NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
0-rix chief cause of complaint. with Mr. Gissing in regard to his new and excellent novel is that he should have so frankly given away the motive of his story in the title, instead of emulating the subtlety of Cherhuliez, who prefixed to a some- what similar study the ingenious label of Samuel Brola et Cie. For, after all, Dyce Lashmar is not irrevocably branded with the stigma of charlatanry until the middle of the story, and with a less outspoken title—always assuming that the reader will abstain from applying the Solonian maxim, ;04 142to; 6piy —the pleasures of suspense might have been maintained for the best part of two hundred pages. This outspokenness, however, is thoroughly characteristic of Mr. Gissing's un- compromising method. He has never shown any desire to conciliate. his readers by indulgence in any literary amenities, and though the tone of the present volume is less sombre than several of its predecessors, the portraiture is as stern and unflattering, the style as free from superfluous orna- ment, as in any of the author's earlier novels. Yet though Our Friend the Charlatan does not fascinate—the word is generally taken to signify charm, in which Mr. Gissing is deficient—it holds the reader by its engrossing and sustained interest. There is, as usual, no hero in the yomantic or heroic sense, while the female characters are even less calculated to appeal to the emotions of the reader; but there are at least half-a-dozen remarkable portraits of modern men and women, and a great deal of convincing illustration of the manner in which character is moulded by circumstances. • The central figure, Dyce Lashmar, a young Oxford man of eight-and- twenty, the son of a poor vicar and the charlatan of the plot, is a really masterly study of that egotism which just lacks the quality of ruthlessness to render it triumphant, and excites. a certain amount of mitigated compassion by its failure. Lashmar, who is eloquent, plausible, and endowed with a singular gift of lucid exposition, so far exploits an intro- duction to a wealthy and autocratic Baronet's widow as to secure her support for his political candidature in the division. Lady Ogram, a strong-minded, shrewd old lady whose power of reading character is blinded by personal pre- judices, succumbs to her protege's eloquence, accepts his plagiarised philosophical creed as original, and plans a mar- riage between him and her strong-minded secretary, Miss Con- stance Bride. But Miss Bride has already seen through Lashmar, and Lashmar is under peculiar obligations to Mrs. Woolstau, a pretty widow, to whose son he has acted as tutor.. Finally, when Lady Ograut discovers and practically adopts a missing grand- niece, May Tomalin, Lashmar, though Constance has already consented to a purely nominal engagement to please her patroness, makes up to the new-comer. The conflicting claims of gratitude, of sell-interest, and of passion tear the unhappy charlatan this way and that, until he is finally unmasked by Lady Ogram, and after being driven to offer marriage seriously to Constance, is rejected in circumstances of great humiliation on the old lady's death. Lastly we see him frankly adopting the ride of parasite by marrying the generous widow, and in the first days of their married life developing a taste for bullying his submissive spouse which augurs ill for. their future. We may note as a curious fact that all the strong characters are women,—Lady Ogram, Constance Bride, and Mrs. Toplady, a brilliant, cynical woman of fashion, who under a gracious exterior conceals a malicious genius for engineering the discomfiture of her friends.
