RECENT NOVELS.*
Ma. COHAN DOYLE'S name is unfamiliar to us, and is, we believe, equally unfamiliar to the world ; but it is not likely that it will soon be forgotten by any one who reads Micah Clarke ; and two or three books equal to this in freshness, • (1.) Micah Clarke : his Statement. By A. Conan Doyle. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.—(2.) St. Cuthbert's TOICer. By Florence Warden. 3 vole. London : Cassell and Co.—(3.) Chance or Fate? By Alice O'Hanlon. 3 vols. London: Chatto and Windus.—(4.) The Country Cousin. By Frances Mary Peard. 3 vols. London: R. Bentley and Son.—(5.) A Game of Chance. By Ella J. Curtis (Shirley Smith). 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett.—(6 ) Shamrock and Bose. By Mrs. J. Galbraith Lunn. 3 vols. London : T. Fisher Unwin.
interest, and literary skill would amply suffice to win for him a high place among living English novelists. New historical stories are not so common as they were a generation or two ago, when G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth numbered their readers by tens of thousands, but they are still fairly numerous ; and the fact that a really successful book of this kind is decidedly rare, seems to indicate that the obstacles in the way of success are extremely difficult to overcome. How- ever this may be, they are without doubt overcome by Mr. Doyle, whose story of the Western rising under " King Monmouth " seems to us little less than a masterpiece. Without a single exception, the characters, both historical and imaginary, are living, breathing men and women, painted with sharp, clear out- line and rich colour; nearly every chapter has in store for us some new incident which is both interesting in itself and artistically valuable as a contribution to the evolution of the plot, while the style is everything that the style of a book should be,—clear, simple, strong, utterly devoid of any mere- tricious ornament, and yet with the charm which always belongs to the perfect adaptation of means to ends. This will seem high praise, and as such we intend it. It may, to those who have not read the book, seem undiscriminating praise ; but such it assuredly is not. We know that it is the duty of the critic to discriminate, but should he fail to find faults, it can hardly be his duty to invent them in order that his summing-up may look severely judicial ; and if Micah Clarke has faults sufficiently serious to deserve mention, they have not disclosed themselves in the course of two careful readings. The story is supposed to be told by the hero in his old age to his three grandsons during the hard winter of 1734, and the style has a certain vague early eighteenth-century flavour, without any attempt at the rigid reproduction of a bygone manner. Unlike many books of its class—and we are thinking of the good books, not of the poor ones—Micah Clarke is not burdened with a dry prelude ; it begins to be interesting in the first chapter, and continues to be in- teresting to the last. Micah and his three companions in adventure—Reuben Lockarby, the loyal friend of his boy- hood, Decimus Saxon, the grizzled campaigner, a chevalier sans pear, if not altogether sans reproche, and the light- hearted, reckless Court dandy, Sir Gervas Jerome—are an admirably contrasted group ; and the brilliant, moody Mon- mouth, impulsively brave, and yet in the moment of trial the most contemptible of cowards, is a very strongly painted and lifelike portrait. The book is as rich in action as in character. The incidents of the ride of Micah and Saxon from Havant to Taunton are happily conceived and briskly narrated ; the daring journey of the hero to Badminton to enlist the sym- pathies of the Duke of Beaufort is a charmingly exciting episode ; and the description of the rout at Sedgemoor is certainly one of the best battle-scenes with which we are acquainted.
