RECENT NOVELS.* No critic with any graciousness of feeling would
desire to speak save with courteous kindness of the work of a lady, a foreigner, and a Queen who has honoured us by choosing our land as the locality, and our language as the vehicle, of a work of fiction. Nor are these the only considerations which prompt a generous judgment of Edleen Vaughan,. The dis- tinguished lady who chooses to be known as "Carmen Sylva " has a literary record which is in every way honourable ; for in a number of bright and tender lyrics, she has proved her- self to be, within a certain range, a genuine poet, and many of the Thoughts of a Queen suffice to give her something more than a merely respectable place among the writers of pensees. All these facts cannot, however, blind us to another fact, that "Carmen Sylva's " Welsh romance is a failure, and a failure that is in more than one way unworthy of its author. One of the short stories printed by Miss Roosevelt at the end of her very effusive biography of the Queen of Roumania, displayed a tendency towards the treatment of unpleasant themes in a rather unpleasant manner; but in Edleen. Vaughan there is more than a tendency in this direction : there is a certain coarseness of suggestion in various passages which has the effect of rendering the book repellent. The fiction of the last quarter of a century has proved that women will rush in where the average man would fear to tread ; but there is at least one passage in the sickening record of Tom Vaughan's purely sensual amours which we regret that any woman, especially such a woman as the Queen of Roumania has proved herself to be, should have brought herself to write. The claims of "realism" are often urged as an excuse for work of this kind ; but poor as the excuse is, it is one behind which "Carmen Sylva " cannot shelter herself, for Edleen Vaughan, though it deals with middle-class people of the present day, is a romantic tale quite out of touch with actual every-day life. The author is, indeed, at her best in dealing with a frankly ideal character like the harper Llewellyn, who makes no appeal to our sense of reality, but is to be accepted, as we accept the fairies and giants in a nursery-story, as a creature of emancipated fancy, pure and simple. In the pages devoted to him, and in all those portions of the story where "Carmen Sylva " gives the rein to her imagination, she achieves a certain unsubstantial, rainbow-like beauty of presentation ; but elsewhere the sense of unreality and want of substance is too apparent for pleasure. It would have been unfair to expect that Edleen Vaughan should prove a queen among novels ; but it was fair to expect that it should be not unworthy of a Queen, and such expectation is unful- filled.
• (1.) Fdlecii Vaughan ; or, Paths of Peril. By Carmen Bylva (MM. the Queen of II oumania). 3 vols. London : F. v. White and Co.—(2.) A Votage of DisecnIery a Novel of Ain. rican Society. By Hamilton A1d6. 2 vols. London: J. 11. Osgood. Malvaine' and Co.—(8.) Light in the Offing. By Hilary Deccan. 3 vols. London : Burst and Blackett.—(4.) Fairest of-Three. By Henry Ores* welL 3 vols. London : Hurst and Blaokett.—(5 ) A Wandering Star. By Lady Fairlie Ouninghteme. 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.— (6.) A Seots Thistre. By E. N. Leigh Fry. 2 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.— (7.) Horsley Grange a Sporting Story. By Guy Gravenhil. 2 vols. London : Chapman and Hall. - Mr. Hamilton Aide's gift of brilliant portraiture has never been displayed more happily than in the two volumes of A Voyage of Discovery ; indeed, the interest of the mere story is throughout subordinated to the finer and more purely intellectual interest inspired by a group of character- studies drawn with subtlety of outline, with delicate, urbane humour, and with a flesh-and-blood substance which makes them really live for us. In the sub-title, which describes the book as "a novel of American society," the last word is used in its more restricted sense. Mr. Aide's Americans are not the Chollops, the Pogroms, and the Jefferson Bricks who figure in Martin Chuzzlewit : they are the cultivated men and women whom any educated English- man with good introductions or a recognised standing at home would be certain to meet with in such "a voyage of dis- covery" as that taken. by Sir Mordaunt Ballinger and his sister. Quentin Ferrars, Mrs. Courtly, Mr. Gunning, and the Barhams, bear a broad general resemblance to well-bred people everywhere ; but they happen to be American well- bred people; and the ability of Mr. Aide's book is displayed in his happy knack of indicating the note of nationality with such definiteness as to render it impossible that it should be missed, and yet without one whit of the over-emphasis by which an inferior artist exaggerates a. subtle differentia- tion into a coarse contrast. If any reader with a fine feeling for nuances of national character and tempera- ment, will open one of the volumes of A Voyage of Discovery in the middle, and peruse half-a-dozen consecutive pages, he will not—unless we are very much mistaken—find the slightest difficulty in picking out the American and the English inter- locutors; and