NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* WE have two grounds of complaint
with Mr. Bernard Capes in connection with his new and very clever novel : he keeps his readers too long waiting for the story proper
(1.) Our Lady of Darkness. By Bernard Capes. London: W. Black-wood and Sons. [6s.]—(2.) Miranda of the Balcony. By A. E. IV. Mason. London : Macmillan and Co. (6s.]—(3.) The Man's Cause. By Ella Napier Lefroy. London; John Lane. [es.)—(4.) A Bitter Heritage. By John Bloundelle-Bui ton. London : Cassell and Co. [Gs.]—(5.) Blake of (h-id. By Adeline Sergeant. London : F. V. White and Co. 168.]—(6.) The Dream of Pilate's Wye. By Mrs. H. Day. London : Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. [3s. 6,1.]—(7.) MX. Bradford, Special. By Archibald Clavering Gunter. London : G. Routledge and Sons. [53.]—(8.) Such is the Law. By Marie 3L Sadlelr. London : Greening and Co. [Ss.]—(9.) The Inca's Treasure. By Ernest Glanville. London : Mahuen and Co.. [6d. and ls.]—(10.) QuInford. By Arthur H. Holmes. London : At the Sign of the Unicorn. [Gs.] .
to begin; and in his quest for the sovereign word he continually lapses into sheer extravagance. Stevenson's love of literary finery was guided by a sure instinct, and seldom or never degenerated into mere polysyllabic parade. But Mr. Capes reminds us in his new story of an executant enamoured of his own virtuosity. Take such a sentence as this : "Facing an opulent sunset, Ned made his way some three or four miles out of Liege [the name of the city is wrongly accented throughout the entire story] through scenery whose very luxuriance affected him like the qualmish aftermath of excess." He indulges in or coins strange adjectives—" irisated," " potulent," " gregal "- and still stranger periphrases,—e.g., for "fluent Billingsgate" he gives us "voluble viraginian," which is simple Telegraphese. All this is much to be regretted, because where Mr. Capes preserves an equilibrium between thought and expression, and abstains from irrelevant roulades and cadenzas, his style is eloquent, persuasive, and picturesque. As for his story, which may be described as a fantastic demi-semi-historical romance of the French Revolution, we despair of giving the faintest outline of its ramifications in the space at our disposal. It has for hero Mr. Edward Murk, nephew and heir of a rakish old Viscount, who, travel- ling in the Low Countries, is entertained at Liege by a young nobleman of pseudo-democratic tendencies, and inspires passion (which he does not return) in the nobleman's lodge. keeper, a devote named Nicette, and a superb village Juno, who afterwards becomes the mistress of his uncle, and finally one of the avenging fiends of the Terror. Mr. Murk, who is a "solemn vagabond," a great student of emotions he does not feel, returns to England, where he is wounded in a duel with the notorious Chevalier d'Eon, falls in love with Pamela (with Sheridan for a rival), and returning to Paris, where his suit of Pamela brings him into contact with Egalite Orleans and other historical personages, is rescued from execution by the timely intervention of Lord Edward Fitz- gerald, and witnesses the death by the guillotine of the girl Nicette. Our Lady of Darkness bears much the same rela- tion to an ordinary novel as Carlyle's French Revolution to an ordinary history ; but we have not found Mr. Capes's phantasmagoria illuminating. For one thing, the succession of surprises is too constant ; for another, all the characters, down to peasant girls, speak in the Capesian dialect.
