Fiction

Eternal Wotna,n

stable. 7s. 6d.) -

IT is not enough id say that Mr. Erskilie takes liberties with his texts ; he gives them hardly a passing glance : he takes a name; an incident, a...moral, and hurries away at his -own sweet will. Some of his readers will be uneasy to see legends and myths of poetic beauty treated ip so _cavalier a fashion ; but there is precedent in Anatole France, and there are

readers who will be attracted by the same gentle impertinence that offends others.

We meet Adam new-born and full-grown, in possession of all his faculties but strange to the world. He has still to find out that if he puts his hand into a thorn bush it will Jump and bite him, if he treads on a wet stone in a brook the floor will rise and hit him and cover him with water.

He explores his surroundings in' a kind of 'solemn and childlike astonishment, cataloguing his experiences and making them fit into a theory, of the universe. But Lilith .is a creature of an entirely different nature. She is born with experience, or at least with a common-sense insight into life which has no need of ponderous masculine theorizing. She takes

everything with serenity, not bothering in the least whether it ought to be so, but adapting herself ;very quickly to what she finds in the world. She is a mystery to Adam through

her self-sufficiency, her large and tranquil happiness ; and he responds with admiration and affection, He thinks there is nothing more wonderful in the world than Lilith, unless it is Adam.

So they seem as if they were made for each other and Adam glows with contentedness, until— Until a pale, slender, incapable and romantic young lady, who faints on the _slightest provocation and is always very helpless and pirthetie, ponies along-; and Adam, without knowing how he has done it, finds himself married to her, hunting and

chopping wood, -building a house and rebuilding it because it wasn't at all to the young lady's liking, always doing wrong

and always repenting of he doesn't even know what. All he knows is that Eve has infinitely more refinement than Lilith and is meant to guide him to spiritual heights, the restraint of his passion and the ideals of domesticity.

Mr. Ersldne's Eve is a very modern young minx ; the whole book is a piece of modern persiflage and irony. He does not look upon the- problem of ", the emergent sex" with anything like the seriousness and naiveté of Mr. Robert W.

Chambers. The heroine of Beating Winis .is a little New-

York ragamuffin who turns out to have a genius for sculpture. She is rather minx-like herself; but we feel that Mr. Chambers

is all in arms to defend the Modern Girl for her iconoclastic habits of smoking Cigarettes and making her own _living ; he shows that the heart is the same underneath these violent

assertions of independence, and that true love will win out in the end. The best part of the book is the description of New York and its multifarious life : this cosmopolis seems always to be giving novelists fresh opportunities for explora- tion, and no one could hope to exhaust its million-fold.

variety.

.The Earthen Lot is delicate and complicated where Beating Wings is crude and flamboyant. Miss Field has a great talent for minute observation and sympathetic insights. Her story follows the life of Victoria Tresidder from her birth to the final crisis of her unhappy marriage ; and, as ?night be gathered from the title, it'is all a little gloomy and disheartening. But Miss Field does not make the mistake Mr. Chambers makes : she is not deluded into thinking that the world is deluged with geniuses, and that it is sufficient or a novelist to mention that his characters paint or play, the piano for .us to accept them. straight away as demi-gods. She draws a gallery of very real characters, and at times

touches a singular pathos. The old Admiral, Victoria's grandfather, is perhaps her chief triumph in portraiture.

The well-meaning fussiness of his daughters when his second wife runs away is admirably shown.

At dinner they tried to distract his thoughts by gentle Adak. of harmless conversation. With some obscure notion that the special mark of attention would have a comforting effect, Sophy ordered his soup to be served in a special porringer reserved for illness. Pathetically he spooned the soup out of the- dfiep - little bowl tilting it sidc(ways_by the handle :` Why tic, I have MI -drink my soup out of this ?—you and Verona have ordinvy -Sates.' Sophy answered soothingly : We thought it would be itiCer for you to have it in i basin to-night.' ' Accepting the eilasion, he stirred his spoon absently round and round in the dreg, 'Making a monotonous grating sound."

But Miss Field has attempted too much -when she tries td give pictures of the change of the times—from Queen Victoria, through Edward, to • George. The novel becomes jerky and overcompressed.

It is something of a relief to turn to a tale of mysteries and crimes, a well-made and modest shocker like Mr. Keverne's. The modern young lady crops up in his pages, too ; but she is incidental only, and it is the plot which mostly matters. There -is a detective of more -than usual humanity ; and the course of true love runs rockily to 'its happy consummation;

A. P.