RECENT NOVELS.*
MB. WILLIAM BLACK in his latest novel has renewed his literary youth. We cannot say that he has returned to his
first manner, because he has never had more than one manner —and a very pleasant manner it is—but in some of his more recent novels his characteristic virtues have displayed a tendency to run off into their allied weaknesses, and the effect has been depressing. The books of which we are thinking have been spoiled not by palpable faults which could be pointed out and criticised, but by a certain im- palpable lack of quality, an unsatisfying thinness in the treatment of both character and incident, a harking-back
upon their predecessors, which have made the novelist's old admirers shake their heads, and observe plaintively that they feared Mr. Black had " written himself out." It is pleasant to be able to predict emphatically that this despondent mood, which has had far too much justification, will, at any rate for the time, be entirely dispelled by In Far Lochaber, which recalls the delight of the days when we first made the acquaintance of Kilmeny and A Daughter of _Seth. Those of Mr. Black's readers who have been declaring that they were tired of the Highlands, will discover that it is not the Highlands which have been to blame for their impoverished gusto, and that the field which has been reaped so often, and even painfully gleaned as well, is still capable of yielding a rich harvest of interest. The troubled love-story of Alison Blair, the daughter of the stern old Puritan Free- Church minister of Kirk o' Shields, and the loyal, light- hearted, manly young Catholic Highland laird, Ludovick Macdonell, is as pretty and winning a love-story as even Mr. Black has ever told. The " religions difficulty " is, of course, reproduced from ADaughter of Seth ; but the once-used motif is used again not only with the old freshness, but with a new power, for Mr. Blair, whose simple fidelity to what he sees as duty conquers us against our will, is a self-contained, con- sistently heroic creation who would in himself provide a sufficing backbone for any work of fiction. Here, however, he is re-enforced and thrown into relief by the delightful portrait of the latitudinarian Aunt Gilchrist, who constitutes herself the guardian angel of the pair of lovers, especially of her niece .Alison, and whose encounter with that wily schemer, Mrs. Cowan, is full of a rich humour which pervades and brightens the whole book, concentrating itself in the sketch of that m.auvais aujet, the boy Johnny, an inhuman but charming young rascal whose diabolical fasci- *(1.) In Far Loehaber. By William Black. 3 vols. London : Sampson Low and Co —(2) From Moor Isles. By Jessie Fothergill. 3 vols. London : B.. Bentley and Son.— (3.) The Rogue. By W. B. Norris. 8 vols. London: B. Bentley and Son.—(4.) This Mortal Cod. By Grant Allen. 3 vole. London : °haft° and Windtts.—(5 ) From the Dead : a Romance. By Denzil Vane 2 vols. London : Sampson Low and Co.—(6.) Sylvia Arden. By Oswald Craw- ford. London : Began Paul, Trench, and Co.--g.) The Graysons : a Story of Dimas. By Edward Eggleston. Bdinburgh : David Douglas.
nations are perfectly irresistible. As for the landscape background, it ought at this time of day to suffice to say that Mr. Black is the painter of it ; but we think that even Mr. Black has never given us descriptions more picturesquely and impressively real than some which are to be found in this story of " far Lochaber."
From Moor Isles is in several ways a pleasant and attractive book—indeed, Miss Jessie Fothergill has hardly written a single story of which this may not be said—but it certainly does not represent her highest possibilities of either concep- tion or execution. It is, we think, a better book than Peril, the author's one conspicuous failure ; but it cannot take rank with such novels as Probation and Kith and Kin. Its lapse from perfect satisfactoriness is caused partly by a certain lack of flesh-and-blood reality in Felix Arkwright, the famous singer, who is the most prominent if not the most important character in the book, and partly by the fact that the two stories of which it is composed—the story of Brian Holgate, and the story of Ines Grey—run on parallel lines and remain separate to the last, the slight connecting links between them being accidental and mechanical rather than inevitable and organic. Of these two stories, the former, when taken by itself, is really the more artistic, in spite of its ineffective close ; but here it seems like an excrescence, and we resent the interruptions which divert our attention from the fortunes of Felix Ark- wright's protegee to those of the young musician whose weakness and blindness have wrecked his life. Brian Holgate is, however, a really fine presentation of the artistic tempera- ment, a temperament which Miss Fothergill understands thoroughly, both in its weakness and in its strength. The early chapters, in which Brian is the prominent figure, are certainly the strongest in the book ; and the noble portrait of Alice Ormerod makes them the most attractive as well. Never, indeed, has Miss Fothergill given us a more graciously moulded heroine than this Yorkshire daughter of the people who is Brian's good genius ; and probably most novel-readers will be disappointed that her loving devotion does not receive what they will consider its natural reward ; but we incline to think that this is one of the cases in which the old fairy-tale ending—" they were married, and lived happily ever after- ward "—would have been a sacrifice of imaginative veracity to superficial effectiveness. Miss Fothergill's books always pro- vide a certain amount of pleasant reading, especially when she writes about music ; but From Moor Isles is a provokingly loose-jointed performance.