Mr. Mason's novel, Hiram/a of the Balcony, which derives its melodious and engaging title from the scene in which hero and heroine first make acquaintance with each other, has a complicated, ingenious, and highly original plot. Miranda Warriner is a young and beautiful woman of twenty-five, married from the schoolroom to an attractive but entirely unscrupulous Artillery officer. Being bard driven for money, Warriner, while at Gibraltar, sells the plan of a new gun to a foreign Government, and threatened with detection, hurriedly sets sail in his yacht, which is wrecked off the Scilly Isles. As a matter of fact, Warriner has changed the rig and name of his yacht, and by the aid of an accomplice and the disposition of cer- tain papers contrives to palm off the wreck of another vessel on the public and the mutilated corpse of a sailor as his own ; and survives to carry on an illicit trade in Winchester rifles and ammunition with Morocco. Now Mr. Luke Charnock, a chivalrous and successful civil engineer, meeting Mrs. War- riner at a dance in London, is impelled by a mysterious instinct to offer her succour should need arise. Unconsciously he conveys to her certain intelligence that her husband is alive, just as he has already conveyed it to Major Wilbraham, a chevalier of industry and former associate of Warriner's. Wilbraham promptly utilises the information to blackmail Miranda, since the revelation of Warriner's whereabouts would lead to a trial and public scandal ; simultaneously Warriner, kidnapped from Tangier by an Arab whom he had wronged, and carried away captive into the interior, contrives to send an imploring message to his wife. Miranda has ceased to love Warriner, but she cannot bear that the father of her dead child should die in torture and captivity. She accordingly summons Chamock, and before she has nerved herself to tell him the whole truth, they have fallen in love with each other. But she bids him go, and he—after routing and dislodging the blackmailer—sets off to find and rescue the missing husband. After two years bill quest is successful, but
Warriner, having guessed Charnock's secret, so far from being grateful, continually taunts his rescuer with allusions to his interested motive. In the end Warriner's desire to wreak vengeance on Wilbraham leads to his own death by drowning off the same coast where his pretended decease took place, and Charnock and Miranda are united. The chain of coincidences by which Charnock is made the means of revealing Warriner's existence to both Wilbraham and Miranda, though most in- geniously narrated, imposes a heavy draft on the credulity of the reader : we do not quite profess to follow all Miranda's sudden alternations of coquetry and sincerity : and the scoundrel Wilbraham's ambition to translate Horace is, as Mr. Capes would say, somewhat difficult of deglutition. But as a story of exciting incident the book is excellent company, the effect being heightened by the author's swift, straightforward, and nervous narrative style.
Pleasant recollections of Janet Dtlille gave rise to anticipa- tions which, we regret to say, have not been fulfilled by The Max's Cause. Mrs. Lefroy, who dedicates her story to her sons and daughters, is anxious to 'impress on all parents the necessity of conducting searching inquisitions into the moral antecedents of prospective sons-in-law. We cannot altogether congratulate her on the choice of her illustration. A charming but colourless girl, daughter of a weak and worldly mother, prefers the suit of the vicious son of a clerical sensualist to that of a blameless young Baronet. The young Baronet, in despair, writes a full, true, and particular account of the mis- deeds of his rival to the heroine of the story—the widow of another vicious brute—and she at once communicates the contents to the young lady. But the letter miscarries, and never reaches the victim until months after her marriage, whereupon she goes out and drowns herself. Of course the heroine was unable to warn her friend by word of mouth owing to a severe attack of congestion of the lungs, but this strikes us as a clumsy device to secure the completion of the tragedy. The mixture of archness, culture, and high. mindedness which characterises the conversation of the heroine is decidedly trying. Instead of impressing us with her nobility, she merely gives us the impression of being a highly moral minx.
