RECENT NOVELS.*
"SARAH GRAND" we take to be a pseudonym, but the per- sonality behind it is clearly that of an able and cultivated woman, who is intensely in earnest, and who, unlike various other earnest people, can give something of imaginative life to her plea for the causes in which she is interested. We say this at the outset, because The Heavenly Twins is a book which in various ways lays itself open to criticism that is not wholly commendatory ; and the praise which it justly demands has to be tempered with the frequent "but," "though," and "nevertheless." Of intellectual and ethical interest the book is full ; nor is it lacking in purely artistic attractiveness, for Sarah Grand's literary style has force and directness, and her characters—with, perhaps, one or two exceptions—are really made to live. On the other hand, it must be said that the book is wanting in form ; it is not an organism every member of which is vitally connected with every other mem- ber; it is thrown together in a bap-hazard fashion, and the very fiat and ineffective conclusion does nothing to bind the various details into a satisfying unity, but rather makes us feel more intensely how heterogeneous and dig. jointedthey are. Then, too, the polemical effectiveness of the book, like that of so many novels with a purpose, is seriously damaged by exaggeration, or, to speak more accurately, by lack of proportion. The author has very strong feelings concerning the obligation laid upon girls to refuse to marry any man who has a vicious past, and the wickedness of the parents who, in order that their daughters may make what they call a good marriage, conceal from them the existence and significance of facts which they ought to know and understand. The proposition that purity of life should be demanded from young men not less than from Young women, is a proposition to which most right-minded and thoughtful people will yield a ready assent ; but when the author goes on to argue that a young man's fall from virtue must he punished by perpetual enforced celibacy—and this is practically the gist of the book—she fails to carry her readers with her. We are certain that very few of those who assent to the general proposition will feel in sufficient sympathy with Sarah Grand's treatment of the special instance, to believe that Evadne Colquhoun did a specially noble thing when she refused to live in conjugal relations with her husband on the ground that his past life had been stained.
* The Heavenly Twins. By Sarah Grand. 3 vols. London: W. Heinemann. —(23 Santo Married Fellow. By the Author of " The Mays of Sodden Fen," Ove. 2 vols. London : It. Bentley and Son.—(5.) The OhiZdron of the Irina : a Tale of Southern nay. By F. Marion Crawford. 2 vols. London : Macmillan and Co.—(4.) The unrirt'8 Amassing. By Mario Connor. 8 vole. London ; Cbapman and Hal.1.—(5.) Lady Verner's Right. By Mrs. Hungerford. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus. A literary column is, however, not the place for discussing the question ; and, indeed, Sarah Grand explicitly or implicitly raises a number of questions which cannot be adequately dis- cussed in any column of a journal with a mixed elienAle. Suffice it to say that in the opinion of the present writer she raises a prejudice against the very conclusions which she strives to commend, and it is certain that her polemics have gone far to spoil her novel.
Some Married Fellows is a novel which, to certain readers of the kind that any competent writer likes to have, will prove more fascinating than any other upon our list. It is a novel of University life, but the noisy undergraduate element, generally so conspicuous in works of fiction which can be thus described, is, after the first chapter, nowhere to be found ; and though the mere story has a fine quality of narra- tive interest, the attraction of the book resides neither in its firmly laid-in background, nor in its sequence of incident, but in its delicately truthful delineation of character,—notably, of two contrasted masculine types. It is difficult to give on canvas the effect of clear, bright, unbroken sunshine; and it seems equally difficult to realise in literature the effect of perfect moral and mental healthfulness, though Thackeray once overcame the difficulty wonderfully in the portrait of one of his minor characters,—.T. J. Ridley, in The Newcomes. The author of Some Married Fellows has hardly achieved such an entire success ; but though Chevington Applewood is not out- lined so distinctly as be might have been, there is quite sufficient distinctness to enable us to realise the true nature of his charm, —the charm of that fine selflessness which is preserved from lapsing into flaccid amiability by those robust qualities of mind and conscience that in the mass constitute what we call strength of character. It must, however, be admitted that the morbid, warped Randal Keltridge is much more of an obvious success, because the angles of his nature, which give to it an arresting individuality, lend themselves with such readiness to effective portraiture. In some respects—though the two men are very different—Keltridge reminds us of Langham, in Robert Elsmere : there is the same centre of nobility and even lovableness, the same overlying crust of a morbidity which is really selfish, though it assumes sometimes, at any rate to the man himself, the appearance of unselfishness. Thus, Kelt- ridge makes Helen most acutely wretched by the very action which he would himself defend as having been resolved upon solely with a view to her happiness ; and, indeed, much of the cleverness of the story—though cleverness is a, word which we hardly like to use in connection with a book which is so much better than any book can be which is simply clever—is seen in the way in which the author gets her effects by reflex rather than' direct portraiture. We are made to understand the per- sonalities of Applewood and Keltridge by being Shown how other personalities—notably those of the women with whom they are most intimately associated—were affected by them. We know the former mainly through Margaret, the latter mainly through Helen. When once the advantages of this method are pointed out, they seem obvious ; but it is a method that is by no means frequently adopted, and very seldom indeed with the measure of success attained in Some Man-led Fellows. There is such equality of excellence in the book, both as regards substance and form, that it does not occur to one to single out this or that passage as specially happy ; but of course there are situations richer than others in that in- trinsic interest which is independent of mere executive charm. Such are many of those which mark the course of the tragic comedy of which Keltridge and Helen are the hero and heroine,—such, notably, is the chance interview between Helen and Dr. Garfoyle, which is hardly unworthy of a place beside the momentous meeting of Romola and Savonarola. Of course, we know the force of such a comparison ; but for a book like this, the faint praise of conventional compliment is inadequate.
