RECENT NOVELS.* Mn. GRANT ALLEN has during the past few
years made many public references to a mysterious book which he wanted to write, but which it was quite useless to write, because when written it would be impossible in the present melancholy con-
dition of English opinion and feeling, either to get it published or read. We can only conjecture that The Woman Who Did is the long-foretold book, but the conjecture can hardly be at fault, seeing that in an inscription upon the fly-leaf the author tells us that it was "written at Perugia Spring, 1893, for the first time in my life wholly and solely to satisfy my own taste and my own conscience." Now when a man who is very able, very earnest, very honest, and exceptionally courageous, speaks thus of a book of his own, we naturally expect it to be interesting. The Woman Who Did does not disappoint us in this respect, for it is interesting, but in a very curious and, we are sure, nnoalculated sort of way. We say " nncalculated "because the main interest of a rather feverishly powerful story lies in the fact that the course and dhionement of the novel are simply a reduetio ad absurdum of the doctrines which the book is clearly written to support. This is a signal testimony to Mr. Grant Allen's honesty. By a little • (L) Th. Woman Who Did. By Grant Allen. London: John Lane.—(2) MY Lady Botha. By Stanley J. Weyman. London: A. 1). Innes and 0o.--(3.) Kitty Holden. By Adeline sergeant. 3 vols. London: Stun and Sleeken. —4.) Mrs. Beavers:a. By F. C. Philips. 2 vols. Loudon Downey and Co.- () TS. Gm( Houk. 3 vols. By T. W Speight. London: Chan* and Windns. —(13.) A Wanum's Lovs-Lsason. By Bmily J. Denham. 3 vols. London: Hand and Blackett.—(7.) The Phantom. Death, and other Stories. By W. Olar)c Russell, London: Ohatto and Windt's.
skilful manipulation of the plain facts of life a writer of his ability might easily have produced a novel in favour of what is vaguely called "free-love," which would have proved un- speakably dangerous not only to young readers, but to readers of any age whose principles are liable to facile unsettlement. Of course there are many households from which the book will be excluded simply by its theme and its opinions, both of which are strongly repellent to probably a great majority of English people. This Mr. Grant Allen doubtless anticipated ; what we think he could not have anticipated is the impression left upon the minds of those persons who are bold enough to read the book and candid enough to admire its power and its pathos. Barring one important lapse from nature, the story is admirably constructed. Save in the portion just referred to—the training or non-training of the girl who is to lead the new crusade—it is, to use the modern word, convincing ; but its very convincingness enlists our feeling in favour of the institutions which Mr. Grant Allen intends to attack. The well-born and highly cultivated "Woman" of the title ruins her own life utterly by yielding to the craving for what she calls freedom ; and after wasting her years in a protest against marriage, stultifies herself by committing suicide, that there may be no obstacle in the way of her daughter who has a conventional, philistine desire to get married. This, surely, is not a persuasive record ; but the fact is that Mr. Grant Allen is a man of imagination, and imagination, as Mr. Ruskin has often contended, is the one faculty which never errs. In this case, as in many others, imagination which was engaged as a servant has made itself master, with the consequence that, instead of doing as it was bid and buttressing a bad theory of life, it has brought up its battering-rams and knocked it to pieces. As a mere story The Woman Who Did seems to us really strong and impressive; as a polemical plea it seems to us hardly less so, but unfortunately—or fortunately as we think it—it is a strong and impressive plea for what Mr. Grant Allen regards as the effete, unintelligent, utterly wrong view of things.
