RECENT NOVELS.*
JUST now, when so many novelists of whom better things might have been expected are trying to achieve a worthless success by substituting fantastic novelty of structure for imaginative freshness of treatment, it is pleasant to come across such a book as Mrs. Herbert Martin's Common Clay. As a. mere tale it is extremely interesting, and the in- • (1.) Common Clay. By Mrs. Herbert Martin 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—(2.) Mrs. Severn. By Mary E. Carter. 3 vols. London : It Bentley and Son.—(3 ) Kophetua the Thirteenth. • By Julian Corbett. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co.—(4.) Long Odds. By Hawley Smart. 3 vols. London : P. V. 'White and Co.—(5.) Birch Dane. By William Westall. 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—(5.) The Lass that Loved a Soldier. By George Manville Fenn. 3 vols. London: Ward and Downey.
terest is so obvious, so much on the surface, that many readers may fail to see that it is imparted by sheer brain- work,—that it owes its existence to what Mrs. Martin makes of her story, not to what she finds in it. Some narrative schemes are. for various reasons, inherently so attractive, that a novel based upon any one of them can hardly be made altogether dull even by shadowy presentation of character or clumsiness of literary style ; but the narrative scheme of Common Clay does not belong to this class. The plot of the book—if plot it can be called, for there is an utter absence of the complexity which we usually associate with the word— has been utilised by novelists almost as often as Haddon Hall by painters, but seldom with the same degree of imaginative -truthfulness with which it is utilised here. It is a story of a temporary deadening of those impulses of attraction which have their source in natural affinities by the action of other impulses, which in the hero spring from the idealisa- tion of youthful passion, in the heroine from the stir- rings of an essentially vulgar ambition, and of the in- evitable reaction when the more constant forces assert their supremacy. Wilfrid Erle, the well-born, refined young artist, accompanies his friend Ward on a Bohemian tour in a caravan, Ward posing as an itinerant photographer. Erle as his assistant. In the course of this tour they encounter Mazella Foster, a half-bred gipsy waif, but a woman of sumptuous beauty of form and colour, in whom poor Wilfrid recognises his ideal woman, who is all the more fascinating because her realisation of the ideal is not quite a thing of the present, but a possibility of the near future which -it will be his glory to make actual. He proposes marriage to her, and, dazzled by the prospect of being made " a lady," she throws over her older suitor, Murray, the saturnine, masterful gamekeeper, and is placed by Erle in the care of his friends, Mrs. Chetwynd and her two daughters, that she may receive the gentle mint-stamp which, as he thinks, is all that is needed to make her virgin gold recognised by the world as current coin. With a girl of Mazella's character and temperament, the experi- ment must, we foresee, be a total failure, and our foresight is justified by the sequel, which is, for Wilfrid, disillusion ; for Mazella, rebellion ; for both, utter disgust with the prospect which had seemed so alluring. The girl, after an outbreak of coarse passion, flies to her old suitor, who has remained faithful through her faithlessness, and Wilfrid finds happiness in the love of the strong, tender, loyal Lesbia Chetwynd. An ordinary story enough, but into the delineation of the principal group of characters, and especially into the portrait of 'Zella Foster, Mrs. Martin has thrown an amount of solid imagina- tive work which will forbid any competent reader to think of Common Clay as an ordinary novel. It would have been so fatally easy to mar the lifelikeness of the central figure by an exaggeration either of 'Zella's superficial charm, or of her innate vulgarity, that we are moved to special admiration by the fine, firm truthfulness of the writer's handling. Not less note- worthy is the skill and subtlety with which Mrs. Martin tells the story of Wilfrid Erle's awakening from his foolish but not ignoble dream of emulating Nature in Wordsworth's poem, by making " a lady of his own." The process is so natural, so inevitable indeed, and yet so gradual, that the reader, like Wilfrid himself, can hardly note its successive stages, but can only make a backward survey and say,—" He was there : he is here." The novel is throughout rich in material for admiration ; but we must leave readers with an eye for good work to find it for themselves.