yet he will not be guided to his selection by any catch-words or phrases : he will be led to it instinctively by his apprehension of certain half-tones of difference which a trained ear can easily recognise. There is in the talk of the Americans an intellectual agility and nimbleness which relieves, and is relieved by, the slower, more tenacious, and more direct manner of a typical islander like Sir Mordaunt. To mention only one other of Mr. Aide's characters,—an English Mrs. Van Winkle would be cleverly vulgar, and nothing more; but the American woman's audacities have a brilliant insouciance which gives them an air of something like breeding, just as the bad grammar of a Duchess has a different effect from the bad grammar of a house- maid,—an effect of bizarrerie, but not of commonness. We have dwelt upon this feature of Mr. Aide's work because it is the feature which will make it specially interesting to those who are not mere novel-devourers of the ordinary type ; but having said this, we must add with all possible distinctness that A Voyage of Discovery is anything but a book which appeals exclusively to "the superior person." It is so fall of life and humour that any one may enjoy it.
Light in the Offing seems to be a first novel, and Hilary Deccan may be honestly congratulated upon having made a good beginning. An Irish story which is really racy of the soil, and which, by dealing with the ante-Home-rule-and- Land-League period, steers clear of irritating questions, always provides good reading ; and this particular novel, without being in any way remarkable, is very pleasant. The good old types of Irish character are represented with know- ledge and sympathy, and with a very fair share of that fresh, unstrained, light-hearted humour which in Ireland attains a ripe perfection to be found nowhere else. The style, too, is admirable, by which we do not mean that every phrase and sentence in the book would satisfy the purist critic, but that the writing throughout has that free, careless, and yet graceful ease which is more winning than the severest correctness, because it assures us that the author is at home with her subject, and that therefore her pen yields instinc- tively to the demands of power or pathos or simple merriment. Some of the little bits of landscape are specially happy. There is an entire absence of those elaborate descriptions of Nature which no novelist—with perhaps the solitary exception of Mr. William Black—can induce us not to skip ; but every now and then we come across a little vignette which renders some momentary natural effect with the adequacy of perfect vision. Nothing could well be better than the sentence descriptive of the gleams of changeful light in the surface-water of a wide marsh just before the sunset fades into night :—
" How strangely the light seemed to linger as if imprisoned in that doleful, wide waste ; gliding here and there in specks over its surface, white and orange and blood-red, and yet the light in
the airy had died down to the narrowest pale streak of leinon-hued purity, menaced by the ever-growing waste of densest black."
Even some of our ablest novelists—and Mr. Cresswell has plenty of ability—are much too fond of using as the key-stone of their imaginative structure some utterly incredible hyper- refinement of emotion or action. Annie Quentin, the heroine of Fairest of Three, discovers that she is the legitimate and eldest daughter of Mr. William Verrier, in whose house she is employed as lady's-maid to his two other daughters, who are, of course, her half-sisters. The proofs of her parentage are in her possession, but she refrains from pro- ducing them, and finally destroys them, her action and in- action resulting in a series of misfortunes culminating in a violent death under circumstances which prove, to the satis- faction even of those whom she had lived to benefit, that her fantastically heroic life has been one long sham, and that she has been the secret accomplice of the lowest of criminals. The story is told with great skill, and the characters—espe- cially Gwendolin.e and her husband, Ralph Young the priggish schoolmaster, Mr. Marks the fatherly butler, and Paul Powys, who develops into that rara avis of fiction, a really credible villain—are thoroughly lifelike and consistent. Indeed, even Annie herself lives for us, though she lives in- comprehensibly. There is no reason whatever for her act of self-effacement; and though Mr. Cresswell would probably justify his narrative-scheme by saying that she acted from instinct, the justification is imperfect, because even an instinct demands some realisable antecedent in character or circumstance which he does not supply. Sometimes one wrong can be repaired only by inflicting another, and then there may be an opening for endless casuistic reasoning; but there is no such opening here. The novel ends in gloom which is almost as exasperating as it is depressing, because it is mechanically introduced to divert the natural current of a story which we feel ought not to have been gloomy. This is all the more a pity because Annie's perversity—which is really Mr. Cresswell's perversity—does much to mar our satisfaction in a very able book.
