THREE NOVELS.*
A PERSON who has written a good ordinary novel should not on that account rashly conclude himself capable of undertaking a historical one, because the gifts requisite for this style of fiction are of a peculiar and more un- common kind. Scott and Dumas pere were, of course, endowed liberally with them ; and so, perhaps, was Carlyle, judging by the vividness and interest which he imparts to some of his portraits from the past,—such as Abbot Samson, of St. Edmundsbury, for example. But if Mr. Minto imagines himself to belong to this rarely gifted class of writers, we fear he is 'mistaken. And as the exigencies of a historical novel are not to be met satisfactorily by extensive tracts of dry history, moistened with only a tiny streamlet of story, his new work, dating at the time of Wat Tyler's rebellion in 1381, is less successful than his previous one, The Crack of Doom, which treated of events and people purely imaginary and modern. One very noticeable feature in The Mediation of Ralph Hardelot is the discrepancy between the strength of its personages' characters and individualities, considered as they would actually have been in real life, and the small amount of effect which they produce upon the reader's mind. For though in themselves a most resolute and ener- getic set of mortals, who always know what they want and go straight to their ends, and are remarkably free from indecision, wishy-washiness, or feebleness of any kind, yet the impression they make is by no means correspondingly forcible, owing to the slightness with which they are delineated. Thus, vigour of design is marred by faintness of outline ; and one has to grieve over such a waste of opportunities as a heroine capable of exciting no sentiment warmer than profound indifference, notwithstanding qualities which, if properly brought out and done justice to, ought really to have given her a high degree of interest. The character of chief importance is the hero, one of Wycliffe's . priests, an earnest, single-minded young enthusiast, who devotes himself unselfishly to mediate • (L) The Mediation of Ralph Rardelot. By William Minto. London: Macmillan and Co.—(2.) The Rebel Rose. London: Bentley and Son.— (3.) The Man with a Shadow. By G. Manville Fenn. London: Ward and Downey.
between Richard II. and the insurgent peasantry, and receives from both parties whom he tries to benefit, that ingratitude which is very apt to be the recompense of would-be mediators. The wicked robber-knight who is his especial enemy must cer- tainly have been taken from Reginald Front de Boeuf ; and in one or two other respects also—particularly where the hero is imprisoned in the wicked knight's castle and released by a band of peasants—Ivanhoe is sufficiently recalled to mind to render inevitable a comparison to which Mr. Minto would have done more wisely not to expose himself. He has ability enough for the book to be not unreadable, in spite of its shortcomings. But it contains too much history and too little story ; the two are not blended together very skilfully, and he needs a reminder of the unpermissibleness of le genre ennuyeux.
A political romance of our own day comes next, for The Rebel Rose is a love-story grafted upon a series of sketches of modern politicians, and is a compound of love and politics wherein the latter receives considerably most attention. The sketches are partly done from life and partly not, being real as regards the immaterial, and unreal as regards the material aspect of the people portrayed ; and they may be defined as actually existing sentiments incarnated in non-existent bodies, and going about like thinly disguised masqueraders, whose costumes are in no wise designed to conceal the wearer's real identity. When we are shown a wonderfully talented and versatile Liberal leader, who believes his country's welfare to be bound up with his own dictatorship, and brings forward an ultra-Radical measure which breaks up his party and alienates a Marquis of great family and territorial influence who has hitherto been his staunch supporter,—when, we say, we are shown such a portrait as this, it is impossible to doubt the original whence it was taken, even though it may be un- adorned with large shirt-collars, and have the outward sem- blance of a middle-aged widower who is entangled in a very undesirable liaison with a colleague's wife, and falls in love with the heroine. Again, Rolfe Bellarmin's disguise as a bachelor of bourgeois extraction is not likely to cause any difficulty in finding a likeness for a brilliant young free-lance who leads the small band of Progressive Tories, and coquettes alternately with the Government and the Opposition. And it certainly cannot be supposed that the trifling additions of height and a handle to his name are intended to obscure recog- nition of a well-known figure in. the cynical, cigarette-loving, extreme Radical Tommy Tressell, whom nobody takes seriously- or credits with any sincerity of convictions. Parliamentary nature, rather than human nature as a :whole, is what the author appears to have studied; and in his love for the House of Commons atmosphere, he allows it to pervade his work to a degree that ordinary nnsenatorial humanity is tempted to resent. For descriptions of