MRS. STEEL'S LATEST FICTION.* As a novelist Mrs. Steel has
come rapidly to the front, and her most recent work seems to us undoubtedly her best. In her new three-volume novel, The Potter's Thumb, and in the two volumes of short stories and sketches there are the inti- mate knowledge, the finely-rendered observation, the quick sympathy, and the noteworthy literary skill which have dis- tinguished her previous books ; but here, though we perceive and enjoy all these things, we are most impressed by the imaginative power shown in realising the inmost secret of the life with which the author deals. That power was not wanting in From the Five Rivers and Miss Stuart's Legacy,—indeed, its presence gave to these works one of their principal charms,—but there its presence was more or less intermittent ; here it is constant, and we feel that the author is not merely a keen observer and an accomplished narrator, but a true and powerful imaginative artist. Indeed, Mrs. Steel does one thing of which, if it cannot be said that it has never been done before, it can assuredly be said that it has never been done quite so well. What this one thing is can perhaps be best, indicated by a moment's reference to another worker in Mrs. Steel's chosen field. It has, of course, been inevitable that her work should be compared or con- trasted with that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and yet there is a point of difference between the two which, important as it is, has hardly been noted, and has certainly not been emphasised. If we recall those stories of Mr. Kipling's which, in virtue of their picturesque or dramatic impressiveness, linger in the memory, we shall find that they deal mainly with Anglo- Indian life, and that the interest which inheres in the pre- sentation of native character is, comparatively speaking, subsidiary. On the other hand, when we look back upon Mrs. Steel's novels or short stories, especially upon the works now under review, we think first, not of the author's countrymen or countrywomen who play their parts in her pages, but of some dusky figure or figures which have made us (and by " us " we mean English readers) free of a new world of imagination. So far as treatment of native life is concerned, Mr. Kipling's stories seem the outcome of years of shrewd observation : those of Mrs. Steel hint at a life time of sympathetic study, and a garnered store of compre- hending knowledge, which in the books of an English author is all but unique. In The Flower of Forgiveness and its companion stories, the native has all the field to himself, the imaginary Englishman being simply a looker-on and narrator. In. The Potter's Thumb, the mere mechanism of the story brings the European characters to the front ; but though they are not deficient in vitality or interest, the book is dominated by the Oriental personalities which, though they seem bat to flit through its pages, stamp on the mind of the reader the deepest and most permanent impression. The narrative interest of the book is provided by the responsibility of the young civilian, Keene, for the keeping, against native craft or violence, of the sluice which protects the great embankment against abnormal floods. Fruitless appeals are made to greed and to passion, but the loyal lad—for he is little more—is invulnerable to both; and it is through the treachery of one of his own countrywomen that the key which sets free the imprisoned waters falls at last into the hands of the plotters. In its main outlines the scheme of the novel is simple enough, but it affords fine opportunities for exhibiting the manifold and sinister resourcefulness of the native in a conflict where his subtlety is pitted against the power and blunt straight- forwardness of his Western rulers; and in a number of marvellously studied portraits, truthfully imagined ex- pedients, and intimate touches which testify alike to fullness of knowledge and fineness of apprehension, Mrs. Steel gives us one of the most truthful pictures of the darker side of Indian character which we have ever had from an English writer.