When we discover that a novel is written in very slipshod English, interspersed with tags from other languages, and copiously interlarded with quotations from " Faustine," and similar gems of Mr. Swinburne's "first period," we know what to expect. Lady Fairlie Orminghame's story, A Wandering Star, does not in any way fail to realise our anticipations of feverish unwholesomeness. A prominent character in the book is a married woman of rank, whose not very innocent flirtations are notorious, and whose young nieces speak of one of her lovers as" Aunt Julia's fancy-man,"—a scrap of conver- sation which will give some impression of the general flavour of the book. -Vega Fitzpatrick is the daughter of an expatriated gentleman who has played Ocartg neither wisely nor quite well enough for his reputation. After some very impetuous love-passages with the handsome Brian Beresford, she is induced to marry a wealthy parvenu who is considerably her senior, who is naturally a very unattractive person, and who makes himself additionally repellent by taking too much to drink. Of course the manifestation of the husband's weak- ness is simultaneous (as in a novel of this kind it is bound to be) with the reappearance of Vega's old lover ; and as she yields with hardly a protest to his plea for an elopement, accident has to be called in to prevent the wandering star from taking the Divorce Court as a portion of its orbit. One of Lady Fairlie's young women says of one of her young men : "The sort of looks I like are different to his." Paraphrasing this remark, with some rehandling of its grammatical con- struction, we may say : "The sort of books we like is different from hers."
Some time ago, the present writer was asked by a friend whether he could recommend any new novel that was "really bright." Strange as it may seem, at a time when at least one new work of fiction sees the light every day of the year, he was unable to give the recommendation asked. He could name several clever novels, and one or two which were unmistakably powerful ; but the " bright " book—the book which did not thrill or harrow or analyse, but simply enter- tained in a brisk, cheerful way—did not seem to be forth- coming. Had A Scots Thistle then been published, all difficulty would have vanished, for it is a book which is of brightness all compact. The heroine certainly has a comparatively bad time during the months in which she thinks that the hero has marriecl his cousin Rose ; but she is not unhappy in a depressing way, and the reader is not unhappy at all, because he sees that everything is coming right. The Scotch chapters and the London society chapters are both admirable, the latter specially so, as the work of an author who knows the world of which she writes. Dukes and Personages (with a large "P ") are somewhat kittle cattle, and in attempting to drive them through the pages of a work of fiction, the average novelist is apt to come to grief ; but Miss Fry never loses her head among the great ones. The audacious Lady Maggie Graham is a creation that is full of vivacity to the finger- tips, and Bell's two aunts, the Misses Wardlaw, might have stepped out of Cranford. Higher praise than this it would be hard to give.
Horsley Grange might also be described as a bright book, but a more appropriate epithet would be " rollicking " or "effervescent." Guy Gravenhil seems to have written in the highest of high spirits, and of high spirits a little goes a long way. The early chapters, devoted to the experiences of the three heroes, who, for no particular reason, go out to rough it in the West, are perhaps the most oppressively hilarious; but as they have nothing whatever to do with the story, they can be read in an irresponsible sort of way; and it is only when the travellers reach England that the tale of horsey sport, with the inevitable garnish of horsey slang, really begins. Novels of hunting, racing, betting, and the like, bear a strong family resemblance to each other, the main difference between them being that some are the work of authors who really know what they are writing about, and some of authors who would have their readers believe that they know. Guy Gravenhil belongs to the former class, and he has written a book which will be high in favour in country houses of the old-fashioned sort, where the claims of sport come first and those of society second. For the purely urban reader, with limited experiences of equitation, a good deal of the novel will have a technical caviare quality ; but the weak brother—and especially the weak sister—will find comfort in the love-story which holds its own in the second volume. It will be seen that Horsley Grange is not exactly everybody's book ; but it is a good, brisk, healthy, open-air story which will be heartily enjoyed by enthusiastic sharers of the tastes of its author.
Previous page
