RECENT NOVELS.*

THE writer who chooses to be known as "Maarten Maartens " has given us an undoubtedly able but very bewildering novel. The one thing clear is that God's Fool has a didactic as well as an artistic motive,—that the author had another aim in view than the mere telling of a story ; the one thing not clear is the nature of this motive and this aim. Maarten Maartens, in addition to his other gifts, has plenty of humour, and we can imagine the amusement he will have in reading the reviews of his novel, and noticing the various guesses made by more or less intelligent critics as to what he is driving at. We frankly admit that we are among the puzzled ones, and that our impressions of the intellectual substance of the book are far too vague to admit of very definite expression. The mere narrative is uncomplicated enough, and has a certain arresting freshness. Elias Lossell, the son of a wealthy busi- ness man in Koopstad, loses his mother in early childhood ; and his father soon gives him a step-mother and two half- brothers. While still a very small boy, he receives a blow which, by producing some injury to the brain, deprives him of sight, hearing, and ordinary mental faculty. The father lives until his three sons have attained manhood; and after his decease, it is discovered that the imbecile, or semi-imbecile, Elias is really the head of the firm, with complete control over its capital. The elder of the two half-brothers assumes the responsibilities of management, and for a time is perfectly faithful to his trust; but he finally yields to an insidiously pre- sented temptation, and the book closes with a tragic catastrophe. This is the simple narrative-scheme stripped of all accessories ; but in the hands of Maarten Illaartens, the story seems to be a mere expedient for pointing a contrast between Elias, who is " God's fool," and the men and women who surround him, and who may be described as the devil's wiseacres. In Elias Lossell the author appears to aim at depicting a human being whose physical and intellectual weaknesses throw into high relief a perfect moral and spiritual sanity. The one yearning of the man with the disordered brain but divinely ordered heart, is to be "like Jesus Christ," and to give everything. In Hendrik, his wife Cornelia, and his brother-in-law Alers, we have perfect intellectual sanity, but no moral life whatever. To them the ideal of Elias—the Christ ideal—has no meaning ; they live to get. The spiritual motive of the book seems to be the truth embodied in the text : "The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God ; " but it is impossible to speak with certainty, and the use of such words as " seems " and " appears " is inevitable in dealing with a work which is so overcharged with subtle irony that in estimating its purpose nothing is easier than to go astray. If, however, the significance of God's Fool is doubtful, there can be no doubt whatever of its acrid, cynical cleverness. It is full of pointed epigram- matic utterances, of which the following are a fair sample " He was not a bad man ; he was worse,—one of those men who are not bad enough to get better."

• (1) Ones Fool : a Koopetad Story. By Maarten Maartens. 3 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.—(2.) Kitty's Father. By Frank Barrett. 3 vole. London : W. Heinemann.—(3.) Miss Latimer of Broans. By Eleanor C. Price. 3 vole. London Boutloy and Son.—(4.) Time's Revenges. By David Christie Murray. 3 vols. London : (Matto and Windus.—(5.) The Mester of St. Benedict's, By Alan St. Aubyn. 2 vols. London : Ohatto and ) Only a Rors,Doaler. By Mrs. RObdi t Jocelyn, 3 voli. Lon- don: P. 'V. White and Co.—,7,) R,Batnanct's Story. By Ina Garvey. 2 vols. London ; Ward and Downey.

" There is nothing that breeds injustice like impatience of injustice."

" Have you ever noticed that when two peoplo keep up a con- versation in 'exactly' and 'undoubtedly' and of course,' they are always in utter contradiction and disagreement? Such words are a kind of jumping-board on which you alight before you leap away."

"One of them was devoted to Charity Organisation. He did not believe in charity, but he believed in organising it into a minimum of charitableness. He was one of their best men."

That God's Fool is a perplexing book is true enough ; it is also true that it contains plenty of what Clifford called "mind- stuff," and, therefore, it is more interesting than many novels which provide much plainer sailing.

