RECENT NOVELS.* As a general rule, no sensible person attempts

to find a reason for a fashion in literature, any more than he would think of attempting to find a reason for a fashion in dress.. The vogue of each concrete novelty is sufficiently explained by the existence of an insatiable craving for novelty in the abstract. Women wear plain gowns one season simply because they are tired of the elaborate trimmings of the season before;. and the books which last year were never " in " at Mudie's, now gather dust peacefully on shelves from which they are never taken down. Sometimes, however, one comes across a fashion-puzzle that must excite to some amount of intelligent curiosity, and one of these puzzles is the rise of Mr. George Meredith. He has been writing for considerably more than a. quarter of a century, and during the greater part of that time his audience was scanty, and to all appearances tepid in admiration ; but within the past five years, the enthusiasm of a little band of critics has been communicated to a section of the reading public, and it is becoming a common experience to meet cultivated persons who gravely assure us that Mr.. Meredith is our greatest living novelist. As Mr. Meredith is not a new novelist, his present vogue is not susceptible of the usual explanation ; and we must frankly admit that to us it is altogether inexplicable. His books are by no means deficient in imagination ; some of them contain passages of considerable power and beauty, and all of them, abound in a too generally misdirected cleverness ; but so far from being a great novelist, he does not seem to us to possess the qualifications which go to the making of a capable novelist of even the second rank ; and even if those qualifications were his, their effect would be ruined by a literary manner which even in these days of affectation and strain is of unique per- versity. It must, however, in fairness be admitted that his latest novel, One of our Conquerors, does him less than justice ; for while his characteristic merits are in abeyance, his charac- teristic defects are in evidence on every page. The mere. narrative is so clumsily managed that the most acute reader will nearly reach the end of the first volume before grasping the nature of the slight, shapeless, and very unattractive story which Mr. Meredith has chosen to tell ; and the outlines of his characters reveal themselves vaguely and in- determinately through the mist of utterly impossible con- versation which provides the atmosphere in which they live and move. The hero in his youth has married for money a. woman considerably older than himself, the deed being, to quote his own refined description of the transaction, that of "a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley-sugar in her pocket." The high-minded young man elopes with his wife's companion, who is, of course, young and beautiful, and the couple have a daughter, from whom the secret of her birth has been kept,—a reticence which, when suitors begin to present themselves, is the cause of awkward complications. As, moreover, the deserted wife is supposed to be bent upon a vengeance which she has certainly power to inflict, the illicitly united pair, who are supposed by the

(1.) One of our Conquerors. By George Meredith. 3 vole. London' Chap- man and Now Grub Street. By George Gissing. 3 vols. London : Smith, Elder, and Co.—(3.) A Lost Mutton, By Leslie Keith. 3 vols. London : Methuen and Co.—(4.) An American Duchess. A Pendant to 'Miss. Bayle's Romance." By W. Fraser Rae. 3 vole. Loudon : R. Bentley and Son. —(5.) His Cousin Adair. By Gordon Roy. 3 vols. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons.—(6.) Boll Barry. By Richard Agile Ring. 2 Tolm., London: Chatto and Windue.—(7.) The Richest Merchant in Rotterdam, By A. N. Romer, 2 vole. London.: Sampson Low and Co.

world to be married people, live an increasingly uncom- fortable life, until the story is brought to a sudden and violent conclusion by the death of both women and the madness of the man. We are quite ready to agree with any sensible inter- pretation of the critical dictum that the telling of a story is of more importance than the story itself ; but of the telling of this particular story praise is impossible,—indeed, it is more by good luck than good management that it is told at all. Mr. Meredith disdains straightforward narrative, and his disdain for straightforward description and characterisation is still more intense. He would not call a spade an agri- cultural implement, but "the earth-cutting knife ungraspable by peculating stewardship." A city statue of a deceased King is "the figure of royalty worshipful in its marbled redun- dancy." Instead of saying that Lady Grace Halley was a little, talkative woman, Mr. Meredith writes, "her stature was rather short, all of it conversational ; " arid as might have been expected of a lady of conversational stature, she " ges- ticulated ecstasies." Another lady on a trying occasion "seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp." When Mr. Meredith means that Sowerby looked sympathetic -when Durance was predicting national misfortune, what he says is, that "the Honourable Dudley's expressing lineaments showed print of the heaving word, alas as when a target is penetrated centrally." Nor are these exceptional lapses from sane and lucid expression which have to be laboriously sought for : the thing which is hard to find is a simple, natural, un- strained phrase or sentence. So affectedly grotesque a style would ruin even a good novel, and to describe One of our Conquerors as a good novel is impossible.

