RECENT NOVELS.* The Legacy of Cain is by no means
one of Mr. Wilkie Collins's beP+ novels ; but it remind us of one of his best novels, for in one respect its intellectual scheme is very similar to the intel- lectual scheme of Armadale. Apart from their interest as mere stories, both books read like implicit protests against the fatalism which is more or less bound up with any full accept- ance of the modern doctrine of heredity. In the older book, the man who seems destined to bring disaster upon his cousin and namesake is really his rescuer and guardian angel ; in the new novel, the daughter of the convicted murderess trium- phantly vanquishes the evil impulses which assail her, while her reputed sister, whose parentage seems entirely free from taint, sinks into the lowest deeps. There is, however, a possi- bility that our interpretation may be mistaken, and that the doctrine in question is not really discredited by the story. We are not acquainted with the circumstances of the crime for which Eunice's mother suffered death upon the scaffold ; and we are left to infer that it may have been the result either of a sudden overpowering temptation, or of a passion of hatred really alien to her nature, but roused within her by the pressure of intolerable wrong. It is quite possible to conceive that a man or a woman might commit a murder without having a murderous nature susceptible of transmission to his or her child. On the other hand, it is equally conceivable that what is simply cruel selfishness in one generation, may in the next generation develop into something more palpably horrible,— in which case it is not a violation, but rather an example of the law of heredity, that while the daughter of the nameless criminal lives a life free from stain, the daughter of the decorous, respectable, and cold-hearted Mrs. Gracedieu should be revealed as a relentless secret poisoner. Perhaps, however, we are considering too curiously, and breaking an intellectual butterfly upon a critical wheel. Mr. Wilkie Collins may occasionally have a theory to illustrate, but he always has a story to tell, and the story is of more importance both to him and his readers than the theory. As a mere story it will, we think, be generally admitted, by both critical and non-critical readers, that it is not one of its author's conspicuous successes. The narrative style is as good, or nearly as good as ever, but the tale is somewhat burdened with needless complexities. For example, Mr. Gracedieu's extraordinary scheme of bringing up the two girls who are supposed to be sisters in ignorance of their respective ages was not merely impracticable in itself—as the elder would naturally remember the infancy of the younger—but was calculated to defeat the very end it was intended to serve by suggesting to some curious person that something was being • (1.) The Legacy of Cain. By Wilkie Collins. 3 vols. London: Matto and Windns.—(2.) That Unfortu ate Marriage. By Frances E. Trollope. 3 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.—(3.) The Dean's Daughter. By Sophie F. F. Veitch. 2 vols. Paisley and London : Alexander Gardner.—(4.) Red Towers. By Eleanor C. Price 3 vols. London: R. Bentley and Son.—(S) The Road from Ruin. By C. L. Purkis. 2 vols. London Spencer Blackett.—(6.) The Story of Helen Dweenant. By Violet Face. 3 vols. London : Chapman and Hall.—(7.) The Old Adam a Tale of an Army Crawmer. By Hugh Coleman Davidson. 3 vols. London Sampson Low and Co. concealed. Mr. Gracedieu's special aim was, of course, to prevent the fact that Eunice was the daughter of a murderess from being disclosed to the world by the malignant Miss Chance ; but the danger seems far too shadowy to justify such an exceedingly cumbrous and inconvenient method of averting it, and the consequence is that the plot seems much less workmanlike and inevitable than Mr. Wilkie Collins's plots are wont to be. Then, too, there is an almost entire absence of the author's peculiar humour, which is always one of the most refreshing elements in his books; and when we add that among all the characters there is not one which appeals very strongly to the reader's interest, it will be seen that we regard The Legacy of Cain as a comparative failure. We say comparative, because to a writer with such a wonderful gift of narration as that possessed by Mr. Wilkie Collins, absolute failure is all but impossible.
