NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* IT would be hazardous to predict
for The Knights of the Cross the same degree of popularity achieved by Quo Vadis? Many readers will doubtless be repelled by the hugeness of the canvas, the outlandish theme, the unfamiliarity of the nomen- clature. In historical fiction the maxim onzne ignotunz pro magnzfico does not hold good : the average reader fights shy of a story which presupposes some acquaintance with the &lactic records of Central Europe in the fourteenth century, and has for its hero a young warrior with the uncompromising name of Zbyshko. Every one knows, or fancies that he knows, something about the Court of Nero: how many English novel readers have heard of Queen Yadviga, or could state who were the contending parties at the battle of Tannenberg ? Yet to all who may suffer from the initial bewilderment caused by the sudden plunge into a strange and unfamiliar world we recommend the exercise of perseverance. Once the diffi- culty of the nomenclature is surmounted, the fascination of this great prose epic of media3val Slavonic chivalry is bound to maize itself felt. We use the word " epic" advisedly, for there is something Homeric in the primitive simplicity of the portraiture, in the frequent enumerations of warriors and chieftains, in the recitals of their heroic feats of strength and endurance. Add to this an Oriental pomp and pageantry of description, a wealth of surprising and highly coloured incident due to the characteristic impulsiveness of the Slav tempera- ment, and a singular power of depicting the poignant emotions to which that temperament is liable, and a rough notion may be formed of the manner in which Sienkiewicz has handled and decorated the historic foundation of his romance. The central figure is the young Pole who, returning from warfare against the Frisians, vows himself to the service of the youthful Danusia, and to the punishment of her mother's murderers. Senteneed to death at Cracow for insulting a German envoy in time of peace, he is saved by the intervention of Danusia, and betrothed to her. Her father, from a secret scruple, withholds his consent, and Zbyshko returns with his uncle to his birthplace, where he falls in love with the splendid Amazon, Yagenka. Mean- time, Danusia is carried off by the Knights of the Cross, and Zbyshko, after a long and painful quest, only rescues his girl-bride from her persecutors to find her distraught and dying. The long Odyssey of his toils and trials ends with his union to Yagenka and the battle of Tannenberg, in which the Knights of the Cross are overthrown and Zbyshko's arch- enemy slain by his uncle. Mr. Cm-tin's version is vigorous rather than scholarly, and is disfigured by some jarring Americanisms. A curious feature of the book is the frontis- piece,—a formal photograph of the author and the translator standing side by side.
• (1.) The Knights of the Cross. By Tfenryk Slenkiewlez. Authorised and Unabridged Translation from the Polish by Jeremiah Curtin. 2 vols. London : J. M. Dent and Co. [9a.]—(2.) Little Anna Mark. By S. R. Crockett London : Smith, Elder. and Co. Ns.]—(3.) The Prison House. By Jane Jones. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [6s.]—(4.) A Lady of the Regency. By Mrs. Stepney Rawson. London : Hutchinson and Co. (Cs.1----(5.) Ursula. Br H. Douglas Ring. London: J. Lane. (6s.)—(G.) Life's airourt Round. By koss N. Carer. London : Hutchinson and Co. [6s.)—(7.) The Person in the House. /3y G. /3. Burgin. London : Hurst and Blackett [64.]—(8.) Mrs. Jerenne Didclere. By H. J. Jennings. London : Harrison and Sons. Ds. ed.]—(9.) The Beautiful Mrs. Leach. By Winifred Graham. London : Ward, Lock, and Co. [3s. Cd.]--(10.) A Marriage at Sea. By W. Clark Russell. (" The Novelist,' No. XII) London : Methuen and Co. [fai.] Mr. Crockett's new romance may be confidently recom- mended, to all readers anxious to sup full of horrors. Little Anna Mark opens with a peculiarly cold-blooded act of parri- cide, and three farther chapters are required before the hapless corpse of the victim is finally disposed of. It is first exhibited on an ice-floe; then at a torchlight procession, coffinless and white sheeted, with the head waggling this way and that; and finally at a post-mortem examination under the knives of the chirurgeons. The next episode is the attempted assassination of the hero's mother by her husband, the murderer of the earlier chapters. The murderer and assassin is condemned to death, but escapes. Then by way of a pleasing interlude we have the incident ef a spy concealed in a case, and stabbed to death, by a "boyish and bairnly " playmate of the hero. At this stage of the story, it may be remarked in parenthesis, the heroine, being about fourteen years of age, shoots a man dead with a musket. Next the hero, now grown into a great "lump of a lad," is kidnapped and carried off to the Spanish Main, where we are entertained with devil-fishes, Voodoo worship, Grand Inquisitors, chain gangs, and other delights. Eventually the hero's father and chief villain leaps into the crater of a volcano with the husband of his mistress, and the remainder of the dramatis persomm return to dwell in peace and happiness in Scotland. The sentimental interest is provided by the attachment of a massive York-shireman for the sorely harassed mother of the hero, and the hero's devotion to little Anna Mark, the daughter of his father's mistress. This young person, who is happily described as a " flichtersome wisp o' brimstane," sustains the role of hoyden throughout with appalling agility, and unremitting archness of demeanour. Whether outrunning the hero on her native heath in kilted petticoats, or acting as powder monkey, or in her favourite Indian hunting dress of "beaded leggings, fringed skirt of tanned doeskin, quilled blouse pearled with silver buttons of Potosi, and close-fitting cap daintily feathered," this dis- tressingly vivacious damsel fatigues us with her unrelenting energy. The elegance of Mr. Crockett's later style may be illustrated by one example: "Juanita looked out of the belly of the coach." It is melancholy to see a writer who has done good and interesting work thus caricaturing the worst faults of his earlier romances.