Mr. George Gissing has never written a more vigorous or a more depressing story than New Grub Street. As will be inferred from the title, it deals with the lower grades of life in the world of contemporary literature and journalism, and had the author cared to follow the present fashion of imitative clap-trap nomenclature, he might have called his book "In Darkest Bohemia." What makes the novel so unrelievedly melancholy is not so much the prevalence of an atmosphere of sordid misery, though this undoubtedly has its effect in lowering the spirits of the reader; it is the persistent dramatic and narrative vigour with which Mr. Gissing embodies his conception of a world in which the man of genius, learning, or fine literary skill is pushed to the wall or trampled under foot, while his rival, with nothing but a poor surface cleverness, made effective by dogged, unsensitive, unscru- pulous pushing, triumphantly reaches the goal of success. The old Grub Street of Pope's day was bad enough, in all conscience, but we really prefer it to the new Grub Street of Mr. Gissin.g's pages. In the former there was much that was revolting, but there was also something of camaraderie arid good-fellowship, of brotherly kindness and charity; in -the latter nothing is heard but the one cry, "Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost." It is difficult to say whether we are more depressed by the slow torture which in various ways crushes the life out of Edwin Reardon, Alfred Yule, and Harold Biffen, or by the snaky wrigglings, each of which brings Jasper Mil vain nearer to his paradise of pounds, shillings, pence, and fame. It seems to us that here, as else- where, Mr. Gissing holds a brief for pessimism, and that his story is, in essence, an ex-parte statement ; but the force and impressiveness of the statement are unmistakable. The chapters which deal with the relations between the unpractical genius Reardon and his practical wife ; the story of Yule and his daughter; the description of Biffen's rescue of his precious manuscript from the burning lodging-house, are all master's work ; and there is not in the whole book a single page which lacks the force of a relentless realism. New Grub Street is, in short, a novel which many may fail to enjoy, but which few competent critics can fail to admire, even if they admire under protest.

The story in A Lost Illusion of how a man's sin found him nut, and paid him literally the wages of death, is told with considerable power; but Leslie Keith's new novel owes its special charm to the pleasant sketches of life and character in one of those rural Quaker communities: which have re- mained unsophisticated and uneonventionalised by the in- -fluences of an unsympathetic outer world. The sweet Loveday Penn, with her virginal, gentle, loyal nature, is, we think, even more irresistibly winning than "Priscilla the Puritan maiden" .of The Courtship of Miles Standish, and her true literary pro-

totype is found in Wordsworth's ideal portrait of the young girl who, while radiating "something of an angel light," was still "not too bright or good for human nature's daily food." It is certainly some time before we are brought to feel that she is not too bright and good for the outwardly stern, hard, and unsympathetic Oliver Car ; but there is nothing in the book more admirable than the skill with which, as the portrait grows before us, the artist gradually familiarises us with the kindly human expression shining through features which habit rather than nature has made grim and repellent. The scene in which Loveday, or rather Oliver acting for her, refuses to accept the mosaic necklace which Roger Wedderburn has brought from Katherine Dale, is a perfect little cabinet picture ; and though the central story of the setting-up and the shattering of poor Katherine's idol is interesting in itself, the book is really made by the friends whom she leaves in the days of her fascination, and to whom she returns in the hour of her crushing sorrow.

A sequel or a "pendant "—to use Mr. Fraser Rae's word— has a way of being in some way or other disappointing, and to most of those who remember Miss Bayle's Romance, its successor, An American Duchess, will seem a trifle flat. The title-page rouses expectations that are not fulfilled, for though the Duchess is a very charming person—as, indeed, she was in her maiden days—she is not in the least American save by the accident of birth. It would seem that when our old acquaintance Miss Alma Bayle became Lady Plowden Eton, she devoted her whole energies to the task of denationalising herself ; by the, time she became Marchioness of Slough, she had made wonder- ful progress ; and when in the course of events she rose to the dignity of Duchess of Windsor, the process was complete, and her Grace was English through and through. Our other old acquaintances have changed less,—though Lord Plowden Eton, or rather the Duke, turns out to have more brains than we had suspected him of possessing, and is quite a model nobleman ; while the vivacious Mr. Atlas has also entered the House of Lords, though his double in real life still remains a commoner. Among our new friends, the most entertaining is Captain Roker, a hero of the sword, but a still more famous hero of the long-bow,--a gentleman "not more renowned as a slayer of tigers and a teller of stories than for the universality of his acquaintance with the great." Mr. Vincent O'Lorrequer, the Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament, is also capital company; and though the Duchess has acquired a provoking resemblance to other great ladies, there is in her circle plenty of interesting individuality. When a clever, observant man, and a vivacious writer, sets himself to depict a world which he really knows, the result of his labours is sure to be enjoy- able ; and while An American Duchess lacks some of the freshness of its predecessor, it is nevertheless among the best of recent society novels.