After trying in her last novel an experiment which was not altogether successful, Miss Florence Warden has come back to the plots and mysteries in which she is most at home ; and she may be fairly congratulated upon her return, for though what are called sensational novels do not belong to the highest class of art, most sensible readers will prefer a good story of plot-interest, to a poor story which aims at interest of a more intellectual order. It will be inferred that we regard St. Cuthbert's Tower as a good story ; and the inference is just, but it must be accepted with limitations. " In every work regard the writer's end," and as Miss Warden's end, which is first to stimulate and then to satisfy curiosity, is undoubtedly achieved, she must be credited with a certain measure of genuine success. Then, too, it must be added that she tells her story well, that her subsidiary characters are lifelike and real, and that she displays considerable cleverness in concealing from the hasty reader the wild im- probabilities which she asks him to accept. It must, however, be admitted that to readers who are not hasty, these impro- babilities are a decided stumbling-block. A clergyman is accused of the murder of a girl ; the evidence against him is so strong that, though he is personally popular, every person in the parish believes him to be guilty ; but he is never brought to trial, because " his mother was Lord Stan- nington's sister, so he had friends at Court." Such connection with the peerage may account for a good deal, but even in a novel it can hardly account for a minister of religion placidly continuing to visit, pray with, and preach to people who, to
his knowledge, suspect him of being a cowardly murderer, or for his insistence upon a course of conduct which cannot fail to transform suspicion into certainty. Of course, as is always the case in fiction, the Rev. Vernon Brander pursues this course in order to shield the real criminal, so it is clear that we are intended to regard him as a self-sacrificing hero rather than as a wrong-headed idiot ; but this motive is so thread- bare, and was so very worthless even when it wore its newest gloss, that a novelist of Miss Warden's resources might in kindness leave it to the amateurs.
It is not very easy to see the relevance of Miss O'Hanlon's title ; but that may pass, for, call it by what name we will, Chance or Fate ? is a readable story, though it can hardly be said to fulfil the expectations raised by its author's first book, The Unforeseen, which seemed to us a novel of considerable promise. The principal defect of the new work is that, while all the characters are fairly well drawn, there is not one in whom we can feel any very deep interest, and the story itself is cut up in a rather inartistic manner. The background throughout the first volume is English and Irish, and then the two heroines, as we suppose they must be called, though one of them is the reverse of heroic, are suddenly transported in a most exciting and uncomfortable manner to the West Indies. Here we are introduced to an entirely new set of characters, who take their parts in what is practically a new story, the two currents of narrative not re-uniting until the author has reached the latter half of the third volume, and her readers have well-nigh forgotten the virtuous Lord Consterdine, the vicious Captain Errington, and the minor players in the first act of the drama. Apart from this disjointedness, Chance or Fate ? is devoid of striking faults, but, unfortunately, it is as a whole equally devoid of striking merits, though it is redeemed from commonplace literary respectability by the very stirring and vigorous chapters devoted to the perilous voyage of Elaine and Kathleen Errington in Lord Consterdine's yacht, which is driven by a hurricane from its moorings in an Irish harbour into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. To this portion of the story, praise which is not faint can honestly be awarded.
Except for the sake of the new generation of readers, it is almost needless to say of a book by the author of The Rose Garden that it is clever and well written. That may be taken for granted, and it may also be taken for granted that the course of events through a considerable portion of the story will be of rather a depressing character. True, The Country Cousin ends happily, so far, at any rate, as the hero and heroine are concerned ; but we are left with very gloomy prog- nostications of the future of Elizabeth Ashton, who is about to throw herself away upon a man whom she knows to be thoroughly worthless, and whose worthlessness is not atoned for even by any great ardour of affection. It is, however, satis- factory to know that Joan Medhurst, the shy country cousin, who marries the great statesman, Sir Henry Lancaster, and degenerates into a thorough-paced town flirt, is brought to a sense of the error of her ways, though it must be admitted that the author, in effecting her conversion by a permanent shattering of her husband's health, is adopting very heroic treatment. Perhaps the story of Joan's gradual moral descent is all the more depressing because we feel that its successive stages are so inevitable. True, she disappoints the reader almost as much as she disappoints Lancaster; but our disappointment is due to the skill with which Miss Peard sketches the figure of the pretty debutante, whose natural instincts have been so crushed down by her fussy, fatuous, and pedantic father, Lord Medhurst, that even she herself is unconscious of them. The portrait of Joan is certainly drawn very relentlessly, but it is the relentlessness of truth, for there is not a single false stroke from first to last. Lancaster, while a good deal more human than the ordinary masculine ideal as discerned from a feminine standpoint, is naturally a less successful creation, for his perfections—like those of Sir Charles Grandison, the founder of his family—are a little too constantly in evidence ; and the remark made concerning his brilliant speech in the House, that " when he had finished, it seemed as if nothing remained for any one to say," is a delightfully feminine touch. We must not, however, waste space in picking holes in The Country Cousin, for it is a good book which, in spite of its somewhat depressing atmosphere, will be read with pleasure by lovers of refined and thoughtful work.
