RECENT NOVELS.*
TEE cordial welcome which Mr. Gallon's novels have encountered cannot altogether be explained by their intrinsic merit. It probably indicates the reaction that is already afoot amongst the clients of Mudie's and Smith's against the tyranny of pessimism and the convention of the unhappy ending. In Dicky Monteith Mr. Gallon starts out with all the materials for a monumentally miserable story. His hero is (1) separated from his wife, a low-born beauty with a shrewish temper and a blackmailing father ; (2) he is addicted to drink ; (3) he has squandered away every penny, not only of his own money but of the trust funds commended to his keeping until his half-brother should come of age. To com- plete these rich possibilities of disaster, Dicky Monteith falls in love with his half-brother's wealthy fiancee. Now we submit that it would be more in accordance with the rules of the game as it is played at present that Dicky Monteith should commit bigamy and make ducks and drakes with his new wife's fortune, that the half-brother should assassinate him with a dynamite pill and then commit suicide, and that Mrs. Monteith the second, after a harrowing interview with the gardener's daughter, should leap from the summit of the Great Wheel. Even if the working out of the plot were shorn of such sensational inci- dents, it ought, in order to chime with modern conventions, to be fraught with misfortune and rounded off in despair. Instead of which, Mr. Gallon, with a heroic disregard for these latter-day traditions, a lavish expenditure of compassionate sentiment, and a vigorous use of the "long arm of coincidence," not only extricates his bibulous hero from a succession of em- barrassing situations, but enables him to cry quits with his half-brother when the latter appropriates a large sum of money which Dicky's devoted protegee—a London " slavey " of the " Marchioness " type—has stolen from a neighbour. The gardener's daughter having been opportunely eliminated, his half-brother's fiancée—an heiress, of course—proposes to • (1.) Dicky Monteith. By Tom Gallon. London : Hutchinson and Co.— (2.) Peggy of the Bartons. By B. M. Croker. London : Methuen and Co.— (3.) Lady Mary of the Dark House. By Mrs. C. N. Williamson. London : James Bowden.—(4.) Disikinberr. By Herbert C. MacIlwaine. London : Constable and Co.—(5.) The Terror : a Romance of the Revolution. By Felix Gras. Trawl- lated from the Provencal by Catharine A. Janvier. London: W. Heinemann.— (6.) Caybasn Fracases. By Theophile Gautier. Translated by Ellen Murray Beam. Illustrated by Victor A. Searles. London : Duckworth and Co.— (7.) The Yellow Danger. By M. P. Shiel. London : Grant Richards:7– (8.) Scribe, and Pharseees. By William Le Queux. London : F. F. White and Co. Dicky and is aocepted. The story is prettily told, but is just as far removed from the normal course of human life as the sinister caricatures of the ultra-realists. Its ethics are be- wildering, its sentiment a parody of Dickens in his most effusive mood. Decidedly Mr. Gallon must do better work than this if he is to justify the eulogies of his admirers.
Mrs. Croker's novels are neither strenuous, sombre, nor severely literary ; but when she is in the vein there are few pleasanter companions in our hours of ease than the author of Diana Barrington. The plot of Peggy of the Bartons is simple to the verge of artlessness. Two brother officers go down to Sandshire to fish, and both fall in love with Peggy Summer- hayes, a rustic beauty whose family has fallen on evil times. Peggy, being young and unsophisticated, is fascinated by the handsome and unscrupulous Captain Goring, who would have actually ridden away had not his self-sacrificing comrade, Captain Kinloch, forced him to fulfil his promise of marriage. Goring soon tires of his bride, and forces her to leave him after falsely asserting that he has another wife in India. Peggy accordingly goes to earn her living in a monster shop, where a chance service rendered to an eccentric lady emanci- pates her from drudgery behind the counter. She becomes the old lady's companion, overhears and baffles a conspiracy to rob the house, and her position being now secure, discovers Captain Kinloch to be the nephew of her benefactress. Kinloch has, meantime, won a V.C. in a frontier war, and returns to marry Peggy, Goring conveniently succumbing to bloodpoisoning from the bite of a monkey. With Mrs. Croker the framework does not count for much; she excels in the admirably simple, easy, and direct flow of her narrative, the briskness of her dialogue, and the geniality of her portraiture. Peggy, like all her heroines, is a charm- ing in g e nue , and the household of Miss Berle, the old spinster lady tyrannised over by her ancient retainers, is very humorously described. Goring's callousness and villainy are somewhat abruptly sprung upon the reader, and the monkey is rather a grotesque deus ex machinci. But with all deduc- tions, this is an excellent book to read in a hammock in such weather as we have had during the past week.
