RECENT NOVELS.*

THE mere title of the story which occupies three-quarters of Mrs. Woods's new volume, "Weeping Ferry," is enough to indicate its general tenor. Though free in great part from the gratuitous gloom which suffuses the "mournful numbers" now issued at Christmas time, it is in its essentials another Village Tragedy, and hardly less efficacious than its forerunner as an antidote to optimism, a specific for the suppression of hilarity. The outlines of the plot are severely simple, not to say familiar. The son of a West- Country squire, a young Oxford undergraduate, falls in love with a beautiful girl of low degree, the daughter of two ex- servants in his father's household. The girl's mother dutifully acquaints her old mistress with what is going on, the lovers are separated, Bessie is sent out to service, and Geoffrey goes abroad. The young man speedily consoles himself and becomes engaged to an entirely eligible partner, but Bessie, who, in spite of severe temptations, has remained true to her lover, is heartbroken at the news, conveyed to her by Geoffrey himself, obtains poison from the witch of the countryside, and dies in great agony. The misery and horror of the situation are grievously aggravated by Bessie's denouncing her mother on her deathbed for her cruelty in intervening—whereas Mrs. Vyne, who is the real heroine of the story, has been animated throughout by a genuine devotion to her daughter —and by the futile efforts of a drunken country doctor. It is not too much to say that the distinctive note of this painful story is its »ziscuulria. The squire, the best of all the male characters, is a hectoring bully. When he hears from Mrs. Vyne that his son "got courting our Bessie while I was laid up in hospital," he brutally retorts, Why the deuce did you go there, then " Bessie's father is a selfish sot. Geoffrey is best described in his own words as "an uncommon poor sort of a chap." How bitter, again, is the description of the household in which Bessie took a situation as servant : "Lady Maud Bryant was a typical member of that noisily foolish little set which the solemnly foolish take at their own 'valuation, and call society. Her house was a kind of Bedlam, where men and women bolstered and kissed each other about the passages and bedrooms, ruined each other at cards, and— the feminine portion of them—appeared in tights in the drawing-room on the smallest theatrical provocation. The servants were scarcely more respectable than their employers." There is power in the portrait of the old witch Catharine, a sinister figure expiating her lurid past in a desolate old age, and a certain acid humour in the sketch of Mrs. Filkins, a sordid Cockney "who had a liver which she mistook for a heart." The character of Mrs. Vyne, a loyal, honest, silent woman, seeking anodyne for her troubles in hard work, casts a gleam of wintry sunshine across the murky landscape of this tragic idyll. Of the three short stories which complete the volume the finely imagined love idyll of Russian prison life is the most striking, while in "An Episode," the story of a quarrel between a vain though kindly book-collector and a starving scholar and its tragic sequel, the homely pathos of the situation is accentuated by a kindly irony which is conspicuously absent from the tale which gives the volume its name.

The novels of Mr. J. M. Graham and Mr. Charles Benham • (L) WHO*, Ferry, and other Stories:. By Margaret Woods. London : Longman, and Co.—(2.) The Son of the Czar : a Htstorical Romance. By James H. Graham. London: Harper Brotbers.—(3.) The Fourth Napoleon By Charles Benham. London W. Heinemann.—(4.) The Confession of Stephen Whapshars. By Emma Brooke. London : Hutchinson and (In— (5) The Cedar Star. By Mary IE. Mann. London : Hutchinson and Co. —(6.) For Prince and People. By E. K. Sanders. London : Macmillan and Ths Clash of Arms. By J. Bloundelle.Burton. London : Methuen and Co.—(8.) Miss Baanaitas Past. By B. M. Oroker. London : Chats° and Windus.—(9.) A Chapter of accidents. By Mrs. Hugh Fraser. London : Yamuillan sad 00.

may be conveniently noticed together, in spite of obvious con- trasts, because of their intimate association with the recent revival of interest—literary and dramatic—in two famous antocrats,—Peter the Great and Napoleon. They both possess the virtue of opportuneness, and they are both handicapped in the race for popularity by notable defects of treatment, by excessive prolixity, and by the absence of a single character calculated to inspire the reader with real liking. In The Son of the Czar Mr. Graham has given us elaborate full-length portraits of Peter and Alexis, dwelling in the case of the former on the genuine love of his country which was the one redeeming feature of that inhuman savage ; while he has illustrated with copious and fatiguing details the mingled mysticism and sensuality of his un- happy son. The descriptive passages are often excellent, but the dialogue is wordy, conventional, and rhetorical, and entirely lacking in the impetuousness one looks for in Slavonic characters of that age. The deaths of Alexis and Euphrosyne are gruesome enough to satisfy the most exact- ing amateur of the horrific, but the book is entirely lacking in the quality of charm imperatively needed to make its sombre theme endurable. Maurus Jokai, with his gorgeous imagination and superb melodramatic instinct, seems alone of living writers to understand the secret of presenting barbarie or semi-barbaric characters in an attractive guise. The Fourth Napoleon, in view of the present ferment in Paris, is even more opportune in its appearance than The Son of the Czar, and opens far more promisingly. Mr. Benham pictures for us the coming of the lost Bonaparte, a lineal descendant of the great Napoleon, educated in England, and ignorant of his parentage until a chance visit to Paris when at the nadir of his fortunes reveals to him the tremendous truth. We regret to say that the promise of the opening chapters is by no means borne out by their sequel. Neither Mr. Benham nor Walter Sadler, alias Napoleon IV., rises to the occasion. No romance can hold the reader when the central figure is not merely an ignoble and vacillating visionary, but a miserable craven into the bargain. His reign is one long squalid farce, from the scene in which he is hustled on to the throne to his con- temptible exit from life at the hand of a Russian officer. The puppet Emperor is never pathetic ; he simply inspires con- tempt or disgust. Mr. Benham's canvas is crowded with figures, but his portraiture, though elaborate in detail, is quite extraordinarily unconvincing, with perhaps the sole exception of the contriver of the coup d'etat, Colonel Brisson. The book is inordinately long—nearly twice the length of an average one-volume novel

