RECENT NOVELS.*

WE are always pleased to open a new novel from the pen of Mr. Christie Murray because we know that we shall have an interesting story told with carefully conscientious literary craftsmanship; and though Bob Martin's Little G-irl belongs to a lower kind of art than is represented by some of its predecessors (notably by Aunt Rachel), there is no scamped work, but everywhere real honest thoroughness which leaves one with a pleasant sense of satisfaction. Mr. Christie Murray utilises certain narrative motives which are so familiar that they may almost be called hack- neyed; but the combinations are fresh, and one or two of the narrative contrivances have genuine novelty, especially the impersonation of the Frenchman, Andr6 Dom, by the villain of the story, John Hetheridge, and the appearance of the real Simon Pure a few weeks after the murder which has been committed by his mysterious double. Of course, no sensible reader resents the presence in a tale which is essentially melodramatic, of an occasional or even a pervading improba- bility : he only asks that the improbabilities, whatever they are, shall cohere with the main structure, and not exhibit themselves as excrescences upon it. George Redwood and John Hetheridge are rival suitors for the hand of the pretty Ellice Greenaway; the former is successful, and the latter swears that he will one day be revenged. He leaves England for Australia, where he accumulates a large fortune and passes through a number of experiences exciting enough to dull the edge of his unreasoning hate ; but it re- mains as sharp as ever, and after seven years of absence he returns to England, and, without any renewed pro- vocation, murders his old rival in cold blood, and with circumstances of fiendish barbarity. Here, to begin with, is a purely melodramatic motive which does not pretend to con- formity with our knowledge of ordinary human nature ; but if this want of conformity be accepted as frankly and simply as we accept the ogre in a fairy-tale, the story of which it is the keystone becomes a solid and stable edifice. One may think that Mr. Christie Murray might have hit upon a more original theme than the love affair of the supposed daughter of the murderer and the son of his victim ; one, cannot, how- ever, complain that he has treated an old story with any lack of invention in the matter of subsidiary details. There are some strong passages in the book — the description of Hetheridge's perilous adventure in the bush being a specially effective piece of work; and though we must confess that we enjoy Mr. Murray's comedy very much more than we enjoy his melodrama, we are quite alive to the ingenuity and interest of his latest story.

Miss Adeline Sergeant always shows herself a capable novelist ; there has been in one or two of her books something rarer than ordinary capability ; but, as we have before remarked, she is curiously unequal. It seems to us that Miss Sergeant is at her best when her narrative structure is simple, and at her weakest when she burdens herself with narrative complications. In Sir Anthony she tells a story which is as essentially incredible as the story told by Mr. Christie Murray; but here the incredibility is not so pardonable, because her book is on the face of it intended to inspire not only the interest of plot, but the interest of portraiture ; it belongs to a higher class of work, and must, therefore, be judged by a higher standard. Sir Anthony Kesterton marries a woman in a position much inferior to his own, who bears him two children and then dies. The boy and girl are unaware of their relationship to him, and if they were aware of it, would be utterly unable to establish their position. He does not acknowledge them as either his legitimate or illegitimate off- spring; he does not fling them out upon the world ; he does not send them away to be cared for according to his own notions of fitness ; be does nothing that any man of whom we have ever heard might be expected to do. Though he has no love for them, he keeps them under his roof, informing his second wife that they have been left to his care by a deceased friend, his amiable object being to spring a mine upon her some day by telling the truth and letting * (1.) Bob Martin's Little Girl. By David Christie Murray. 3 vols. London : °haat) and Windus.—(2.) Sir Anthony. By Adeline Sergeant. 3 vole London : Hurst and Blackett.—(3.) Through Pain to Peace. By Sarah Dettloff. 3 vols. London: Hutchinson and Co.—(4.) The Honourable Jane. By Annie Thomas (Mrs. Ponder Ondlip). 3 vols. London : F. V. Whits and Co. —(5.) A Big Stake. By Mrs. Robert Jocelyn. 3 vols. London F. V. White and Co.—(6.) Treason Felony. By John Hill. 2 vols. London Matte and Windus.—(7.) Honours Easy. By Charles T. 0. Janus. 3 vols. London; Ward and Downey.

