NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
nECENT Scandinavian fiction has shown a marked tendency towards the harshest and most uncompromising realism, partly, no doubt, as the result of a literary revulsion against the fascinations of legendary mythical and elfin romance. We are glad to find the pendulum swinging back in the latter direction in the works of some of the younger writers, and to welcome in this delightful volume by Selma Lagerlof evidence of the unabated vitality of that vein of fantastic invention which ran purest in the tales of Andersen. The influence of Goethe's Wilhelm. Meister is obvious in the longest and most beautifuLstory of the collection. Ingrid, the heroine, reminds us of. Mignon—indeed the parallel is admitted by the writer— and the strolling players and the blind musician enhance the resemblance. But when all deductions are made on the score of indebtedness, the originality of plot and treatment remain unquestioned. Gunnar Hede, the hero, is a young man of good social position and strongly marked artistic leanings. Summoned home from his studies at the University to rebuild the shattered fortunes of his family, he resorts to the calling of an ancestor and turns travel- ling pedlar, only to lose his reason after the failure of a disastrous deal in goats. Thenceforward he continues to roam the country with his pack, a harmless lunatic, dressed in peasant garb. In the course of his wanderings he strays into a churchyard and rescues from an open grave a young girl who had been buried while in a trance. This girl, an orphan and a waif, had been removed from a troupe of strolling players and adopted by a benevolent pastor. But when the madman carries her home in her grave-clothes in his pack to the pastor's house, the pastor's wife is frightened out of her wits, the girl beseeches her rescuer to carry her away to an old woman's but in the woods, and the old woman eventually obtains her a position in the house of the madman's mother. There Ingrid learns the identity of her rescuer, learns also that he is none other than the handsome student who had befriended her when she was with the mountebanks, and devotes herself to the task of charming him back to sanity. The story, which when presented in bare outline seems fantastic and even grotesque, is rendered touching and convincing by the ingenuous charm and sincerity of the narrator. There is nothing macabre in the weird interview in the graveyard, or the harrowing scene when the poor heroine, miraculously restored to life, realises that her benefactress is only too anxious to be rid of her, and resolves to take' refuge with the poor peasant woman. There is humour, too, in the characters of the acrobat and his wife, and the peculiarity of their old horse, so accustomed to work a merry-go-round that he will not draw a cart except to the accompaniment of a Jew's harp.
The quality of Miss Dorothea Gerard's work varies a good deal, and we confess to having been somewhat disappointed with some of her recent novels, especially those dealing with cosmopolitan society in high places. But in The Supreme Crime, a most striking story of Ruthenian life in Austria, she is once more the Miss Dorothea Gerard who gave us Orthodox and Recha, in other words, at her very best. The motive of the story is given in the quotation from Heine on the title- page:—"Der schlimmste Wurm, des Zweifels Dolchgedanken."
• (L) From a Swedish Homestead. By Selma Lagerliff. Translated by Jessie Brdchner. London : W. Heinemann. [Os.]—(2.) The Supreme Crime. By Dorothea Gerard (Madame Longard de Longgarge). London : Methuen and co. Ds.] —(3.) Northborough Cross. By L. Cve-Cornford. London : George [6.1—(4.) Prince Rupert the Buccaneer. By C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. London : M-ethuen and Co. [6s.]—(5.) The Warden of the Marches. By Sydney B1r John A. Steuart. London : Hutchinson and Co. 6s.]—(7.) The Third Roar. By Mrs. Dudeney. London : Methuen and Co. Cs.]—(5.) A Secretary C. Grier. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [68.116.) The Eternal Quest. 414gation. By Hope Dawliele. Loudon : Methuen and Co. [68.] Gregor Petrow is a young schoolmaster, an earnest, high- minded youth, who is paying his addresses to the eldest of the three daughters of the Pope or priest of the village. The priest consents to favour his suit if he will enter the priesthood, and offers him pecuniary assistance while pursuing his studies. On his return from Lemberg four years later, Gregor falls violently in love with Zenobia's younger sister. Zenobia, though cut to the heart by his defection, relinquishes her claim and the wedding-day is fixed, when Wasylya—the younger sister—dies with appalling sud- denness of some mysterious illness. On recovering from the blow, which he regards in the light of a judgment on him for his desertion, Gregor decides to renew his suit to Zenobia. They are married, Zenobia makes him an adoring and devoted wife, but the young priest speedily finds that every one looks askance on her, including her own father. Subsequently a rejected suitor of Zenobia's calmly volunteers the informa- tion to the unhappy Gregor that his wife is generally sus- pected of having poisoned her sister. As the evidence steadily accumulates Gregor taxes his wife with the crime; her indignant denial only reassures him for a while, as Hypolit —the rival—adduces fresh proof of her guilt. Finally, on her husband's saying that he would only believe her innocence if she protested it on her deathbed, the unhappy Zenobia, taking him at his word, poisons herself in order to regain his confidence. And then, after her martyrdom, the truth comes out, by the confession of the Pope's servant, that Wasylya was accidentally poisoned by some arsenic powders which she had obtained from the village witch to improve her complexion. Apart from the exceptional poignancy of the story, the author's artistic use of local colour, her knowledge of the homely details of Ruthenian life, and her intimate apprecia- tion of racial characteristics lend interest to this intensely engrossing narrative. A striking feature in the story is the attitude of Hypolit Jarewicz, a disciple of Nietzsche's, who, believing Zenobia to be guilty, admires her for her ruthless- ness, and tries to make love to her at the very same time that he is supplying her husband with proofs of her guilt.
