FOUR NOVELS.*
THE new American novel with the rather imposing title of Trajan, which the author, in a gorgeous dedication to "Major Henry A. Huntingdon, of Chicago, Illinois," says is "the firstfruit of literary leisure," has had its appearance in England heralded by nearly as emphatic a eulogium from Mr. W. D. Howells as that passed by Mr. Henry James on the author of Nana, or that passed by the author of Nana on the author of Numa Bountestan. Whoever wishes to understand what such a panegyric really means, should, after reading Trajan, refresh his memory—in a literary sense, perhaps, rinse his mouth—with a re-perusal of one of Mr. Howells's most characteristic works, say, The Lady of the Aroostook. As he will not, of course, question the sincerity of Mr. Howells's praise, he can see in it only the vague admiration which an artist like Mr. Stone may feel when standing in front of one of Mr. Frith's large pictures crowded with characters, rather than full of character. "Such a size as it is, to be sure ! Such variety ! Such colouring ! Such boldness r Such historical picturesqueness ! Such everything that makes life, if not worth living, at least worth talking about ! r could never attain to such art as this." Perhaps not ; but we prefer the one incident in The Lady of the Aroostook, to all the political and moral complications and intrigues in Trajan. There is not a little power in this novel; but we are most, and least favourably, affected by its oppressiveness,—an oppressiveness like that of the American girl of the period, who is a triumph of Paris and of Mr. Spencer's teaching, who knows and has seen everything, who is handsome, ambitious, clever, and who would, indeed, be perfectly fascinating if she could treat her admirers to an occasional blush or flash of silence. Mr. Keenan, the author of Trajan, is, we presume, a young man ; at all events we have not beard of him before. In all the con• fidenee produced by youth, he seems to have set himself deliberately to write a "champion novel," to whip the creations of Scott, the late Lord Lytton, Thackeray, and George Eliot, by one supreme effort. That he will some day write a really admirable novel—though not, perhaps, one in the first class— we have little doubt. There are some very strong situations and several powerful characters in the work he has produced. Trajan Gray, an American artist of Scoto-Irish extraction, and the real heroine, Theo Carnot, a Franco-American adventuress of a new type, being quite as much of a Brinvilliers as of a Becky Sharp, are both admirably drawn as the good and the bad angel respectively of the majority of the other folks in the story. Theo, in particular, who keeps herself and her family by acting as intermediary between American visitors in Paris and shopkeepers, is an intrigante of the most finished and daring description. But she is unnaturally, repulsively revengeful; she seeks to have Trajan put to death as a Communist,. and for no better reason than that he has recovered from a passion for her which drove him to the brink of suicide. We get disgusted with her in the long-run, and we ought never to get altogether disgusted with any character in fiction of the Becky Sharp type. Of the other characters, male and femalt, none is especially good, with the exception of a girl who finally becomes the successful rival of Theo, who reads George Eliot, and expects to find the counterparts of her creations in real life.
• Trojan : the History of a Sentimental Young Man ; with some Episodes in the Comedy of Many Lives' Errors. By Henry F. Keenan. London : Cassell and Co. ]M.—Once for All. By Max Hillary. 3 vols. London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rirington. 1885.—.4 Hard Knot. By Charles Gibbon, 3 vols. London : Obatto and Window. 1885.—Tie and Trick. By Hawley Smart. 3 vols. London : Chapman and Hall. 3883.
There is what is intended to be a vigorous Scotch sketch in a certain Kate McNair ; but she is a caricature. Edith Arden, the sister of the young man who prevents Trajan from making away with himself, is not quite as limp as Amelia Sedley, but is quite as uninteresting; while the brother, who looks rather promising in the opening chapters of the book, falls-off as it goes on. Nothing could be more absurd than Elliot Arden's falling-out with Trajan, except, indeed, his being fascinated by Theo. Besides, Mr. Keenan compresses far too many quasihistorical incidents into his book. He makes Trajan not only, although a Gambettist, help the ex-Empress Euenie to escape frcm the Tuileries after Sedan, but act as a self-appointed mbassa,dor to Prince Bismarck, of whom, as the "big Chancellor," he gives a sketch that is not quite free from vulgarity. Mr. Keenan attempts so much, that really good episodes—such as that of the child, of whom Trajan Gray becomes, after a very singular fashion, the guardian—pass almost unnoticed in the crush of other events. Let him, however, write a novel of a third of the size of Trajan; let him people it with about a third of its characters ; let him tone-down his style and his colouring ;. above all, let him eschew appeals to the "gentle reader," such as that with which he closes his present venture. When he does all these things there will be considerable hope for him and for his work.