Mr. Harold Clay, the hero of The Prison House, was a. handsome young man about town of thirty or thereabouts, with expensive tastes and a wretchedly inadequate income, when a distant relative opportunely died and left him a house in Park Lane and 28,000 a year to keep it up with. Mr. Clay, finding himself in the happy position of indulging his hedonistic tendencies without fear of outrunning the constable, made violent and rather vulgar love to an impecu- nious governess with wonderful coppery hair, but being debarred from prosecuting his suit by her sudden disappear- ance, accepted an invitation from a distant cousin to visit him in the country, and promptly fell in love with a beautiful and saint-like young lady named Mary Upton. Mary was really in love with, as well as being beloved by, Harold's cousin, a poor curate, but the latter not only heroically stood aside (as there was insanity in his family), but actually advised her to marry Harold. The marriage of the rake and the Puritan soon ended in a disastrous fiasco. If Mary was uncompromising, Harold was incorrigible, frequenting the music-halls, keeping low company, and coming home drunk. So they parted, and Harold eloped to Paris with the coppery-haired governess, who bore him two children, and finally died of diphtheria. Meantime the curate, driven frantic by the disastrous sequel of his self-sacrifice, had died a raving lunatic, while Mary had steadily refused her vicious husband the boon of divorce. But on learning of his return from Australia, broken in health and spirits, she decides to return to his roof, and a most unconvincing scene of reconciliation closes a tawdry and unwholesomely sentimental novel. The characters are all ill-balanced—either intensely emotional, or snobbish, or narrow-minded—while the descrip- tions of the sumptuous mode of life indulged in by Harold Clay have a note of absurdity that reminds one of the early Oujda. The young sybarite who habitually drinks Chateau Yquem is not likely to smoke cheroots ; he would probably prefer the brand of cigar called after his American namesake.
There is a great deal of good, and not a little hard, reading in Mrs. Stepney Rawson's romance of the Regency. So long
as one can fathom what the characters are at, one is -interested and amused, but it must be owned that owing to the vague and allusive style Mrs. Rawson thinks fit to employ, these obscure intervals are too frequent for the plain person. The book, too, begins in a dull way, which is a drawback. One must insist on these defects, as Mrs. Rawson is clever enough to make it a matter for real regret that she has not adopted a plainer and more unvarnished style. She has real historical imagination, and her characters are not mere puppets labelled with historic names, but live and move and act just as one fancies their originals would have done. The best thing in the book is the portrait of old Queen Charlotte, masterful, prim, and self-willed, and only redeemed by the divinity which doth hedge a Queen, from being utterly odious. But it is precisely this impalpable atmosphere that Mrs. Rawson contrives to suggest. A Lady of the Regency, in short, is well worth reading, especially by those who care to imagine how the world looked when, to quote the opening words of Vanity Pair, "the present century was in its teens."
Ursula is a Russian story, and though frankly sensational, mercifully refrains from Nihilists or the clanking of chains on the road to Siberia. The story has a good deal of verve. though the coincidences involved in the resemblance of the two pairs of cousins seem to violate the canons of credibility. However, a work of this kind hardly calls for serious criticism. Ursula will at least fulfil the function of carrying the reader very pleasantly through a two-hours' railway journey.
It would take something little short of genius to make an exceedingly quiet story told by a country-house housekeeper interesting, and that rare quality certainly does not betray its illuminating presence in the pages of Life's Trivial Round. All the characters do exactly what one would expect of them. The motives which actuate them are neither subtle nor am they analysed with such skill that the subject is overlooked in the interest of the analysis itself. The most that can be said for the book is that the style is fluent and the moral irreproachable.
The best thing about Mr. Burgin's new story, The Person in the House, is the title. For the rest, the book is readable, though not so clever as it is intended to be, and the picture of the working of a society paper is overdrawn. It may be pointed out, for instance, that a weekly morning interview by the editor of a string of lady's maids is hardly possible, as they would all be professionally engaged.
Mrs. Jeremie Didelere is a vulgar story of a vulgar adven- turess. There is nothing new in the record of her schemes and subterfuges ; only the old, old story of dodging duns and husband-hunting.
The hero of The Beautiful Mrs. Leach is a virtuous Baronet who, thanks to his scientific training, completely foils the criminal and murderous schemes of a gang of burglars and housebreakers, in which the part of decoy is assigned to a beautiful Australian widow, an accomplice in the murder of her first husband, and the bride-elect of the Baronet's father. The extravagance of the plot is accentuated by the absurdity of its handling. In the epilogue we read how, as Sir Oliver Ashford, strolling along the terrace, caught his wife to his heart, "the goldfish rose upon the surface of the still water to watch that fond embrace."
Mr. Clark Russell's genial story of an elopement by sea and its romantic consequences furnishes far better entertain- ment than three out of every four novels reviewed this week, to say nothing of the extra inducement that it can be bought for sixpence.
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