If it be too much to say that the numerous disciples of Mr. Bret Harte—who is, after all, the father of the short story as English readers know it—have bettered their instruction, it is certainly true that he has suffered a good deal of late years
• (1.) Our Friend the Charlatan. By George Gissing. London : Chapman and Hall. 6s.]—(2.) Under the Redwoods. By Bret Kerte. London : C. A. Pearson. [es.)—(3.) Pastorals of Dorset. By M. E. Francis (Hrs. Francis Blundell). With Illustrations by Claud C. du Pre Cooper. London: Longmans and Co. [6s.]—(4.) The Wise an of Sterncross. By the Lady Augusta Noel. London: J. Miurray. [6s.]—(5.The Vicar of St. Luke's. By Sibyl Creed. London: Longmans and Co. [6s. —O.) Kitty's Victoria Cross. By Robert Cromie. London : Warne and Co. [6s.J—(7.) In Search of Mademoiselle. BY George Gibbs. Philadelphia Henry T. Coates and Co. London Only: a Bet of Common Occurrences. By W. Pelt Ridge. Londcn: Hodder and Stoughton. [Os.j from the most deadly of all competitors, his own earlier self Hence we are glad to find in his new volume a morieffectual rekindling of the old fires.of imagination than has illumined his work for many a long day. In the matter of time and scene Mr. Bret FIarte is strangely .faithful to his earliest loves ; his theme is still the free life on the Pacific slopes, in the mining camps, and in San Francisco in the "fifties." But when that theme is handled with such spirit, such picturesqueness, and above all such a masterly appraciation of the value of unex- pected contrasts—perhaps Mr. Bret Harte's greatest secret of success—we have no desire to quarrel with the -familiarity of the setting. The turbulent, lawless period of transition in the growth of the West was full of literary possibilities which have hardly yet been exhausted, and as long as there is a s,,ark of sentiment left in this world, the hero a hi Bret I_Arle—the hero, that is, who is three parts ruffian and one part Bayard—will retain his hold on the gentle reader. (We- except, of course, the emancipated modern who prefers the inversion to be complete : that the Beast must net only marry Beauty, but remain a Beast.) Under the Red- woods, then, if it cannot repeat the resounding success achieved by its author's earlier camp stories, is at least un- commonly good reading. The story of the miner who imposes on the little brother and sister of the dead comrade whom he has impersonated in a spirit of thoughtless generosity, borders perilously on the domain of artificial pathos ; but the strange experience of the San Francisco journalist, "Under the Eaves," in which the man of the pen harbours the wife and children of a hunted desperado, is a miast ingeniously contrived little romance. The desperado's wife is perhaps too elegant and refined for her situation, but that is where Mr. Bret Harte's application of the law of surprise comes in.
- The pleasant volume of short stories whieh Mrs. Blundell has collected under the title of Pastorals of Dorset worthily Maintains her reputation as a sympathetic delineator of the humours and hardships, the charities and amenities, of rural life. Mrs. Blundell has no mind to treat her subject d ht Watteau; on the other hand, she is no slavish adherent to the new convention of the unhappy ending. In a word, her outlook approximates more closely to the kindly serenity hf Barnes than to the sombre realism of Mr. Hardy. It may be that her rustics of both sexes are more addicted to the shed- ding of tears than in real life, and that she has occasionally substituted a cheery stoicism for the callousness born of the long struggle to make both ends meet. A touch of legitimate actuality is given to some of the tales by their connection with the war in South Africa, and perhaps the most moving of them all is that of the brave mother who fulfilled her soldier-sons request by celebrating the relief of Ladysmith, though the good news followed hard on the tidings . of _his death. Excellent, also, is the story of the ingenious but risky stratagem by which another devoted mother sought to cover the humiliation of a deserted daughter,—viz., by inventing a soldier-husband who had fallen in the war. This is a capital specimen of rural tragi-comedy. We may also note the charming story of the little boy who was lost at the fair, and the admirable character-sketches of the old shepherd, . his master and mistress, in the tale which opens the collection.
The plot of Lady Augusta Noel's novel is too complicated to allow of finished portraiture or elaborate analysis of character. Denys Godolphin, the Wise Man of the story,. a benevolent recluse with a taste for gardening, one day finds a little girl asleep under a currant-bush, and takes her to his neighbour, Mrs. Morland, a gentle little woman who earns a livelihood for herself and her son Chris as a drawing mistress, —nomen omen. The little waif turns out to be the daughter of a certain Mrs. Shirley, a lady of good fauiily who had appropriated and sold- a family heirloom, and subsequently lived a sordid, struggling life in the hope of saving enough money to repay the rightful owner, Sir Alwyne. Carteret. True Shirley—the little girl found under the currant-bush- befriended by Godolphin and Mrs. Morland, grows up and becomes engaged to Chris Morland, a somewhat dijicile youth with a talent for 'sculpture: But when Chris is studying in London he discovers that he is really the despised and outcast son of the- famous. sculptor, Sir Lyon Dunbar, having been palmed off in early childhood on Mrs. Mot-hind after a shipwreck in the place of her own child, Who was then drowned. We cannot pursue the ramifications of the plot of The Wise Man of Sternero3s further in detail. Suffice
it to say that Chris is unhinged by the discovery, that Mrs.
