RECENT NOVELS.*
M. FELIX GRAB, who occupies, in the estimation of competent critics, a place second only to Mistral as a master of Provençal poetry and romance, has chosen for the theme of his vivid and engrossing story, The Beds of the Midi, the historic march to Paris of the Marseilles Battalion, of whom Carlyle wrote :— " They wend, amid the infinitude of doubt and dim peril ; they not doubtful : Fate and Feudal Europe, having decided, come girdling in from without; they, having also decided, do march within. Dusty of face with frugal refreshment they plod onwards; xmweariable, not to be turned aside. Such march shall become famous. They must strike and be struck, and on the whole prosper, and know how to die." Much interesting material relating to the antecedents and record of the men who composed the battalion has since come to light owing to the exploration of the Marseilles Council books suggested by Carlyle, and on this basis of documentary history M. Gras has constructed a romance in which the worthiest and most romantic aspect of the Revolutionist cause is presented in a highly attractive guise. The story is cast in the form of a narrative told by an old peasant of ninety who, as a boy, had taken part in the march, to a gathering of villagers, who assemble night after night at a shoemaker's shop to listen to the old warrior's stories. An aroma of rustic simplicity breathes throughout the whole book, the style of narration being admirably suited to the narrator, and from beginning to end the writer gives one the idea of a man who is entirely in love with his subject. It must not be thought, however, because the sympathy of the readers is chiefly enlisted on the side of the Revolution, that M. Gras is a vehement partisan. Against the miserable Marquis, his tyrannical son, and Surto, the brutal ogre of a bailiff, must be set the gracious figure of Adeline, the tender-hearted daughter of the Marquis, the saintly cure, and many another (L) The Reds of the Midi. Translated from the Provençal of Felix Gros by Catharine Janvier. London: Heinemmn.—(2.) The Malady of the Century. From the German of Mat Mardsu. London: Heinemann.—(3.) One of God's Dildrnmas. By Allen Upward. Lond Beinetnann.—(4 ) The Enemies. By E. IL Coo. or. nion Constable.—(5.) Naney Noon. By Benjamin t-divdt. 1,nelon : T. F sher Coal —(6.) Fellow Travellers. By Gdabam Travers. London: Plackwood.—a.) Goddesses Three By D. If. Pryer. Lm.don Bentley and r on.—(8.l Vol: a &coy of the Tiry Side. By Jud th Vaadeleur. Lord ,n: !tura and B!acke•.t,
sympathetically drawn portrait of the representatives of the old regime and religion. M. Gras does not shirk the horrors of the situation, but be does not wallow in them gratuitously. An idealist and a poet, he does not refrain from dispensing a substantial measure of poetic justice at the close of his in- spiriting story. The translation, for which Madame Janvier is responsible, is easy, forcible, and picturesque,—in every respect an admirable piece of work.
It is not likely that such repute as Dr. Max Nordan has achieved as a caustic but extravagant critic of modern social, political, and economical tendencies will be enhanced by The Malady of the Century. For one thing, it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile his constant change of standpoint with any genuine sincerity of purpose, other than that of a settled resolve to startle his readers. In his Conventional Lies of Our Civilization he was frankly revolutionary and secularist. In Degeneration we found him, by implication at any rate, preaching the advantages of conventionality, normality, and commonplaceness. Both works, however, united in proclaim- ing the blessings inherent in a scientific training. Now in. each of the two novels from Dr. Nordan's pen which have appeared in an English dress—A Comedy of Sentiment and The Malady of the Century—the hero is a man of science, and in each he is as wax in the hands of a wanton and worthless. woman. Wilhelm Eynhardt, the hero of the book before no, is a perfectly colossal prig, for whom, whether flirting or- philosophising, whether immured in his Vennsberg or flying precipitately from it, we find it hard to feel the very slightest respect. With all his cleverness, Dr. Nordan often sails perilously near to the ludicrous, if he does not actually cross the border-line, as in the case of the ponderous reflections committed to his huge brass-bound diary by Dr. Schrotter. As for his lack of reticence or delicacy, it is quite remark- able, though we prefer him in his frankly vulgar moments. to his occasional deviations into greasy sentimentality. There are undoubtedly some striking passages in the book; the episode of the duel is well told, and the picture of the vagaries of latter-day German Imperialism, with its craze for denunciation, is powerfully drawn. But as a whole the book is ineffective and disagreeable. The men are tedious, the women dull or dangerous. Woman, as envisaged by Dr. Nordan, can only fulfil her destiny with decorum as a stodgy Hausfrau.