her see her own children suddenly deposed from the position which has been apparently assured. It will be observed that this is the kind of story which no skill of narration could render reasonably credible. There may be—it would be rash to say there are not—persons like Dickens's Quilp, who revel in malignity for its own sake, and feel the keenest pleasure of which they are capable in witnessing the pain or the misery which they have themselves brought about; but whether there be, or be not, such a class of persons, it is quite 'certain that Sir Anthony does not belong to it. He is no connoisseur in inhumanity; he is simply a selfish, unsocial person, with low moral principles, but some kindly instincts—a type which is not exceptional, but quite familiar,—and yet for more than twenty years this commonplace man pursues an extraordinary course of duplicity and cruelty which is equally devoid of present satisfaction or anticipation of future enjoyment. Such a central scheme is hopeless; and there could be no better evidence of Miss Sergeant's general capability than the way in

which, by the introduction of strong dramatic situations and the effective treatment of secondary characters, she manages to cast the dominating unreality into shadow, and to throw the light upon those portions of her work which are as truthful as they are effective. Indeed, there is such a large amount of really good work in Sir Anthony that many readers may wonder that we should carp at a novel which they have found "so interesting." We think, however, that Mies

Sergeant will understand, even if she does not agree, and agreement would, perhaps, be too much to expect.

Miss Doudney is a very womanly writer; and just now, when we have in literature so much feminine masculinity and masculine effeminacy, the genuine womanly touch has a peculiar charm. Womanly literature has, however, the limi- tations of its qualities, and they are plainly visible in the

pleasing but hardly satisfying pages of Through Pain to Peace. The Tracy Taunton who is introduced to us in the opening chapter of the book seems to us an impossible child, and if she

were possible, she would be much less charming than Mies Doudney seems to think her; but she is in a mild way amusing, and the first volume is, we think, much the best of the three. When Tracy's first love-affair comes to a violent end, and she enters upon that path of self-abnegating duty in which she is to find peace, the story becomes terribly slow in movement ; and a certain sentimentality of treatment, which has been visible from the first, becomes aggressively obvious. It is rather unfortunate that the most satisfactory of Miss Doud- ney's characters, from an artistic point of view, are those which are either commonplace or objectionable. The conven- tional Mrs. Taunton, the very ordinary Laura, and the ill- tempered and intemperate Sir Alfred, are not interesting, but they are more like real men and women than are the almost irritatingly admirable people who are associated with the church of St. Monica. Tracy, in her later years, and her second lover, the Rev. Wilmot Linn, exhibit a saccharine kind of goodness which cloys upon the palate ; and their somewhat feverish emotions are far too much in evidence. There is much in the novel that is pleasing ; and the audience of well-bred and simple-minded girls, which the author probably had in her mind's eye, will find no fault with it; but older readers will miss what they generally miss in the sermons of youthful clergymen—a good strong grip of the hard facts of life.

The novels of Mrs. Pender Cridlip have always been slip. shod in style, and too often the reverse of edifying in sub. stance. That The Honourable Jane does not take a new

departure in the direction of grammar and good taste may be inferred from a few choice quotations, or, to use an old fashioned term, "elegant extracts" :—

"He had seen Miss Herries safely to the door of her home, and taken leave of her with as much emotion as a morally disposed fish might have displayed."

" Kiss me, you darling. Captain Stafford, make him [the " him " is a horse] kiss me like he did the other day when I had been riding him.' " "Long [a man-servant] knew Miss Florence [his young mis- tress] to the very marrow of her delicately shaped small bones, and liked her as little as it was possible for a man to do under the circumstances."

