NOVELS.
THE FLY ON THE WHEEL.*
IT is interesting to trace the development of the Irish, or perhaps we should say the Anglo-Irish, novel from the time of Lever and Carleton down to the present day. That development has always been on two lines, of which the two authors named may be taken as fairly representative,—the one appealing primarily to a British and the other to an Irish audience. Occasionally there have been instances of an author who contrived to kill the two birds with one stone ; but the two schools have been main- tained down to our own day, with this difference, however, that writers aiming at the wider public do not feel the same necessity to make concessions in regard to local colour as of yore. Thus the absolutely faithful reproductions of the Anglo- Irish dialect in the books of Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have not militated against their popularity with English readers. Mrs. Thurston in the setting of her new story is careful to maintain a provincial atmosphere. The pictures of middle-class society in an Irish country town are truthfully done, both as regards the social usages of the characters, the nature of their entertainments, the style of their dress, and the manner of their conversation. There is even an attempt to give a certain up- to-date political flavour to the narrative in the introduction of references to the Gaelic-speaking movement. But, after all, Mrs. Thurston's particularism, though correct enough within its narrow limits, is non-essential to her purpose. So far as the main outlines of the story are concerned, the scene might just as well have been laid in Aberdeen or Exeter as in Waterford, while neither of the two principal characters is essentially Irish,—the man being hard, angular, and ambitious, while the girl represents a type of pagan self-assertion singularly rare amongst middle-class Irishwomen.
At the opening of the story Stephen Carey, a Waterford solicitor, has at the age of thirty-eight rebuilt the fortunes of his house, shattered by the disastrous speculations of his father. He has educated and launched all his brothers save the youngest, who, while studying medicine in Paris at Stephen's expense, suddenly announces his engagement to Isabel Costello, the orphan daughter of a bankrupt Irish bank manager, who had just left a French convent school. Stephen resents the engagement as premature and undesirable, and on Isabel's return to the roof of a maiden aunt in Waterford loses no time in letting her know that he ref uses his consent, and that unless his brother breaks off his engagement he will cut off supplies. Isabel, on her side, has already begun to realise her lover's weakness and her own social attractions. She is also quick to recognise that she has favourably impressed the strong and masterful Stephen, and has little compunction in throwing over his brother. In return for this concession she is made much of by Stephen's wife, an amiable, handsome, but insignificant young woman, and as her protegee makes a triumphant entry into Waterford society. The sequel may be readily guessed. Frank Carey, after a hurried journey to Waterford, an ineffectual appeal to Isabel, and a purely histrionic threat of committing suicide, acquiesces in the inevitable, returns to Paris, and disappears * The Fly on the Wheel. By Katherine Cecil Thurston. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [tia] from the scene, leaving the ,field clear for Stephen, who drifts rapidly into a dangerous attachment, in which his brainless wife acts as an unwitting accomplice. The situation is intelligible enough,—a strong man absorbed in business struggles till he was thirty makes a mariage de convenance with a pretty doll, and at thirty-eight falls violently in love with a girl who is at once unconventional, beautiful, and audaciously sincere. The catastrophe seems inevitable, when it is averted by the intervention of an old priest, who persuades Stephen, on the eve of elopement, to return to his wife, and Isabel thereupon kills herself with the poison she had wrested from the hand of her first lover.
The story is well told and interesting in its way, but singularly lacking in elevation. With the exception of the old priest, a genial but ineffectual personage who pre- cipitates the catastrophe, and the ill-starred heroine, who has a certain engaging quality of courageous sincerity, the characters are moulded of common clay, and their primitive passions are exhibited on an undistinguished and unheroic plane. We find it hard to believe that Stephen Carey, whose obstinate selfish- ness is so frequently insisted on, could have been suddenly induced to abandon his grande passion for the deadening routine of domesticity. The conclusion is evidently meant to be a tribute to orthodox morality ; but inasmuch as the sanctity of the matrimonial tie is vindicated at the cost of inconsistency and cruelty, and the sympathy of the reader is enlisted on the side of the victim, the value of that tribute is seriously impaired.
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