One feels very strongly the difference between unfinished and finished work, in passing from the latest novel of Miss Fothergill to the latest novel of Mr. W. E. Norris. The inspirations of the former writer are often so happy, that she is tempted to rely upon them too exclusively, and to neglect that conscious adaptation of means to ends which is essential to a satisfying success ; but the latter writer is always an artist. Though the materials in The Rogue are much more complicated than in the book just noticed, Mr. Norris never loses command of them. They are his servants, not his masters ; and work performed under these conditions possesses an order and a shapeliness which are in themselves, apart from any other merits, wonderfully attractive. Here, however, there are other merits in plenty, for the story is excellent, the characters stand firmly upon their feet, and the style has that combination of smoothness and vigour which is so difficult to achieve and so charming when achieved. The title is capitally chosen, for Tom Heywood, whom that shrewd old woman, Lady Hester Burke, declares to be " a rogue " the first time she meets him, is the character which gives the book its reason of being; and Mr. Norris shows his artistic skill in the way in which Tom makes his presence felt, and is never allowed to be forgotten by the reader, without being brought into a position of undue prominence. A further, and perhaps even better justification for the title, is provided by the fact that Tom is a genuine and credible rogue,—the rogue of real life, who very seldom finds his way into the world of fiction. So-called rogues are, of course, plentiful enough in novels, but their roguery is too much in evidence ; they are, indeed, rogues first and human beings afterwards. Now, Tom is first a human being, a pleasant, light-hearted, sociable fellow, who attracts us as we are attracted by such people every day, and his utter want of prin- ciple discloses itself so gradually—the revelation being brought about by sheer pressure of circumstances—that during the perusal of a great part of the first volume we find ourselves won-
dering whether Lady Hester's verdict, which seems to have no evidence to support it, can possibly be a true one. Portraiture of this description is fine art of a kind which is far from common, and to its presence in all Mr. Norris's books is largely due their power to minister so successfully to pure intellectual enjoy- ment. Tom Heywood is by no means the author's only triumph. Lady Hester and Stella are, in their way, almost equally good, and Mr. Fisher, the unscrupulous financier who is prompted by his one unselfish emotion to a heroic act of self-abnegation, is even better; but our space is exhausted, and we must content ourselves with a hearty commendation of one of the cleverest and brightest novels of the season.
" Cecil Power " is Mr. Grant Allen's most dangerous rival, for he has sadly deteriorated since his real name replaced his pseudonym on the title-pages of his novels. We do not mean that there has been any falling-off in mere literary skill, and in constructive ability he has gained something since the days when he wrote Babylon ; but he has deliberately lowered his standard, and made a bid for the applause of lovers of crude and vulgar sensationalism. This Mortal Coil is not so grue- some a book as its predecessor, The Devil's Die ; but it belongs to the same essentially low class of art, if, indeed, it can, in any legitimate sense of the word, be called art at all. If Mr. Norris had named his book " The Scoundrel," instead of The Rogue, his title would have served admirably for Mr. Grant Allen's story ; but Hugh Messinger, the central character in This Mortal Coil, though much more objectionable than Tom Heywood, is also much less lifelike. If he is accepted as credible, such acceptance is due partly to Mr. Grant Allen's literary cleverness, and partly to the fact that he is so like numberless other villains of fiction who are familiar acquaint- ances, that the lack of vraisemblance does not impress us. We are speaking, it must be understood, of the character as a whole, for it would be unfair to deny that the portrait has some touches which are both vigorous and truthful. The story of the first few days of suspense concerning the fate of the poor girl whom he believes he has driven to suicide, is told with a great deal of real power, and there is something very pathetic in the chapters which deal with the awakening of Hugh Mas- singer's wife to the fact that his avowals of love had been mere stepping-stones to her fortune. The conversations at the Oheyne Row Club can also be honestly praised, for they are at once bright and natural ; but half-a-dozen good things do not suffice to make a good book.