Morland dies of the shock, that True's mother is rehabilitated by the discovery that the diamond necklace which she stole had been really left to her by her father, and that after the unlucky Chris has been eliminated by drowning, True Shirley is left free to marry the Wise Man's eligible nephew. The element of the inevitable is by no means conspicuous in the development of this story, but it is far from unreadable.
Victorian James Goring, vicar of St. Luke's, Holt, has aroused the Protestant element in his congregation by pro- posing the introduction of lighted candles upon the altar.
His Bishop advises him not to do this without first consulting the wishes of his parishioners, and therefore he and his two curates, Docker and Bannerman, arrange for a meeting to discuss the matter. Mr. Bind, a wealthy parvenu whom Goring has unintentionally offended, is the best and most emphatic speaker on the other side ; but the eloquence of
the vicar carries the day. Goring, it should be added, is the devoted visitor of his poor, and at the deathbed of a tailor accepts in a measure the charge of his daughter,
Lena Merton, a vain, hysterical girl. He has also made friends with a sybaritic novelist of no special religious views
—Mr. Lilly—and falls in love with his charming daughter Elsie. As he advocates the celibacy of the clergy, and con- siders himself specially bound not to marry, this causes him much distress. Meanwhile Lena Merton, having vainly tried to attract his attention, steals part of a letter which he has written for a blind old woman, and concocts a tale of love and betrayal which is readily believed by Mr. Bind, the bulwark of Protestantism. At a public meeting where the vicar presides Bind induces a parishioner to read this letter and challenge the vicar to deny its genuineness. Having for- gotten the episode, Goring can only declare that he has no recollection of the matter, and, but for the prompt support of Docker, his reputation seems nearly lost. Miss Lilly dies of shock from hearing of this scandal before Docker's discovery of the rest of the letter with the blind woman's signature clears the vicar. Goring, however, finds peace in joining the Jesuit Order, and at the end is engaged in trying to cure Mr. Lilly from the excesses of drink into which he has fallen after his daughter's death. The writer of The Vicar of St. Luke's suggests that " Anglo-Catholics" cannot logically exist. But as we have said before, fiction is, in our opinion, a most un- satisfactory means of attempting to secure credence for con- troversial propositions of this sort.
The heroine of Kitty's Victoria Cross and her friends are either so undistinguished or so improbable that it is hard to feel much interest in their fortunes. Captain Peters." a poor type of British officer, stationed with a subaltern at Innisboffin on eviction duty, shows a sad lack of chivalry in his treatment alike of Kitty O'Neill, an ingame with a "cultured brogue," and the vicar's daughter, a Girton girl, who both fall in love with him. Then there is an American millionaire, who at intervals proclaims his nationality by the remark, Honest Injin," and a terrible Professor, who lives in the "Ghost House," vivisects any creature he can lay his hands on, and finally sacrifices his daughter's life in the pursuit of science. Perhaps the most exhilarating character amongst the dramatis personz is Dan O'Mara, the village Sandow, who heads a mob to attack Captain Peterson, and on being arrested by two policemen "wipes the street" with them until their tunics are torn to ribbons. Ultimately Captain Peter- son is sent to India, where he loses his life in leading a forlorn hope. His Victoria Cross is sent to Kitty, who consoles her- self after a decent interval with the subaltern, while the Girton girl espouses the millionaire.
The story of Sidney Pettigrew's adventures by sea and land in France and Florida, with Spaniards, Huguenots, and Indians, rests on a historical basis, the struggle between the Spanish and French colonists for dominion over Florida, and many of the characters introduced are historical person- ages. In Search of Mademoiselle is full of incident, though in briskness of movement and lightness of touch it leaves something to be desired.
London Only, a companion volume of short studies to Out- side the Radius, exhibits Mr. Pett Ridge's alert and genial talent in the very best light. Few writers excel him in the art of condensed characterisation, or enable the reader more fully to recognise that the domain of the street-arab is not always an Arabia Infelix. We can cordially recommend these enter- taining stories and sketches, with their happy blending of humour and pathos, as the best possible antidote to the elaborately depressing portraiture of fashionable society so much in vogue at the moment.
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