RECENT NOVELS.*
THE first two novels on our list are decidedly able and interesting books, and may both be described as novels of redemption. In Muriel's Marriage, the redemption is that of a man, not in- herently ignoble, but with a vein of weakness in his nature which allows him to fall into a sin that has far-reaching issues of deterioration and catastrophe. In Sara, the saved soul is that of a woman who, though she commits no act of overt sin, such as that committed by the man in Muriel's Marriage, bids fair to ruin her own life, the life of her husband, and the lives of others who are near to her, by that most fatal form of obstinacy, the obstinacy of a shallow, ignorant nature. It is clear that Esme Stuart has been a diligent student of George Eliot, and Muriel's Marriage has much of the special kind of intellectual interest in which George Eliot's books are so rich,—the interest which attaches to any careful presentation of the approach to, and the outcome of, those moral crises and situations which constitute the turning-points of life. Esme Stuart, however, overdoes George Eliot's expatiatory manner, and introduces far more than her great predecessor of that reflective and analytic matter which, while it may be good in itself, is not good dramatically, because instead of elucidating the action of the story, it diverts us from it. She is too uniformly elaborate and "intellectual" in her treatment ; her book is somewhat lacking in moral perspective, and is therefore likely to be tiresome in parts to those who read "for the story," and not entirely satisfactory even to readers of a better class. We must, howeier, bring this kind of comment to an abrupt end, or we shall do no adequate justice to a novel which is excellent with a kind of excellence which is always impressive, and which is now by no means common in English fiction. The story of the gradual deterioration in Aylmer Hardy's character after he has yielded to the great temptation of his life, and married Muriel while morally bound to another woman, is a masterly piece of portraiture, and all the more masterly because purely objective and dramatic, for his secret being as yet nn- revealed, the writer is compelled to forego all analysis of his inner life. He is, indeed, for the time somewhat inexplicable, and only when the revelation comes do we understand all that has preceded it. Muriel herself is a fine creation, and here again we have a suggestion of George Eliot, for she can best be described as a nineteenth century English Romola ; while Varinka Page, the half-Russian, half-English girl, with her over- whelming good-heartedness, her delightful eccentricity, her un- romantic common-sense, and her passion for music, is as original as she is charming. Muriel's Marriage is not a book for every- body, but it will be enjoyed most by those whose enjoyment is the highest tribute.
Sara will probably be more popular, because Mrs. Chetwynd's treatment of her theme is less elaborate and more direct than that of Esme Stuart. It is, indeed, a thoroughly interesting and well-told story,—so well told, that doubts concerning its imaginative veracity may only arise when the reader has closed the third volume and begins to think it over. Sara herself is made very real, but it can hardly be said that either the girl herself or her relations with Basil Fairlie are made entirely credible. We can easily conceive the possibility of a girl brought up in almost entire solitude subordinating all other feelings to a burning desire for poetical distinction ; but when she is represented as being utterly destitute of imagination, utterly devoid of any idea of the very meaning of poetry, and even lacking in that fatal facility of stringing verses together which induces some people to think themselves poets, we are, to put it mildly, perplexed. Equally perplexing is Sir Basil's passion for this femme incoraprise. Had he been represented as being simply fascinated by her beauty, we should make no complaint ; but he is supposed to be drawn to her by the belief that she is in some way depreciated and mis- understood by the people who surround her, while a man of his trained discrimination could hardly have failed to see that she was little better than a conceited idiot. If, however, we grant that Sara is possible, and that she and her husband could have been brought together in the manner described, it must further • Muriel's Marriage. By Home Stuart. In 3 vols. London : Hurst and Blaekett. —Sara. By the Hon. Mrs. Henry W. Chetwynd. In 3 vole. London : F. V. White and Oo.—Fcund Guilty. By Frank Barrett. In 3 vole. London : Ward and Downey.—The Broken Seal. By Dora Russell. In 3 vole. London Hurst and Elackett.—Sir James Appleby, Bart. By Katherine 8. Macquoid. In 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—Playing with Fire. By James Grant. In 3 vole. London Ward and Downey.— The Touchstone of Peril. By Dudley H. Thomas. In 2 vols. London : T. Fisher Unwin. —.A Year in Eden. By Harriet Waters Preston. In 2 vols. London : T. Fisher Unwin.
