RECENT NOVELS.*
THE anonymous author of The Story of a Penitent Soul is almost certainly young, for the courage or temerity which enters into rivalry with the recognised masterpiece of a man of genius is essentially youthful. The leading situations of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter are so rich in humour and dramatic interest that even the most clumsy handling could hardly deprive them of impressiveness, and there is a great deal in the work of the new writer that is the reverse of clumsy ; but that the book should suffer from the comparison which it inevitably suggests was a thing to be expected. True, the author might possibly have been a second Hawthorne, but had she been so (we write " she " without any hesitation whatever) she would never have borrowed a motive from the first Hawthorne : we should have had the old spirit embodied in a new form. The three prin- cipal characters in The Story of a Penitent Soul—the wife, the husband, and her minister-lover—are much less pictorially and dramatically effective than Hester Prynne, Roger Chilling- worth, and Arthur Dimmesdale. In Hawthorne's romance the figures have a certain aloofness like that of the background of the past with which they so perfectly harmonise. The new story is a novel of the present, and the characters are seen through no transfiguring atmosphere of time : they are in- tended to be people like those with whom we are ordinarily familiar; and yet, as a matter of fact, they are not nearly so real to us as are the members of the little group in The Scarlet Letter. Mary Fleming, who fills the place of Hester, is, indeed, little more than a shadow. In the chapter near the close of the first volume, where she enters into the story, she is for the moment distinct enough ; but the effect of distinctness is produced simply by admirable description ; and as soon as she begins to play her part in the little tragedy, we lose all imaginative hold of her personality. The husband who receives her confession of unfaithfulness in what she believes to be her dying hoar, and who takes such a terrible vengeance upon the man who has wronged him, is presented in much stronger outlines ; but his por- trait is little more than a vigorous sketch. In the much more elaborate presentation of the personality of the minister of Lynnbridge, who tells the story of his sin and his repentance, the author puts forth her whole strength ; but whether the subject is worth the imagination and literary skill bestowed upon it, seems very doubtful. Stephen Dart is one of those morbid, hysterical natures whose moods and actions appeal to the student of moral pathology rather than to the student of normal human character. What may be called his " fall " is not a real fall, in any strict application of the metaphor: it is the wreck of a rudderless vessel which has simply drifted upon the rooks. His recurring reflections upon the doom of heredity—for he is himself the offspring of a Bin similar to his own—have dramatic consistency and a certain measure of pathetic interest ; but we fail to find either moral or artistic value in the most veracious rendering of the oscilla- tions of a nature which is never for one moment in stable equilibrium. That The Story of a Penitent Soul is an excep-
• (I.) The Story of a Penitent Soul : being the Frigate Papers of Mr. Stephen Dart, late Minister at Lysnbridge, in the County sf Linegin. S vols. London; R. Bentley and Son.—(2.) Pan the Story of a Young Girl's Life. By Henry Burford. 3 vols. London : Chapman and Hall.—(3.) Wife, Pet No Wife a Story of To-Day. By John Coleman. 3 vols. London: Henry J. Drane.— (4.) Belhaven. By Max Beresford. 2 vols. London : Hurst and Blackett — (5.) More Kin than Kmd. By B. Loftus Tottenham. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blaekett.—(6.) Camellia Verbena Stephaeotie, tee. By Walter Besant London: Chatto and Windus.—(7.) From Midsummer to Mart.nmas: a West Cumberland Idyl. Written and illustrated by Cuthbert Rigby. London : George
Allen.
tionally powerful book we do not deny ; but to tell powerfully such a story as that told in its pages is comparatively easy. One or two of the subsidiary characters who stand apart from the main action are, however, snffioiently successful to give one the impression that the author is not entirely dependent upon her theme. What her true powers are will be shown by her second book.