An even closer parallelism prevails between The Confession of Stephen Whapshare and The Cedar Star than that noticed in the case of the last pair of novels. Stephen Whapshare- who surely may vaunt the possession of the most hideous name of any hero in modern fiction—and Ted Harringay both make the initial mistake of marrying the wrong woman. There is nothing remarkable in that, either in fiction or in real life. Where they assert themselves as true heroes of modern romance is in the manner of getting rid of their wives. Stephen W.—our pen refuses to write that amazing name — administers an overdose of narcotic to his sickly spouse. Harringay, who is upset in a boating accident along with his wife and the girl he loves, rescues the latter (who is unconscious) at the express desire of his wife, and when Mrs. Harringay rises to the surface and clings to him mechanically, strikes her off. The self-sacrificing heroism of Mrs. Harringay is paralleled by that of Mrs. Stephen W., who, although aware, by his own admission, that her husband has murdered her, writes a letter, before losing consciousness, to the effect that she has committed suicide. It only remains for the authors in either case to make the survivors miserable, and this is rendered the easier because Stephen and Harringay are not robust scoundrels, but half - hearted sensualists.. Accordingly the desired result is secured in Stephen's case by the refusal of Ellinor Blakemore, the woman with the grey eyes and beautiful month, to marry him ; and in that of Harringay by the flight of his second wife—the lady he rescued from drowning—on her marriage eve, after learning from his lips the price at which their union had been pur- chased. Later on she relents, and in response to his appeals is about to bid him return to her, when a telegram announces his death in South Africa. Both books are extremely morbid, but while Wass Brooke's work is steeped in a sloppy religiosity which is to us inexpressibly unpleasant, The Cedar Star has a grace and literary charm which make us deeply regret the unworthy use to which they have been turned in the latter half of the book.

The writer of For Prince and People has drawn for her materials on the inexhaustible store furnished by the annals of Italy of the Renaissance, the period chosen being that of the Catholic reaction, the scene Genoa, and the central figure the brilliant but ill-fated Gian Luigi Fiesco, to whom the hero, an obscure and unrecognised scion of the house of Doria, brought up as a peasant in the mountain village of Ceriana, has attached himself. The conflict between interest and personal devotion nearly costs Oberto his life, but in the end, after renouncing his rightful claim to the Doria succession, he is allowed to regain the shelter of nameless obscurity. The story is pleasantly told and shows intelligent research, but it would be idle to assert that it conveys more than an attenuated and idealised impression of Cinque-cento manners and morals. To reproduce with any approximation to realism the life of that age, especially during a violent upheaval like the revolt of the Fieschi, would be impracticable for even the most audacious of the women novelists of to-day. Miss Sanders has gone to the opposite extreme, and produced a story virginibus puerisque, in which Princes and courtiers, peasants and bran, are presented in a comparatively amiable and rose-coloured light. Thus, to take one individual instance, it is almost incredible that Andrea Doria would have spared the life of Oberto when the latter was at his mercy, and had boldly proclaimed his unimpaired loyalty to Fiesco at the moment of Doria's triumph. Mr. Sanders forgets how truly Machiavelli's glorification of virth—in the sense of unscrupulous self- assertion—expressed the temper of the times. Oberto would have needed nine lives to neutralise the inevitable consequences of his repeated though generous indiscretions.