be granted that the story of their married life, with its in- evitable jars, is characterised by keen insight and observation, and that it is told with real literary skill. In so far as absence of positive defect is a constituent of success, some of the minor oharacters are more successful than the principal personages, and we do not see in the story of the educated and accomplished thief, Carl del Drino, enough of improbability to demand the author's apology and justification.
Those who remember Mr. Frank Barrett's John Ford, the only work of his with which we are acquainted, have a sur- prise waiting for them in Found Guilty. John Ford had little of story, and next to nothing that could be called plot ; but it was a noteworthy book in virtue of its vivid presentation of character, and its singularly direct, vigorous style, which rather reminded us of the style of Charles Reade. In this latter respect there is not much change, though there are fewer Readeian suggestions in Found Guilty than in its prede- cesssor ; bat so far as substance is concerned, the two books belong to quite diverse orders of literature. In Mr. Barrett's latest story, character-interest is nothing, plot-interest is every- thing, the book being a very typical and clever specimen of that class of fiction to which, since the days of Lady Audley's Secret and The Woman in White, the epithet " sensational " has been applied. It is obviously difficult to review a book of this kind save by the process of disclosing the plot, and so dis- counting the interest of those who may become readers, and as this is manifestly unfair, our remarks must be somewhat general. For once, Mr. Barrett has evidently taken Mr. Wilkie Collins for his master, adopting not only his general manner, but the special expedient or trick— invented, we think, by him—of telling the story by means of a series of statements supposed to be made by the principal actors. The expedient has some artistic advantages, but more dangers ; for unless the individuality of the various persons is dramatically sustained throughout their narratives, there is a felt sense of unreality. It is sometimes so sustained by Mr. Wilkie Collins. We could not open The Woman in White at a page supposed to be written by Count Fosco without recognising in a moment the identity of the narrator. But in Found Guilty, the mere style of Dorothea Howard is indistinguishable from that of the Rev. Dr. Bnllen, and of both of them from that of Thomas Craik, though the two former—to note no other difference—are cultivated people, while the last is a half-educated lawyer's clerk. Then, too, Mr. Barrett makes one or two little slips which his master would have avoided,—such, for example, as that of representing the villain of the book as making the acquaintance of the heroine under a false name at a time when there was no possible motive for the deception, he being then ignorant of the existence of the document which gave a motive for such deception. As a rule, however, the dovetailing of Found Guilty is excellent, and readers who estimate the goodness of a story by the difficulty they have in laying it down will have a high opinion of Mr. Barrett's latest novel, as it will probably deprive them of some hours of sleep. Otherwise it will not hurt them, for the tone is wholesome throughout.
The Broken Seal is another story of plot-interest, though the construction is less elaborate than that of Found Guilty. Miss Dora Russell avoids slips by avoiding too ambitious elaboration, the sole interest being the very familiar difficulty of discovering the perpetrator of a mysterious murder. This part of the story is decidedly ingenious, and, indeed, we cannot at the present moment remember a novel of this kind in which a similar secret is better kept. The circumstantial evidence that Sir James Lester has met his death at the hand of Laura Davis, the girl whom—as it turns out—he has seduced under a promise of marriage, is simply irresistible ; and though we very soon become assured of Laura's innocence, we have no clue as to the identity of the real criminal. Perhaps puzzles of this kind are hardly worth constructing at all ; but good work is always preferable to bad work, and Miss Dora Russell's work is very good indeed, for even the most experienced novel-reader is likely to lose the scent. In the matter of character-drawing, the writer's aims are not ambitious, but they are fairly success- ful. The types are familiar, not to say hackneyed; but the typical personages are, at any rate, so much alive that we should know them if we met them, which is more than we can say of the personages who figure in Found Guilty. The worldly mother, Mrs. Doyne, who by her vulgar scheming ruins her daughter's fife, bat who can always prove herself to have been in the right, is a very cleverly drawn piece of portraiture ; and in a quieter way, the middle-aged Mr. Harford, who, when rejected by the young girl whom he loves, heroically endeavours to secure her happiness with the man of her choice, is equally successful. Unfortunately, the story is spoiled by a conclusion which is both ineffective and inartistic. If a young man like Sir Alan Lester, who is repre- sented as not only chivalrous but strong, had once plighted his faith to a lovely and loving girl, he would never, on the eve of his marriage, have been guilty of the contemptible weakness of confessing to an old love—who, by the way, is a married woman —that she still held possession of his heart. The blunder is one which most readers will find it very hard to forgive.