Mrs. Severn. is in many ways an exceedingly clever book, though it is a book to be commended with important reserves, for it is curiously loose in construction, and the story told in it is gratuitously unpleasant. We say gratuitously, because the picture of Mrs. Severn's subjection to the passion for drink is entirely devoid of either ethical or artistic justification. When we open a story avowedly written in the interests of total abstinence, it is unfair to complain of the smell of brandy ; and in a work like George Eliot's Janet's Repentance, which has no crude didactic aim, the sin of the heroine is the patch of shadow which is needed to give what painters call " value " to the high lights that fall upon the loveliest portion of the design ; but Mrs. Severn does not help us to a moral, and she is simply a cold, selfish, superficial woman, who has " taken to drinking" apparently from no external provocation, bat from sheer lack of moral fibre. Her vice springs from nothing, and leads to nothing ; and we are not sufficiently interested in her even to regard her with active disgust or dislike. Indeed, hardly any of the more prominent persons in the novel are seen at all vividly ; we regard them, as it were, through a mist; and were it not for one or two of the rustic characters, by means of whom we get a rather striking picture of the seamy side of rural York- shire life, Mrs. Sevens would be altogether, what it un- doubtedly is in the main, an irritatingly shadowy book. And yet it is, as has been said, a clever book ; and some portions of it have something better than cleverness,—they have power. The novel may perhaps be best described as the work of an able writer who has imperfect command of the mechanism of her art, and who has been heavily handicapped by an infelicitous choice of subject.
There is something in the handling of Kophetua the Thir- teenth which recalls Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's Prince Otto, by which remark, it must be said at once, we do not intend to make any imputation upon Mr. Corbett's originality, which is, indeed, so obvious, that a doubt cast upon it would discredit the critic much more grievously than the novelist. In one respect, many of the judicious will incline to think Mr. Steven- son the wiser writer. Prince Otto is in one volume, Kophetua the Thirteenth is in two ; and the too lengthy elaboration of a tale of fantasy is a dangerous experiment. Considering the nature of the risk he has run, Mr. Corbett may fairly be congratulated upon the measure of success he has achieved. It would be too much to say that there is nothing akin to lassitude in the emotion with which we regard the records of State intrigue to which a large part• of the second volume is devoted, but, on the whole, the interest is well maintained until the last ; and readers to whom a piquant intellectual flavour is of more im- portance than mere narrative excitement will not feel even a momentary loss of gusto. The Colony of Oneiria, in North Africa, was, we are told, established towards the conclusion of the Renaissance period as a practical. attempt to realise that ideal of a perfect community which was then in the air. The leader of the colonising expedition was probably an English- man, who founded a monarchical Commonwealth on the ruins of a previous Kingdom, ruled over by that Kophetua whose romantic marriage with the beggar-maid has passed into popular legend. The new-comer called himself Kophetua and this name was borne by each of his successors, until the dynasty and the Kingdom were both brought to an end by the death of the eleventh of them, Kophetua XIII., whose story is told here. The peace and prosperity of his Kingdom being to all appearance absolutely perfect, there was nothing about which the politicians of Oneiria could disagree, and the instinct of party spirit had to invent a controversial issue, which took the shape of the great marriage question. Every King, before reach- ing the age of thirty, must marry the woman chosen by the people, and the body politic was divided into two main parties, the Kallists, who held that the Queen should be chosen for her beauty, and the Agathists, who proclaimed the higher im- portance of moral worth, there being also a third small party which, though composed of superior persons, had little weight, whose object it was to bring about a unity of the two policies by adopting both. It will be seen that Mr. Corbett has pro- vided himself with a scheme offering fine opportunities for the display of fine high-comedy humour and bright, airy satire, and he has not failed to make good use of them. The complexities of political intrigue are most happily invented; and diplomatists like the Chancellor Turbo and the Marquis de Tricotrin, the father of the popular candidate for the queendom, would have their abilities amply recognised other- where than in the "no man's land" of Oneiria. The two volumes sparkle with little points of brilliance, but these are of less account than the perfect keeping of the whole. Even the elements of passion and pathos are not wanting, and it is not easy to understand the taste of the cultivated reader who fails to extract intellectual satisfaction and enjoyment from the pages of Kophetua the. Thirteenth.
