RECENT NOVELS.*
Tun principal novels of any single month are of necessity so various in theme, treatment, and merit, that, as a rule, any attempt to group them in relations of similarity or contrast must needs be an ineffectual strain. Could they come under the eye of a critic living a century hence, he would doubtless discern in them the common expression of the age in which they are produced, just in the same way that we can discern a common expression in the most diverse works of the century which pre- ceded our own; but to contemporaries, the generic resemblance is rendered invisible by the greater prominence of individual and differentiating features. It happens, however, that, in spite of very obvious surface dissimilarities, the first three novels upon our list have an intellectual kinship which is quite recognisable to the reader of to-day, inasmuch as they all deal more or less directly with that doctrine of vicarious responsibility 'Which is suggested by such texts as "Am I my brother's keeper P" and "Bear ye one another's burdens." Of the three novels, Mrs. Spender's is the most graceful and artistic ; .Mr. Junior's story of Lucy Carter, notwithstanding its dull East-London back. ground, is the brightest and pleasantest; while Tracked is certainly the most powerful, recalling, indeed, again and again the strong, impressive handling of the author of Wuthei-ing Heights.
My Brother's Keeper, though a very charming and beautiful novel—certainly the beet piece of work we bave seen from Ifni. Spender's pen—is, we incline to think, more satisfactory from a literary than from an ethical point of view. Ursula Campion, though she may just miss being a truly heroic figure, wins at once, and retains throughout, our admiring affection ; and it seems to us that the author's natural and justifiable sympathy with the girl whom she has created, has to some extent made her blind to a serious defect in Uranla's method of performing the labour of love to which she has devoted her life. She does, indeed, in the most absolute Henseof the phrase, constitute herself the keeper of her poor weak brother Raymond, and bear his burden for him ; but, apparently, ehe fails altogether to see that her primary duty was surely that of helping him to be his own keeper, and strengthening him to bear his own burden. To surround such a young man as Ray with mechanical safe. guards against temptation, and when the temptation proves too strong for the safeguards, to drag him with painful
• (I.) Her Brother's Keeper. By M.. Jobs Kent Spender. a volt. London : Spencer Blackett.-12.) Tracked. By B. A. CortoR. 2 rob. London Remington and Co.--(3,) Lucy Carter. By Thomas C. Junior. London Sonnensobein and Co.—(4.) A False Position. By G. M. Rabin.. 3 rola. London : B. Bentley and Bon.-124 The Tufa Soul; or, the Strange Adventures of Mr. Homages. 2 vole. London : Ward and Downey.—(8.) His Sisters. By klerbert P. Earl. 2 volt. London : Sampson Low and Co.—{7.) The Plan of Campaign. By F, Mabel Robinson. 2 vole. London: Visetelly and Co.
self-abnegation out of the pit into which he has fallen, and eat him on firm ground again, is a, beautiful and loveable task ; but it does not realise the ideal of either divine or human helpfulness. We part from Ray with hope for his future, but we cannot speak of the hope as "sure and certain," for we cannot help feeling that his moral life is at best parasitical and derivative, and that, were his sister and Wilfrid Fielding removed from his side, he might sink as low as in had ever sunk before. It would, however, be both uncritical and unfair to regard Her Brother's Keeper from merely one point of view, and that the point from which it is seen to least advan- tage. In questioning the wisdom of Mrs. Spender's heroine, we have left her verisimilitude unchallenged ; and had Ursula Campion been wiser than she was, she might, and probably would, have been much less imaginatively credible, and would certainly have been less winning, because less frankly human. As it is, the girl who bursts in upon the starchy society of the rural suburbs of Bath with the unchartered freedom of thought and manner gained in the most Bohemian circles of artistic Paris, really lives for us with that richness of eager life seldom found in the companionship of the well-balanced judgment which Ursula certainly did not possess. Poor Ray, weak, idle, sensuous, pleasure-loving, not wholly depraved, but altogether without moral backbone, is an example of a type with which we are very familiar, both in fiction and real life ; but he is so strongly individualised, that we should recognise him at once among a crowd of his fellows. Some of the most impressive portions of the book are those in which he is the most prominent figure—notably the scenes at Oxford, and the powerful but almost too painful chapters which follow the murder by Dubois, for Raymond's -sake, of the poor lost French girl, Valentine Durand ; and even in the pages where he subsides into the background, we never lose a vivid consciousness of the peculiar quality of a personality which, with all its weakness, is not devoid of a certain fasci- nation.