Fan is one of those novels to which even a really competent as well as honest critic is likely to do either more or less than strict justice. It is immeasurably superior to the average product of the circulating libraries, and yet, in spite of its superiority, it is disappointing. It is, in fact, so good that we are inclined to feel irritated—perhaps unreasonably irritated —that it is not better. Mr. Harford's edifice of invention by no means either a well-planned or a well-built structure, and in several of the situations his imagination is not equal to the demands made upon it; but the book is interesting because it is not a piece of mere conventional work,—because the author has studied character at first-hand, and is able to give the results of his study in satisfying concrete form. This means that Mr. Harford is, within a certain range, a creator, not a mere copyist ; and though his creations are very unequal in vitality and interest, two or three of them are specially good. Among these two or three we do not number the central character. Fan promises well, but does not fulfil the promise. When the street-waif, who becomes first the- protegee of the unconventional Miss Starbrow, and afterwards an assistant in a West-End shop, is recognised as the daughter of the deceased Colonel Eden, and enters upon a career of commonplace prosperity, she ceases to be interesting; and then the reader realises, perhaps for the first time, that he has been interested all along, less in the girl herself than in the experiences that life might possibly provide for her. It is not Fan, but Fan's friends—Miss Starbrow, the masterful, impulsive woman whose moods are so incalculable, and Constance Murton, who has the mental equipment of a sceptic with the moral fervour of a saint—who make the book interesting ; and they are characters which have just the kind of interest which belongs to so many people in real life and to so very few people in fiction. Mary Starbrow, for example, is a woman who, so far as certain externals of character are concerned, becomes known to us at once, but we are more than half-way through the book before we can feel certain that we have the key to her nature, and, even then, her action with regard to the suit of her repentant lover provides one of those surprises which our most intimate friends occasionally spring upon us. Morton Chance, with his ineffective imagination, which provides him with such an imposing ground-plan of life, and the lack of both the principle and will which would enable him to build upon it, is a more familiar type ; but he is studied with equal care and truth, and if the whole of Fan had been equal to the best parts of it, Mr. Harford would have written an unusually able book. As it stands, his first novel is a thing of general promise rather than of all-round performance.
There is sufficiently rough-and-ready vigour and picturesque- ness in the description of the shipwreck given by Mr. Coleman in his opening chapter to rouse the reader's interest, and to give him a comforting anticipation that Wife, Yet no Wife, is going to turn out a fairly satisfactory novel. The second chapter suggests the painful thought that hope has been injudiciously premature, and thence onward through the three volumes the book reveals itself as of grotesque melo- dramatic absurdity all compact. Mr. Coleman's characters are so extravagantly fantastic that they might have been created by a writer to whom living men and women were alto- gether unknown ; his plot is like nothing but an imperfectly remembered nightmare ; and his style is the kind of thing. that we thought had gone out with those romances in penny numbers—number two being given gratuitously to purchasers of number one—which some thirty years ago used to be pub- lished for the delectation of kitchen-maids and office-boys. One' of the principal persons in the story is the proud possessor of a forehead which appears "by sheer power of intellect to have forced its way through the hyacinthine locks which, during some embryonic period of development have overshadowed its severe and classic beauty ;" and his eyes are, if possible, more remarkable still, for "when he concentrated his gaze upon an object, those lustrous orbs absolutely coruscated, emitting streams of light which dazzled and, it may be added, some- times delighted the weaker vessels." Nor can it be said that the physical characteristics of this gentleman are one whit more unusual than are the ways and words of the Duke, the Duchess, the Dowager Countess, the Baronet, and all the heroes, heroines, and villains to whom Mr. Coleman is good enough to introduce us. As he treats with equal freedom the laws of nature, the laws of the realm, and the laws of English prose composition, it is not surprising that the result of this effort should be a novel the pervading absurdity of which can seldom have been surpassed.
The next two novels on our list belong also to the good old family of melodrama. Belhaven, which is perhaps the best of the three, deals mainly with the misdeeds and misadventures of Mr. Robert Gordon, a Scottish banker of the very highest respectability, who murders his wife by shutting her up in a secret room, where she is starved to death ; appropriates to his own use securities which have been deposited in the bank ; and commits other offences which entitle him to be regarded as a most satisfactory villain of the gentlemanly kind. Like most members of his tribe, he has a way of starting and betraying embarrassment and making mysterious remarks whenever certain subjects are referred to in his presence ; and the wonder is that his guilt is not brought home to him before "Max Beresford " has reached the end of his first volume, especially as he preserves the skeleton of the late Mrs. Gordon under his own roof, in the aforesaid secret chamber, where, at any moment, a very simple accident may reveal its presence. As it happens, the skeleton and the defalcations come to light together, and the novelist devises an ingenious plan by which one crime is made to provide a means of escape from the consequences of the other. The respectable Mr. Gordon takes a dose of curari, which produces the semblance of death ; and when he is prepared for burial, he is removed from his coffin, and the remains of his victim are carried to the grave at what is supposed to be his own funeral. As a matter of fact, curari is a drug which produces hardly any effect what- ever when taken into the stomach after Mr. Gordon's method; but this is one of those details of which the minor novelist takes no heed. Oddly enough, the mere literary work in Belhaven, is much better than that usually found in stories of -this type ; and the two old maids, Miss Prue and Miss Prissie, are such a pleasant pair as to suggest the thought that in pure comedy "Max Beresford" might do some -creditable work.
