An Open Foe : a Romance. By Adeline Sergeant. 3
vols. (Bentley and Son.)—There is an old Greek adage comprised in the two words Mnlav &yap, which we would commend to Miss Sergeant's notice, or if she prefers the characteristically different Hebrew version of the same sentiment, "be not righteous overmuch." Do not overdo it, is as safe a rule in literature as in morals. Miss Sergeant has terribly overdone it in this book. She has overdone it in the plot, in style, in the length of the story; she has even overdone it in the ink. For terrible to relate, she has actually printed her book in red ink, with the result that one leaves off reading the book with a feeling of physical as well as intellectual exhaustion and sense of relief. In the story Miss Sergeant has accumulated plots and horrors that would furnish stuff for a dozen sensation novels. To begin with, we have a secret marriage which is not secret, a desertion which is no desertion, ending in the death of the undeserted wife, the death of a baby, and the death, which is not a death, of a child of three years old who could not possibly understand what was supposed to have happened, and therefore had not the least reason for dying. So that in the "first act of Gaston Ravenscroft's life," which ends on page 73 of the first volume, we have material for the whole three-volume drama. The second act is quite as exciting. Gaston Ravenscroft, thinking his wife and children dead, goes on to an open down as a convenient spot to commit suicide, and is about to do so with a pistol when he is stopped by a little girl "nine or ten years old" (Miss Sergeant apparently has not sufficient determination of mind to decide which), who understood what suicide with a pistol was, because, being a member of a strolling troupe of actors, she had seen sham suicides in a theatre, and no doubt had well learnt all that goes to distinguish the sham from the real. This little girl, who afterwards turns out to be his cousin's granddaughter Vera, Gaston, as in duty bound, rescues from the troupe, and has educated and brought up as a lady. Meanwhile, Gaston's cousin, her grandfather, is having Gaston's boy brought up as a gentleman, whom everyone supposed to be an illegitimate son. When Gaston sees hie protegee Vera again, aged 22, as a famous singer and lovely beyond compare, he naturally falls in love with her ; and as she has already fallen in love with a young Russian, thence springs another tragedy of a complicated character, owing to the violence of Gaston's wrath. Meanwhile, Gaston's son, who had somehow managed to grow to nine- teen from three in the same number of years as Vera had taken to grow from nine or ten to twenty-two, makes love to Gaston's niece, and thereby incurs Gaston's bitter hatred. The complications which then ensue are too elaborate to give an account of. Suffice it that the un- fortunate Gaston's life ends in a greater tragedy than it had begun in, and Vera marries and lives happily ever afterwards Who is the open
foe and to whom he is foe, does not quite appear, as there are so many secret foes about the book. But the whole story is a mass of im- probabilities, which is bad, and what is worse, of inconsistencies.
There is not a single character in the book who partakes of real life. Vera is as preternaturally lovely, and sweet, and good, as Gaston is openly vile-tempered and villainous, and as his mother, who is at the bottom of all the complications, is insidiously wicked. The plot thickens so that the hapless reader gets entirely confused, and fails
to take much interest in the characters. Altogether, MistoSergeant requires to learn that it is not multiplicity of tragic incident that makes a good story, or piling on the paint that makes a good portrait. She displa) a a certain amount of power, but she requires to temper it with discretion, and above all with patience and care.
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