RECENT NOVELS.*
DR. CONAN DOYLE'S stories are always welcome, if only for their manliness and hearty geniality. In Rodney Stone he has essayed to give us a picture of what he very justly calls an age of heroism and folly—the age of Nelson and Brammell, of the First Gentleman and of Walter Scott—and he has accomplished his task in a manner which, if not invariably convincing, is remarkable for its spirit and enthusiasm. The mechanism of the plot is decidedly artificial. Lord Avon is very naturally suspected of the murder of his brother after a gambling party, and disappears, to reappear some twenty years later, having lived all the while in a secret chamber of the house in which the tragedy occurred. The chapter in which the mystery is cleared up and Lord Avon's character vindicated is the weakest and most laborious in the book. But if the book is weak in plot, it is strong in episode. The coaching race from Brighton to London between Sir Charles Tregellis and Sir John Lade is a really brilliant piece of descriptive writing. And the two prize-fights are un- commonly well told. For Rodney Stone is, in great part, an apologia for the Prize Ring. With all its faults, Dr. Conan Doyle points out, it was a strong age, and he contends that in developing and maintaining that con- • (L) Rodney Stone. By A. Conan Doyle. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. —124 A Child of the Jago. By Arthur Morrison. London : Methuen and Co. —(3.1 The Backslider. By Constance Smith. 2 v, ls. London: BenVey and Son.—(4.) A Reluct.rit Evangelist, and other Stories. By Alice Spinner. London : Edward Arnold.—(5.) Palladia. By %Ira. lineh Fra-er. London Macmillan and Co.—(6.) The Lifeguardsman : a Tale of the English Revolution. Aeapted from Schimmels " De Kaptein van de Lijf .arde " London: A. and O. Black.—(7.) Le Solve. By Oaida. London T. Fisher Unwin. tempt for danger and pain which was at the bottom of our success against foreign enemies, the Ring served a useful purpose. And he brings out in his vivid and realistic sketches of the heroes of the Fancy what we believe is un- doubtedly true,—that some of the best fighters were honest men and clean livers. But although his enthusiasm for the courage, the endurance, and the physical development of these men borders at times on the rhapsodical, he is ready to admit that even in its palmy days the Ring had its ruffianly side. " If the Ring has fallen low," he says at the end of the book, " it is not in the main the fault of the men who have -done the fighting, but it lies at the door of the vile crew of ring-side parasites and ruffians who are as far below the honest pugilist as the welsher and the blackleg are below the noble racehorse which serves them as a pretext for their villainies." The sketches of historical personages—the Regent and his circle, Nelson and Lady Hamilton—are boldly and -effectively dashed in. Dr. Doyle's references to Sheridan will not please Mr. Fraser Rae; but he is to be congratulated on the characteristic mot he has invented for Brummell. When the narrator—a rather colourless personage—tells the bean that he comes from Sussex, Brummell replies, " Sussex ! Why, that is where I send my washing to. There is an excel- lent clear-starcher living near Hayward's Heath. I send my shirts two at a time, for if you send more, it excites the woman and diverts her attention." Of the fops in general Dr. Doyle writes with a very shrewd perception. He does not condone their extravagances, but emphasises the fact that their effemi- nate habits were often united with real wit and remarkable personal courage.
Mr. Arthur Morrison reverts in A Child of the Jago to the domain already explored by him so relentlessly in his Tales of Mean Streets. Dicky Perrott, the child in question, is the son of a thief and murderer, born and bred in the vilest slum of London, where men and women live and breed and fight and die like rats in a sewer. Dicky has some fine qualities, but heredity and environment are too much for him. The example of his father, the encouragement of his friends, and the insidious suggestions of the evil genius of the plot— a villainous pawnbroker and receiver of stolen goods—com- bine to make a thief of him ; and after his father's execution he is stabbed in a street-fight by a hunchbacked boy whom he had once cruelly wronged. It is a harrowing, horrible story, that makes the gorge rise and the heart sick, told—if we except the murder scene, where there are obvious reminiscences of Oliver Twist and Martin Chuzzlewit—in a plain matter-of- fact and passionless style. Mr. Morrison cannot be charged with aggravating the squalor of his theme by his method of handling it. If such things really go on, it is well that the world should know of them. But it is much to be regretted that the author omitted to state, as he since has stated in an interview, that "the Jago is only a plague-spot in the East End, which for the greater part is respectable to the gloomiest point of monotony." We suggest that the substance of that interview, in which he pays such a splendid tribute to the work done by the Church of England in the East End, and to the Rev. Osborne Jay in particular, ought to be incorporated in the next edition of this painful but most interesting book.