One does not fully realise how great a master of plot- weaving was Wilkie Coffins, until one studies with some attention the processes and achievements of other fairly skilful workers in the same line of constructive activity. Mr. Frank Barrett, for example, is a very ingenious artificer, and

among the plot-novels of the season, Kitty's Father takes a very creditable place ; but if it be compared with such a story as The Moonstone, or even with such a very inferior work as Man and Wife, we see at once what a very loose-jointed and shaky affair it is. The quality of a plot-novel depends largely upon the number of " Hews " and " Whys " suggested during the progress of the narrative which are answered by the denouement. If all are answered—and Wilkie Collins seldom left a single one—the story, qud story, is probably of first- rate excellence ; if all but one or two are answered, the chances are that it is very good ; if a large number remain unanswered, it must be more or less defective. In Kitty's Father, the main questions are, "How did the Rev. Roger Sherridan come by his death ?" and, "What happened to the missing will and money P " To these questions, the final chapters give a satisfactory reply ; but in the meantime we have become interested in a number of other questions, to

which we get no answer whatsoever. Yorke knows himself to be suspected by his own daughter and other persons of murder and robbery, but for many months he adopts a course of action which tends to intensify rather than to allay their suspicions. Why does he do so? We never learn. He is represented as penniless, and yet he spends money as freely as if he were a man of fortune. How did he get his money ?

Mr. Barrett fails to tell us. He assumes a multiplicity of disguises, the purpose of which, in several cases at least, seems wholly inexplicable. What was that purpose? The denoue- ment does not reveal it ; and these are but a few of the threads left hanging loose at the close of the book. Of course, the coherence of a story written simply to entertain is of much lees importance than, say, that of a philosophical argument intended to instruct or convince; but still, whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. In his theatrical chapters, Mr. Barrett has done excellently ; but he has not done so well as he might either in the planning of his puzzle, or in his really audacious "conveyance" of the Rev. Crawley Shepherd from that very well-known farcical comedy, The Private Secre- tary. He has left nothing but the bath-bun, the orange, and the bottle of milk.

Miss Latimer of Bryans is the exceedingly well-written and absurdly planned story of a, young lady who, with the best

intentions in the world, does everything that she possibly can do to make a mess of her own life and of the lives of several

other people for whom she feels the warmest regard. In the first place, when she has to choose between two suitors, she selects a worthless man who has not even the recom- mendation of being in love with her, and ignores a worthy young fellow whose devotion, as disclosed by the story, is of

a quite transcendental character. This mistake would, how- ever, only have affected herself ; but, in the warmth of her heart and the weakness of her head, she goes on to plan a grim comedy of errors, in which the despised young man shall be the hero, and her friend, Maggie Farrant, the heroine. The comedy is played to perfection. Geoffrey Thorne proposes to Maggie, partly because he knows it to be the wish of his goddess that he should do so, and partly because Miss Maggie has become entangled in a warm flirtation with Arthur Nugent,

