NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
Wu are glad to see that in Outside the Radius Mr. Pett Ridge, most invincible of optimists, has taken in hand the suburbs, a district lately given over to the tyranny of squalid realism. The results of his invasion are unequal, and, as a whole, by no means on the same level of excellence achieved in his delineations of "Hooliganism." Some of his characters, for instance, approach perilously near the conventional types of farcical comedy ; the trail of melodramatic sentiment im- pel/lithe poignancy of his pathos; and his gaiety at times is a trifle forced. We are quite ready to admit that life in a .suburban crescent, as depicted by the genial bachelor who acts as showman, may be far from monotonous. But to con- tend, as he does, that there are romances in every house is a proposition hardly consonant with the facts of everyday life. The optimistic note is struck almost aggressively in the first story, •.‘ The Education of Mrs. Gregory." Here we are introduced to the minage of a devoted but socially ill-assorted young couple. A smart young Government clerk has married an excellent young ehopwoman, and his sister and aunt under- take to instruct her in deportment and the use of the aspirates. Result, a successful rebellion on the part of the wife against the unsympathetic and snobbish intervention of her husband's relatives, followed by an equally successful effort on her own part to acquire the desiderated qualities of culture and social address. "The Taming of Captain Tempest" is another story of revolt, this time on the part of a gentle wife against her hectoring husband, resulting in the signal and theatrically sudden victory of the downtrodden partner ; while in "The Young Ambassador" the reconciliation of a high-spirited and quarrelsome young couple is effected by their only child on ite deathbed. It may be urged that the precocity of the • (1.) Outside the Radius. By W. Pett Ridge. London : liodder and Stoughton. [6s.]---(2.) The Tone King : a Romance of the Life of Mozart. From the German of Heritiert Rau. By J. E. QuIntin Rae. London : Jerrold and " Sons. [68.]—(S.) Chinatown Stories. By Chester Bailey Fernald- London : W. Heinemann. [6g.]—(4.) The Professional, and other Psychic Stories. Edited .K. Goodrich-Freer. London: Hurst and Blackett. (6s.] —(a.) In a State of ature. By Alfred Clark. London : Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. [6s.] . —(6.) A Cry in the Night. By Arnold Golsworthy. London : Greening and Co. • Ds. ed:]—(7.) Jocelyn Errol. By Curtis Yorke. London : Jerrold and Sons. [ee.]—(8.) Vengeance is Mine...By Andrew Balfour. London : Methuen and Co. [6s.]—(9.) The Lost Emeralds of Zarinthia. By Henry Beauchamp. London; Sands and Co. Ds. Gd.]—(10.) In a Corner of Asia: being Tales and impressions of Men and Things in the Malay Peninsula. By Hugh Clifford. -"Overseas Library," No. V. London : T. Fisher Unwln. Us..]
child is excessive, but only hypersensitive readers will fail to be moved by the last two pages. Best of all is the little episode of the widow who, with heroic mendacity, prepares the neighbourhood for the return of her convict son by elaborate fictions of his prosperity in South America. We have not space to set forth in detail the motives of the remaining stories ; they mostly treat of harmless conspiracies by which domineering wives, patriarchical parents, and husband-hunting adventuresses are defeated or foiled. Mr. Pett Ridge is always a cheery companion, but he is less con- vincing than usual.
It is to be regretted that Herr Ran, who in The 7 one King has constructed a very readable and picturesque romance out of the authentic materials at his disposal, should, by a systematic resort to the rose-water pot, and an equally systematic elimination of painful details, have diluted and eviscerated one of the most tragical histories of neglected and unappreciated genius. To take the most conspicuous instance of all, the shocking story of Mozart's burial in a pauper's grave is entirely omitted, while the impression is distinctly created that the ceremonious mourning for his death was as general in Vienna as it undoubtedly was in Prague. The simple fact is that the life of Mozart, as told, for example, in the excellent short biography by Holmes, is far more interest- ing and pathetic than any novel on the subject could be. The embellishments of fiction detract from rather than enhance the mingled charm and bitterness of the reality.
The exhaustion of ordinary subjects in fiction leads an ever-increasing number of writers to exploit outlandish, exotic, and abnormal themes. Here the American novelist has a signal advantage over his British brother from the greater number of strangers within his gates. When be is tired of delineating Anglo-Saxon life, he can fall back on the Red Indian, the African, or the Chinaman without crossing the sea in quest of local colour. Of such studies in colour— red, black, and yellow—the third and last have so far found their most able representative in the author of that strange play, The Cat awl the Cherub, the appreciation of which came to be regarded as a sort of test of intellectual acumen amongst a certain set of Londoners not many months ago. Mr. Fernald now gives us in his Chinatown Stories a whole collection of short sketches much on the same tines. They are based almost exclusively on his observation of the ways of the dwellers in the Chinese quarter of San Francisco; and the San Franciscan Chinaman, for all we know, may be as far removed from the home-keeping Celestial as Mr. Dooley of Chicago from his friends and relations who have never crossed the borders of Tipperary. The main point. however, is that Mr. Fernald renders his strange barbarians extremely interesting in spite of their inherent aloofness ; and that his Chinese children, notably the delightful infant who is the central figure of the first group of sketches, are most fascinating personages. The opening tale bears the same name as the play already mentioned, but moves on different lines. How far Mr. Fernald has really probed the recesses of the Oriental mind we are not qualified to say. It would be most interesting to know what a highly cultivated China- man like Sir Chihcheng Lohfengluh thought of the book. But to the untutored Occidental it is full of unexpected entertainment and strange surprises.
