RECENT NOVELS; Fon his abandonment of the realm of portrait-fiction,
in which he won his earliest and most resounding triumph, Mr. R. H. lichens deserves considerable credit. And it may be con- ceded that in Flames, his latest and most ambitious venture, he establishes other than negative claims on the recognition of his readers and reviewers. Few novelists of the day can reproduce with greater vividness the squalors and splendours of the London landscape. As a literary cinematographer he takes high rank, while his style is marked by a subtlety of expression and an ingenious fertility of metaphor which dis- tinguish him honourably from most of his fellow-craftsmen. This literary virtuosity—the term is naturally suggested by the constant references to music scattered throughout his pages—is the strongest feature of the book. As a story it suffers primarily from its composite character,—from the attempt to combine sensational supernaturalism with photographic realism, and from the needless insistence on details in the treatment of either element. Briefly put, the plot is concerned with an exchange of souls. Valentine Cresswell, a highly cultivated, refined, and pure- minded young man, wearied of his effortless victories over the allurements of the senses, longs to change souls with his friend Julian Addison, a full-blooded youth, whose abstinence from vulgar vice has been entirely due to the influence exercised over him by Valentine's example. After several ineffectual dark seances Valentine finally falls into a deathly trance, out of which he awakes possessed of the soul, not of Julian, but of an extraordinarily vicious man named Marr, who has taken a keen interest in their experiments, and who dies, in extremely discreditable surroundings, at the moment of the soul-transference. From this hour Valentine
• (L) Flames. By Robert Riehens. London : W. Heinemann.—(2.) His Daughter. By W. L. Alden. London : Neville Beeman.—(3.) The Massarenes. By Guide. London : Sampson Low and Go.--(4.) The Whirlpool. By George Gissing. London : Lawreece and Ballen.—(5.) Patients Sparhawk and her Times. By Gertrude Atherton. London : John Lane.—(5.) The Landlord at Lion's Head. By William D. Howells. Edinburgh David Donglas.--(7.) A Spotless Reputation. By Dorothea Gerard (Zdadamo Longard de Longgarde). London: W. Blackwood and Sow.
becomes the evil genius of his friend, leading him into the paths of sensuality and dissipation, from which they are both ultimately redeemed by the devotion of an unhappy woman of the streets, whose manner of life is described with distressing minuteness. It is only fair to Mr. Nichens to state that this
girl is by far the most human character in the book, and that his picture of her terrible life is free from grossness or sentimentality. On the other hand, nothing could be more morbid or sickly than the conversations between the two young men, or the superfine, cream-laid benevolence of their friend Dr. Levillier. The effect of the would-be eerie passages is immensely weakened by the author's lack of reticence. His efforts to describe the indescribable are quite painful to witness. We do not go the length of saying that this is a harmful book, since the most powerful and sincere passages in it are in the main calculated to excite a loathing for the scenes described, while its preciosity and sophistication are bound in most minds to excite a wholesome reaction in favour of honest Philistinism. But it is none the less an extremely gratuitous and displeasing tour de force.
We have hitherto only been acquainted with Mr. W. L. Alden as a writer of diverting short stories. There is no lack of humour in His Daughter, but the serious note predominates, and the dinouement partakes of the nature of a semi-tragedy. Though the scene is laid in Italy, the chief characters are all Americans, and the story derives its principal charm from that curious intersection of social strata which is peculiar to American society. Fairchild, a young man of independent means and artistic tastes who has made Italy his home, strikes up a casual acquaintance with a retired engine-driver whose daughter is studying singing in Milan. Old Hoskins, who is indiscreetly communicative, enlists his new friend as an ally in his attempt to break off his daughter's engagement with an undesirable Frenchman. The girl, bitterly resenting Fairchild's action in the matter, resolves to revenge herself by making him fall in love with her. She succeeds, they become engaged, and on the eve of their marriage she elopes with the Frenchman. The charm of the story resides in the pathetic loyalty of the old man to his daughter, and in his splendid mendacity as to their subsequent relations. A speedy Nemesis falls on the girl, who finds too late that she has lost her heart to Fairchild, and entrusted her happiness to a selfish scoundrel. The old man, who endures his desertion with singular fortitude and forbearance, is forced to seek occupa- tion on an Italian railway, breaks down from overwork, and dies in hospital. His last days are soothed by the visits and affectionate solicitude of Fairchild and a fellow-student of his daughter's; but the latter never sees him, her letters having been intercepted by her husband. Here most modern authors would have ended, but Mr. Alden contrives an unex- pected reconciliation between Fairchild and the woman who has wronged him so deeply. How that is managed may be left to readers of this charming little story to find oat. It is worth reading if only for the mingled na-ivete and shrewd- ness of old Hoskins's views — invariably expressed, with truly laughable results, in the terminology of engine-driving —on Italy and art and the philosophy of life generally.
