NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
THESE five short stories by Miss Wilkins are longer than her earlier ones, but it cannot be said that their vertebra are insufficient for their length. Four of them belong to the period of hood; tippets, and tuckers, and are suggestive of miniatures perfumed with lavender and pot-pourri. Parson Lord's painful reserve in domestic intercourse and his equally painful outspokenness in prayer; Love's longing for love; and the Squire's manful treatment of a deadlock make a charming story, and one quite in Miss Wilkins's best manner. The adagios and largos to which she has accustomed us are • (L) The Love of Parson Lord, and other Stories. By Mary E. Wilkins. London: Harper and Brothers. [6s.]—(2.) The Green Flag, and other Stories of War and Sport. By A. Conan Doyle. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. [6s.]- (3.) The Wallet of Hat Lung. By Ernest Brainab. London : Grant Richards. [6s.)—(4.) Hearts Importunate. By Evelyn Dickinson. London : William Heinemann. [6s.]—(5.) Was it Right to Forgive? a Domestic Romance. By Amelia E. Barr. London : T. Fisher ITnwin. [6s.]—.(6.) The Adventure of Princess Sylvia. By Mrs. C. N. Williamson. (" The Novelist," No. IX.) London : Methuen and Co. [6d.)—(7.) Chrtstalia : an Unknown Quantity. By Esme Stuart. London : Methuen and Co. [Cs.]—(3.1 The strong God Circumstance.
E4 Helen Shipton. London Methuen and Co. 00 • so delightful that we are hardly disposed to welcome the more stirring movement in "Catherine Carr," where drums and fifes and scarlet coats play an important part; but it is excellent in its way, and we return contentedly to the New England of to-day in the last story,—" One Good Time." There is nothing better in the whole book than the con- cluding sentence. We do not, as a rule, care for the principle of presenting to the public the portrait of an author, but in the present instance the charming miniature of Miss Wilkins almost converts us to another view.
Dr. Conan Doyle has gleaned from the short stories written by him in the last six years a sheaf of tales concerned with war and sport, a fact which, he observes, may commend them to the temper of the times. Apart from their topical character, however, the contents of The Green Flag will be welcomed on their own merits. Dr. Doyle is an admirable narrator, and when his theme is arma virumgue nobody can be better company. The story which gives its name to the collection is a striking study of the strange logic of the fight- ing Irishman, having for its hero a young Fenian who, after organising a mutiny amongst his comrades, dies like a hero beneath the green flag he had smuggled into action as the emblem of revolt. The tales of the ferocious buccaneer, Captain Sharkey, are excellently invented; Brigadier Gerard's unintended fox-hunt is a capital illustration of the humours of campaigning; while in "The Croxley Master" Dr. Conan Doyle describes an irregular but exciting prize- fight with a fervour and enthusiasm which the most pacific reader will find it hard to resist. Having said thus much in praise of a capital book, we may be allowed to express regret that Dr. Conan Doyle should have misrepresented his fellow- countrymen by the faulty brogue on pp. 2.27-2.`23. It is a positive libel to make an Irishman say " winder" for " window " ; while " horse-bradin'" is one of the solecisms which show a defective ear for the nuances of the Anglo- Irish dialect.
How far Mr. Ernest Bramah has borrowed from authentic Chinese sources in the volume of tales which he has put forth under the title of The Wallet of Kai Lung we are unable, in our ignorance of Celestial literature, to say. Internal evidence would seem to point merely to the adoption, by a sympathetic outsider, of the Chinese standpoint with an occasional subtly veiled arriere pensee, and to the imitation of the Chinese method of narration. The great point about the book, however, is that it is not merely a clever exotic tour de force; it is genuinely and irresistibly entertaining. Kai Lung is a professional story-teller, and the first taste of his quality is given in the delightfully topsy-turvy comedy of Chinese courtship narrated to the brigands into whose clutches Kai Lung has fallen. The " Transmutation of Ling," as it is called, tells of the chequered career of the high- minded and studious youth who, for all his love of peace was pitchforked into the profession of arms, became a hero malgre lui, and ended by marrying the daughter of the magician whose magic elixir had wrought such a strange effect on his personal equation. Mr. Bramah treats the most ludicrous situations with imperturbable gravity, and the excesses of Chinese ceremonious diction are repro- duced or imitated in a most engaging manner. The tales, which are all amusing, are embellished with a profusion of maxims and proverbs of a cynical or ironical cast, amongst which it may suffice to quote the following :—" Money is hundred-footed ; upon perceiving a tael lying apparently un- observed upon the floor, do not lose the time necessary in stooping, but quickly place your foot upon it, for one fails nothing in dignity thereby ; but should it be a gold piece, distrust all things, and valuing dignity but as an empty name, cast your entire body upon it." Though the book is probably written with the sole intention to divert, the picture which it gives of the intrigues, the corruptness, and the tyrannical extortions of the Mandarins shows that now as ever there is nothing to prevent a writer ridendo dicere verum.
