is the unhistorical Lady Oxford, a fascinating but unscrupulous harpy, who treacherously plunders her trustful lover in order to pay her gambling
• (1.) Parson Kelly. By A. E. W. Mason and Andrew Lang. London : Longmans and Co. (Gs.]—(2.) An Obscure Apostle. Translated by C. S. de Soissons from the original Polish of Madame Orzeszko. London : Greening and Co. (8s.)—(3.) Mrs. Knollys. and other Stories. By F. J. sttmson. London : Downey and Co. [Os.]--(4.) The Two Miss Jeffreys. By David Lyall. London: Hodder and Stoughton. [6s.]—(5.) The Valiant Runaways. By Gertrude Atherton. London : Nisbet and Co. [5s.]—(6.) Annie o' the Banks o' Dee. By Gordon Stables, M.D R.N. London : F. V. White and Co. [6s.]—(7.) The Favour of Princes. By Mark Lee Luther. London : ILaenallinn anal Co. (6al —(8.) law in His Generation. By Philip Davenant. London : John Long. (is.] —(9.. The Lady from Nowhere. By Fergus Hume. London : Chem and Windus. (3s. 8d.)—(10.) The Golden Idol. By J. E. Maddock. London : Chan°
and Windus. Gd.]
debts. As Vanity Fair was described as a novel without a hero, so Parson Kelly might be called a novel without a heroine, to such an extent does the brilliant adventuress eclipse the representative of fidelity and all the domestic virtues. Besides, Lady Oxford has a start of precisely one hundred and seventy pages, or say two hours (from the reader's point of view), which is precisely four times as long as the start acquired by Wilkes. To make up, however, for the lack of a genuine heroine the two joint heroes, both Jacobite Irish outlaws hailing from the County Kildare, are excellent company. The story suffers in regard to cohesion from the long period of years over which it is spread, and the consequent gaps in the narrative ; but with all its drawbacks —the literary interludes are in particular strangely artificial— Parson Kelly is a book of more than common merit.
Creative writers are not always the beat critics. Sir Walter Scott's verdict on Lady Morgan has hardly stood the test of time, and the same may be said of Dr. Johnson's estimate of Hannah More. Still, the opinion of a master must always command respect, and the generous tribute of the great Polish writer Siezikiewicz to his compatriot—" Eliza Orzeszko still holds the sceptre as a novelist," which the translator of An Obscure Apostle quotes in his preface— naturally excites pleasurable anticipations in the breast of the enterprising novel reader unfamiliar with her work, We gather from the same source that translations of some of her stories appeared more than twenty years ago in the Revue des Dews Afoncles, but that this is her first appearance in an English version. It is to be regretted, therefore, that the inherent obstacles in the way of her gaining a hearing—the ont]andish nature of her theme, her uncompromising avoid- anceof the amenities of romance, and her constant employment of the terminology of Jewish ritual—should be accentuated by the shortcomings of her interpreter, since the English of Mr. de Soissons is not always lucid or idiomatic, while his method of transliteration is based on phonetic principles alien to English readers,—e g., he always alludes to Majmonides instead of Maimonides. In any case, this is a book which needs a certain amount of preliminary effort on the part of the reader; but once that effort has been made, and the some- what heavy historical prologue has been mastered, the reader will find matter of engrossing interest in this homely tragedy of Jewish life in Russian Poland. The story is concerned with the long feud between two families, the Ezofosvich, who stand for enlightenment and material progress, and the Todros, the hereditary Rabbis of the town, narrow, fanatical ascetics who, themselves the ex- ponents of a spurious form of orthodoxy, countenance and even direct ihe persecution of the remnant of an obscure and inoffensive sect of heretics. The progress of the conflict from generation to generation is traced with remarkable insight and sympathy, and at the same time with a detachment and candour in dealing with the sordid and unlovely aspects of Jewish life and character that remind us of the Ghetto Tragedies of Mr. Zangwill.
