RECENT NOVELS.*
THERE are months of good and bad novels, just as there are months of good and bad weather; and the October of 1890 may be regarded with satisfaction by the meteorologist of fiction. There is, first, a new story by the author of The Repentance of Paul Wentworth, which will certainly be opened by the better class of readers with pleasant anticipations that will be amply fulfilled by The Riddle of Lawrence Haviland. The book has two attractions which in combination suffice to confer dis- tinction on any literary vintage,—the body given by a firm grasp of material that is intrinsically rich in common human interest ; and the bouquet, the subtle aroma which exhales from work in which the perception is fine, the touch delicate yet determinate, the whole product a thing of easy grace and graceful ease. There is, on the one hand, the light-handed elaboration of character and situation which is the cachet of the new American school, and on the other, the flesh-and-blood substance which still appeals to the less highly strung organi- sation of the beefy islander. The " riddle " of the title is a character-problem which may be thus stated :—" How is a man of inflexible personal rectitude who has grown into the habit of treating the sins of others with the same untempered Draconian severity which he is ready to apply to his own (for- getting that in one case he has the perfect knowledge which in the other cases he lacks) to be softened, liberalised, humanised, taught to be tender as well as true ?" Of course, from the moment in which we fairly grasp the nature of the problem, we guess what will be the process of its solution,— that in some crisis, undreamed of before it presents itself, Haviland will be startled into staining his own white ideal, and as he sits in judgment and passes sentence upon himself • (L) The Riddle of Lawrence Haviland. By Constance Smith. 8 vols. London R. Bentley and Son.—(2.) A Fellow of Trsnity. By Alan St. Anbyn and Walt Wheeler. 3 vols. London : Chatto and Wind:Ia.—(3.) Lover or Friend ? By Rosa Nonohette Carey. 3 vole. London : R. Bentley and Son.—(4.) Sliding Sands. By Henry Croswell. 3 vols. London : Hurst and Blaokett.—(5.) Sapphire. By Sarah Tytler. 2 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—(6.) Two Masters. By B. M. Oroker. 3 vole. London : F. V. White and Co.
will learn by personal experience that be has never known the diviner side of the justice which he has all his life hugged as his special possession. This solution is reserved for the third volume, the greater part of the novel being devoted to a narrative of the series of events which one after the other leave Haviland harder and less sympathetic than they found him. First comes the'deceit of the young sister to whom he has been a brother and father in one; then the deser- tion of acquaintances and friends when he is accused of dis- closing to the dynamiter& the secrets of the Minister whose secretary he is ; and, last, the discovery that the wife in whom his belief is absolute has violated his code of honour, and for love of him has been guilty of what he is pleased to consider an act of criminal concealment. The story as a whole is as truthful as it is powerful ; but if known character stands for anything, the evidence upon which society found Haviland guilty of treachery to his chief and his country was surely almost ludicrously inadequate, and Haviland's own conduct when his wife makes her tearful confession is so wantonly and deliberately cruel, that for the time being we lose not only patience but respect,—an effect which we do not think the author intended to produce. But this is all that can reasonably be said in the way of complaint. So far as Haviland is concerned, the "riddle " is propounded in an interesting way and answered in a satisfactory way ; for in the account of what may be called his conversion, the author gets very cleverly over a somewhat difficult place. Perhaps, however, the finest—by which we do not mean the best, but the most delicate—work in the book is to be found in the portraits of such less pro- minent actors as Mrs. Orde-Lauriston, the " appropriate " woman, and Mr. Atherley Meyrick, that smooth-manner cynic who always "put his finger on a tender place "—a favourite amusement of his—" with full knowledge of what he was doing, and an intense appreciation (resulting from personal idiosyncrasy and experience) of the suffering he must be inflicting on his victim." The entire absence of slovenly, ill- considered patches would in itself suffice to make The Riddle of Lawrence Haviland pleasant reading.