From the Dead belongs to the class of stories which are popularly and loosely described as " psychological romances." The author quotes on his title-page from a poem in which Mr. Matthew Arnold wrote, " The energy of life may be kept on after the grave ;" but the poet would have been much surprised at the extraordinary interpretation of his words given in these two volumes. The story is based on the theory—which of course, we presume, the author does not hold seriously, but adopts provisionally for an imaginative purpose—that the spirit of a man may after death carry on the work which has interested him in life, by entering the body of a living person who becomes for the time a mere automatic agent. Aubrey Devenish stands in this uncomfortable relation to Etel Berezna, a young Hungarian musical composer of great genius, who is accidently killed while thinking out the scheme of his opera, Arethusa, which he believes will secure for him recognition as a master of his art. The process by which the dead Berezna communicates the un- written score of this magnum opus to the living Devenish is not very clearly indicated ; but the opera is finished in an incredibly short time, and published as the work of the transcriber, who has previously been known only as a very mechanical and mediocre musician. Running alongside with this spiritualistic hocus-pocus are two other stories,—one dealing with the infatuation of Devenish for Lady Marcia Clissold, an aristocratic Circe ; and the other with the very quiet love-affair of Kate Noel, a young novelist, and Mr. Clive, a reviewer, who begins his acquaintance with his future bride rather unfortunately, by implicitly admitting the authorship of a hostile notice of her first book. When thus summarised, From the Dead will not seem a very attractive story, and as a matter of fact, it contains a good deal that is absurd, and not a little that is unpleasant ; but it contains also some really good writing and admirable character-portraiture. Our im. pression certainly is that if the author will only make a more judicious choice of theme than he or she has made here, a very able, interesting, and pleasing novel may be in store for us.
Readers of Mr. Oswald Crawfurd's previous work in fiction —and very bright, clever work it is—have a surprise awaiting them. No two books from the same pen could be more unlike each other than The World We Live In and Sylvia Arden ; and the latter is not only such a surprising, but such a puzzling performance, that we honestly confess that we hardly know what to say about it. In it, the author has abandoned the quiet society portraiture which sometimes recalled the handling of Thackeray, and has produced a book of the kind which might be expected from a very able man who had for some months devoted himself to a study of the romances of Mr. Rider Haggard, the tales of Edgar Poe, and the more sensa- tional novels of Charles Reade. We have seldom read a book which presented a more curious combination of the realistic and the fantastic. It is described on the title-page as a romance; it might have been described as a nightmare; but it is a nightmare related in the matter-of-fact manner of the author of Robinson Crusoe. Scarfell Chase, with its mysterious caves, is at once in England and in the air. Gregory Mawson is at the same time real and impossible. We know that this kind of criticism must sound wilfully para- doxical, but we have no intention of dealing in paradoxes ; we are only making an honest attempt to set down our impres- sions. One thing we can say that will be comprehended at once,—that when begun, Sylvia Arden is not likely to be laid down until the last page is reached.
In his biography of that fine genius, Richard Jefferies, Mr. Walter Besant makes moan over the time wasted by Jefferies during his early manhood in writing stories about a society of which he was altogether ignorant. No such mistake has been made, or seems likely to be made, by Mr. Edward Eggleston. He sticks to men and things in Illinois which he knows thoroughly ; and so long as he finds in Illinois materials for books like The Graysons, no sensible reader will wish him to seek fresh woods and pastures new. It is a refreshing change to get away from the familiar conventions of even the freest and simplest English life, to Rachel Albaugh's impromptu "at home "in the " settin' room " of her father's farm ; to Lock- wood's store, where the young men of the village loaf around while Tom Grayson and Dave Sovine play that unfortunate game of cards on the end of a barrel; to the village school, where Hiram Mason and Barbara combine love-making and algebra ; or to the Timber Creek camp-meeting, the humours of which have such a tragical ending. The chapters in which the young Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, puts in an appearance are very good. As a rule, it is hazardous to verisimilitude to place a historical character in imaginary surroundings ; but Mr. Eggleston has doubtless utilised some of the many stories of Lincoln's lawyer days which must be current in Illinois ; and we can recognise in the "young Abe" who saved Tom Grayson, the " old Abe " who saved his country. From first to last, The Graysons is a bright and most refreshing book.
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