Even in the palmy days of English fiction, a novel of striking originality either in conception or execution, was necessarily a rare thing; and just now it seems past praying for; but those of us who have learned the fine art of contentment are satisfied to forego absolute originality—in the sense of novelty—if we can now and then find a book which recalls the delights of the old times, when a novel sometimes justified its name. Such a book is That Unfortunate Marriage, which reminds us often of the work of Miss Austen and still oftener of Mrs. Gaskell ;. indeed, some of the sketches of life in Oldchester might have come straight out of the pages of Cranford, and we are quite sure that the author of Cranford would not have been ashamed_ to own them. The strong-minded and large-minded Mrs. Dobbs and her faithful admirer and ally, Jo Weatherhead, who believes, not without reason, that she is a pearl among women, are a delightful pair; but the most per- fectly Gaskellian characters are the Piper sisters. Miss. Patty has, perhaps, not much individuality, except such individuality as must be possessed by a person who never forgets that she is the satellite of a superior orb, and that she shines with a reflected light ; but Miss Polly—or, to be more correct, Miss Piper—is a person of great importance,. for did she not in her youth compose that remarkable oratorio Esther, which was actually performed once before the fashionable amateurs of Oldchester, and has she not lived upon the rapture of that hour and the fame which the good old soul believes has followed her ever since P Pleasant company is also to be found in the society of the good-natured organist, Sebastian. Bach Simpson, whose mere name would have crushed the vitality out of a less light-hearted musician ; but with all her musical people, professionals and amateurs, Mrs. Trollope is evidently at home, and the chapters devoted to them are the lightest and brightest portions of a book which is of lightness and brightness all compact. The Miss Austen suggestions are to be found principally in the pages allotted to that fashionable lady, Mrs. Dormer Smith, and to that very worldly-wise young, woman, Constance Hadlow. The conversation and letters of the former are perfect, and what could be better than the sentence which follows the statement that Constance was by no means sure whether she was or was not in love with Owen Rivers P—" She did, however, arrive at the conviction that falling in love lay much more in one's power than was. commonly supposed; and that no Romeo-and-Juliet destiny could ever inspire her with an ungovernable passion for a. man who possessed but a hundred and fifty pounds a year." Mrs. Dobbs, too, has her good things, as when, for example, in answer to Owen's exclamation, " Mere words, you know," she indulges in the Poyserish metaphor,—" Words are words, for certain. And nuts are nuts. Only some of 'em hold sound kernels, whilst others have got nothing inside but dust." The story of That Unfortunate Marriage is very simple, and though it is interesting enough in itself, its main service is to hold together the vivacious sketches which make the book the pleasant thing it is. Really good light comedy can be en- joyed in any mood, and because it is provided here, That Unfortunate Marriage is a book for every reader and for every season.
There can be no doubt whatever that The Dean's Daughter rises far above the level of the average novel ; but we fear it will prove very disappointing to those who remember Miss Veitch's last book—the powerful and pathetic story of fames Hepburn, Free Church Minister—and irritating to those who make the writer's acquaintance for the first time. In one of his early essays, the late Mr. Walter Bagehot drew attention to a curious tendency on the part of various notable feminine novelists to glorify self-renunciation for its own sake, and to represent the act of a person who deliberately chooses the un- comfortable course as necessarily grand, heroic, and admirable. Of late, this tendency has perhaps hardly been so marked as it was when Mr. Bagehot wrote; but Vera Dormer's passion for self-abnegation is quite as fervid as that which moved any of the heroes and heroines of whom he wrote, and the conse- quences it entails upon her are uniquely unpleasant. A mor- bidly conscientious girl might be tempted by a mistaken sense of duty to compromise herself in order to preserve the reputation of a vain and selfish young married woman whose reckless folly had brought her to the verge of moral and social ruin ; but when Miss Dormer deliberately per- jures herself in the witness-box by accusing herself of a forgery, and rapturously accepts a sentence of five years' penal servitude in order to screen the real offender—an unhappily-married man with whom she has unfortunately fallen in love—we feel that the story is taking us into an unwholesomely rarified moral atmosphere. Miss Veitch is a wonderfully able writer, and this extraordinary situation is modelled with so much ingenuity, that its heroic sides catch all the lights, while its absurdities are cast into shadow ; but there they are, and the reader who can ignore them must be either very young or very impressionable. The introduction into a work of fiction of difficult questions of casuistry is generally an artistic mistake, and we feel sure that it is a mistake here; but its presence does not prevent The Dean's Daughter from being a strong and striking novel. Miss Veitch has as firm a grasp of character as ever—Colonel and Mrs. L'Estrange are specially excellent —and as the story progresses, the interest increases rather than declines ; but the chapters which are richest in imagina- tive truth are those which deal with Vera Dormer as she was before she began her career of renunciation. After the reference we have made in one sentence, it is only just to add that the story of the mutual love of Adrian Warren and the heroine is utterly devoid of offence, and is very gracefully and tenderly told.
Miss Price's new novel, Red Towers, is pleasant for many reasons, but it is specially pleasant for one reason,—that the admirable characters impress the imagination much more strongly than it is impressed by the characters which are less admirable. True, the hero, Paul Romaine, is at once admirable and shadowy, a not uncommon combination in the case of heroes; but Colonel Ward, M. de Montmirail, and his daughter Antoinette, who are all cast in a noble mould, are not only more pleasant but more real than the aggressively selfish Celia and Vincent, and the passively selfish Canon and Mrs. Percival. Not only revolutionary poets who sing of " the lilies and languors of virtue, and the roses and raptures of vice," but respectable Philistines with a strong pre- judice in favour of the Ten Commandments and Mrs. Grundy, feel "in their bones" that virtue—at any rate, virtue in fiction—is a somewhat flat and colourless thing, and that a dash of wickedness is essential to anything like real interest. Fortunately for the world, the combina- tion of moral excellence with that impressiveness of nature which we call " individuality" or " character," is not really uncommon in actual life ; it is only in fiction that goodness seems inseparable from a certain lack of colour ; and therefore it is a specially pleasant experience to come across a book which in this repect holds the mirror up to Nature. In Red Towers, the bluff, loyal, tender English soldier, Colonel Ward, and the strong, chivalrous French nobleman, M. de Montmirail, really live for us and compel our credence ; it is the shallow, worthless Celia, to whom so much larger a space upon the canvas is devoted, who every now and then eludes us and makes us feel that we see her through a mist. To delineate a woman who is at once thoroughly heartless and universally fascinating, is a delicate task, and in performing it we think Miss Price has only achieved a partial success. The fact is, that Celia's cold selfishness is made much more real than her powers of attraction; we are told of her fascinations, but not made to feel them ; and therefore the subjection of Paul, Colonel Ward, and M. de Montmirail seems fatuous and in- credible. Apart from this defect, Red Towers is not merely a charming but a satisfying story, admirable alike in its scheme and its execution.