In Mrs. Spender's novel, Ursula Campion answers the ques- tion, "Am I my brother's keeper ?" in the affirmative. In Tracked, the powerful story by M. E. Cartois, the wealthy father of the outcast, Geoff Holden, answers it in the negative; and so the books, unlike as they are in other respects, may be regarded as companion studies. When Mr. Andley takes his baby-boy from the cradle where he lies by the side of his dead mother—the woman who has deceived her hnsband, and whom even in death he will not forgive—and hands him over to the reckless vagabond, Jim Haldan, hoping never to see or hear of him again, he little knows the Nemesis which he is setting on his own track to hunt him clown even to the death. It is a long time since we have read anything which made so impressive an appeal to the sympathetic imagination as the story of the poor forsaken lad, with his wild, fruminating beauty, his warm affections and intermittent aspira- tions through which he might have been redeemed, his strong, unruly passions which drag him down into the whirlpool and seem to make redemption impossible, up to the final scene in which all the crushed-down nobility of the lad asserts itself for the last time, and we feel that for the poor, erring, much-tried soul, redemption has been achieved, literally by lire. The record of the Nemesis, from the night in which Mr. Audley sees the white, wan, desperate face of his son peering in at him through the window of his well-lighted, luxurious drawing-room, to that other night of the last meeting in the Wolfe Den, has a tragic intensity of terror and pathos which moves ns as we are only moved by imaginative work of a very high order ; and we are sur- prised that the name of the author, who seems to have written several other books, should be entirely unknown to us. We have compared Tracked to Wuthering Heights, and in a certain wildness of power the two books have much in common ; but in the work of the living author there are touches of spiritual beauty in which Emily Bronffi's sombre romance is almost, if not altogether deficient. That sense of responsibility which comes from the recognition of human brotherhood, and which is only awakened in Mr. Andley when the sin of his youth rises before him a threatening spectre, is never asleep in the breast of Elizabeth Harts, the poor dressmaker who enters as a redemptive agency into the lives of Jim Gibson, and his child- brother Will, and poor lost Geoff, and who strives to enter thus even into the life of Mr. Audley himself. Elizabeth is a character who, like Dinah Morris, is at once nobly ideal and absolutely real, and she and the loyal little Will, whose fidelity to his friend stands the test of physical and mental torture, light np with a warm and tender glow the pages of a book which, but for them, would be too gloomy for imaginative delight. As it is, the night that gathers about Geoff Haldan is dark enough lightning lurks in the black, heavy clouds, and the stars are very few ; but as we look at the picture for the last time, we see that in the East there is a hint of dawn, and we are content. Tracked is, in short, a very noble and beautiful book.
We have noticed a certain relation of contrast existing between the first and the second of the novels upon our list ; there is a certain relation of similarity between the second and the third. In Lucy Carter, as in Mr. Curtois's story, we trace the career of a lad who has never known his father, and here, too, the unknown father is living in luxury while the son is toiling in penury. The career of Harry Burr is, however, a much brighter one than that of Geoff Haldan, for he Buffers from no worse ill than hard work for small pay ; and it is not his story, but that of the heroine, which links this book with the other two. Lucy Carter is a strong-natured, quick-minded girl, inclined—as is the habit of such natures—to question everything, primarily her own right to live in idle opulence in her comfortable home at Hamp- stead, while a few miles to the east of her men and women are what they are. Lucy is far too practical a person to be satisfied with a brief course of fashionable "slumming," so, though very unecclesiastically disposed, she consults a clerical friend of her step-father's concerning the kind of work which most needs doing, and, by his arrangement, takes lodgings with a certain Mrs. Killick, the good-natured widow of an East-End knacker, who has established a creche, in the management of which Lucy is to assist her. The author evidently writes from more than hearsay knowledge, for the external details are sketched in with true realistic verisimilitude; but we incline to think that Lucy is represented as falling a little too easily and naturally into the rontine of a life which was certainly unfamiliar, and which must have been in many ways repellent. The element of pain in every act of true sacrifice is not the element which forces itself most insistently upon the consciousness ; but it is there, and it is in the victory over it that sacrifice achieves its rapture. Certainly Lucy Carter possessed one of those direct practical natures which have a happy knack of ignoring inevitable unpleasantnesses, and the representation may be truer than it seems at first sight; but we doubt whether it is quite true ; and such a picture, to be valuable, should betray no lapse from imaginative veracity. Otherwise, however, the book is admirable, for it attains, with- out exaggeration, that distinctness of portraiture which is one of the greatest charms of fiction. There is perhaps a touch of caricature in the sketch of the clergyman's vinegarish sister ; but Mrs. Killick, and the drunken druggist who employs Harry to dispense for him, are singularly truthful transcripts from life.