The possible or reasonably probable elements of romance in undergraduate life do not at the first blush seem to be very numerous, but when they are carefully collected and skilfully arranged, the collector and arranger finds that he has taken the difficult premier pas towards the production of a very readable story. There is a good deal in A Fellow of Trinity which deserves stronger praise than seems to be carried by this one epithet, for there are passages in it which may be characterised as powerful or beautiful or tender ; but whereas these things come here and there, the readableness is never wanting. Nor is it a quality to be held cheap, for to produce a readable novel, a man must see and realise what he writes about; he must feel a strong interest in it; and he must possess sufficient literary skill to make others see and realise to such an extent that their interest is equal or nearly equal to his own. Novels which fulfil these conditions are by no means as plenti- ful as blackberries, and " readable " is therefore a distinctly honourable epithet, though it may have been " soiled by all-ignoble use." Messrs. St. Aubyn. and Wheeler have been very successful in bringing together and grouping effectively specimens of the most prominent undergraduate types,—the enthusiast ; the careless, generous, happy-go-lucky Grallio ; the man who is made a rebel by high spirits or weak will ; the much more dangerous rebel who is an unobtrusive dispenser of corrupting influences ; and—most ordinary type of all—the man of healthy instincts and conscience in good working order, who is betrayed into folly by the inevitable inexperience of youth. Though Ernest Flowers, who ultimately justifies the title of the book by becoming a Fellow of Trinity, is the nominal hero, the real centre of narrative interest is the in- fatuation of the manly, loyal, sweet-natured Geraint for the beautiful but utterly unscrupulous siren, Hebe Bellenden ; and the story of Jayne's prayer for Geraint's deliverance, of the deliverance itself, and of the devotion with which the man whom Geraint had rescued from a self-inflicted death preserves his friend's memory unsullied in the hearts of those who loved him, is full of genuine and quite unstrained pathos. A Fellow of Trinity is certainly the best novel of University life which has appeared for many years.
The main story in Miss Rosa Carey's pleasant novel, Lover or Friend ? concerns a noble fellow, broken down in health by wounds received in the struggle which won for him the Victoria Cross, who hides a love which might have been returned, until such time as he can undertake the responsi- bilities of marriage, only to discover, when he is in a position to make his declaration, that he has been forestalled by a younger and more impetuous rival. There is also a sub-story, the central figure in which is a fascinating but vaguely un- satisfactory widow lady introduced to us as Mrs. Blake, who turns out to be in reality the wife of a living husband named O'Brien, who for the crime of forgery has been sentenced to a long imprisonment, and whose involuntary intrusion upon the woman who has made herself dead to him comes, of course, at the most inopportune moment. The two stories are, how- ever, so skilfully welded together that they are practically one, for Mrs. Blake, or O'Brien, is the mother of the handsome, loyal-hearted Cyril, who, by winning the love of Audrey Ross, has unwittingly robbed the strong and tender Michael Burnett of a hope which, faint as it is, has been for years his most cherished possession. As a rule, it is rather unfair, both to author and readers, to indicate the course of the story in a novel ; but in Lover or Friend ? the interest of narrative is entirely subordinate to the finer and richer interest of artistic presentation and handling, and a synopsis of the plot is a mere eaput mortuum which gives no truthful impression of the quality of the novel as a whole. Captain Burnett, the invalided soldier who brightens his dull, disappointed life by quiet humour and equally quiet acts of kindness, and who determines to be the helpful brother and friend of the girl whom a cruel fate seems to have snatched from him, is certainly the most winning per- sonage in the book, not even excepting the sweet-natured, unconventional heroine ; but it is in the delineation of the character of Mrs. Blake, with its curious surface contradic- tions and its underlying unity, that the author really shows what she can do. Mrs. Blake is never in the least shadowy, and yet to the last she puzzles us just as we should be puzzled by a similar character in real life. Novelists as a rule, in striving to make their outlines distinct, make them unnaturally sharp, and portraiture which preserves distinctness but softens it by the haze which more or less surrounds us all, is truthful and delicate art.