We owe gratitude to Mrs. Macquoid for several very pleasant stories ; but our obligation is hardly increased by Sir James Appleby, Bart., for it is anything but a pleasant story. We do not mean that it is unpleasant in the sense in which that word is frequently used when fiction is in question. It contains no offences against good morals or good taste, and it has a great deal of real cleverness of a somewhat hard, mechanical kind; but its unpleasantness lies in the fact that all the cleverness is wasted upon the matrimonial schemings of worldly seniors, and upon the utterly fatuous compliances and surrenders of the young people who are their passive, if not their willing victims. We do not think we have read anything more exasperating—that is the only word for the sensation—than the chapter in which Sydney Appleby is bamboozled into an engagement with Georgina Dunsfold, when he is as much in love as he well can be with his cousin Marian, and she has been brought into the same condition by Arthur Cavan, the clever young barrister. In the third volume, we have a reminiscence of the Tichborne case, for a claimant from Australia puts in an appearance ; and a novel in which such a person is welcomed as a relief is clearly a depressing performance. It must be added that the style of the book is occasionally careless, not to say slovenly. " Different to," and similar phrases of equal inelegance are altogether in- excusable.
Either Mr. James Grant must have sadly deteriorated of late years, or oar juvenile taste must have been very immature, for in boyhood's days The Romance of War and its companion stories were prime favourites. We fear that the latter hypothesis is the more tenable, for Playing with Fire is really so poor in both conception and execution as to induce a doubt whether its author could ever have produced anything really admirable. The strings of those familiar puppets, the scheming, heartless flirt, the wicked step-mother, and the villainous steward, are all palled again for us as they have been pulled a thousand times, bat rather more jerkily than usual ; and the manner is certainly not such as to atone for matter which is at once hackneyed and unnatural. The military chapters of the book, which are intended to justify its sub-title, " A Story of the Soudan War," read like clippings from special correspondence, and are very clumsily worked into the body of a story which contains hardly anything that we can honestly single out as praiseworthy.
The next two novels on our list do not call for lengthy notice, though The Touchstone of Peril, another military story, is as good as Playing with Fire is bad. It is a tale of the Indian Mutiny, and some of the incidents of the Sepoy uprising are described with such vivacity as to suggest the idea—borne out by the motto on the title-page—that Mr. Thomas is writing of scenes which he has actually witnessed. There is no elaboration of character portraiture, but the principal per- sonages are sketched in a natural and lifelike manner. Some of the later chapters are really thrilling, and it is in them that we find the explanation of the title, for the touchstone of peril unmistakably distinguishes the gold from the alloy. Alloy is, indeed, too complimentary a word, for Percy Dacres is the poorest pinchbeck.
A Year in Eden would be much abbreviated, and also much improved, by the elimination of all the adjectives and of all the passages which have nothing to do with the action of a very thin story ; but no cutting and hacking could make it anything else than an extremely tiresome, unnatural, and affected per- formance. The faults of the book, which are as plenty as black- berries, are rendered all the more provoking by various little indications that the author is not destitute of a certain clever- ness, and perhaps of something even better than cleverness, though it must be said that these indications are least frequent in the passages where she is consciously aiming at being clever. A Year in Eden is, in short, as typical an example as we have lately seen of amateur work in fiction.
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