The people who justify the title, More Kin than Kind, are cousins and rival suitors for the hand and heart of the -beautiful Eva Graham. Ralph Denham is the familiar model of all the virtues ; Hugh Denham is the not less familiar embodiment of all the vices ; and as the young lady is wise enough to prefer the former, the reader foresees that the latter will make things generally uncomfortable. His fore- sight is aided by the utterances of a modern Meg Merrilies, who sees visions and indulges in prophecies which, though vague in detail, indicate with sufficient clearness that trouble is ahead. The trouble begins when Ralph's father, Sir Gilbert, dies suddenly of an attack of heart disease, brought on by the visit of a mysterious stranger, as it is then discovered that the dead man's marriage has been celebrated three years after Ralph's birth,—a discovery which beggars his good son, and makes his bad nephew successor to the title and estate. Of course Ralph, after the manner of heroes in such circum- stances, at once disappears, and Eva, after the manner of heroines, consents to provide for the comfort of her im- pecunious mother by marrying the objectionable Hugh. Then follow other complications, provided mainly by the stranger before-mentioned, who, knowing that Ralph is legitimate after all, is paid by Hugh for keeping his know- ledge to himself, and so on and so on. In this pleasing and original manner, the plot unfolds itself until it is time to bring the third volume to a close, when poetic justice is done all round, and the reader is left with the hope that the next novel in the library-box may prove to be something different from More Kin than Kind.
Of the four stories in Mr. Besant's new volume, Camellia Verbena Stephanotis, the two longer ones are much more satisfying than their shorter companions. The title-tale is at once slight and fantastic, and the imaginary continuation of Ibsen's drama, "A Doll's House," seems to us a rather dreary and unattractive embodiment of the author's well-known views on one branch of the great "woman question." "The De- moniac" may be objected to on the ground of unpleasantness, and an inherited craving for alcoholic stimulants is certainly a gruesome theme ; but the story is unquestionably powerful, and there is no reason to think that Mr. Besant has ex- aggerated the horrors of hereditary alcoholism. Indeed, he has displayed commendable reticence in dealing with those portions of the story where an inferior artist would have yielded to the temptation to "pile on the agony," the result being that "The Demoniac" is one of the most impressive of his minor performances. Still, it must be admitted that it is painfully hortatory rather than pleasantly entertaining ; and we turn with relief to that brightly humorous fantasy, "The Doubts of Dives," in which Mr. Besant utilises with charming freshness the central motive of Mr. Anstey's Vice-Vend. Of course, that essentially stupid person, the plagiarism-hunter, is certain to make his voice heard ; but the rule that a principle cannot be patented applies to literature as well as to mechanical invention, and Mr. Besant's application of the principle of exchanged per- sonal identities is as original as it is interesting. The troubles of the young man who is poor and lazy, and who takes the place of the young man who is rich and energetic, are irresistibly amusing ; and the whole story is conceived and executed in the finest vein of genuine high-comedy.
Local colour is a capital thing in its way, bat, so far as it is represented by peculiarities of dialect, Mr. Cathbert Rigby makes a somewhat too prodigal use of it in his West Camber- land idyl. The present writer, to whom the Cambrian doric is not an unknown tongue, has found From Midsummer to Martinmas very pleasant reading; but were he to commend it to his Southern friends without a word of warning, he fears that they might turn and rend him. Having said this, how- ever, it is merely fair to add that the difficult passages only come here and there, and if, when the reader comes to a hard word or phrase, he will "say Jerusalem, and pass on," he will find the general drift of the book perfectly intelligible. Mr. Rigby has a keen eye for character, and is by no means lacking in humour. The sale by auction in the first chapter is an excellent piece of work, and the author has supplemented his studies in rural portraiture by a story which, though a little shaky in the matter of construction, has many of the elements of dramatic interest. Mr. Rigby is his own illus- trator, and his pretty drawings add to the pleasantness of his graceful Cumberland idyl.
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