In The Massarenes Oujda reverts to her old methods, but with a striking difference in regard to her moral. Once more we breathe the sumptuous Sardanapalian atmosphere in which her golden-haired Guardsmen spent their hours of ease in the days of Under Two Flags, but the roses have lost their sweetness, the raptures have lost their thrill. Ouida no longer revels in the delineation of high life. She has ex- ()hanged the role of an Ovid for that of a Juvenal. What Jugurtha said of Rome--urbem venalem et mature perituram si emptorem invenerit—she believes of London, and in her lurid pages triumphant vulgarity, armed with a key of gold, penetrates into the most exclusive coteries of Mayfair, while members of the oldest and noblest families sacrifice dignity, honour, and even virtue in their frantic eagerness to gain a share of the spoils. There is excellent excuse at the present moment for such an indictment, but Oaida has spoilt all by her extravagance and exaggeration. Pearls are not to be found on every dunghill, but here we have supreme refine- ment—mental and physical—springing from the coarsest stock in the ease of the heroine ; angelic sweetness from Machiavel- lian cynicism in that of the Comtesse an Lynar; while high-minded magnanimity and infra-human vileness are contrasted in the persons of Lord Hurstmonceaux and his sister, Lady Kenilworth. The last-named personage, the evil genius of the plot, unites the facie of a seraph to the soul of a Borgia. But all the characters in the book are abnormal, whether they are on the aide of the angels or otherwise. Of all the wild caricatures in which it abounds none is more in- felicitous than that of the millionaire's wife, an ex-milkmaid from " Kilrathy, County Down," who talks a wonderful Cockney jargon, and is conspicuously destitute of all the characteristics of her alleged race. If there is one thing that an Irish peasant woman is free from it is vulgarity. Oaida's picture constitutes a fresh Irish grievance. Altogether The Massarenes is a sad falling from the really admirable pictures of Italian life recently given us from the same pen.
Sobriety of method, in which Oujda is so conspicuously lacking, is essentially a strong point with Mr. Gissing. He deals neither in purple patches, superlatives, padding, nor flaming rhetoric. He has got rid of a certain trace of literary artifice noticeable in his earlier work, and his style is now admirably terse, expressive, and adapted to the matter in hand. That he should not have achieved a popularity in proportion to his great ability need excite no surprise. He is too uncompromising a delineator of human nature, too relent. less in his exposure of the skeletons that are concealed in the most reputable cupboards. What is more, Mr. Gissing con- cerns himself almost entirely with the tragedies and tragi- comedies of middle-class life, and it is for this reason—a snobbish reason—that he is never likely to become a fashionable writer. His characters are human but undis- tinguished. The element of nobility is lacking. He will have none of the glamour of romance, and never portrays a character which inspires anything approaching to unqualified admiration. Thus the central figure of The Whirlpool, Alma Rolfe, is an attractive but unstable woman with intermittent artistic instincts and a feverish desire for social distinction, who ruins her life by her impulsive and reckless choice of the means to gratify a comparatively harmless though trivial aspiration. The most curious and fatal feature in Alma's character is her capacity of feeling jealousy without love, the desire to out- shine an old friend leading her to enter on dangerous and even compromising relations with the very man whom she suspects of being that friend's lover. The situation is further complicated by the fact that she believes this man to be the most capable instrument in aiding her to fulfil her scheme of achieving success as a professional violinist, and so con- vincing her unselfish but irresolute husband, whom she loves better than anybody after herself, of her claims to admiration. The Nemesis that attends on her impulsive folly is inevitable. Mr. Gissing does not deal in gratuitous tragedy, and nothing could be more discreet than his indications of the part played by heredity in Alma's shipwreck. We have spoken of Mr Gissing's usual frigidity ; it is right to say that the prevailing sombreness of this powerful novel is relieved by occasional glints of unexpected geniality and even tenderness. As in more than one of the books noticed in this review, a good deal of space is devoted to music and musicians; but though Mr. Gissing has taken no little trouble to master the patois of the profession, his notions of the purely business side of concert- giving would not be endorsed by, say, Mr. Vert, while it is hardly necessary to state that no new pianoforte piece by Sterndale Bennett was produced in the year 1891. It may seem captious to insist on these trifles, but Mr. Gissing's technique is as a rule so accurate, that any flaws of this sort are especially noticeable in a book from his pen.