the goddess's unworthy fiancé, and Geoffrey believes that, by sacrificing his own happiness, he may guard the happiness of Miss Latimer from an impending danger. Of course, a situation that was unfortunate enough to begin with, is made ten times more unfortunate by this new tangle, and the conclusion of the story is of gratuitously contrived misery all compact. It is a dreary business ; but, still, there would be nothing in the mere wrong-headedness of this impossible story to call for special attention, were it not that Miss Eleanor Price's name appears on the title-page, for such lapses from verisimilitude 9.3 those of Miss Latimer of Bryans are not in her way. Indeed, even here, the mere literary art is, as we have said, excellent. Like the person who did not hesitate to commit a murder but never forgot that he was a gentleman, Miss Price falls from nature, but never from grace, and tells her incredible story with a skill and charm that makes us well-nigh forgive, and even forget, its incredibility. But why cannot we have substance that is worthy of its pleasant form P There has been more than a soupcon of melodrama in all Mr. Christie Murray's recent novels ; and though it is melo- drama of the "high-toned" variety, we often find ourselves wishing that he would give us another book with the refined delicacy of workmanship which made Aunt Rachel such a charming story. Still, it is wiser to be thankful for what is given than to grumble at what is withheld ; and, making the usual allowances for the improbable conjunctures which are of the essence of this kind of fiction, Time's Revenges is a very work- manlike performance. We are, however, by no means sure that the book would not have been somewhat heavy, had not Mr. Christie Murray, in a happy moment, conceived the character of that delightful villain, Count von Herder. We are not convinced of the Count's artistic raison d' are ; we have an impression that so far as the evolution of the plot is con- cerned, he is a superfluity, and that work has to be made for him ; but his colossal impudence and his imperturbable temper are so delicious that we accept him gratefully, and feel no temptation to indulge in depreciatory reflections. Invention is a field in which only one person can be first, and the critics who delight in the discovery of everybody's indebtedness to everybody else, will point out that the new German Count has had a predecessor in the old Italian Count, the immortal Fosco. Well, be it so. The critics are welcome to any pleasure they can extract from this remarkable discovery, if they will not attempt to spoil our pleasure in one of the most agreeable of recent rascals. The villain of ordinary fiction is a nuisance, because, as a rule, his creator, wishing to inspire a proper detestation for his character, makes him not merely a villain, but a bore. This is carrying virtue too far, and Mr. Christie Murray is to be congratulated on his resistance to the tempta- tion to be righteous over-much. The innocent convict and his wife, and his son and his son's sweetheart, are all most admirable people, but they are perhaps a trifle dull. The Count is not in the least admirable; he is a thief, a forger, a miscellaneous swindler, and finally a murderer ; but still he does more than any one else to make the book.

Alan St. Aubyn (evidently a pseudonym veiling a feminine authorehip) has written a third story of University life, which has most of the merits and most of the defects of its predecessors, though, on the whole, it falls below A Fellow of Trinity. It will certainly wring the withers of two classes of readers, the teetotallers and the sweet girl-undergraduates- how they must resent Tennyson's saccharine epithet I—of Newnham. True, the drunken outbreaks of the most promi- nent man in the novel are made repulsive enough to satisfy Miss Willard or Sir Wilfrid Lawson ; but that the unfor- tunately :named Mr. Wyatt Edgell—who, in his last term, attempts suicide during an attack of delirium tremens, and is several times found on the floor helplessly intoxicated—should eesily achieve the Senior Wranglership, is contrary to all the principles of teetotalism, and, it may be added, to all the phyeical laws of human nature. As for the Newnham girls, they are depietel as feminine prigs of the most in- tolerable kind, and are held up to the ridicule of all sen- sible persons, though it must be said that, towards the close of the book, the author somewhat changes her attitude, and represents Pamela Gwatldn and Capability Stubbs as noble souls, ready for all redemptive heroisms, while Lucy

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ae, who lacks courage to marry a suicidal dipsomaniac, is pilloried as apoor, contemptible creature. The satirical chapters are, we think, the best. Pamela, who is so ineffably superior and so wearily disdainful of her brother, who is going into the Church just when its methods are all exploded, and its teaching proved to be') reposterous, may be somewhat of a caricature ; but, like all effective caricatures, she is a recognisable person, and her very silly and objectionable type is one which really exists, and is not invented by Alan St. Aubyn. There is good work elsewhere, notably in the picture of the last days of the old Master, the pathos of

which is true and unforced; but the framework of the story is decidedly shaky. It is, for example, impossible to believe that,

in any college of either of the great Universities, the fact that a man had cut his throat, and was lying for days at death's door, could be concealed from the knowledge of the authori- ties; and this is not the only episode which taxes our belief too severely. Of Alan St. Aubyn's literary manner, much need not be said. At its best it is passable,—what it is at its worst may be seen in the last sentence of the following brief paragraph :—

"Lucy was past expressing an opinion. The milking-stool had collapsed. The three idiotic logs had all gone different ways ; it had fallen quite to pieces like the church was going to, and Lucy was seated on the floor."