The contrast between Trajan, and Once for All is nearly as marked as it could be; for it is the contrast between the glare and the adventure and the tragedy of Paris, and a Scotch country village, with its narrow life, its quiet pleasures, and its petty gossip. Mr. Keenan is daring to a fault; "Max Hillary" seems to have a "craven fear," if not of being great, at least of doing his (or her) best. It is easier to mention the fact of this weakness than to indicate how it is shown. Not one of the personalities in Once for All is made enough of; and yet there are several of them who might have been worth a very considerable amount of attention. Thus Yetta Grahame, a young lady of beauty and refinement, suddenly introduced into a Scotch village, who is none the worse, but all the better, for being blinded by a flash of lightning—by a lucky accident she recovers her sight when on her honeymoon—has so much of character, that we are surprised at the lack of resolution which prevents her from investigating carefully the slanders raised against her favourite lover, Robert Ardwell, a skilled organist, by his rival, Sir John Wardour, who plays, as he says, with loaded dice. One is reminded, by Yetta Grahame and her troubles, of Paula Power and her dilemma as between De Stancy and Somerset, in Mr. Hardy's A Laodicean. But "Max Hillary" has not Mr. Hardy's verve or resources, which make a difficult situation wear the appearance, not only of piquancy, but of probability. Then, neither the villain nor the hero is quite to our mind. Sir John Wardour is not wicked enough for a wicked baronet; and the organist is essentially a phantom, appearing and disappearing without adequate reason, and above all, taking too little pains to defend his reputation. He makes his fortune far too suddenly and mysteriously; and it must be added that his hair is too long. To be done with fault-finding, the comic element contributed to Once for All, by a boy-andgirl attachment between the cousin of Yetta and the sister of Sir John, is very slight. The good points in the story are two : the writer does not attempt to crowd his canvas too much, and he can draw Scotch characters of " a certain class with the humour which comes of fidelity to truth. Two gossips in particular, Andrew Flint and James Milligan—Milligan is a moralist rather than a gossip—are even yet to be found in most Northern villages. "Max Hillary's" Scotch is not unimpeachable. It slides into English or into such a poor compromise between English and Scotch as " claithes." " Noo he'll have as decent a funeral as old Sir Lawrence himsel'," is intolerable.