The seven " psychic " stories edited by Miss Goodrich- Freer, who herself contributes the first three, are declared by her to be, to the best of her knowledge, "even if specifically fancy, generically fact," four of them being "directly taken from life." Compared with the old-fashioned Ghost story— how lamentably inferior in suggestiveness, and even in its look, is the term "psychic" !—some of these narratives suffer from the preciseness of their terminology. The plain person, for example, finds it hard to be interested in a lady's maid who was, "in point of culture, above the scepticism and materialism of ignorance, but below that of science." The element of eeriness in the opening story—that of a homely little Yorkshire lass afflicted with a dual personality—is entirely overshadowed by the mere pathos of the situation, in which the wretched child is sacrificed to make sport for a set of silly fashionable women. The moral is excellent, but one hardly expects a moral of this sort in a ghost, or even a " psychic," story. Of the remaining tales, by far the best in our opinion is that by Miss Olive Birrell, in which a doctor
gifted with second-sight, and desirous of turning his gift to practical account in order to rescue the girl be loves from imminent peril, induces her to change her plans, with the deplorable result that in escaping from the clutches of an unscrupulous stepfather she is killed in a railway accident. The mental impasse to which the unhappy man is reduced by this untoward disaster is admirably described, for his visions had hitherto invariably come true, and he is left bitterly regretting the advice of his shrewd old aunt, who had coun- selled him to let his birthright get dull from want of use instead of cultivating it for practical purposes.
The heart of Africa having been somewhat over-exploited as the home of mysterious and semi-civilised communities, Mr. Alfred Clark in his new novel, In a State of Nature, plants his hidden kingdom inhabited by people of English descent in the furthest Arctic regions. What is more, the inhabitants, their faculties having probably been numbed by the cold, have degenerated sadly in civilisation since the days of good Queen Bess, when they left England as the disciples of a certain Josiah Cheetham, who named them "the Children of Nature" and taught them every sort of license. As may be imagined, the book makes no pretensions to subtlety, but the Arctic setting is well done, and the adven- tures of the hero, who is wrecked off a whaler, make enter- taining reading.
A Cry in the Night is a melodrama pure and simple, but by no means a bad specimen of that hybrid order. It begins in the most orthodox way with a murder, and ends with the discovery of the criminal. The threads of the plot are ingeniously spun, and if Mr. Golsworthy never succeeds in curdling the blood of his readers, no effort and not a little entertainment are involved in the perusal of the book.
Jocelyn Errol, "Curtis Yorke's" new novel, is not an un- attractive book in its way if the fastidious reader can forget the sentimental portrait which figures as a frontispiece. The story is concerned with two pairs of people. The jeune premier of tile first pair is Jocelyn Errol, the hero, a clergyman who resigns his pulpit because he has formed a new creed all to him- self, and is deeply dissatisfied with it as a " working " religion in practice. He has two women attached to him,—Pauline, the pretty, frivolous female villain, and Beatrice, whom he marries,—a young person who takes life with dreadful serious- ness. The other pair, the sub-hero and heroine, marry each other in a commonplace manner in the middle of the story, and are specimens of those excellent, normal middle-class people who are the backbone of the British Empire, but do not con- duce to the exhilaration of the blase novel reader.
In Mr. Andrew Balfonr's new story, Vengeance is Mine, the hero is " pressed " in Scotland, and after many adventures is landed in Corsica in good time to help Napoleon during the Hundred Days. The local colour is not ill done, but the figure of the little Corporal is as elusive to the pea of Mr. Balfour as to that of most modern romancers. The love interest is rather too disconnected from the main plot to arrest attention, and the final uniting of hero and heroine rather clumsily and unconvincingly managed.
In The Lost Emeralds of Zarinthia Mr. H. Beauchamp tries to impart an element of freshness to the familiar theme of a jewel robbery by making the stolen gems valuable principally for political reasons,—or rather, to be pedantically accurate, the lost gems are politically valuable, while the gems which are the subject of the jewel robbery are a mere imitation of the originals. The book by its very subject inevitably challenges comparisons with others covering much the same ground, but on the whole the various intrigues and mystifications are well devised and fairly interesting.
Several of the stories which are included in Mr. Hugh Clifford's new volume, In a Corner of Asia, have already appeared in various magazines, but they were well worth reprinting. Mr. Clifford is a brilliant interpreter of the sombre magic of the Malay Peninsula, and the mingled charm and savagery of its inhabitants. We are glad to note, moreover, that he shows no disposition to extol the un- doubted nobility of the Malay at the expense of the Euro- pean, and that without any aggressive assertion of Imperialist principles he never fails to enforce the high responsibilities that attach to "the white man's burden."
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