The Road front Ruin is not altogether a bad novel as novels go ; but when we remember some of its writer's previous works, it is impossible to regard it with unqualified satis- faction. Mrs. Purkis always manages to make her stories interesting; but our interest in her latest story is a good deal marred by the fact that it is very difficult to understand the nature of the central situation. Lord Chertseye, on his return from Australia, where he has been for some in- explicable reason concealing himself for several years, is confronted by a charge of murder. He has left Europe strong and healthy in body and mind ; he comes back a physical and mental wreck ; and of this startling change we have from first to last no adequate explanation. He goes from bad to worse, and has at last to be confined in an asylum, where, of course, he is powerless against his accuser. This accuser is his cold-blooded and unscrupulous cousin Horace, the heir to his title and estates, who is in love with Violet Constable, who is herself in love with Lord Chertseye, but who consents to marry Horace on condition that on the wedding- day he will destroy the documentary evidence which in- criminates his cousin. Then there is a fire at the asylum, from which Lord Chertseye escapes in the company of a somewhat mysterious hospital nurse ; suddenly recovers his health ; hunts down the real author of the crime of which he has been accused ; and finally appears, clothed and in his right mind, and with a cleared character, just in time to prevent the sacrifice of Violet Constable to the wicked, scheming Horace. This will sound rather absurd, and as a matter of fact it is rather absurd; but Mrs. Purkis has the art of making even an unsatisfactory story decidedly readable. This, how- ever, is no reason why she should write unsatisfactory stories in order to display her art.
We confess that we are becoming a good deal tired of the fictitious treatment of mesmerism, clairvoyance, and of what has come to be called " occultism ;" and our waning interest in the romance of the pseudo-supernatural is not revived by the latest literary nightmare, Violet Fane's Story of Helear Davenant, which provides a maximum of extravagance with a minimum of that emotional excitement which well-managed extravagance is supposed to secure. There are few things more irritating than misdirected cleverness, and there is as much cleverness in Violet Fane's latest book as in any of its predecessors ; but it lacks that core of common-sense for the absence of which no amount of mere literary ability will compensate. The story of Helen's early days at Northover Park, before the bewildering romance of her life begins, is so good, that the reader promises himself an enjoyable time ; but he is speedily disappointed, for with the introduction of the mysterious Prince Crecozoleski, the high-souled " sensitive " who under mesmeric influence becomes a murderer, the novel loses all imaginative coherence, and becomes what we have called it,—a mere nightmare. The Story of Helen Davenant. is unsatisfactory in the way in which every book must be unsatisfactory which is not an imaginative organism,—in which the sequence of events is not inevitable, but arbitrary,. and the situations are selected simply for the sake of their strangeness, without any regard to their value as steps in the evolution of the main scheme. It may be added that the revela- tion of the secret of Helen's parentage, in the third volume, is gratuitously unpleasant; and when the author, through one of her characters, remarks of Courtenay Davenant that " he is only a Colonel in the Guards, which, it seems, is equivalent to a Captain in any other regiment," she puts the cart before the horse in a way which reminds us that a little learning is a dangerous thing.
Mr. Hugh Coleman Davidson's two previous novels had plenty of cleverness and promise, but they had also the appearance of being tentative experiments, and made one feel that the author was testing various styles and methods with a view to finding the style and method which suited him best. His search has been successful, for The Old Adam. is a much more artistic book than either The Green Hills by the Sea or Cast upon the Waters, and has a homogeneity which they cer- tainly lacked. It is, indeed, a thoroughly good and interesting story, not without faults, but with a freshness and vivacity' in the handling of character and incident which throws its defects into the background. Mr. Davidson would, we think, have been more perfectly successful had he chosen a less com- plicated plot, for his plot difficulties necessitate a certain indeterminateness of drawing in the portrait of his principal personage. Up to the middle of the third volume, we have no doubt whatever that Dr. Copingstone, the celebrate& " crammer," is a thoroughpaced humbug, and that he has really been guilty of some grave offence which has placed him in the, power of his rascally tutor, Valentine Gaunt; and then all at once we have to revise our verdict, and to see in him an essentially noble man who has been led to place himself in a false position by a nervous fear of the disinterment of a family scandal. This is a weakness into which Mr. Davidson has been betrayed by over-temerity in the matter of con- struction, though we must confess that even when we admire the Doctor least, we like him well enough to rejoice at the rehabilitation of his character, startling and bewildering as it undoubtedly is. With the other prominent personages no fault can be found. They are consistently lifelike, and the story as a whole has interest, ingenuity, and a pleasant humour which adds much to its charm.
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