Grey Roses. By Henry Harland. (John Lane.)—The stories which constitute
this collection, and all of which, unless we are mistaken, first saw the light in the Yellow Book, are by no means equal in point of merit. The shorter stories, in which Mr. Harland tries to prove that he is a humourist, as in " A Re- incarnation," in which is reproduced a poor creature who tries to make others believe that he is Shakespeare over again, or a master of the hopeless tragedy of an imperfect life, as in "A Broken Looking-glass," are not specially successful. But when he gives himself scope and rope enough, as in the first story and the last—" The Bohemian Girl," and "Castles near Spain "—Mr. Harland is really delightful. "Castles near Spain," in particular, in spite or because of its slightness—it is but the story of a long- drawn-out and almost unconscious flirtation—is as near perfec.. tion as it well could be. Here again we are, if not in Arcadia, at least in the Forest of Arden. A strain of a more serious mood is heard in " The Bohemian Girl"; in it Mr. Harland very nearly raises one of the tiresome " problems" of the time. But one forgets this "problem" in the striking personality of Nina Childs, the Bohemian girl. She is half-sister to Mr. Du Maurier's Trilby, and has even more force of character, and perhaps on that account is more fortunate in life,—at all events in the material sense. Mr. Harland takes too little account of what can only be accounted Nina's weak moral sense, as indicated by her inability to regard her temporary and irregular relationship with the coward Ernest Mayer as a sin, but otherwise his sketch of her is firm, and as delicate as it is firm. Altogether, Mr. Harland is both a master of style and a thinker, and if he seems in the meantime to incline too much in both capacities to the new school, it would be unfair not to recognise his merits.
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