Simple-minded people must often be sorely perplexed by the sayings of the critics, especially the critics of novels. One reviewer, who gives them the impression that he is a competent judge, says that some particular book is very good ; another reviewer, who seems to be equally competent, says that it is very bad ; and the discordance between the different verdicts is often too extreme to be accounted for by the fact that tastes differ. A better explanation is provided by another fact, that critics have different standards, and that a book which, judged by one standard, must be pronounced a suc- cess, is, when tried by another, a proved failure. A Game of Chance is one of the novels which provide material for these altogether contradictory estimates. Its absurdities and improbabilities are so numerous, that the critic who chooses to recite them in order may easily, and without any perversion of fact, persuade his readers that the book is thoroughly worthless ; while another critic who sees the absurdities quite as clearly, but who has been pleasantly entertained by the author's fertility of invention and briskness of narrative, will naturally and legitimately speak of it in a much more kindly strain. The game referred to in the title is a game of chance in the same sense that race-course roulette is a game of chance, that is, the chances are all against the player, and the end of the game is certain from the beginning. Bella, the maid who personates her mistress, to whom she bears a strong resemblance, is received without question by her mistress's wealthy relatives as the person she pretends to be ; and though she is represented as being an exceedingly shrewd and clever woman, she is fatuous enough to carry out this deception when she knows that at any moment she may be, and before long must be, confronted either by the real Mrs. Erskine herself, or by one of half-a-dozen other people who are close at hand, and summarily consigned to a prison cell. Other characters act in a manner which is equally natural and probable; and yet, curiously enough, Miss Curtis, by sheer vivacity of narration, has managed to invest with the quality of readableness an utterly ridiculous story.
It will be seen that the author of the novel last noticed has made a good use of poor materials, while Mrs. Lunn, in Shamrock and Rose, has made a poor use of good materials, the result being that her story has the fatal fault of tiresome- ness. To say of a novel what must be said of this particular novel, that it can only be read by dint of copious skipping, is tantamount to saying that it is devoid of the quality which gives it a right to exist, because an unentertaining or wearisome work of fiction has no more raison d'être than an unedifying sermon or an inaccurate guide-book. The intellectual scheme of Mrs. Lunn's main story bears some resemblance to that of Mr. William Black's Princess of Thule, and a very unlucky likeness it is, for it forces the weak points of Shamrock and Rose into painful prominence. Eithne O'Meath—" the Princess Eithne," as she is called by the simple folk who live around her Western home—meets Sterne Tempest at a viceregal ball, and the wealthy Englishman and the poor but well-born and beautiful Irish girl fall in love with each other at first sight. They are speedily married, and all seems to promise well ; but Tempest is a practical agnostic, while Eithne is a devout Catholic, and though love fails not on either side, they gradually drift apart. The story might have been made a very graceful one, and it is not want- ing in pretty and pathetic touches ; but it is altogether spoiled by long, utterly unreal conversations, in which the inter- locutors do not talk, but make speeches, and which have the further disadvantage of being utterly irrelevant. We can see that if Mrs. Lunn had been able to make her persons and situations as vivid to her readers as they doubtless were to herself, she would have produced a very satisfactory novel ; but this is just what she seems unable to do, and therefore her book is largely a failure. We may add that readers of the better sort are likely to be daunted by a bad misquotation on the title-page. Shakespeare never wrote,—" Spirits are not finely toned but to fine issues."
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