RECENT NOVELS.* IT is an injustice to speak of the
author of Lady Audley's Secret as a mere plot-novelist. Most of her books contain admirable descriptive passages, and though perhaps she has never actually created a character, she has a genuine gift, of vivid and consistent portaiture. Still we do think that she needs a good plot-structure to enable her to show herself at her best, for her most characteristic books are such novels as Henry Dunbar, Ishmael, and Joshua Hogard's Daughter,— novels with a story which will, as old-fashioned ladies used to say of a rich silk, "stand alone." Now Sons of Fire is in this respect deficient; and the deficiency tells against its total effectiveness,—tells against it all the more because Miss Braddon's early chapters seem to promise the very kind of interest which the remainder of the book withholds. When a novelist introduces us to two young men who are in no way related, but who are so remarkably alike as to be mistaken for each other by persons who are intimately acquainted with one of the two, we naturally expect that the resemblance will reveal itself in the coarse of the story as an important narrative expedient. To put the matter colloquially, some- thing should come of it ; but in Sons of Fire nothing comes of it, and the story might have been practically what it is, bad Allan Carew been a plain, fair man of 5 ft. 8 in., and Geoffrey Wornock, a handsome, dark man of 6 ft. 1 in. Indeed, the narrative ineffectiveness of the remarkable resemblance—a defect so unusual in this writer's work— induces a suspicion that Miss Braddon originally intended to make Mr. Carew the father both of Allan and Geoffrey, but that after writing a few chapters she changed her mind ; and we believe that a critic with some of Edgar Poe's analytic power could present a case for this hypothesis which would be well-nigh impregnable. Then, too, there is Mrs. Wornock's ardent belief in spiritualistic manifestations, which is so heavily emphasised; and this also is something which has no narrative raison d'être, for the clumsy harking back, in the third volume, to the early days in which she had been so cruelly deceived by the rascally mediums, makes her belief all but incredible. We do not like to say it of a veteran author (if we may call a lady a veteran) to whom we owe thanks for much pleasant entertainment, but it is to be feared that the one word " carelessness " will answer most of the perplexing questions suggested by the perusal of Sons of Fire.
Some time ago a well-known novelist published a story which was, he informed the world, the first book he had ever written to please himself. Mr. Conan Doyle makes no such declaration with regard to The Star .k-Munro Letters, but we are certainly left with the impression that he might have made it if he would. As a whole the book can hardly be considered an artistic organism, but, unless we are very much mistaken —and mistake is hardly possible—it is what the slang of the day calls "a human document," a very close and sincere transcript of actual personal experience. It is, we admit, probable enough that the majority of the narrative details are inventions, quite as free from the adulteration of fact as are the most wonderful achievements of Mr. Sherlock Holmes; and the only two characters who are of any importance in the nar- rative may be equally imaginary, though if the fascinatingly repellent Cullingworth be not either wholly or in great part a study from life, he may fairly claim to be regarded as a very striking creation. When we speak of the book as a transcript from experience, we refer to its general substance rather than to its special incidents. Mr. Conan Doyle (not the literary artist, but the man) has something to tell and something to say, and in the Stark-Munro Letters we have the telling and the saying. The former is, we venture to think, more satis- factory than the latter. The story of the early struggles of a young professional man, altogether unaided in his fight with fortune, has never been better told than in these pages. The hours of chilling despair, the moments of exhilarating hope, the half-humorous, half-pathetic expedients born of a constant pressure of prosaic necessities are rendered as they could only be rendered by a man who had known the world • a.) so. of Fire. By the Author of Lady Andley's Secret." 3 vols. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Ft Riliilti n, Kent, and Co.--(2.) The Stark-Munro Letters. Edited and Arranged by A. Conan Doyle. London: Longman', Green, and Co.-43 ) The Professor's Ezperime”t. By Mrs. Hungerford. 3 vole. London: Chatto and Windus.—(4.) Narmanstatee. 3 vols. London: Richard Pent'ey and Son.—(5.) Coming of Age. By Elizabeth Neal. 2 vols. London: Hurt and Blackett ) At Heart a Rake. By Florence Man-yet. London: Herare Cox.—(7.) Redburne. By Henry Ochiltree. Paisley and London: sit:ander Gardner.