Mr. Upward's novel, One of God's Dilemmas, is a great deal better than its tasteless, screaming title, so typical of the modern habit of confounding violent expressions with genuine sentiment. As a matter of fact, the dilemma in question is entirely of the novelist's creation, and a great deal has to be taken for granted before events begin to march to the tragical dinoilment imperatively demanded by the conventions of the new romance. We have to. assume, first of all, that a girl of good position and refine- ment will elope with a loafer of no birth or breeding. We have to assume—this is easy enough—that the loafer coolly deserts her in six months. What is harder to swallow is that the same loafer, being thrown on his own resources, develops into a strong, self-reliant, and industrious man, and after tea years in America, where he amasses a small fortune, returns to look for his wife. She, meanwhile, had been living under- her wedded name in England, but in spite of all his efforts it takes him four years to discover her whereabouts. He, on the other hand, had seen much of men : his mind had become more dignified and gentle. Before announcing him- self to his wife, he makes the acquaintance of his son, a boy of fourteen, of whose existence he was entirely unaware, and the story proper resolves itself into the efforts of the father to win the affection of his son, and the desperate struggles of the mother to keep the boy to herself. Mrs. Bere will not forgive her husband, not so much for his desertion, as for his inability to profess orthodox Church views. The character of the boy, a vain, pleasure-seeking creature, easily caughl. by the bribe of pocket-money and presents, is well drawn, and the scenes between him and his father are not amiss Some pathos is, in short, extracted from the situation, which the author accurately describes as a "simple, almost vulgar, tragedy." No boy of any pretension to refinement, we may parenthetically remark, would address his mother as " beauty." But Mr. Upward is not content to stand aside and let his characters speak and act for themselves. His own bias is to plainly observable in the incidental comments interspersed is
the course of the narrative. And as for the catastrophe, it is at once gratuitous and clumsily introduced. It would be unfair to conclude this notice of a clever but unsatisfying story without recording the fact that Mr. Upward gives evidence at times of a sense of humour which, if not of a particularly dis- tinguished quality, is as welcome as it is unexpected in the modern " strong " novel.
In The Enemies Mr. Cooper has chosen the not unfamiliar theme of the child-wife neglected by an indulgent husband engrossed in his profession, and solacing her loneliness by a dangerous flirtation with an unscrupulous admirer. It is only when on the brink of the abyss that Maud Hamilton realises the real nature of Trevor's attentions, repulses them with scorn, and invokes the aid of her husband to crush the would- be seducer. It is an eminently satisfactory, if somewhat un- expected, solution of the problem, but we could wish that Mr. Cooper had contrived to render it more convincing. To us the merit of the book lies not so much in the handling of its rather painful central theme as in the exceedingly lively por- traiture of the minor characters,—the moderately clever but immoderately ambitious clergyman ; the hero's younger brother, an irresponsible optimist with a gift for radiating sunshine more by the manner of his talk than its matter ; the coarse-fibred, underbred Irish Roman Catholic Bishop; and the brilliant, reckless, and eccentric Lady Hamilton. More than one of these characters give one the impression of having been drawn, and rather cruelly drawn, from the life. The side-glimpses at the inner working of party politics at the height of the Home-rule agitation, again, are uncommonly good, and afford relief to the more intimate and emotional side of the story. The mise-en-scene, in fine, is excellent, but one cannot help wishing that so clever a writer as Mr. Cooper had chosen a more nutritive subject than the undesirability of a schoolroom marriage.
Mr. Benjamin Swift apologises at the outset of Nancy Noon "for introducing a few hopelessly commonplace persons." The apology is entirely needless. Whatever may be the faults of this extraordinary novel, commonplaceness at least cannot be laid to the charge of its author. In characterisation, as in style, it is consistently grotesque and eccentric. Mr. Swift is a disciple—conscious or unconscious —of Dickens, Carlyle, and, if we are not mistaken, of George Meredith, each of whom is eminently an exemplar vitiis imitabile. When Nancy assures her high-born lover that no other suitor is in the field, we read how, at her word, "the gray-haired, Everlasting Ironies ogled at each other." One of the most trying features of the book is the amazing dialect in which a great deal of the conversation is held. The author admits in one passage that it is a" mixed dialect," and the admission is justified. "It'll rend mi auld hert," "Well, mim, will you have mircy on an old sirvint," "By Jiv," "a briss firthing," "liddy," may suffice to illustrate the strange obsession under which Mr. Swift labours as regards the letter " i." And the proper names are to match,—Jiss, Cluff, Lord Pose, Piff, Sneeze, Twigg, Frills. To attempt to epitomise the plot would be hopeless. It is as incoherent as a dream, and the last chapter is sheer delirium. As for his hero, Mr. Swift assures his readers that he knows him and that they do not, and will laugh at him. That, we fear, is more than probable.