* (1.) The Potter's Thumb. By Flom Annie Stool. S vole. London William!. Heineman.—(2,) The Flower of Forgiveness. S vols. Ilaounillan and 0o. The imaginative interest of the book—the conception which gives to it an intellectual as well as a narrative unity—is hinted at in the title. Into St. Paul's question, "Hath not the potter power over the clay ?" we may read the essential spirit of the fatalism of the East ; and Mrs. Steel strikes the key-note of her novel in the opening chapter, where Keene and Fitzgerald listen to the mother who points to her dying child, and speaks of "the potter's thumb," while Fitzgerald asks her if she refers to some disease :— "She gave the native cluck of emphatic denial. No ! Huzoor. The child dies because it does not drink milk properly ; yet is it the potter's thumb in the beginning ? Lo ! many are born so in this place. The doctor-sahib who put the tikka on the arms for small-pox said Hodinugger was too old for birth—that it was a graveyard. I know not. Only this is true ; many are born with this; many die of Die of the potter's thumb—what potter ? ' —The broad face broadened still more into a smile.—' The Hu- zoor doth not understand ! Lo ! when the potter works in the clay, his hand slips sometimes in the moulding. It leaves a furrow, so,'—her brown finger, set with tarnished silver rings, traced a girdle round the baby's naked breast—' then in the firing the pot cracks. Cracks like these,'—here the finger pointed to the shreds among which she sate,—' so when children are born as this one, we say, 'tis the potter's thumb. Sometimes there is a mark,'— again the finger softly followed the line it had traced before- ' this one had it clear when he came ; sometimes none can see it, but it is there all the same, all the same. The, potter's thumb has slipped; the pot will crack in the firing.' " This opening renders with an obvious impressiveness the underlying intellectual idea of the story ; but such idea is not allowed to exercise a mechanical and unimaginative dominion over the work ; it appears and reappears like a haunting phrase making itself heard now and then in a com- position of elaborate harmonies. Mrs. Steel's imagination has never reinforced her knowledge so adequately and splendidly as in The Potter's Thumb. The old half-crazed potter himself, working at his wheel and living not only in his own past, but in the past of his far-reaching ancestry, is a singularly poetic figure ; and there is something almost creepy in Mrs. Steel's power of realising the old Diwan, Zubr-ul Zaman, sitting high up in his ancient tower,— an inert shrunken figure, in whom only the crafty brain seems to be alive. We find we have said nothing about the European characters, and as our omission has not been deliberate—for several of these characters are exceedingly interesting and lifelike creations—it is a sort of testimony to the peculiar fascination of Mrs. Steel's treatment of Indian life pure and simple. A book the reviewer of which can, without glaring inadequacy, ignore such portraits as those of Keene, Fitzgerald, and especially Mrs. Boynton, must needs be a remarkable novel of its kind.
As a collection of short stories, The Flower of Forgiveness is not less obviously, though it may be less uniformly, success- ful than The Potter's Thumb. To many writers of fiction the artistic filling of seven hundred pages is much easier than the artistic filling of twenty pages. They may be expert navi- gators of the sea of imagination, but they are slow in getting under way. They need plenty of sea-room, and unless they have it, they are apt to show to poor advantage ; but Mrs. Steel's alert dexterity in attacking an episode or a situation is equal to her command of more elaborate narrative. In hinting at a certain want of equality in The Flower of Forgiveness, we are thinking of certain stories in the second volume where, as it seems to us, the very intimacy of the author's knowledge militates against artistic success. For the moment Mrs. Steel seems to forget how absolutely ignorant are the majority of her readers concerning the most elementary conditions of the life with which she is dealing, and the narrative has something of a tantalising elusiveness. These, how- ever, are rare lapses; and we could make a long list of the stories which, distinguished as they are by power, pathos, or picturesqueness, are, like The Potter's Thumb, mainly remark- able for the skill with which Mrs. Steel makes us free of the secret of a life so alien to the life of the Western world that the two seem to have nothing in common but naked humanity.
The stolid immoveableness of the East, its unquestioning acceptance of immemorial tradition, and, as a consequence of these things, its bewildering standards of taste and morals, have never been more closely indicated, or more sympatheti- cally interpreted, than in some of these stories. An episode in the conflict between the mighty inertia of the East and the progressive, revolutionary activities of the West is described with charming humour, and not a few touches of fine pathos, in For the Faith, where the well-born and enthusiastically devout young Englishman, who is called. "Sonny baba," returns in the garb of a Salvation Army Captain to the India which he has left as a child, eager to storm the citadels of superstition and error and vice. His success is not conspicuous, and the whole story, especially that portion of it which is devoted to Sonny baba's anti- opium crusade, is as instructive as it is entertaining; but this is a story in which an obvious purpose counts for much, and perhaps Mrs. Steel achieves her finest triumphs in such tales as The Flower of Forgiveness, The Bhut-Baby, and Hura Nund, in which her well-nourished imagination plays round some strange, fantastic feature of native life without anything in the way of an arribre pens6e. They are remarkably powerful stories, with a strange mixture of beauty and terror; and they are charged with the mystery of the East in a measure which makes them a new thing in English literature.
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