NEW NOVELS. * MRS. OWEN has made a promising &but as
a novelist in "Raised to the Peerage." Faults there are neither small nor few in her first work, but they are for the most part the faults of inexperience and exuberant energy. We believe, therefore, that she has it in her own power to attain a fair position among living writers of fiction, if only she have firmness enough to resist the dangers incident to the favourable reception which has greeted her first efforts. She has much to learn and to unlearn, and she ought not to be overhasty to encounter that most critical point in the lite- rary fortunes of an author, the publication of her second work. Her villains in "Raised to the Peerage" are too elaborately and demonstratively villainous; her weaklings are superflubusly weak, to an excess of fatuity ; and her good people are all good- ness and nothing besides. They are not creatures of flesh and blood, but sublimated impersonations of the cardinal virtues. In dialogue she succeeds best when the speakers are moved by some strong excitement, but fails sadly in commonplace scenes whether of high or low life. The conversation at the dinner- table in Wentworth Hall, reported in the fourth chapter, is almost like a new version of Swift's " Polite Conversation," contrived as a caricature of nineteenth century insipidities ; but we are afraid we cannot give the author the benefit of this hypothesis. Un- happily it is but too certain that the whole scene is intended as a faithful representation of social intercourse among persons of good breeding and more than average cultivation at the present day. Another distressing fact, and one which inspires us with some grave misgivings, is the propensity to superfine writing which is manifested by Mrs. Owen. She opens her first volume with a dithyrambic on Darkness—in emulation no doubt of Mr. Dickens, who began his " Bleak House" with a fantastic de- scription of a London fog.
"Darkness was upon the wide-stretching city. Darkness—shut out of nay saloons, where the warm glow of fires, the radiant smiles of unnum- bered tapers, flashed back to lustrous eyes from mirror and ormolu; dark- ness—scarcely to be dreamed of in the brilliant opera-house, or glittering theatre, yet spreading around each scene its bat-like wings, impatient to envelop, as with a heavy pall, each nucleus of light, its enemy; darkness— unfathomable and silent, floating within a few feet of the glare of the foot- lights, assured of its ultimate prey, yet watchful ever; darkness—assassin-like, lying in wait within as many inches, in the nnbattened corners of the miserable garret to swallow the sobbing flicker of the sempstress's solitary candle ; dark- ness—lifting to its'mysterious embrace the reflection of the white snow-drift gathered without, and lapping the hazy radiance of the paled gas-lights in the deserted shops :—darkness was all pervading—strangely ubiquitous— ready to absorb each traveller, to dog every guest returning from banquet or from ball—hungry to devour the self-complacent smiles of the youthful fop, or the maiden's silent tears of hopeless love, to creep in mystic and ghost- like ; stealthily appropriating every inch of the wide unpopulated waste, when lights were out, and bright eyes had departed !"
So it goes on for two mortal pages, merely to tell the reader that it was a rough winter's night at the time when the story begins ; and so it might go on for two hundred pages or two thousand without advancing his information a hair's breadth beyond that point ; for it is the grand distinction of this kind of writing that it is wholly independent of ideas, it can be set going upon any sub- ject, and can be continued without intermission so long as the writer's memory can supply him with tumid words and phrases. Another example of the same literary foible is the dis- sertation on Love, which makes the whole of the eighth chapter, fortunately a short one, and which moreover the forewarned reader will hardly fail to skip,—unless his curiosity prompt him to see how bad may be an imitation of Sir Bulwer Lytton's pa- renthetical disquisitions. Having thus discharged our conscience by warnino. Mrs. Owen of the faults she must overcome by severe self-discipline if she would do justice to the powers she evidently possesses, we turn to the more agreeable task of specifying some of the good qualities for which. Raised to Use Peerage is fairly commendable. It is full of varied incidents, conceived with skill and vigorously presented. The action never flags—only it pauses now and then while the author is talking aside to the reader— and the main thread of the story is well chosen, sound in texture, and lit to support and hold together the tissue of which it is the basis. One thing this novel unquestionably possesses, the want of which is conspicuous in too many novels of our day : it really has a plot, and the interest it excites rises continually till it culminates in the last chapter.
Nee tecum vivere possum, nee sine te. Modify its meaning in literary sense, and this cry of the Roman lover to his wayward charmer will serve to express the feelings excited by the way in which the author of _Almost a Heroine treats her readers. She irritates them by her extravagant caprices, and yet interests them in spite of themselves by the manifest ability which she so fan- tastically misapplies. Ernesto Loftus, the narrator of the story,
• Raised to the Peerage. A Novel. By Mrs. Octavius Freire Owen, author of " The Heroines of History," &e. in three volumes. Published by Hurst and Blacken.