in which these things are the staple of life. The chapters devoted to Stark-Munro's early days in Bircheston when his purse and his house were both empty, and his solitary friend and patient was a good-natured but heavy-drinking ancient mariner, have a pleasant, rough-and-ready picturesqueness, and are of elementary human nature all compact. It is the record of the young doctor's spiritual experiences that is the really disappointing element in the book, for we have no distinct statement either of the problems which for a time baffled him, or of the solution in which he found rest. The vehicle of fiction does not readily lend itself to that precision of thought and language which is essential to useful dis- cussion of these great themes.
Mrs. Hungerford is at her best in The Professor's Experi- ment, though the story is, as usual, about as loosely knit as it well could be. The professor of the title dies in a very early chapter of the first volume, and the results of his experiment —if indeed it can be said to have any results at all—are entirely unconnected with the main action. Not that there is much action, either main or subsidiary ; but then action is something with which Mrs. Hungerford is always able to dispense. Give her a country house—which must, of course, be situated in Ireland; a good big disorderly garden ; a family, also big and also disorderly in a charming Irish sort of way —and she has all the materials she requires for a novel full of brightness and gaiety, and charming with that peculiar charm for which "Hibernian" is the only epithet. Mrs. Hungerford may not have seriously studied the technique of the art of fiction, but she has studied boys and girls, young men and maidens, and she loves them so well that she can give a winning quality even to that hobbledehoy stage of development which in real life is so unattractive to all save fathers and mothers, and frequently irritating even to them. There are several hobbledehoys of both sexes among the members of the Barry family, in which cousin Dom must be included, and Mrs. Hungerford's readers will be in love with them all, though special affection will be reserved for the eighteen-year-old Susan, who is one of the most delightful heroines to be found even in the books of the writer who has given us Phyllis and Molly Bawn. In the woes of the maiden all forlorn who does not know her own name, we cannot bring ourselves to be greatly interested; but the Barrys, from Susan down to the little cripple Bonnie, are delicious.
The anonymous novel Normanstowe presents a curious com- bination of genuine literary aptitude, with something which we can only call amateurishness. In many chapters of the book the author displays a firm grip of life ; in others this grip is perceptibly relaxed, and the narrative becomes unreal and unconvincing. The motive of the story is the redemption by a strong, self-reliant, courageous, and passionately pure woman of a man of originally noble instincts who has allowed himself to drift into a life of selfish profligacy. He is the lessee of a West-End music-hall, and he inserts in the daily journals two advertisements, one for a ballad-singer, another for a matron of the boarding-house in which a number of his "young ladies" reside. Ella Lyell, who by the death of her father has been left alone in the world, applies for both posts and is success- ful in obtaining them ; and the first two volumes, which con- tain the really strong parts of the book, tell the story of how, in humanising the waifs and strays of feminine humanity intrusted to her charge, she restores the man who calls himself James Bates to his true self. Ella's music-hall and boarding - house experiences are admirably handled, and leave the impression of being based upon actual knowledge of the life with which they deal. It is in the portrait of Bates that the writer's weakness displays itself. The character of the man before his transformation is never made real, and therefore the effect of the transformation is minimised. We hear a great deal of his bad reputation, but we are never permitted to see anything that justifies it, and this omission well-nigh destroys the dramatic effective- ness of the situation. It is in the picture of Ella's struggle with the rebellions spirits of the boarding-house that the writer touches her high-water mark ; and if the rest of the novel were equal to some of the scenes at "No. 21," the book would merit a kind of praise which, as it stands, can hardly be bestowed upon it.