The formidable lists of errata prefixed to two out of the three volumes of Long Odds are somewhat symptomatic. Of course, some of the many errors may be due to the printers, those much-enduring scapegoats ; but in their mass they do undoubtedly serve to emphasise the fact that no popular novelist whose popularity is equally well deserved is so habitually careless as Major Hawley Smart. His novels provide the happiest of hunting-grounds for the small fault- finder ; and yet, when he has done his worst, and convinced us that the writer ought to be considered a man of no account, we take up each new novel from the peccant pen with the old zest, and read it with the old exhilaration. If we ask Artemus Ward's question, "Why is this thus ; what is the reason of this thusness ?" we may find it difficult to formulate a reply which shall satisfy the superior person; and perhaps it is best to say simply, with no affectation of belonging to the superior caste, that we enjoy Major Hawley Smart's books, in spite of all their faults, partly because he has always, or nearly always, a really lively story to tell, but mainly because he has the happy knack of telling his story as if he believed it. It will be gathered from the title of the new book, that he still sticks to his old theme, and readers will also find that he has not exhausted its possibilities of entertainment, though he leaves more sharply stamped than ever the impression that there is something pitchy in the nature of " the Turf," and that few who have anything to do with it escape without some measure of defilement. Long Odds deals mainly with the mental perplexities and social aspirations of Mr. Bramton, a rich, good-natured, vulgar parvenu, with a pretty daughter, to whom her deceased uncle, Mr. Bramton's brother, has left his stable of race-horses, which includes the celebrated colt ' Damocles,' who is expected to win the Derby. Mr. Bramton, who is his brother's executor, is supposed to be the owner of the colt, and the sporting world is much exercised by doubts as to his intentions concerning it. He is divided between his suspicion of "perishable goods," which prompts him to urge the sale of the animal, and his liking for the social position given by his reputed proprietorship of a Derby favourite, which brings even members of the peerage to his feet. Turf intrigues are described with the author's usual vivacity, and there is a sub-story dealing with the war in the Soudan, which is apparently introduced for the sake of one exciting episode,— the escape of a young English officer from the custody of an Arab sheikh. Long Odds is one of the most readable of Major Hawley Smart's novels.
There is a fair, but not an unfair, amount of melodrama in Mr. William Westall's new story, and the melodrama is modified and strengthened by capital studies of life in the manufacturing districts some half-a-century ago. Among the mill owners and mill " hands " of Lancashire and Yorkshire, Mr. Westall is always at home; and though there is not so much effective local colour in Birch Dene as there was in Red Ryvington, the later book is not wanting in strong, realistic work. Most of Mr. Westall's North-Country characters are probably imaginary types, to whom his thorough knowledge enables him to give vivid lifelikeness ; but we can hardly be wrong -in thinking Romford to be a portrait of the weaver, poet, and politician, Samuel Bamford, whose Passages front the Life of a Radical is a singularly fascinating and even exciting volume of autobiography. Mr. Westall breaks new ground in his power- ful and pathetic description of the horrors of the old appren- ticeship system, under which thousands of little workhouse children from all parts of the country were consigned to the cotton manufacturers of the North, who were practi- cally free to use them as mere money-making machines, for whose welfare, health, or even life, there was no one to make them responsible. The revolting picture of life in the apprentice houses where the poor little wretches were huddled together is made painfully real, and not less so are the earlier chapters, devoted to the scenes in Newgate before the days of reform in criminal law and prison administration. The descriptions of the trade riots are also very well done, and the only weak point in the book is the story which holds these materials together, and which, though by no means deficient in the kind of interest secured by the excitement and Gratification of curiosity, has surely rather more than its necessary share of improbabilities. Of these it is not neces- sary to say much ; but we cannot help remarking that Mr. Westall's fondness for his heroine, who is in many ways an exceedingly admirable as well as charming girl, seems to have blinded him to the fact that the way in which she makes love to her father's apprentice boy is a little too pronounced for perfect good taste. There are also some curious little errors of detail. The name of the great novelist of the eighteenth century was not " Fielden ;" the accomplished Scotchman, Crichton, was "Admirable," but not an Admiral; and the North-Country word " fratch " does not mean to boast, but to feel irritated,—to worry oneself. When, however, all objec- tions that can be made have been made, Birch Dene must be pronounced a decidedly good story. When, after many successes, a novelist proves to the world that to him, as to less successful people, failure is not im- possible, the critic who has a due sense of gratitude for past favours will touch upon the incident as lightly as possible; and, therefore, we shall not dwell at any length upon the latest work of that prolific story-teller, Mr. George Manville Fenn. The Lass that Loved a Soldier is one of the talcs we should expect to find in those cheap weekly publications which appeal to a clientele of romantic servant-girls and sentimental shop- boys, to whom intellectual coherence, ordinary probability of incident, and lifelikeness of character arc things of naught when compared with the full-flavoured excitement which can easily be provided by any clever writer who is prepared to sacrifice for its sake all the higher qualities of art. The story of the well-born boy who is abducted by a rascally relative, who enlists in the Army, and who is sentenced to death by his own father, to the despair of the young lady who is his father's ward, and who has fallen desperately in love with " Private Black," is harmless enough, but it is also worthless enough ; and the epithet is not one which it is pleasant to apply to any book written by Mr. Fenn.
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