It would surely be difficult to cram a greater number of in- elegancies into three lines.

We must confess to a hearty liking for Mrs. Robert Jocelyn's novels. We know all that can be said against her treatment of the English language, which is even more cruel

than that of Alan St. Aubyn. She also is apt to use the word "like" where correctness demands "as ; " the un- cultured "different to" is a form of speech which appears only too frequently in her pages ; and, worst of all, she can be guilty of such an enormity as "between him and I." These

are dreadful sine, but there are qualities which will almost cover them, and such qualities are generally to be found in Mrs. Jocelyn's work. In Only a Horse-Dealer, as in its various prede- cessors, she has a pleasant story to tell, and she tells it pleasantly ; she introduces us to a number of men, women, and horses who are really good company; and the whole atmosphere of the book is bright and fresh and wholesome. It may be a weakness, but when we can say these things of a novel, we are not indisposed to let a modicum of bad grammar slide, and to write as if Mrs. Jocelyn's prepositions, adverbs, accusa- tive cases, and sentences generally, were all that they ought to be. In the new book, hunting and horse-dealing are supple- mented by ghosts, which are very good ghosts of their kind, though we know all along that, like the blood-curdling horrors in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and the more recent spectres of Mrs. Henry Wood, they will have a most prosaically natural explanation; and a ghost explained is a ghost ruined. Both the pseudo-spooks and the horses are, however, subsidiary-- as, of course, they ought to be—to the flesh-and-blood human beings ; and one does not often encounter a group of young people who are more lifelike and likeable than the Bevans, masculine and feminine, Tom Seaton, and the unconventional heiress, Helen Clinbarton.

The Rosamund whose story is told by Miss Ina Garvey— whose name is new to us—is a very beautiful girl, with refined,

artistic tastes, who is brought up in a dingy London suburb, and trained in the narrowest traditions of small-shop-keeping Nonconformity. She becomes the wife of a young City clerk, and some two years after the marriage, a long illness of the husband's brings the little family to destitution. In spite of bitter opposition from the invalid, and also from her only remaining relative, a sister of the sourest Puritanical type, Rosamund goes on the stage that she may earn money to support herself, her husband, and her child. A captivating nobleman, Lord St. Neots, who has previously seen her, and who knows her to be a married woman, endeavours, unsuccess- fully, to make her his mistress ; and her husband, who is accidentally on the spot when the crestfallen peer is leaving Mrs. Dale's lodgings, jumps to the conclusion that his wife is unfaithful, and dies from the shock of the supposed discovery of diehonour. Lord St. Neots, who is a widower with one boy, now proposes marriage, and is accepted ; and we next see Lady St. Neots twenty years afterwards, when she is a widow and a leader of fashionable society. A letter, inadvertently read, acquaints her with the fact that her step-son, by promise of marriage, has induced a young girl to leave her home and place herself under his protection ; and, fearful of a misalliance, Lady St. Neots visits the girl, and assures her that she is the victim of a profligate, who will never fulfil the promise be has made. In her despair, poor Stella drowns herself ; and Lady St. Neots makes the dis- covery that, by a falsehood, she has driven to death her own daughter, whom she has been eagerly seeking. .Rosamuncl's Story is, it will be seen, a rather doleful affair ; but there is

that in it which leads one to think that Miss Garvey has in her the making of a capable novelist of the second rank. It has little of the crudity usually found in maiden attempts, and the various stages of Rosamund's career are depicted with vigour and eraisemblesice. 'I he portrait of Prank Dale is specially successful, for he is one of those utterly common- place people who offer the greatest difficulties to the inex- perienced writer ; and Miss Garvey has rendered admirably the depressing, deadening atmosphere of a London suburb of the Levelbury type. Altogether, there is real promise in the book ; but the fulfilment of it, which we hope to have in a second story, may with advantage be a little more cheerful.