Mr. Stanley Weyman is certainly one of the best living writers of what in boyhood we used to call " story- books,"—a term worth preserving to distinguish the narra- tive mainly compounded of romantic adventure, from the ordinary novel which is devoted to the treatment of comparatively familiar incidents and situations. It is cer- tainly a relief to turn from the peering, prying, dissecting sophistication of contemporary psychological and patho- logical fiction to such simple, wholesome, open-air books as Stevenson's Kidnapped, Mr. Stanley Weyman's A Gentleman of France, or The Honour of Savelli, by that well-equipped new-comer, Mr. Levett Yeats. Of course it is possible that mental indigestion might follow a too prolonged feast, even of such light fare ; but as yet satiety is far ahead of us, and we call for more. My Lady Rotha is well worthy of its author, and as every one knows, this is no stinted praise. The scene of the story is Germany, the action moving rapidly from place to place, and the period is the year 1632, between the time of the death of Tilly and the last fight of Gustavus Adolphus. The Lady Rothe, Countess of Heritzburg, is driven from her castle by her disaffected burghers, who have been moved to revolt by religions bigotry, and the story deals with her eventful and exciting adventures, set down by her faithful steward Martin, who in his narrative reveals his own comparatively simple character, and the more complex character of his kind, imperious, wilful, but noble-hearted lady. A capital story it is—admirably written as it was sure to be, full of stir and movement, with vivid description and happy characterisation—and yet we are not sure that we like it so well as we like one or two of its predecessors. It seems a trifle more laboured than they, the impression being possibly due to a certain crowding of characters and incidents, and also in part to the fact that Mr- Weyman is rather more hampered by the facts of history than he was, for example, in Under the Red Robe, where the play of invention was all but absolutely unrestricted. In fiction every new complication introduces at least half-a-dozen new difficulties, and though difficulties attract the dauntless, it is well to remember that- " He who fights and runs away, Will live to fight another day."
Mr. Weyman has not run away, but he is very much alive, and we hope he will live long to engage in the agreeable fighting to be found between the covers of My Lady Rotha.
In a strictly Pickwickian or literary sense of the term. Miss Adeline Sergeant is an old friend of ours, and there- fore it is pleasant once more to encounter a book of hers which can be honestly praised and not carped at. Kitty Holden is certainly the best novel which Miss Sergeant has written for a long time, and it might have been the best of all her novels had she taken more pains with the architecture of the first volume upon which the con- vincingness of the whole story so largely depends. John Holden, who is represented as originally a hard, coarse, but essentially honest man, is transformed with incredible rapidity into a cruel scoundrel; and we find it quite impossible to believe that Catherine, when assured of the survival of her little baby whom she had thought dead, should take no means whatever to verify or disprove a statement which meant so much to her. What readers have to do, is to get over this part of the story as quickly as may be; to do what in them lies to forget its incredibilities ; and then to give themselves up to enjoyment of the strong and interesting remainder,—a good two-thirds of the novel. Catherine herself, who, seeing her own life fall in ruins around her, devotes herself to saving from ruin the lives of others, and unwittmgly includes her own boy in the beautiful ministrations of mercy, is a lovely and pathetic figure ; but Miss Sergeant is at her strongest in following the downward course of John Holden, who, caught in a net of his own weaving, is driven by the fear of exposure and dishonour to entangle himself still more inextricably. Of course the theme is familiar enough, for such a career as Holden's is obviously rich in openings for invention and in opportunities for subtle por- traiture; but in Miss Sergeant's treatment there is nothing, or hardly anything, that is commonplace or conventional_ The stages of downfall are truly, because imaginatively, drawn. At first the guilty man cm fortify himself by a more or less conscious self-deception. He is not really wronging Catherine. He simply sees what is for her welfare better than she sees it herself; but as he grows stronger in sin he abandons the pretext, as the experienced swimmer abandons his corks, and acknowledges himself to himself as a rogue whose sole business is to save himself from being found out. This study, the truth of which is as notable as the power, would give backbone to an otherwise weak novel, and Kitty Holden is certainly not weak.
There are people whose first and last demand from fiction is that it shall provide them with light and cheerful ("cheer- ful" is the word upon which they lay special emphasis entertainment. At a time when so many writers seem to share Mr. Grant Allen's opinion that all great art is pessi- mistic, this demand has often to go unsatisfied, so we have a feeling that we are performing an act of kindness in com- mending Mrs. Bouverie to these hungerers and thirsters after cheerfulness. It will have been seen that, in our opinion, Miss Sergeant's novel is in many ways admirable, but no admirer can say that it is a specially bright book, whereas Mr. Philip's story glows with brightness from its first page to its last, without a single sigh or groan, or even a gloomy anticipation to mar our peace. Of course the severe censor may sternly say to us : "In the very terms of your praise you have utterly condemned the book ; such a story as you have described is not life, but a caricature of its least essential features." To which we reply, "It may be so, but we are in a reckless mood, and do not care for your hard names. You may call it a caricature or a parallelopiped ; we find it pleasant, and just now pleasantness in fiction is not a
thing to be lightly foregone." Mrs. Bouverie is a wealthy young widow in good society, who sets herself, with much more tact than is usual in such cases, to act as guardian- angel to two orphan girls and their brother, who are not much younger than herself. The young man has literary aspirations, with brains to back them, and Mrs. Bouverie procures for him a post in the office of an influential editorial friend, who allows him to try his wings in a dis- creetly modest way. Then of course he sets to work upon the inevitable novel, in which task Mrs. Bonverie gives him the advantage of her own social knowledge, and equally of course he falls in love with his collaborator. She, however, is a sensible woman; she knows that this is one of the cases in which marriage would almost certainly be a failure ; and
though her repulse makes Frank appropriately miserable for some time, it does not prevent him from speedily falling in love again with more luck in his second wooing. The adventures of the manuscript by which fame and a wife are at last won, are narrated by a writer who knows his business ; and the publisher, the editor, and the sub-editor, are thoroughly lifelike portraits. As a book to be read for simple entertainment, Mrs. Bouverie is bad to beat.