Mr. Bloundelle-Burton's new story, as its name, The Clash of Arms, indicates with unmistakeable clearness, is concerned neither with introspective analysis nor problems of any sort. it is an outcome of that literary cult of the sword of which the late R. L. Stevenson, Mr. Anthony Hope, Mr. Levett Yeats, and Mr. Stanley Weyman have been in different ways the most notable hierophants of recent years. Andrew Vause, an English soldier of fortune who has fought under Conde, Turenne, and Sobieski, returns to his ancestral home to find his brother Philip dying of a broken heart, his sweetheart having been carried off overseas by a French adventurer ; and the story is concerned with Andrew's unceasing efforts to trace the lady and wreak vengeance on her abductor. Andrew, who is "a first-class fighting man," follows up the clue fur- nished him by his brother with great vigour ; but De Bois- Vallee, the villain of the plot, is as slippery as an eel, and in the end escapes the death at his pursuer's sword to die in an oubliette in which he had taken refuge. Marion Wyatt, the kidnapped bride, has her character cleared, but dies of a decline, so that Mr. Burton's tribute to poetic justice is by no means extravagant. For the rest, the tale is told with plenty of vigour and no lack of sword-play, but it is seriously handi- capped by the absence of a heroine. The swordsman of fiction ought always to have a ladylove of his own to fight for, and here Andrew ought obviously to have rescued and married Marion. But the modern convention of the unhappy ending has infected even the novel of adventure.

After the deliberate dreariness or forced vivacity of most of the novels noticed above, one turns to Mrs. Croker in the hope, begotten of past experience, of enjoying a brief respite from harrowing situations and unnecessary excursions into the dustbins of abnormal humanity. For once in a way the hope is only partly fulfilled. Miss Balmaine's Past is a read- able and lively novel, but it is hampered by an artificial and complicated plot, culminating in a resort to that well-worn but unsatisfactory device,—the second wooing of a wife by her lost husband. Rosamond Balmaine, whose mother has married again, and lives in India, is brought up at the house of an autocratic grandmother in the South of England. Attacked and robbed by a tramp during a lonely walk, she is rescued by a handsome young civil engineer, and marries him privately on the eve of his departure to take up an appointment in New Zealand. On the voyage out he is shipwrecked and cast away on a desert island for three solid years. Meantime the grandmother dies, Rosamond's mother

returns with her husband and step-daughter—a most disagree- able trio—and no proofs of the marriage being available, and the engineer having disappeared into space, the unhappy girl is persuaded that she has been betrayed and deserted. More

than that, she believes that her child has died at birth, whereas it has been smuggled away by her mother and

farmed out with an old countrywoman. After three years her husband returns, aged by his privations and disguised by a beard and a title. What, we are tempted to ask in passing, would novelists do if the House of Lords were abolished ! Lord Airdrie discovers and adopts his child, believing it to have been deserted by the mother. He is thrown constantly into her society, but she never recognises him until, after learning her innocence, he has won her love and informed her as to his identity. The story bristles with improbabilities, and suffers from the absence of those pictures of Anglo-Indian and Irish society in which Mrs. Croker

excels. It is redeemed to a certain extent by some lively portraiture and brisk dialogue, but falls far short of the high level attained in Diana Barrington or Beyond the Pale.

Last, and by far the most entertaining, of the novels in our list is Mrs. Hugh Fraser's A Chapter of Accidents. She has

dared to be frankly amusing, and achieved signal success. This airy little comedy in a country house is instinct with gaiety and grace, its satire is legitimately directed, its sentiment pure and tender. Harry Sartees, an impecunious but well-preserved ornament of clubland, finds his Platonic attentions to a fashionable widow misconstrued by that lady, and executes an undignified retreat into the country. The widow pursues him, and Harry, who has conceived strong though unfounded hopes of winning the hand of a country cousin, a fascinating hoyden of seventeen and an heiress to boot, basely consents to aid the latter and her schoolboy brother in a practical joke designed to curtail the stay of the widow, who is regarded as a spoil-sport by the young people.

The execution of the plot involves not only the alarm of the widow, but the humiliation of the unlucky Harry. Their discomfiture is carried one step further by the irrepressible heroine, who takes them for a sail on a rough day, lands them on an island in a state of abject collapse, and leaves them to their own uncongenial company. Great praise is due to Mrs.

Fraser for the courage with which she resists the temptation of resorting to a conventionally tragic denouement. For all

her impish tricks Kitty is a thoroughly loveable creature, and her timely rescue from drowning spares us a genuine heart- ache. The portraiture throughout is excellent, witness this incisive sketch of Kitty's mother, Lady Marston, of whom it is said that "she had no sympathy with the divine unreadiness of youth. Promise was nothing in her eyes ; she liked every- thing ready made" :—

" Surely it does not follow that because a woman is irreproach- able in important matters, she must be fussy and hard and unlovely in little ones. Alicia Marston was only a type of the British matron of a certain class, a creature of small faults made unbearable by large patent virtues ; a combination of energy, economy, True Blue Protestantism, and faithful nagging, with an imagination not always delicate, but clothed in the grim propriety of a Dean and Chapter ; capable of going to the stake for her own, but afraid to let any sunshine into their daily lives, for fear that it should injure the carpets."

Lady Marston, in fact, is one of those irreproachably angular Saxons who remind us of the remark of a mercurial Irish lady : "Do you know," she said, after recounting her experiences as a visitor in a particularly prim London house- hold, "they are so terribly English that they made me feel as if I were a foreigner."