Parliamentary manners and cus- toms, intrigues, negotiations, party-moves, lobbies, and terraces, are not what one generally wants in a novel, however true to life the descriptions may be. And readers would probably have preferred somewhat more action and incident, instead of quite BO many details as to component parts (both animate and inanimate), of the House of Commons; and a sufficiency of conversations to gladden the heart of Cherbuliez's Lady Rovel, who was of opinion that la discussion est encore ce gu'il y a de moires ennuyeuz dans ce monde. The "Rebel Rose" herself is a young lady lineally descended from the Stuarts, and in the very impossible position of having adherents who regard her as the rightful Queen of England, and are barely restrained by the Act of Settlement from claiming the Crown for her. Notwithstanding the absurdity of her sham royalty and ambition to resemble Mary Queen of Scots, she is a sweet girl enough, though not thrillingly interesting. And as we cared sufficiently about her to wish for her future happiness, we disapprove of her matrimonial choice, and should like her to have taken the chivalrous, loyal, unswervingly faithful Lord Stonehenge, with whom we should have felt much better satisfied of her prospect of felicity than with the volatile young man who found it possible to be enamoured of her, and of a married lady of peculiarly shady principles, almost simultaneously, and who did not scruple to make his proposal to her just after professing eternal love and devotion to her wedded rival. The book's incidents are all reserved for the last few chapters, and then compressed into a denouement which—though having the merit of avoiding an anti-climax- seems disproportionately abrupt and hurried when compared with the length of the preceding part.
After a romance of history, and one of politics, we come to a romance of the charnel-house. For that term seems undeniably applicable to a story wherein science enters the tomb, not figuratively.but literally, to compel it to give up its prey; and wherein coffins, coffin-furniture, skulls, vaults, mouldering remains, and sextonesque (if we may coin a word expressive of our meaning) concerns in general, are obtruded as largely as is the case in The Man with a Shadow. Horace North is a clever young country doctor, with a theory to the effect that death by shock is a blot upon science, and no man in health and vigour ought to be allowed to die in consequence of an accident or operation. The apparent death, according to him, is only a trance to enable Nature to commence building up again the injured tissues ; and regarding it as merely a sleep during which she would repair all damages if aided by man, he holds it the bounden duty of medical men to try and find out how to sustain the patient whilst the work of restoration goes on. Enthusiastic about his theory, and eager for a suitable subject to experiment on, no sooner • is what he wants placed within reach by the sudden death of Sir Luke Candlish, than he gets admission to the Candlish mausoleum by corrupting the sexton, and therefor night after night carries on ghastly and unlawful operations, until seized with a terrible conviction that he has only managed to affect the ethereal, spiritual part of the deceased, which, in return for his interference, has entered into and become part of himself. "He felt that, failing to arrest the decay of Luke Candlish, he had imbibed the essence of the man, which, needing a fleshy body in which to live, had possessed him, so that his fate seemed to be that he must evermore live a double life, in which there was one soul under the control of his well-schooled brain; the other, wild, independent, and for whose words and actions he must respond." The result of this belief is that his words and deeds partake some- times of the nature of the deceased and sometimes of his own. And as Sir Luke was a drunken, coarse reprobate, whilst Horace is quite the reverse, there ensues a kind of modified Hyde and Jekyll business, which not unnaturally produces doubts as to Horace's sanity. With four couples to be paired off by the end, and an unscrupulous maid whose heart is set on securing her mistress's admirer for herself, there is no lack of other- material to engage attention, as well as the leading idea set forth above, whence the title is derived. And the work-is a lively (if improbable) story of the sensa- tional school, with plenty of " go," keeping up its interest throughout, and a fresh proof of the abundant imagination and cleverness which Mr. Fenn's writings have already shown him to possess. Grumbling at the improbabilities of a book which has entertained us, is, we confess, base ingratitude. But for all that, the crippled girl's intervention in the nick of time to save her beloved, approaches too nearly to the impossible for us not to take exception to it. Had she been aware of his ..danger, we would have said nothing, knowing that strong mental stimulus sometimes works bodily wonders ; but as it was, her sudden recovery of the use of her limbs is unaccount- able, and simply miraculous. Is it the fault of author or printer that " unpleasa.ntry " is twice used in the sense of " unpleasantness " P
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