The story of A Bitter Heritage, which might well have been told in one-third of its three hundred pages, has for hero a singularly simple-minded young naval officer, who goes out to Honduras to discover proofs of his parentage with a view to claiming a large property. His wicked cousin, who is the man in possession, endeavours, at the instigation of a French Creole lady, to get rid of his intrusive kinsman by various methods. He is shot at, a deadly snake is put in his bed, and two forms of poisoning are tried upon him. All these attempts upon his life are so clumsily made that the reader cannot but marvel at the young sailor's slowness in appreciating them. He takes hours and hours to fathom their meaning, but he is a sailor (he tells us this very frequently), and prefers danger to safety, so he remains on under his cousin's roof. When he is lying, bound hand and foot and ready to be turned adrift in a leaky boat, his lady- love and the police from Belize appear on the scene, and then, in about thirty pages of ponderously slow-moving explanations, we learn how the wicked cousin is substituted for the good and successfully drowned, and how the French Creole admits that the latter is the rightful owner of Desolada, Boys will like the book, no doubt, but the plot is scarcely good enough to excuse faults of style that cannot fail to irritate older and more critical readers. Here is a speci- men :—" Yet, on the silence, there broke now some sounds, they coming from the front part of the house; the sound of voices, of a hurried convereation." But for pure clumsi- ness the following sentence would be hard to beat :— "Yet the sun, although now hidden behind the topmost ridge of the Cockscombs, was still an hour above the blue horizon, though, nevertheless, signs were apparent that it would soon be gone altogether." Why could not Mr. Bloundelle-Burbon have said : "It wanted about an hour to sunset" Johnny (afterwards Cuthbert) Blake, the central figure of Miss Sergeant's new and clever story of the "ladder of learn- ing," begins life as a Board-school boy, and by winning scholarships raises himself to the position of a University man. Unfortunately Johnny, though full of ability, is a scoundrel of the deepest dye : he tells lies about his parentage, preys like a vampire on the profits of a lodging-house kept by his poor mother, and picks and steals the small change and valuables of his associates. Meantime, by virtue of the " Jekyll " side of his nature, he becomes a sort of leader in the cult of the "higher life" among the undergraduates. The element of masterfulness, however, is wanting in his villainy, and when his disreputable father emerges Cuthbert allows himself to be blackmailed, and generally prepares the way and the reader for his own downfall. Altogether, Blake of Oriel is a clever study of the dangers of merely in- tellectual education.
The Dream of Pilate's Wife is a story of ancient Rome, the incidents at Jerusalem being merely alluded to. The hero, a mysterious stranger of immense wealth, is called the "noble Calderon," and the author having announced in the preface that she deals with the subject of mkempsychosis; the reader is only faintly surprised to find that Calderon is the latest inoarnation of Cain ! Nerina, the heroine, refuses to marry Calderon, since in primeval times she was Cain's sister-wife. Of this fact she is not conscious, but a mysterious instinct restrains her, and she fulfils her engagement to marry Pontius Pilate. There is, of course, a good deal of mysticism in the book, mixed up with gladiators, Roman orgies, &c., in a rather bewildering fashion.
Mr. Gunter is assuredly one of the most prolific of writers, and the quality of his work suffers from his prodigal output. Happily M.S. Bradford, Special is a great improvement on the story recently noticed in these columns about the Florida sex-changing bean. If we cannot go so far as to admit the existence of any distinction or delicacy in his new story, it has at least the merit of an exciting plot. The tale is con- cerned with the romance of the Stock and Share Market; a domain in which adventures may be, and indeed often are, exciting enough to satisfy the most inveterate lover of sense- tionalis m.
Such is the Law is a novel with a purpose, the author being apparently horrified at the state of the English law which enables a rich man, if he pleases, to leave all his fortune away from his widow and children. The story is not very impres- sive, for the characters act on the flimsy motives so admirably caricatured in Mr. Jerome's Stageland, while their implicit confidence in the statements of the female villain borders on the ludicrous. The cover of the book is black with a blood- red hand pointing with the index finger to an open folio, also of a sanguinary tint. But the contents hardly fulfil the thrilling promise of the exterior.
Mr. Ernest Glanville tells hi The Inca's Trea,ure a fairly stirring romance of mines, Peruvian loins, the " last of the. Aztecs,' and cognate wonders. The devices by which all the characters are assembled in these wild regions will not bear rigorous investigation, but at least the reader has no reason to complain of the quantity of adventures, escapee, and conflicts provided by the writer.
Quinford is an account of the love affairs of a set of amiable persons living in the country, but the style is so strenuously allusive as effectually to conceal its merits. Mr. George Meredith, exemplar vitiis imitabile, has indeed much to answer for.
[*** The authorship of the novel Through a Keyhole, noticed in the issue of the 16th inst., was inadvertently attributed to Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse, instead of to Mr. Cosmo Hamilton.]
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