It is quite depressing to think of the amount of cleverness and culture, local knowledge and careful observation, that are often lavished on the writing of an ineffective novel. Miss Dickinson has really an excellent style, she is familiar with life in the bush, in Sydney, and in London, she has faithfully studied various types of Colonials, and is .sympathetically disposed towards the highly educated Amazon of to-day. Yet in spite of all these advantages, we have found Hearts Importunate strangely disappointing and unreal. Ralph Hazen is an embittered man with a past who buries himself in the wilds of New South Wales to find an anodyne for his grief in hard work. There he meets his affinity in Avis Fletcher, a superb young lady, but also hampered by her antecedents. Hero and heroine are both terribly sensitive personages, and their final reunion is only achieved after an immense amount of preliminary quarrelling. Hazen at their second meeting "snarled through his teeth" at Avis, and Avis, five minutes after she had kissed Ralph, branded him with immeasurable meanness."
Mrs. Barr paints in Was it flight to Forgive I a some- what glaring contrast between immaculate virtue and the laxity and vice of New York society. The vulgarity of the "smart" Mrs. Filmer is positively repulsive ; so too is the wilful wickedness of her daughter ; while the perfections of the highly liberal Calvinist, Peter van Hoosen, and his lovely daughter Adriana impose a serious tax on the credulousness of the reader. Long dissertations upon Browning's poetry and other serious subjects interrupt with- out enlivening Mrs. Barr's story. The only really amusing passage in the book is, we are quite sure, purely uninten- tional. "Put on your hat and your new snit," says a friend
to Adriana. Full of pleasant expectations, Adriana dressed herself in the sunshine, and came downstairs in an unusually merry mood" (p. l74).
We never like Mrs. Williamson so well as when she emanci- pates herself from the shackles of sensationalism and indulges in her graceful talent for sentimental comedy. Of this talent we have a very agreeable specimen in The Adventure of Princess Sylvia. The heroine is the daughter of an English lady of rank and widow of a German Grand Duke, and she has fallen in love with the Emperor Maximilian of Rhaetia., who is a sort of idealised portrait of the present German Emperor. But Sylvia has no intention of foregoing the pleasures of a boni-jde courtship, and when the Emperor formally applies for her hand, she immediately plane and carries out a campaign for captivating him under an alias. The Emperor is in the habit of frequenting a remote corner of his dominions for chamois hunting, where he dresses like a peasant, waives all ceremony, and lives incog. at a modest hostelry in the mountains. Here the intrepid Sylvia lays siege to his heart as Mary de Courey, and carries it by storm. Various complications and cross-purposes ensue, but in the end, after Maximilian has sworn at his Chancellor, and Sylvia, for one brief moment, thought of entering a convent, the Imperial lover finds himself in the delightful predicament of being able to reconcile duty with inclination. Of the in- numerable novels that we owe to the Ruritanian formula this is by no means the worst.
Christalla can hardly be called a novel, inasmuch as the heroine is a little girl and love interest of the ordinary type is conspicuously absent. But it is none the less a very pretty story of the excellent influence exerted by a charming Jrpban child on her two elderly protectors, who are really her slaves.
Arthur Kenyon, the central figure of The Strong God Cir- edinstance, is an ex-University coach, unjustly condemned by the authorities for bribing the printers to furnish him with copies of examination papers. He subsequently becomes a clergyman in the Midlands, where the squire of the parish, as the result of a terrible accident in his youth, never appears in the day-time. Ultimately the squire, whose strong views on the subject of game preservation embroil him with his neighbours, makes a love match with the lady who, as 8, child, had caused his disfigurement. The parson is excul- pated, and a confused and artificial story is brought to an unconvincing close.
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