In a curious dedication to M. Paul Bourget, Mrs. Atherton speaks of the "extraordinary self - dependence and in- dependence of certain traditions which govern older nations" as forming "the quintessential part" of American women as well as men. Whether this be a true estimate or not, it is certainly the mainspring and governing principle of Patience Sparhawk and her Times. To follow the career of this extra- ordinary heroine, from the days of her life on a Western ranche to the hour in which she is rescued from the chair of electrocution, is a liberal education in that peculiar quality of excess which Mr. Godkin is perpetually castigating in the columns of the New York Nation and Evening Post. The book has a certain feverish brilliancy of colouring ; it is destitute of reserve or reticence, and dwells on the passionate and animal side of love with a startling frankness. If it represents with any accuracy the general
temper and tone of American society, then American society is past praying for. Some of Mrs. Atherton's uncon- scious indictments of her compatriots are undoubtedly true bills. The account of Patience's trial for poisoning her husband is not an unfair travesty of the manner in which certain criminal trials have been conducted of late in New York. And as for her sketch of the malignity and rottenness of American sensational journalism, it is in great measure justified by the recent action of the best New York clubs. In conclusion, we may add that if American men of good birth and position are really so bestial and brainless as they are made out to be in this book, American heiresses cannot be blamed for seeking husbands over-seas.
It is welcome transition to turn from Mrs. Atherton's lurid pictures of the unbridled individualism of the "new race" of Americans to the serener landscape and purer air of Mr. Howells's admirable romance of north New England. There is plenty of self-assertiveness in Jeff Durgin, the central figure of The Landlord at Lion's Head; but with all his hardness and unscrupulousness, his simplicity and wholesomeness are vastly refreshing by contrast with the vicious" dudes "and decadent journalists depicted by his compatriot. Jeff Durgin is the son of a poor farmer in the mountains, who alone of his brothers and sisters inherits the rigorous physique of the mother. On the father's death the pinch of poverty induces them to take in boarders, and by slow degrees the farmhouse becomes a prosperous and fashionable hotel, and Jeff is sent to Harvard. The painter whose patronage and help started the Durgins on the road to fortune finds himself installed as the unofficial adviser of the family, a role which he is too good- natured to reject, and by the irony of fate is condemned— there is no other word—to be perpetually acting as the friend of a man whom he can neither like nor yet cast off. Jeff's gradual rise in the world, his social aspirations after culture, his relations with his grim but ambitious mother, his flirtations with the "Summer folk" and others, his engagement to his old playfellow Cynthia Whitwell—a really beautiful character—form a series of episodes which are treated by Mr. Howells with all his wonted subtlety of analysis. The minor characters are all excellently drawn, and the book is rich in quiet surprises and delicate humour. Mr. Howells gives us glimpses of the "whirlpool," but it is the sanity and the wholesome rusticity rather than the excess and extravagance of American life that are most happily illustrated in his pages. We sincerely trust that he is nearer the truth than Mrs. Atherton in the picture he gives us of the dominant traits of the American character.
A Spotless Reputation is extremely clever and interesting, like everything that Dorothea Gerard writes, but it is hardly up to the level of her best work. To begin with, she discounts the effect of her story by making the nature of the catastrophe transparently clear at the very outset. A clever and honourable man loses his heart at first sight to a girl of transcendental loveliness, and marries her out of hand, in spite of the warning of his oldest and shrewdest friend that her beauty is likely to prove a curse rather than a blessing. The prophecy is fulfilled with startling rapidity when Geral- dine is launched on the tide of London society. The triumphs of vulgarity are dwarfed by the furore created by her looks. Her career is that of a destroying angel ; one of her admirers dies of softening of the brain ; another commits suicide. First London and then Vienna are perturbed by her electrifying presence. But all the time, and here is the irony of the situation, Geraldine's reputation is spotless. The pleasure she takes in her triumphs is purely childish. She is horrified when her admirers make love to her. As for herself she is not capable of loving anybody or anything except her own beauty. It cannot be said that the author is altogether successful in convincing her readers of the possibility of such a personage as this dazzling puppet. Far better is the portrait of the frank and fearless Helen Lambert, who, in the finest scene of the story, mercilessly reveals to Geraldine the worthlessness of her shallow nature. The painfully tragic catastrophe is well told, and the sketches of Viennese society are much more successful than those of Mayfair manners. But the book stands and falls with *Geraldine, and we cannot bring ourselves to believe that mere beauty, unshed to intellect, passion, or ambition, could exert such a disintegrating influence on the equa- nimity of modern men and women.
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