Of that class of novel of which Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas is the classical example Mrs. Williamson has already given us a spirited example in The Lady in Grey. Her new venture, Lady Mary of the Dark House, is very much on the same lines, though the procession of sensations is not so con- tinuous. The heroine is a beautiful heiress, who is summoned from the boarding-school where she has lived for many years to make her home with her stepmother in Cumberland. This stepmother, a superbly handsome but incredibly wicked per- sonage, who has already poisoned her husband, endeavours to persuade her stepdaughter into a marriage with her nephew, Valentine Graeme. The heroine, however, having already lost her heart to the gallant Sir Donald Howard, refuses, and then the tortures begin. She is kidnapped, chloroformed, and finally brought back to the Dark House to furnish a subject for Lady Mary's toxicological experiments. Finally, as the heroine contrives to baffle her would-be poisoner, Lady Mary determines to kill her by driving long nails into her head. But on coming to her room through a trap-door for the pur- pose, she is confronted by her husband's deeply-wronged and innocent first wife, the mother of the heroine, who, disguised in a wig and in the character of a lady's maid, had watched over her child. Lady Mary is so overcome by this apparition that she falls through the trap-door, the heroine is rescued by Sir Donald, and Lady Mary poisons herself. The obvious criticism on the book is that we are prepared for mischief from the very outset, and when the horrors come their impact is discounted. The masters of this school of fiction do not "give themselves away" in this fashion, but merely diffuse a vague atmosphere of distrust or mystery. When Mrs. Williamson has realised the value of the law of suspense, she ought to be able to make our flesh creep handsomely. At present, however, her horrors are only amusing.
Mr. Macliwaine displays on a larger canvas and to greater advantage in Dinkinbar that knowledge of life in the " back- blocks " of Australia which he has already turned to such good account in his Twilight Beef, recently noticed in these columns. Dinkinbar is the name of the station where the scene is chiefly laid, and the author has spared no pains to bring home to us, under all its varying aspects, the life led on an Australian cattle-run in the bush. The book is worth reading, if only for the incidental but elaborate descriptions of those dramatic climaxes which accentuate the strenuous monotony of this life,—notably the brilliant picture of the night panic amongst a herd of cattle on a three months' journey to the railhead, and the heroic exertions of the drover in staying the stampede. What lends especial interest to the book, however, is the skill with which Mr. Macllwaine illus- trates the dangers as well as the wholesome discipline of this life. He not only tells us what the lonely madness of a " hatter " means, but he enables us to realise how it arises ; he gives us something more than a glimpse of the Combo, the white man who lives with blacks and in time comes to hate his own colour. In a word, he paints for us the sinister as well as the heroic side of the life of the Australian pioneer, and illustrates both in the person of his hero, Ned Singleton, whose reclamation is brought about by his love for the playmate of his boyish days in England, who has come to pay a visit at her uncle's house in the bash. Ned's consciousness of his degradation owing to his relations with a native woman is very powerfully described, and the catastrophe when Susan Thynne is abruptly confronted with the truth loses nothing of its poignancy in Mr. MacIlwaine's telling. Singleton's self-abasement and voluntary exile render his ultimate forgiveness and acceptance by Susan plausible enough, for one is made to realise early in the book that her fastidiousness is only skin-deep, and that the robust manhood of Singleton appeals to her with peculiar force. The old settler and his wife, the "new chums," Susan's clever journalist brother, and the remaining dramatis persona are all clearly and vigorously drawn. Here and there Mr. Mac- Dwaine inclines to the melodramatic, but his melodrama is impressive in its way, while the book as a whole is a pictur- esque and vivid delineation of the warring impulses that must always meet in the pioneer.
A cordial welcome is due to the English version of another of the admirable historical romances of Felix Gras—The Terror, excellently translated from the Provençal by Catharine Janvier. With this we may bracket Gautier's Captain Fracasse, which has been fluently rendered by Ellen Murray Beam. Lovers of the prophetic novel may sup full of horrors in Mr. Shiel's The Yellow Danger, in which the duel between East and West is told in a strange, spasmodic style, now recalling Carlyle, and again Victor Hugo. Mr. Le Queux's Scribes and Pharisees is a highly-coloured novel of journalistic London, written in an alert, undistinguished manner, and abounding in sensational incidents.
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