A youth and a maiden are brought up in close proximity to each other, and a love grows up between them that is too young to know itself for what it really is. Then the youth goes away for years, and the maiden thinks of him always, but he only thinks of her sometimes ; and one day, when the thought is not with him, he speaks words which entangle him in a coil from which he cannot escape. Then he returns, and the old love awakens, full-grown and conscious of itself, and in some moment the young man and the girl find out how it is with them, and know that henceforward they must be united by a great yearning and divided by a great folly. So they walk apart for many years of starved loyalty and hope- less longing, until at last the man's fetters suddenly fall from him, things are as they might have been so long ago, and Damon and Phyllis live happily ever afterwards. This little story, which, though perhaps gratuitously sad and sentimental, can be made very pretty, has been told in various forms perhaps a thousand times, and it is told for the thousand-and-first time very pleasantly and gracefully in the three volumes of His Cousin Adair. Of course, in a book of this kind, the attractiveness, if there be any, is given by the quality of the variations upon the main theme, and by the accessories in general ; and in these matters Gordon Roy's work deserves hearty commendation. Adair Douglas is not only a loveable but a capable heroine, who, in bearing her trouble, displays what Miss Alma Bayle, in her American days, would have called "real grit ;" and the story of the half-developed Elfic—the girl who finds her soul in music and love, and dies of the finding—has true pathos

and beauty. There is nothing remarkable about His Cousin Adair, but it is a thoroughly interesting and pleasant novel.

Mr. Ashe King's Bell Barry has an agreeable Irish flavour, but it is hardly more than a flavour, and the story has not enough of the distinctively Hibernian element to justify the liberal display of shamrocks on the cover. Mr. Barry, indeed, with his priggishness, his prosiness, his utter lack of any

sense of -humour, and his dreary teetotal mania, is, despite his nationality, the most un-Irish person in the book, with the

solitary exception, perhaps, of his hateful daughter Edith ; and there is nothing specially Irish even about Bell but her beauty, her charm, and her instinctive loyalty. The effervescent young journalist, Finch, and Mr. Barry's servant, Tim Daly, who accompanies him on his lecturing tours, are, however, racy of the soil, and between them they contribute a good deal of pleasant fooling, which, though it has nothing much to do with the story, is more enjoyable than the rather tedious detective business connected with the murder of Stewart Rivers's wife. Dick Finch may be a little too lavish with his quotations, but he is frequently very happy in his use of them,—witness his enumeration of the "objects of interest" which Mr. Barry must see in Cork :—

"The cove should be done, sir; and St. Finbar's Cathedral, the Queen's College, the Model Farm, and the Asylum for Idiots. The Idiot Asylum is not, perhaps, an exhilarating place, but my friend hero was charmed with it. Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home,' sir, as the song says."

Though the books which have been produced with the greatest ease are often the books which are perused with the greatest difficulty, Bell Barry, which gives us the impression of having

been written =mute calamo, is thoroughly readable.

The Richest Man in Rotterdam is by no means a badly written novel, and its far-fetched plot is not wanting in a certain perverse ingenuity ; but the story seems to us too grotesquely improbable to be really interesting. The breaking of a butterfly upon a wheel, or the cracking of a nut by a Nasmyth hammer, is an economy of machinery when compared

with the elaborate contrivances devised by Mynheer Stephen Vanclerliagen for accomplishing his tortuous schemes of matri- mony and vengeance. When this ridiculous elderly villain first sees Madge Milford and Philip Moresby, the former is a girl of fourteen and the latter a boy of sixteen ; but he instan- taneously makes up his mind to marry the one and to ruin the other ; and for a number of years he devotes time, money, and thought to the furtherance of a design ot which it is im- possible to say whether the end or the means by which it is ts be reached can be regarded as the more absurdly incredible. As it stands, The Bicliesj Merchant in Rotterdam is a very

crazy and rather tiresome book ; but there are in it the materials for an amusing extravaganza.