Mr. Charles Gibbon, as a novelist, evidently takes a delight in leading a double life. He alternates love-stories, which are in the true, and not merely in the popular sense, idyllic, with the wildest romances, full of plots, murders, and hairbreadth escapes. Having gone on for some time leading this double life, with evident satisfaction to himself, and no doubt with pleasure to two sets of readers, he has endeavoured in A Hard Knot to combine both of the arts he has acquired. He interests us in the fortunes of Katie Cargill, a good girl of the type of goodness he especially excels in sketching ; and from the beginning of a three-volume story to the end, he keeps us wondering who killed, not Cock Robin, but Jean Gorbal, a drunken and disreputable woman in Glasgow. The success achieved in this venture is considerable, The materials out of which Mr. Gibbou constructs his plot—a man who marries for money a woman he does not love, and goes through a mock-marriage with the woman he does love ; a legitimate and an illegitimate child ; the substitution (in this case, supposed substitution) of the children by a nurse—are not original. But he displays considerable originality in working it out, in directing the suspicions of a very original detective on the wrong scent, and, above all things, in making the real murderer of the nurse act as legal adviser of the suspected man. The concluding game of skill between the assassin and the detective is, too, a decided success of its kind. At the same time, it must be allowed that the interest which Mr. Gibbon awakes in, or rather for, his plot affects somewhat prejudicially our interest in his heroine. It compels him to marry her secretly to Alick Tavendale, the man accused of Jean Gorbal's murder, so as to supply an adequate motive for such a deed. Yet Mr. Gibbon's girls, even more than those of most other writers of fiction, lose after marriage such charm as they had before it. Perhaps it is on this account that Katie Cargill has a faded and almost unreal look beside her half-sister, Sarah Burnett, who for a time believes herself the legitimate, and in consequence, the ill-treated and virtually disinherited, daughter of Cargill, a Glasgow millionaire. She has courage and character; and yet, in spite of her position, she is not without a conscience. When she discovers that her lover, Lawrence Hewitt, is not only the murderer of whom justice is in search, but that he has for his own mercenary ends deceived her as to her true situation, her feelings change towards him ; but she does her best—and that is no little —to save his life. There is something, however, rather too grotesque in her throwing herself, at the close of the third volume, into the arms of John Hadden, the old detective who had hunted Hewitt to his death, and who is notable chiefly for his habit of ejaculating "Thunder !" This is an action worthy of Martha Trapbois, and Sarah Burnett is neither old nor ugly enough to be a Martha Trapbois. On the whole, while A Hard Knot will not increase Mr. Gibbon's reputation, or, to be strictly accurate, the better of his two reputations, it is sure to find, and to be appreciated by, many readers. Although the scene is laid chiefly in Glasgow, there is but little in it of the Glasgow dialect. All things considered, this is not a blemish.
Tie and Trick is one of the best and most ambitious of Mr. Hawley Smart's fictions, which are, we suspect, read a good deal more than is ordinarily suspected, by people who in their hearts prefer work of a very different kind. Is it altogether heretical to say that after a surfeit of Mr. Black's landscapes and singing Scotch maidens, or Mr. Hardy's intense personalities, nay, even after Mrs. Oliphant's great world of actual life opening-out into the spiritual, one occasionally finds a relief in Mr. Smart's pretty daughters of sporting squires, even although they may talk slang, and his hard-riding heroes, although they unquestionably smoke too many cigars and drink too much brandy and sodawater? Their philosophy may contain far too much of earth and far too little of heaven, but they are both real and happy, and the ethical creed which Mr. Smart gives his favourites is sound enough in essentials. His own novels are, at the same time, open to the charge of sameness, of even being too. full of turfy men and of women worthy of them ; and the leading, if not the sole superiority, of Tie and Trick over the majority of its predecessors, lies in its giving us a change, if not of characters, at least of scene. The story opens in England ; and the first important episode in it of a stirring character is a card-trick, in which, of course, the good young man, Wheldrake by name, is victimised by the scoundrel, Fred Hammerton, with the aid of the villain Patroceni. But after this, everybody is taken to Italy, where Patroceni proves to be a very melodramatic villain indeed, being a brigand and a breaker of banks on the largest scale, and where a game of hideand-seek takes place between him and a great Neapolitan thieftaker of the name of Leroux. Everybody in whom Mr. Smart would interest us, falls in one way or another into the hands of Patroceni, or—which is, perhaps, even worse—under his protection. All this is, of course, ludicrously improbable ; but that is of secondary importance compared with the skill which Mr. Smart shows in tying and untying his Gordian knots, and in making all his folks act as if they were on English, and not on foreign, soil. His characters, too, such as these are—the downright Sir Jasper Eversley, the sporting "Jim Glanfield," and the widow, Mrs. Fullerton, with whom he carries on a comic flirtation—are well-drawn, and bustle about with delightful vigour. Mr. Smart does not pretend to teach his readers, except to this limited extent : "Our travellers took advantage of the slight halt at the Dover station to dash across, at Hammerton's suggestion, to the buffet, and there pull themselves together with a tolerably stiff dose of brandy and seltzer—it is only the young and uninstructeci that drink soda." There is a world of significance in the gravity with which Mr. Smart enunciates this important fact.
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