When Charlotte Bronte created Jane Eyre, she did not know that she was inaugurating a revolution in English fiction ; but, as a matter of fact, Mr. Rochester's strong- minded and strong-willed governess proved the progenitor of a race of heroines which was destined well-nigh to exterminate that earlier race of pretty, clinging, and somewhat silly creatures of which Thackeray's Amelia Sedley and Dickens's Dora Spenlow were typical representatives. The heroine of Mr. Henry Cresswell's Sliding Sands belongs to the dominant tribe of clever, capable girls who are quite equal to ordering their own lives, taking due care of themselves, and acting bravely as doughty combatants in the struggle for existence with- out losing any of the charm of their shrinking predecessors,— possessing, indeed, a new and piquant charm, which is all their own. It is certainly possessed by Vera Meredith, the young writer who beards in his den the acting editor of the Len- d-tester Herald, with the manuscript of her novel in her hands ; and the story of her friendship with Orlando Osbaldistone, whose talent attracts her, but whose weakness she recognises from the first, is told with real vigour and subtlety of insight. Osbaldistone himself is one of those men in whom many really beautiful traits of character are rendered utterly inoperative by flabbiness of moral fibre,—who, when strung up by the excitement of a sudden crisis, can be even heroically loyal, but is powerless to preserve the personal honour which he really values against a continuous assault of temptation. Of the subsidiary personages, Mr. Forman, the gentle-mannered but iron-willed editor, is the most successful, and one or two touches leave the impression that he has been drawn from the life. Dudley, who is rather unsuccessful in hiding a chivalrous nobility of nature behind a thin veil of humorous cynicism, is less strongly individualised, and the manner in which he and Vera Meredith are re-united at the close of the third volume is certainly inartistically hurried. Otherwise, the construction of Sliding Sands is exceptionally good, and in both intellectual and literary qualities it repre- sents a marked advance upon its predecessors.
Miss Sarah Tytler has scored so many continuous successes, which have been from time to time celebrated in these columns, that a failure is about due, and Sapphira comes well up to time. The mere writing is as good as ever, bright, easy, and graceful, nor is the book wanting in lifelike character ; but it is the most striking example we have lately seen in imagina- tive literature of much ado about nothing. The title of the novel, and the text from the Acts of the Apostles which is selected as a motto, prepare us for something unusually shocking in the way of mendacity ; and when we make the acquaintance of a sad and silent woman who has grown prematurely aged in the shadow of some terrible memory, who is evidently in the power of a mysterious old servant, and who is compelled suddenly to hide herself and her family under an assumed name, we are quite sure that the story is leading us to some justification of title and motto. After all this elaborate pre- paration of a mystery, it is more than disappointing—it is absolutely exasperating—to discover that the deception of which Mrs. Baldwin has been guilty is about as harmless as any deception possibly can be,—a simple wuppressio yeri of a kind which is indulged in every day by perfectly respectable people who never give the matter a second thought. Of course, a really high-minded woman would not have deceived the world as to the circumstances of her husband's death ; but a lapse from ideal rectitude which injures nobody is a ridiculously slender peg for the story of a modern Sapphira.
Two Masters, in spite of a certain vivacity of treatment which we expect from the author of Diana Barrington, is a poor novel, as any novel must be which is devoted to the commonplace treatment of a theme which is at once hackneyed and improbable. The heroine, who is married to a very worthy man whose single fault is a tendency to jealousy, discovers her father, whom she has supposed to be dead, in the disguise of a stonebreaker, who is commonly known as " mad Dominic." It seems that in his youth he has been an officer in the Army, and has been accused and convicted of the murder of a card- table acquaintance ; but for some unexplained reason he has been reprieved, and after undergoing a term of transporta- tion, has secretly returned to Ireland, with a view of vindicating his innocence and proving the guilt of the true criminal. He reveals his identity to his daughter, who constitutes herself an amateur detective, and immediately devotes herself to the very easy task of showing the amazing disproportion between her zeal and her discre- tion. She has a number of secret meetings both with her father and with the man whom she believes to be the real criminal, and as her husband has been kept altogether in the dark, it is hardly unnatural that, when he finds her secretly stealing from the chambers of a bachelor of shady reputation, he should accuse her of infidelity. Of course both husband and wife are for a time plunged into an abyss of senseless misery, and equally of course everything comes right in the end. The father is vindicated, the real murderer makes a full confession as a prelude to suicide, and the recon- ciled couple live happily ever afterwards. Such is the story which is told in the three volumes of Two Masters. It is a product of manufacture rather than a work of art, but the circulating libraries must be supplied.
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