The novel of revolt has led naturally enough to the novel of protest or reaction. We have had the fierce tirades of Mrs. Lynn Linton and the well-bred cynicism of Mr. Norris, to which may be added the simpler, gentler, and more senti- mental methods of Miss Constance Smith's The Backslider. Katherine Eyre, in whose fortunes the breakdown of the new principles is illustrated with a good deal of point and clever- ness, was a highly educated young lady who lost patience with her humdrum surroundings, and, having determined to live her life, left home, attended a highly emancipated debating society, and wrote a novel of the most elevated " hill-top " variety. It appeared anonymously, but the secret of its authorship was guessed by a very unpleasant decadent named Carstairs, with whom, in a moment of " Grantallennial " expansion, Katherine was on the point of eloping. Katherine immediately repented of her error, though she still maintained friendly relations with Carstairs, and was already half ashamed of her novel when she met her fate in Arnold Grey, a scholar, a Christian, and a gentleman. Katherine makes her recantation to her old associates bravely enough, but she shrinks from revealing to her husband the truth about this terrible novel. And Carstairs, being a vindictive cad, uses his knowledge to blast
her happiness, and for a time succeeds only too well. The subsequent misunderstandings, estrangement, and reconcilia- tion of husband and wife are told with sympathy and genuine pathos. The sketches of Katherine's early associates, especially of Mrs. Heseltine, are excellently done. Miss Smith, it may be noted, judiciously refrains from converting any of the other hierophants of Feminism, but leaves them impenitent, though by no means united. Except that Katherine is rather severely punished for her literary indis- cretion, we have little fault to find with the teaching of this wholesome and sensible story.
There is no more acute or sympathetic observer of the varied aspects of West Indian life than " Alice Spinner," whose new volume—A Reluctant Evangelist, and other Stories —maintains, if it does not enhance, the reputation gained by her Study in Colour and Lucilla. Of the sight stories forming this collection none is more thrilling than " Buckra. Tommie," a strange and painful tale:of inverted race-hatred, in which the child of white parents is brought up in a negro village by the faithful servant of his dead mother, deserted by her seducer and disowned by her people. All too late his grandmother relents, and would adopt him as her heir, but environment has triumphed over blood, her advances are scornfully repelled, and the child lives and dies a negro in all but colour. In " A Reluctant Evangelist " we have the tragic history of a missionary's futile heroism in Hayti. Ill-health affords his wife an excuse for a return to England which is practically a desertion ; but while one admires the fanatical Quixotry of the husband, it is hard to withhold sympathy from the sorely tried wife. " The Principles of Miss Mehitabel" is a beautiful and touching story of two old maids from New England, in which humour and pathos are blended with singular felicity ; while in "How the Bride Came Home " the author has given us a portrait of a young Scottish girl-wife drawn with a delicacy and tenderness which Mr. Barrie could not have excelled. As in the earlier works from the same pen, the balance is held with admirable im- partiality. No one who is interested in the future of the West Indies can fail to derive profit and enlightenment from these vivid and suggestive studies.
