NOVELS BY OLD HANDS AND NEW.* Mn. WILLIAM Buscx's novels
are, to use a feminine adjec- tive, invariably "nice," and they have none or very few of the weaknesses that are generally associated with that epithet, especially when it is applied to a literary performance. There are various good reasons for this characterisation, but per- haps the most obvious of them is that when we close one of Mr. Black's stories, we are left with the impression that life is on the whole a pleasant thing. "A sure proof," the pessimist will say, "that they are altogether wanting in truthfulness as a picture of life ; " but even the pessimist, if he be a sane person, will admit that life has some agreeable constituents, and if they are so insignificant that they are likely to be overlooked, all the more gratitude is due to any one who keeps them well to the front. And this Mr. Black undoubtedly does. He almost invariably takes us to pleasant places ; as a rule, he introduces us to more or less pleasant people ; and where the less predominates over the more, he does not accentuate the predominance, but softens and mini- mises it. Though the name Hume iuggests a return to the country of his love, the scene of Mr. Black's latest story is laid in the valley of the Thames, with the lanes of Henley in the foreground and the domes and spires of Oxford in the middle distance. The story itself is a pretty idyll, having for its theme the mutual love of the young man Sidney and the girl Nan,—he the most youthful of the handsome Humes," whose handsomeness is equalled by their blue- bloodedness and their pride; she the only child and chief joy of the quiet Mr. Summers, known only to his Henley neighbours as a country gentleman in a small way, though he is really the great Jim Summers, once famous in sporting circles as a redoubtable hero of the "ring." It is in the portrait of this Mr. Summers that the novelist's pleasant idealisation makes itself very manifest. Of course the bruiser's calling may become his by accident rather than by choice, and he is not necessarily either a blackguard or a bully, but still the gentle, retiring, devoted father of the pretty girl who by his care has known nothing of life but its beauties and refine- ments, and for whom his own. life is at last sacrificed, is a courageous creation of the true Blackian type. Another kindly portrait is that of Dick Erridge, who is really 'Arry, the one person whom the most tolerant ordinary novelist cannot away with; but Dick is so humble, so loyal, so chival- rous indeed, that he almost redeems 'Arrydom from scorn. As for the lovers, they are, like all Mr. Black's young men and maidens, most winning creatures ; and even the ambitious, manceuvring mother of Sidney and the other handsome Humes commands something of sympathy as well as of scorn. Mr. Black's latest story is not his best; but he has never written a pleasanter or more thoroughly genial novel.
Mr. Ernest Dowson and Mr. Arthur Moore are not merely a new pair of collaborators,—they are both new literary hands; but when they become old hands, and have learned what only experience can teach, they will have no valid reason for feel- ing ashamed of their maiden effort. We cannot say that we discern any special justification for the title of their first venture, and indeed it was probably chosen as a good title per se, for persons as well as things are not what they seem, and any story which fairly represents life as it is will be, more or less, either a comedy or a tragedy of masks. Here the mask is worn habitually and with injuriously delusive effect only by one of the characters, who represents a type which, since the time when George Eliot drew Tito Melema, has made increasingly frequent appearances in fiction. A type, however, is common property ; it cannot be monopo- - * (la The Madame Mmes. By William Black, 3 vole, London : Sampson Low, Marston, and Co—(2.) A Comedy el' Masks By Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore. 3 vols. London: William Heinomann,—(3.) ohear.,Task Zita. By S. Baring•Gould. 3 vols. London : Methuen and Co. used, any more than a mechanical principle can be patented ; and Dick Lightmark, the clever, popular young painter, stands so well upon his feet that he has a substantial claim to personal identity, even though he is not a creation, as he might have been forty years ago. He is the able, agreeable, good-natured self-seeker; and it is simply his self- seeking—so common and so apparently trivial a weakness— which transforms him from the pleasant, light-hearted fellow whom no one can charge with anything worse than lack of purpose, into the vile traitor who proves false to the two friends who trusted and to the two women who loved him.
Lightmark is a really successful portrait, with just that kind of lifelikeness which will make many readers feel that they have known the original—much more successful, we think, than his immeasurably nobler friend, Philip Rainham, Rainham's heart, like Lightmark's heartlessness, is covered with a mask ; but in his case the disguise seems somewhat purposeless, and when, in the central situation of the comedy, he masks his true self more effectually than ever before by taking upon himself the odium of Lightmark's villainy in order to preserve the happiness of the woman whom he loves, we feel that the truth of things is sacrificed to a dramatic effect which, though strong in its way, is showy and essentially meretricious. It is the kind of thing which brings down the house, but it is not art ; and it is a blot on a novel which has genuine artistic merit, both in detail and in general exposition. From what has been said, it will be seen that we regard A Comedy of .111ask8 with considerable favour; but we believe that the authors have it in them to do work that, if not stronger, shall be less faulty.
One-half of a famous formula of art criticism may be appropriately applied to Cheap-lack Zita. As it is a book, and not a canvas, we cannot, with any show of relevance, "praise the pictures of Pietro Perugino ; " but we may say that this literary picture "might have been better if the painter had taken more pains." Mr. Baring-Gould has not done his best. In the body of the story he has used-up old material both of his own and of other people's, and in the literary vesture of it there are patches of really deplorable carelessness. Drowniands, the Fen-country farmer who pur- sues Zito, with an unwelcome suit, is but a weaker Elijah Rebow ; the heroine herself is a less impressive Mehalah ; and when Drownlands, in his last struggle, pulls Zits down with him into the water of the flooded fen, even her rescue does not deprive the self-plagiarism of its irritating quality. Zita's jealousy of a girl who turns out to be her lover's sister instead of his fianc6e, and her conduct in saving the man she loves by a self-denying compact with the man she almost hates, are expedients so thread- bare, indeed, so tattered, that we should have thought them beneath the notice of every one but the veriest amateur in fiction. Then, too, the conversation of Zita and Karel% the Cheap-Jack's unlettered daughter and the rude Fen-country maiden, abound in words and phrases which, if not absolutely literary, are at any rate the words and phrases of a class with which these roughly nurtured young women have nothing in common. Blunders like these set the teeth on edge, and yet somehow it is difficult to be as angry with Mr. Baring-Gould as one ought to be. Even where, as in Cheap-Jack Zita, there is little freshness to charm, there is still energy to arrest; there are vividness, pic- turesqueness, gusto,—all the qualities that make for vitality. Zita herself, the impulsive, self-reliant, instinctively pure child of Nature, would have been almost a creation had she not been a replica, and even as such she lives. Mr. Baring- Gould's backgrounds are always full of colour; and he makes the flat Fen-country as pictoriallyeffective as the West-country moorland and the Cornish coast. The burning of the mill in the darkness, the flaming sails revolving like a great catharine- wheel, has a Rembrandt-like strength of chiaroscuro, and the book abounds in lovely "bits." It is, in fact, the work of an artist, but of an artist who has failed to do himself full justice.
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