If the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood are still popular, The Grey Monk ought not to be a failure, for Mr. Speight has adopted one of the narrative methods of his predecessor. Mrs. Wood was very fond of a ghost, which in the third volume of the novel turned out to be not a ghost at all, but simply some living human being who was supposed to be dead, and who, for reasons of his own, chose to masquerade in a ghostly disguise. The Grey Monk who haunts Withington Chase is one of these bogus spectres, and though we do not grumble on that head, we have one complaint to make against him,—that he is not nearly so credible, and therefore not so creepy, as he ought to be. If we can trust our remembrance of The Shadow of Ashlydyat and other stories in which Mrs. Henry Wood utilised this pseudo-supernatural expedient, she managed her hocus-pocus in a mach more workmanlike manner; and whatever may have been our sus- picions, we did not dare to scoff openly until the modus operandi had been duly explained. For the rest, there is nothing to be said about The Grey Monk, except that it is
fairly capable story of the old-fashioned melodramatic species which nowadays has rather a belated look. Those who care for this kind of thing will find it a respectable time- killer, and probably Mr. Speight does not intend it to be any- thing more.
There is no melodrama in A Woman's Love-Lesson, which is a quiet, wholesome, unexciting, but not uninteresting story of English rural life. The characters comprise a rather unfairly large proportion of prigs of both sexes, but as the author clearly intends them to be recognised as prigs and not mistaken for heroes and heroines, their priggishness is not to be regarded as an artistic blemish, though as Miss Dunham has no great gift of humour, it makes them at times rather dreary companions. Perhaps, however, the best char- later in the book is a man who is not merely a prig, but a pragmatical, self-conceited, obstinate, and domineering tyrant, —the Rev. John Broughton, father of the girl who learns the "love - lesson" and of her brother Dick, who is treated by his father in a way which is hardly consistent with sanity. Indeed, Miss Dunham spoils this part of her story by telling us of Dick's offences, but not allowing us to see any of them,—by presenting him, indeed, as the model Di a manly young man of whom any reasonable father might be proud. There is all through the book a certain lack of solidity, but its unpretentiousness and good English leave a favourable impression.
When one comes to think of it, there are comparatively few novelists who are masters of the short story, and there is nothing remarkable in the fact, for the conditions of success in the two departments of fiction are altogether different. Mr. Clark Russell is, however, one of the few, and there would be nothing unintelligent in a discussion as to the kind of work in which he shows to the best advantage. The wonderful fertility of invention which we have once or twice referred to as specially characteristic of his maritime novels, is well in evidence in this collection of stories. The best of them are really excellent, and even those which are less good than the best stand on an exceptionally high level. One or two of them—indeed, more than one or two—are very grue- some, but in Mr. Clark Russell's hands even the gruesome never becomes repellent. Perhaps the most attractive of them, as simple narratives, are those devoted to a mystery. Of these, the title-story is a favourable specimen. The captain, first officer, and second officer of a merchant-ship are successively attacked by a mysterious disease, and die in a few hours. The first theory is that they have brought on board germs of infection from the last port visited, the second that a poisoner has been at work ; but both of these hypotheses are discredited by facts, and the solution of the problem, simple as it is, comes as a genuine surprise. Some of the stories, however, deal with a simple incident or uncompli- cated series of incidents ; and in them, not less clearly than in the more elaborate tales, the author's singular gift of narrative is triumphantly displayed.
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