That gift of fantastical imagination of which Mrs. Hugh Fraser gave such agreeable proof in The Brown Ambassador is exercised on a larger canvas and with happier results in Palladia. Here we have no mixture of fairy-tale and every- day life, as in her earlier book, but a romantic novel pure and simple, in which we are pleasantly reminded now of Mr. Marion Crawford—Mrs. Fraser's brother—and anon, and even more, of Mr. Anthony Hope. Palladia is the daughter of the Prince of Schaumburg, who is hurried by her father into a mariage de convenance with the young Duke of Carinthia, in order to secure her position, for Palladia is his illegitimate daughter by a gipsy, substituted during his wife's delirium for her dead baby. The marriage is extremely distasteful to Palladia, who is entirely ignorant of her antecedents ; but her father works successfully on her feelings by the extraordinary stratagem of wounding himself dangerously — it is believed to be an accident—and appealing to her to gratify his dying wishes. The Prince recovers, but Palladia keeps her word, and enters immediately on a heritage of gilded misery, exposed to the plots of Anarchists and intriguers, and despising her weak and worthless husband. Her subsequent trials and adventures form the materials of a most vivid and engaging romance, told with the utmost vivacity and charm. Palladia herself is a most fascinating heroine, though her character belies her ancestry. She is far more like a high-spirited English girl than anything else. And the same remark, with the necessary modifications, applies to many of the other characters and to the conversa- tions generally. There is none of that intimate perception of foreign modes of thought which is found, for example, in the works of Dorothea Gerard. But with all deductions this is a most engrossing and ingenious story, printed in abominably small type. The one-volume system has certainly notorious drawbacks.
From the publisher's notice which accompanies The Life- guardsman we learn that this is not a translation, but a free adaptation and condensation of two stories by the Dutch novelist, Hendrik Jan Schimmel. Some of the incidents have been slightly varied ; comments from an English point of view have been added ; names have been altered ; passages have been omitted or revised in conformity with historical accuracy ; while, finally, a new complexion has been given to the denouement by " permitting the life of Karel Semeyns to end as a not ignoble tragedy, full of moral interest at the point to which the Dutch anther had brought it, rather than to comply with the practice of novelists who finally dispense shares of worldly happiness to their favourite creatures." Inasmuch as all this has been done with the consent of the Dutch author, the anonymous adapter stands acquitted of taking unwarrantable liberties with the original. But such a process obviously renders it difficult for a reviewer unfamiliar with Dutch exactly to apportion the credit of the result between Mynheer Schimmel and his anonymous English sponsor. Taking the book as it stands, however, we are chiefly impressed by the interesting and conscientious sketch which it gives of the expedition of William of Orange, and the sympa- thetic yet faithful portrait of the great Stadtholder himself. The underplot is far less satisfactory. Karel Semeyns, the "Lifeguardsman," a brave, homely, angular Dutch officer, employed on important secret service by the Prince of Orange, soon forfeits the respect of the reader by the unaccountable and unconvincing rapidity with which, during his absence in England, he turns his back on an honourable past, betrays his allegiance to his heroic wife, succumbs to the wiles of a wanton, wrecks his career, blindly flings away the golden chance of reunion with his wife and children, and seeks to cover a multitude of sins and follies by a soldier's death. There is a certain homely vigour about the book ; the few scenes of Dutch family life are excellently done, and the historical groundwork reveals the intelligent, con- scientious, and impartial student. But as a novel it is decidedly " stodgy " and wanting in charm and lightness of touch.
It is a far cry from the Ouida of Under Two Flags to the Ouida of Le Salve, a tragic idyll of modern Italian peasant life. A Russian noble, condemned to exile for the expression of Socialist opinions, escapes on the road to Siberia, makes his way into Germany, and ultimately accepts the offer of an Italian friend to act as agent of his estates in the neighbour- hood of Viterbo. These vast tracts of forest and pasture-land have altered hardly at all since the days of the Farnese and the Borgias, and, if we are to believe Ouida, the peasantry are still as brutal, cruel, and benighted as they were in the Middle Ages. The humane if injudicious efforts of the Russian to better their condition and raise their standard of morality only lead to bitter discontent, culminating in a plot to murder the stranger. From this be is rescued by the niece of his assailants, who pays for her heroism with her life. Muriella, the girl in question, is the one bright spot in this grim and gloomy tale of ineffectual benevolence and sordid brutality; and the really touching episode of Muriella's pilgrimage to Viterbo to pray to the saints for her master goes far to neutralise the painful impression created by the numerous instances of treachery, rapacity, and callousness which are to be found within the narrow compass of this story. We should not fail to mention that the effect of this sombre tale is greatly enhanced by the simplicity of the narrative, and the author's intimate appreciation of the beauties of woodland scenery. Ouida's style is here sober and concise : it is only the cruelty of man to his beast that now and again spurs her to a characteristic but pardonable outburst of eloquent indignation.
Previous page