The story itself could not well have been made more repellently unsavoury than it is. One of the prominent feminine characters invents a story of her own seduction in order that her guardian may put pressure upon a man whom she has determined to marry ; and on her wedding-day she shamelessly confesses to her victim that she has secured him by blasting her reputa.

tion and his own. A second, who is a young widow, engages herself to one old man and marries another on the same day.

A third is only saved from adultery by the cowardice of the scoundrel upon whose protection she has thrown herself. Even the heroine, whom we are evidently intended to regard as a model of all the virtues, takes to her solitary home the husband of another woman, and entertains him by reaAing sentimental poetry, which acts as a provocative to the nauseating embraces that immediately follow. It is, perhaps, fortunate that the

repulsiveness of the book is equalled by its dulness. The journey to the end of the third volume will be found very

wearisome by all who are not proficient in the art of skipping.

There is not so much hunting in A Big Stake as there generally is in Mrs. Jocelyn's novels, and there is not very much story of any kind ; but what there is is brightly and pleasantly told. Mrs. Warren has married a widower with one little girl. She has accepted him, believing him to be a rich man ; bat, after her marriage, she makes the disquieting discovery that he has only a life-interest in his daughter's immense property, and that the wealth which she has expected will be hers is really Valda's. After Mr. Warren's death, his widow is therefore dependent upon her step-daughter, and the novel is devoted to the schemes by which this clever, wily woman endeavours to retain her extremely comfortable position by preventing Valda from taking a husband. Her plots seem rather needlessly elaborate, and sometimes they are not even ',very intelligible ; but the portrait of the fair Aline is drawn with both truth and vivacity, and her encounters with the people who, for various reasons, she desires to sub- jugate, are very spirited engagements. Val& is a very pleasant and winning heroine of the strong and capable, rather than of the clinging, type; and though her various lovers are rather a conventional set of young men, they are not in any way obtrusively unreal. The two older men—the frank and hearty Colonel Glen, and the pompons prig Mr. Percival—are an admirably drawn pair ; and though A Big Stake is slight enough, it is in its slight way very readable.

We see from the title-page of Treason Felony that it is not Mr. Hill's first book, but it has a good deal of the shapelessness which is generally a sign of literary inexperience. The first volume, which contains considerably more than two hundred pages, consists of only four chapters, and the first of these, though it fills considerably more than a third of the book, has no vital relation to the main story other than that given to it by the introduction of four of the principal characters. Three of these—Doherty, Macgregor, and Vane, an Irishman, a Seotehman, and an Englishman—are members or allies of the Irish dynamitard party ; but their plottings do not count for very much as narrative material, except in a fortuitous sort of way, the central incident being the unpremeditated and almost involuntary murder by Doherty of the rough-tongued bat kind-hearted squire, Sir William Long. The strength of the book lies in the descriptions and conversations, which are always bright and clear, and which sometimes have the point and sparkle of epigram. Such, for example, is the remark of Shaw, that "a neat essay might be written on the egotism of unselfish people, who must always indulge their vice at the expense of the moral integrity of others;" and there are scores of similar good things scattered up and down Mr. Hill's pages. The author of Treason Felony may not be able to construct a very symmetrical story ; but there is, no doubt whatever, that he can write.

Vulgar vice, described with vulgar realism, is the staple of the book which bears the title of Honours Easy. It deals mainly with the adventures of a young nincompoop, who has been tied to the apron-strings of a puritanical female relative, and who comes up to London from the country, ostensibly to study at the British Museum library, but really to see life, as life is understood by the members of his empty- headed tribe. Under the tutelage of a young hypocrite, who is the secretary of a philanthropic and religions society— known as the "Association of Pure Lilies "—he is taken through an arduous course of drinking and low flirtation, being eventually rescued by a girl, who, though by no means specially refined, is much too good to be thrown away upon such a caddish imbecile. There is not in the whole book a single page which can interest or attract any readers of good sense or good taste ; and we can wish nothing better for Mr. James than that it may speedily be forgotten, as we do not doubt it will be, for even its badness has no memorable quaritY-