Almost a Heroine. Br the Author of ".Charles Auchester," &c. &c. In three volumes. Published by 'finest and Blacken. is the son of a British officer and an Italian lady. His father died when he was an infant, his mother married again and Ernesto, a precocious child, of rare imagination and a highly nervous temperament, was sent to England at his own request to live with his uncle Archibald Loftus. This warm-hearted but eccentric gentleman, rich in the gifts of fortune and of intellect, had retired in disgust from the world, in the prime of life, to live in a one-storied house on the verge of Uglyville Common, in Kent. So sedulous of seclusion was he that the house had no windows on the side next the road, but within it was a palace of art and com- fort. Here Ernesto spent his boyhood in a manner most con- genial to his idiosyneracies, cultivating an extensive acquaintance with ancient and modern languages and literature, but growing up in perfect ignorance of the outer world. When Ernesto is about twenty-two years of age his loving uncle dies, leaving a will which constitutes his valet, John Crofts, sole heir of his pro- perty, real and personal, with the exception of legacies of 201, to each of the servants, and one of the same amount to the testator's " well-beloved nephew and nearest blood relation" ; and directs that a certain iron chest shall be opened in presence of witnesses on the third anniversary of the testator's funeral, but not sooner. John Crofts was a sort of virtuous and semi-idiotic Caliban, de- voted to his master with the unswerving fidelity of a dog ; and it is plain at once to the reader that the will in his favour was only a stratagem designed to repair the great defect in Ernesto's edu- cation by throwing him for three years on his own resources. Ernesto's lawyers think the will may be set aside on the ground of insanity (it is manifestly informal, having been witnessed by the universal legatee), and John Crofts piteously implores that his young master will take what is rightfully his own, but Ernesto will not hear of this, and throws himself upon the world with nothing but his 201. By the time it is all but gone he has a chance of obtaining a secretaryship, spends his last shilling on a journey, arrives twelve minutes too late for his appointment, and sinks down in a swoon. On recovering his senses he finds him- self tenderly nursed in the mansion of Lord Lyndfield, a physician who, after succeeding to a peerage, has converted his house into a private lunatic asylum. Ernesto remains with him for some months, acting as his private secretary, and falling in love with his ward in defiance of warning. Erselie Hope is the daughter of a woman-whom Lord Lyndfield had fondly loved ; but she pre- ferred to him a man who strangled her at last in an outbreak of his hereditary insanity, whereof the noble doctor gives the fol- lowing curious account :- " The kind of madness in the Hope family is the cursed one ; it can never be anticipated, nor prevented, nor eradicated. Every other generation in- herits it, and those between are free. It is those last who are to blame in perpetuating the curse. I, who am no hero, have existed without the sweets of lore ; it can be done. Of this race, too, few are capable of loving ; and their marriages, with scarcely an exception, have been for interest. Don't think me hard again, I say, for crushing the slightest germ of any hopes you children might have harboured in your young hearts, any possibilities you might have dreamed. I know the girl is brut, if loft to herself ; I have taken care to nurture her in knowledge at least of the crime she would com- mit in bearing children, and, though she is in her own power by this time (she was my ward), I am sure of her, unless you intermeddle. You can bear now what you could not bear if you knew her a little longer, and now, while it will not kill you, you must go."
Now if in the affair of the will the author has sinned artistically as well as absolutely against probability, she has done still worse in taking a pathological chimera for one of the main foundations of her story. The kind of madness here described does not exist in nature ; it is a visionary creation of the author's fancy. Imagine how different would be the statistics of insanity in Eng- land at the present day if such an inextinguishable taint had taken possession of half-a-dozen families five or six centuries ago, and continued to propagate itself ever since in undiminished force through all the families with which they and their deseendants intermarried.
As the " cursed madness " theory forbids Ernesto to remain at Lyndfield Chase, lie goes to London, applies himself to literature, and contracts a close friendship with Arnold Major, who is " reader " to the great publishers, Brown, Jones, and Co., and also the hero of the novel, whilst Horatio Standish is the " al- most heroine." These two are beings of a transcendental order, hardly to be comprehended by ordinary mortals, and yet the author has the art to inspire us with a bewildered feeling of interest in their doings. They have loved each other long, but a misunder- standing conspires with Arnold's ultra-puritanical sentimentality to keep them asunder until a satisfactory explanation is brought about by Ernesto. The marriage which follows of course is not, as usual in novels, the end-all of their history. Almost the whole of the third volume is concerned with the joys and sorrows of their wedded life, and it is the best of the three. Some portions of it are exquisite.
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