Northborough Cross, as a novel of cathedral society, suggests comparisons with Trollope, but apart from the setting, there is hardly anything in common between Mr. Cope Cornford's clever story and the work of the genial mid- Victorian novelist. For while Trollope's attitude to the Church and the clergy was always kindly or indulgent, Mr. Cornford's book is permeated by a distinct anti-clerical bias we had almost said animus. Not one of the clergy who figure in the dramatis persona commands our respect ; Canon Glossop, the loose-lipped sensualist with green, shifty eyes, is apeculiarly odious personage; the Dean is a pedant and a snob; and the hero's father an amiable but utterly unspiritual weakling. Lured by the greed of gain, they fall victims without exception to the blandishments of an unscrupulous company promoter, who after one liquidation restarts his company with the funds realised by the sale of sundry chests, con- taining the lost treasures of the chapter, which he burglariously removes from the cathedral vaults. The only persons who, living under the' shadow of the cathedral, are moved by the grandeur of its fabric and the glamour of its past are both laymen. The old architect is excellently drawn, but the hero is a rather shadowy figure. But the book must stand or fall as an indictment of clerical life in a cathedral town, and as such we cannot help feeling that it is grossly exaggerated and unjust.
Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne has taken Prince Rupert's cruise to the West Indies (1651-52) as the groundwork of his romance, and woven on to it a pretty series of adventures for the Prince Palatine. In one instance, however, the ingenious author fails, contrary to his usual practice, to " join his flats.' Prince Rupert, in the opening chapters of the book, lets out the King's ships, of which he is in command, to the Governor of Tortuga for a certain time, in order—and a special point is made of this—to obtain the money to release his old comrades in arms who, exported by Cromwell as malignants, have been sold into slavery under the name of engages. Well and good ; the fleet sails, and Rupert joins himself to the Buccaneers, with whom be has a series of blood- curdling adventures, which continue till the middle of the very last chapter. Finally, Rupert and his disguised (female) secre • tart' return to Tortuga, where, coerced by sundry pricks of a dagger, the Governor pays Rupert fifty thousand pounds and returns the fleet. Whereupon Rupert resumes his proper place once more as Admiral of the King's fleet, the curtain is immediately " rung down," and not a single word is said about the fate of the unfortunate engaggs for whose benefit the whole venture was undertaken. Apart from this point, Prince Rupert the Buccaneer is filled with rousing adventures, and will be much enjoyed, especially by young gentlemen at home for the Easter holidays.
It is not often that the jaded reviewer becomes as absorbed in the perusal of a book "for notice" as did the present writer in Mr. Grier's The Warden of the Marches. It is an exceedingly interesting and exciting story of life on the Indian frontier. Whatever may be the reader's views on the vexed question of frontier policy, he will be far more likely to extend his sympathy to Major North, who has for some years "run the frontier," than to the Commissioner and his academic theories of a peace policy of non-interference. Mr. Grier's well-known power of conscientious characterisation stands him in good stead in his present book, the personages in which are as well drawn and as carefully differentiated from each other as if they had not an adventure between them.
Mr. Steuart hardly makes it sufficiently clear to his readers what he means by calling his book The Eternal Quest. There is no particular quest in which the characters are engaged. The story is a quiet, every-day tale of a Scotch village, in which live, amongst some minor characters, a retired General, an old Army chaplain, and a banker ; and this trio have the honour of being the parents of the young people with whose fortunes the story is concerned. The result is a read- able book, though one cannot but think that the " General " resembles the dictatorial fathers of the last century rather than the submissive parents whom the rising genera- tion have produced by unremitting care in their education. However, of course his hero son overrules him in the long run and gets his own way,—and perhaps, after all, "one's own way" is the true object of Mr. Steuart's " eternal quest."
Women readers will probably think it a debatable point as to whether Mrs. Penrice would not at the end of The Third Floor have risked everything to tell Valencia that she was her daughter. It would, of course, be difficult to tell one's child that one had, for very sufficient cause, divorced her father and then remarried him after an intervening further matrimonial experiment, but it would, one would think, be still more difficult for a woman to live close to her child and see her constantly and yet keep such a secret. Mrs. Dudeney always loves a "problem," and she certainly propounds one here. The book is clever, like all this author's work, and she has not lost her power of setting the every-day life of her characters before the reader with almost photographic accuracy of detail. Valencia, the girl heroine, is not quite so attractive as she is meant to be, but few authors are con- vincing in this regard. Anyhow, it is satisfactory to be able to say that the story is pleasant reading, a proposition not invariably applicable to Mrs. Dudeney's earlier work.
Mr. Hope Dawlish gives us in A Secretary of Legation a cleverly written novel of diplomatic life, with, for its main motive, the recrudescence of the gambling mania in a woman happily married, but with a tempestuous past. The madness of Mrs. Trehearne, for it can be described by no other word, her ruthlessness in exacting from Hal Dale a return for her former generosity, the revenge of the acid spinster Miss Vaughan, and the magnanimity of the gambler's husband, are described with considerable ability by the author.
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