For once Mr. Marion Crawford is disappointing. In The Children of the King he deals with a motive which is good in itself, and which has the additional advantage of harmonising with the bent of his genius ; but he has made a mistake in treating it as the pilwe de rosistance of a novel in two volumes. As a short tale, The Children of the King would have been excel- lent, for though the contrast between a genuine and a feigned love is old enough, it is one of those themes to which such a master as Mr. Crawford can always give the interest of fresh- ness; but here it is led up to with so much of elaboration that
the reader is fatigued before be reaches the chapters for the sake of which the book is written. The opening of the story gives us some warning of what we are to expect. Mr. Crawford seems to be saying to himself : I have not much to do. and plenty of time in which to do it ; I can refresh myself by a little play before settling down seriously to the work in hand.' And so he plays, practically until nearly the end of the first of his two volumes, gracefully enough it must be owned, and in a way that would be pleasant to watch were it not that we who are the spectators are naturally impatient for the performance to begin. When it does begin, it is in the author's best manner. Mr. Crawford has done few things that are better in their way than the story of the evening on which Beatrice receives two avowals of love—one from the polished Count of San Miniato, the other from the ignorant boatman Ruggiero—and learns to recognise the counterfeit passion by hearing the true tone. Still, the zest has lost a little of its intensity, because the happy moment has been unduly postponed. Even when Mr. Crawford really sets to work, he is too deliberate ; the plotting and fencing of those wide-awake and worldly but not interesting people, the Count and the Marchesa, become almost tiresome ; and, on the other hand, the central situations are treated in what is, com- paratively speaking, a hurried and ineffective manner. This is a pity, for Mr. Crawford has never had a more attractive hero than Ruggiero, of the Children of the King, with his unselfish, chivalrous, reticent loyalty; and we have a feeling that, even with all the space provided by his two volumes; the author has hardly made the most of him. Thus, as we have said, the book is disappointing, though, of course, it has the charm in which Mr. Crawford's stories are never deficient.
Miss Marie Connor is improving, and her latest novel, The Heart's A wahening—which, by-the-way, does not seem to us a specially happy title—shows a decided advance upon her previous work. The story is well built and interesting, the tone is thoroughly healthy, and the literary manner displays a large emancipation from those crudities which from time to time have somewhat marred the pleasure of the critical reader. In the character of Delilah Manifold, Miss Connor pourtrays a shallow, ill-balanced nature with fine truth- fulness, and she might have been equally successful with her other prominent characters if she could have with- held that touch of exaggeration to which she is tempted by a craving for a cheap kind of effectiveness. Miss Connor has not yet learned the true effectiveness of moderation and reticence. The strong-mindedness of the eldest Miss Manifold, the cruelty and avarice of Esther Ricardo, the snobbishness and fatuity of Lady Manifold, and the all-round perfection of David Armstrong and Alberta, have the forced emphasis of caricature; and where there is no aim at caricature, but only at ordinary portraiture, these methods are out of place. Whether the writer lacks confidence in her own skill in delineation, or in the intelligence of her readers, we cannot say; all we know is that her constant use of the big brush destroys all delicacy of outline. Then, too, there is the old carelessness—though less of it than there once was—in matters of detail. A person who is such a purist in expression that she shrinks from the com- pany of a lady who says "different to," should not be represented as using the equally illiterate phrase "very disappointed;" and it is ludicrously incredible that an educated woman like Lady Manifold should be ignorant of the meaning of the word "analogy," or that a man who has dined in hall for three years at Oxford should not know the use of a table-napkin. These, it may be said, are trifles ; and so they are; but accuracy and verisimilitude are not trifles ; and in art, as well as in life, there is place for the rule : "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves." Still, The Heart's Awakening is far from being a bad novel as novels go.
There are, in Lady Verner's Flight, several of the bright young people who are wont to make Mrs. Hungerford's books such very pleasant reading; but they only flit about the back- ground, and are really not of much consequence. The fore- ground is entirely occupied by the usual trio, "he, she, and another," who in this case is another "he." Sir Gaston Verner, the husband, is one of those utterly detestable wretches in whose existence we should like to disbelieve if • the daily journals would allow us the luxury. He cynically parades his infidelities before his wife, makes her the victim of brutal assaults which leave their marks upon her, and, worst of all, endeavours to entrap her into losing her honour, in order that he may rid himself in the Divorce Court of a bond which has become distasteful. Lady Verner, aged twenty-two, proves herself a girl of such spirit and enterprise when she really makes up her mind to act, that we cannot exactly understand why she has so long played the part of a "patient Griselda ;" but, after all, she can- not be numbered among the strong-minded ones, for in some of the situations which follow her flight, it must be admitted that she decidedly loses her head. As for "another," he is a Mr. Drayton—Christian name unrecorded—and nothing need be said of him except that in every respect he behaves as a hero of fiction is wont to behave. For a bad half-hour he has his doubts of the heroine, as have they all, while his subsequent remorse for those doubts, and his plea for forgive- ness, are rendered in an irreproachably orthodox fashion. 01 course, too, he has to rescue the heroine from something or other, and a mad dog is certainly a less-hackneyed danger than fire or water, for—if our memory does not deceive us—Char- lotte Bronte's Shirley Keeldar is the only person who has been beforehand in the field. It will be seen that, without com- mitting the crime of telling too much of the story, we have indicated the fact that Lady Verner's Flight is constructed on somewhat conventional lines ; but in all the novels by the author of Molly Bawn there is a breezy freshness of treatment which makes them most agreeable reading.
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