When a novel opens with the death of a baby baronet and the substitution for him of his Italian foster-brother, we seem to be taken back through a quarter of a century or longer to a time
when the average novel-reader was satisfied with a simple meal of crude familiar melodrama, and did not even dream of the more cunningly mixed and piquant, though even less nutri- tious dishes, which are served up to his successors of to-day. On the whole we are inclined to welcome Coming of Age partly as a change from psychology, and all the other "ologies" which make contemporary fiction so very depressing, and partly because it comes as a pleasant reminder of the days of " anld lang syne." And indeed the book in itself is quite pleasantly readable, for Miss Neal has the knack of keeping the obvious improbabilities of her scheme as much as possible in the background, and she has taken more pains than are usually taken by the average novelist to make her story hang to- gether and to give it a certain look of symmetry. That the characters and incidents should be for the most part hack- neyed and conventional, was to be expected ; but that vivacious busybody, Lady Rosalie Finch, has palpable flesh and blood, and she contributes an element of bright humour, in which, but for her and old Lord Blackstone, the novel would be rather dismally deficient. To the readers who regard fiction simply as a means to the agreeable wiling away of time Corning of Age may be safely commended.
There is by no means the same safety in commending the next book on our list. A title taken from Pope's offensively cynical line (characteristically misquoted by the author), " But every woman is at heart a rake,"
is one danger-signal ; and unfortunate experience of some of Miss Florence Marryat's previous novels compels us regret- fully to add that her name on the title-page is another. The elaborate treatment of vice and vulgarity demands an excep- tionally fine quality of good taste to save it from offensive- ness; and good taste of any quality has never been conspicuous among Miss Marryat's endowments. We suppose she would excuse the unsavouriness of At Heart a Rake by pleading that she has written a satire, and that the satirist is compelled to touch pitch. This is undoubtedly true ; but he is not compelled to wade through it and to revel in it, and it is Miss Marryat's obvious tendency towards such wading and revelling which makes her book so unspeakably distasteful. Nor is this all, for the author adds to her other offences some perfectly recognisable caricature portraits of well-known living women of note, which, if they do not actually come within the range of the law of libel, are flagrant outrages upon the accepted decencies of social intercourse. It is a good long time since we have read a book which left such a nauseous flavour upon the palate, and we hope it will be still longer before we read such another.
Mr. Henry Ochiltree's Redburn seems to be a first attempt, and as such it is by no means lacking in promise ; but before he ventures upon a second story he will do well to give some study to the matter of the artistic use of dialect in fiction. We venture to think that even Border readers upon the south side of the Tweed, will find half the pages of his present book much too difficult to be read with pleasure, and to the thousands of reading men and women who live south of the Humber they will be practically unintelligible. The peculi- arities of local speech, if properly treated, can be made both effective and charming ; but both effectiveness and charm are sacrificed by a writer who, instead of doing his best to render the general impression of a dialect, is content with nothing less than a pedantically accurate reproduction of its idioms and vocabulary. In taking the latter course Mr. Ochil- tree has made a grave blunder, which is all the more regrettable because R,edburn contains some good work. It must be ad- mitted that the conclusion is deplorably weak, for it is plain that the two sinners, Adam Scott and Liz Waugh, are re- moved by death for the simple reason that the writer does not know what to do with them; but the story of the temptation and fall of the young theological student is certainly not wanting in either insight or power, though Mr. Ochiltree has hardly been wise in challenging comparison with Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, or even with Lockhart's less known, but striking and sombre book, Adam Blair. There are some creditable descriptive passages in the book ; and while it is difficult to believe that the writer is an addition to the ranks of the Scottish humonrists, there are some touches of genuine, if thin, humour in the record of Jim Buchan's rather comically unsatisfactory experiences of courtship. One cannot with perfect honesty speak of R,edburn as a success, but it has pages and chapters which redeem it from failure.
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