One expects good work from the clever author of Mona Maclean, and the expectation is not disappointed in Fellow Travellers, a collection of stories which owes its title to the fact that in each instance the two leading characters are thrown into contact, or discover their true mutual relation- ship, while on a journey. In "After Many Days" it is the chance meeting of a rugged country doctor and a hysterical young lady artist. To his stimulating and sensible advice she owes, not only a new lease of life but a new sphere of utility, and many years afterwards is able to play fairy godmother to her struggling benefactor. Here the sentiment is a little strained, and the denointent artificial, though the idea is gracefully worked out. A sister's devotion furnishes the motive to The Examiner's Conscience," where a professor strains a point to pass a consumptive candidate for a medical degree. The young man is at once vulgar and vain, but none the less a pathetic figure from the doom of an early death that over- shadows him, while his sister's loyalty is really moving. Better still is the charming idyll of "The Knight and the Lady," which tells of the romantic friendship between two
children, a Scottish peasant lad and a little lady, who inveigles him to escort her to a fair. One cannot resist the conclusion, however, that the tragic ending is simply due to the difference in social status between hero and heroine. Finally, in The Story of a Friendship" we have a singularly unconventional but discreetly handled essay in Platonics. In all the stories the atmosphere is distinctly but never aggressively modern. One finds in nearly all the highly " up-to-date " young men and women who people Graham Travers's pages a touch of poetry and chivalry which reconciles one to their culture and redeems them from priggishness.
Goddesses Three has strong claims:on the gratitude of readers and reviewers. It has a good if slightly conventional plot, abounds in well-contrived incident and lively dialogue, and boasts in Evangela Wynne a heroine of quite exceptional charm and spirit. Evangela is an orphan, a modern girl of the very best type, who makes her home for the time being with some warm-hearted Austrian cousins. They—the Bertemilians— are living under a certain amount of social ostracism, as their father, a man of honour and courage, has refused the challenge of a certain Baron Adlofstein, who, inspired by motives of filial loyalty, endeavours to pick a quarrel with the supposed author of his father's undoing. The real villain of the plot is Adlofstein'a own stepmother, a lady with a taste for toxicology, but her guilt is not fully revealed until the close of the story. Meanwhile Evangela exerts her- self nobly to reconcile the two families, and incidentally makes a conquest both of the grim Baron, who is really a very fine fellow, and the Viennese Adonis who has been courting her favourite cousin, Melanie. It is a terrible tangle, for Adlof- stein imagines himself to be the victim of an hereditary taint of insanity, and the Viennese Adonis takes all manner of mean advantages to cut out his magnanimous rival. However, in the end the terrible historic holocaust of the Ring Theatre is made use of to eliminate the wicked Baroness and other enemies of the hero, and all ends happily. There is a touch of melodrama about the book, reminding one of the novels, so popular a decade or two back, and much on the same lines, of E. Werner. But the pictures of Austrian society, though they lack that profound insight into foreign modes of life and habits of thought which marks the novels of Dorothea Gerard and her sister, show a close and sympathetic observation. The three girls are admirably drawn, the naiveté of the Austrians contrasting most happily, and at times humorously, with the reserve of their English cousin, while real power is shown in the character of the unhappy Stephanie, a girl determined to be avenged on the slights of Nature by the vindictiveness of her tongue, as well as in the vivid description of the ghastly scenes in the burning theatre.
Another brisk and wholesome novel, with a decidedly engaging child-heroine for its central figure, is Vat: a Story of the Tivy-side. The Anglo-Welsh novel is new to us, but the reader will soon find himself very much at home in the company of Val, a warm-hearted hoyden, her genial friends and devoted retainers. The marriage-rate is perhaps un- necessarily high in proportion to the number of the dramatis persona, and the episode of the stolen diamonds not very happily contrived. Perhaps the best thing in the book is the character-sketch of an apparently apathetic girl of fashion who by contact with sympathetic and stimulating natures thaws and develops into a gracious and charming woman. But the book is full of refreshing gaiety and movement.
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