Mr. Stimeon's excellent volume of short stories deserved earlier attention, but such disregard. in view of the over- whelming profusion of what Americans call the "fictional output," is occasionally inevitable. The story which gives its name to the collection, and deals with the disappearance down a crevasse of a young man on his wedding tour, and the subsequent discovery of his body by his widow forty years later, might have seemed grotesquely fantastic were it not that an incident recently occurred in the Alps which supplies Mr. Stimeon with a basis of solid fact for his curious yet touching romance. Of the other episodes and tales included in Mrs. Knollys, and other Stories we may note in particular that entitled 'The Three Achievements of Eileen," an in- genious series of hard cases that befel a susceptible yet chivalrous officer. In the last piece of all, " Dynevor," Mr. Stimson shows a tendency to harrow his readers by gratuitous melodrama Bat alike in matter and manner the book is much above the average.
In The Two Miss Jeffreys "David Lyall " gives us a set of pleasant studies of Scottish life, gentle and simple, as it un- folded itself to the confidential clerk of a firm of Solicitors and Writers to the Signet in the Edinburgh of some thirty years ago. The stories are healthy in tone, optimistic in tendency, and compare very favourably with the work on
similar lines of "Ian Maclaren," whose somewhat importunate appeal to the fount of tears "David Lyall " discreetly avoids. Dramatic intensity, effective contrast of light and shade, and the element of surprise are the qualities whioh one chiefly misses in these unpretending stories. On the other hand, it is most refreshing to meet a writer nowadays who finds so much honesty and kindliness in the average man and woman.
Mrs. Atherton tells us in The Valiant Runaways a truly thrilling tale of California under the Dons. Her heroes are two young Spaniards of high degree, who run away from their luxurious homes to escape the conscription, take refuge at a Mission, are carried off by Indians into the Sierras, rescued by a Yankee, and ultimately help to turn the tide of battle in favour of a revolutionary leader. Roldan and Adan are a strange mixture of emotionalism and grit, grace and ferocity, and though they may not always inspire the admiration of the stolid Saxon, they are picturesque, uncon- ventional figures moving alertly amid the Californian land- scape, which Mrs. Atherton paints with glowing colours, as well as intimate knowledge of its enthralling beauty.
Dr. Gordon Stables has given his new novel, Annie o' the Banks o' Dee, so Kailyardish a title that he was obviously bound to lay most of the scenes near Edinburgh. Still, the reader cannot help detecting a decided sense of relief on the part of his author when Dr. Stables, about the middle of the book, shakes a loose pen and carries off his hero on a yacht to be shipwrecked on a volcanic island, where a white " skin- clad " queen rules over the savages in what she has christened the Isle of Flowers. The adventurous part of the book is more exciting reading than the Scottish chapters, though the latter are enlivened with a murder and with a great many fugitive pieces of verse. The texture of the book is slight, but the interest is fairly well maintained throughout.
"it is too late to be ambitious," said Sir Thomas Browne; and we are much tempted to apply his dictum to novels dealing with the French Court in the times of both Louis XIV. and Louis XV. However, although Mr. Mark Lee Luther has chosen this hackneyed setting for The Favour of Princes, the story in itself is good, the manner of its telling vivacious and the characters not lacking in vitality. If with its Canadian figure of the " coureur de bois" the book re- minds one a little too much of the beginning of Dr. Conan Doyle's Refugees, that is simply because, as we remarked before, it is too late to be ambitions in this field of fiction.
Mr Davenant in his novel, Wise in. His Generation, has drawn a clever picture of the probable effect of the introduc- tion of a beautiful "child of Nature" into the society of a small country town. The figure of the hero, Arthur Erle, is well drawn, and his first falling in love with the fair barbarian, and his subsequent disenchantment and marriage with a pretty, commonplace, country-town young lady, are well imagined and set forth.
Mr. Fergus Home presents ne with his usual melodramatic murder-story in The Lady front Nowhere, though the where- abouts of "nowhere" are very quickly discovered by the in- evitable detective. There is very little else for a reviewer to say about the book. Mr. Fergus Hume's name on the back is a guarantee that it will be good in its own particular line, and we can do no better than refer to Lincoln's famous dictum once more, and leave the intending reader to settle for himself whether a murder-story is "the sort of thing he likes."
The Golden Idol, by J. E. Maddock, is an adventure-story of considerable length, beginning in the wilds of Australia and ending in the volcanic South Sea island of "New Britain." The adventures are well devised and fairly exciting, but the book presents no salient features to distinguish it from a host of competing volumes already in the field.
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