The remaining four novels seem to us much less interesting than the three we have noticed, though A False Position is an exceeding clever and well-written book. Hed we not seen the author spoken of in the columns of a literary contemporary as "Mr." Robins, we should have taken it for granted that the novel was from the pen of a lady, for not only are there many feminine touches (we do not use the epithet disparagingly), but the whole scheme of the book is one which has always found special favour with lady-novelists. It is an inventive scheme, the interest of which resides in the elaboration of a fantastic misunderstanding absolutely impossible in real life, and there- fore irritating in a work of fiction which in other respects is so lifelike as to throw the central absurdity into unfortunate prominence. Mr. Fleetwood, a London lawyer, who is apparently a cold, passionless man of business, marries Lady May Errol, an orphan-girl who is alienated from her relatives, and is on the- verge of, destitution. He makes no pretence-of love on his side, and demands no love from her, but avowedly makes the proposal to secure a home for her and a housekeeper for himself. This, however, is a pretence. Mr. Fleetwood is really deeply in love, for the second time in hie life ; but his first love-affair has been so unfortunate, that it has engendered a distrust of all women, and he not only conceals his affection, but by a sudden question deliberately tempts his young wife into an unpremeditated lie which she immediately repents, but is prevented by her fear of him from confessing. Knowing that Lady May has told him a falsehood, he, of course, believes that her deception ie ranch more far-reaching than it really is ; and out of this awkward situation arise complications which go a
long way towards filling three volumes. This kind of thing is always annoying, and in this case it is more annoying than usual, because if it were absent, A False Position would be a novel which could be praised without reserve. The movement of the story is not quick, but it never drags; the characters, with few exceptions, are not lay-figures, but living human beings ; and the style is throughout admirable.
The anonymous story, entitled The Twin Soul, ie an example of "much cry and little wool." It is described on the title- page as " a psychological and realistic romance," but it is cer- tainly not realistic, and—though we do not exactly understand the epithet when applied to fiction—we think we may safely say that it is not psychological. When we are first introduced to Mr. Rameses, the highly cultivated, mysterious Oriental gentleman who professes to remember things which happened three thousand years ago, we think that we are in the presence of a new Zanoni or Mejnour ; but we are terribly disappointed, for Mr. Rameses turns out to be a most commonplace person, distinguished from other people only by being exceptionally wealthy, exceptionally prosy, and uniquely long-winded. Much of his ponderous talk has for its theme the twin soul of whom he is in search, and for some time we are led to hope that the twin is to be found in a resuscitated female mummy ; but the mummy is left to slumber in its original swathing-bands, and Mr. Rameses discovers his feminine affinity in a young fire. worshipper whom he sees performing her devotions on the top of a Scotch mountain. Mach of the book is occupied by imposingly pretentious but exceedingly empty conversations; and the thin substratum of story is, to our mind, as dull as it is improbable.
His Sisters is a fairly readable novel, though Mr. Earl has done his best, or his worst, to prevent it from being so by a crude stiltedness of style which would be amusing were it not so tiresome. The descriptions of the personal appearance of some of the characters in the story are really very wonderful affairs, for the people have faces which reveal not only their present character, but the general features of their past history. We read of Mr. Menzies, for example, that "deep lines round his eyes and on hie brow indicated a mind long ill at ease, and led an observer to suppose that the hard look of health upon his face was the result of an outdoor life sought not so much for the sake of pleasure, as for the distraction it afforded from rest- less thoughts." The italics, of course, are ours ; and we can only say that a face of this kind is worthy to be compared with the celebrated piece of instrumental -music which was intended to suggest the idea of a man leaving his country and changing his religion. Mr. Earl's feminine characters are somewhat colourless; his respectable masculine personages have more than a suspicion of priggishness ; and he is much too fond of copious and rather flat moralising, though he occasionally says a good thing. "It is very dangerous to be angry with things in general, because it generally means that we are going to do something foolish," is a shrewd and wise remark.
As a role, a work of fiction dealing with current political questions is a mistake, and to this rule we do not think Mies Mabel Robinson's latest novel is an exception, though she is certainly to be congratulated on the ingenuity with which she has escaped the temptation to make her story a bulky party pamphlet. Unionists and Home-rulers, National Leaguers and Anti- Leaguers, will all find in it something to suit them ; and this fact seems to indicate that Miss Robinson's survey of the situa- tion is, to say the least, a tolerably fair one; indeed, in the present heated condition of public opinion, there is something quite noteworthy in the impartiality of her distribution of sympathy to evicted tenants and impecunious landlords. The mistake she has made betrays itself in the construction of her story, which is almost inevitably clumsy. Love and politics, the two principal constituents of the novel, do not fuse together as they are made to fuse in some of the political novels of Lord Beaconsfield and Anthony Trollope; and Miss Robinson has committed the error of sadly overcrowding her stage. Still, though the book as a whole is somewhat shapeless, it contains some passages more vigorous than anything we have previously seen from the writer's pen.
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