RECENT NOVELS.*
Mn. WILLIAM BLACK'S new novel has something of the panoramic quality—given by a constantly shifting background —of The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton ; and we recognise our old friend Queen Titania in the unnamed " small creature who keeps her own and certain other households in meek sub- jection." There are, too, the old gay humour, and almost more than the old beauty in the descriptive passages ; but here the resemblances end. The earlier book was a comedy; the latter one, in spite of the unbroken brightness of its first two volumes, is in essence a tragedy, and as such it enters into comparison, not with The Strange Adventures, but with that noble tragic novel, Maeleod of Dare. It cannot be said to stand the comparison *ell. To protest against a denouement simply because of its gloom is unreasonable. To give a cheerful end to such a story, for example, as that which is told in Shakespeare's King Lear would be to fling truth of human nature to the winds; but for the emotional satis- faction which any work of tragic art ought to leave behind it, we demand—and justly demand—that the climax shall be inevitable, that it shall be the growth of germs of catastrophe which have been latent from the first. It is not so here, for there is a want of essential harmony between the nature of Amelie Dumaresq, as revealed to us in the earlier portion of the book, and that action of hers which has such terrible issues. That such a girl might, in certain circumstances, have turned her back upon her art, and even upon the man to whom she owed all that was best and brightest in her life, is possible, though barely probable ; but it is safe to declare it absolutely impossible that she should have succumbed to the spells of so poor a creature as the young Russian Paul Hitrovo. The nature of Hitrovo's fasci- nation is altogether inexplicable, and Mr. Black does not even attempt to explain it, the result being that the wreck of two lives does not merely harrow, but bewilders and irritates us, It is not a case of leaving the noble Arthur for the more human Lancelot, for Wolfenberg is much more human than the cold reticent Russian : it is not a conceivable case of any kind; it is simply an enigma without a solution. Happily, there is much more in the book than its gloomy tragedy. In Wolfenberg, the great imaginative painter, we have one of those ideal heroes whom Mr. Black can create so winningly ; and in his lighter humorous portraiture he is as successful as ever. The passionate poetess, known as Sappho, and her pug-dog, Phaon,''are a delicious pair, and the irascible Major makes a fine third. Some of Mr. Black's greatest literary successes • (1.) Wolfenberg By William Black. 3 vols. London : Sampan Low and 00.—(2.) Tho Moir.Prosumptivo and t1, Hoir-Apporont. By Mrs. Oliphant. • 3 vols. London: Macmillan and co.—(34 His (,)race. By W. K. Korrfo. 2 vole. T,ondon Methuen's:ad Co.—K.) The Step.eist,re, By B. McQueen Gray. 3 vole.London; Bioliard Bentley and Son.—(5.) Miss Blanchard of Chicago. By Albert Kovill•Davieo. 3 vole Loudon, F. V. White and Oo —(6.) Out of the Taw of Death. By Frank Barrett. 3 vole. London: Cassell and Co.— (7.) Nurse Elisio. By G. Manville roan. 2 vols. London : Hunt and Elaokett.
are, however, to be found in the descriptive passages, the truth and beauty of which will be recognised by all lovers of the middle sea, If one could only take out the story, Wolfenberg would be perfectly enjoyable ; but, unfortunately, the story cannot be got rid of.
Mrs. Oliphant takes the somewhat unusual course of writing an apologetic preface to her novel, and in this preface she ex- presses a quite unnecessary anxiety. The conditions of publishing have altered so much of late years, that some- times the works of an author seem to follow each other with almost reckless rapidity ; and as several recent books of Mrs. Oliphant's have appeared at very abort intervals, she is apprehensive of a charge of over-production. She need not be afraid. The evidence for such an offence is found not in quantity, but in quality ; and if Mrs.. Oliphant every year turns out six novels of the quality of The Heir-Presumptive and the Heir-Apparent, no reader is likely to complain. In the new book, as in its immediate predecessor, The Cuckoo in the Nest, the principal character is that of a clever, scheming, and unscrupulous woman ; but the action of Mrs. John Parke, who has married the heir- presumptive to the Frogmore title and estates, and sees him supplanted by the birth of an unlooked-for heir-apparent, is a much more complicated and tortuous affair than the upward progress of Patty Hewitt. Patty, with all her unscrupulous self-seeking, had a certain rough, low code of honour which would have saved her from actual criminality ; but Mrs. Parke is of the stuff of which, under favouring con- ditions, criminals are made. She is practically a murderess When she visits Lady Frogm ore with the thought of attack- ing, through the mother, the unborn child who is the one enemy to her peace, aud the attempt at the actual murder of the boy, whom she has enfeebled, but failed to kill, does not reveal her as a worse, but only as a more reckless and desperate woman than she was sixteen years before. Patty, for the most part, fights in the open, and conquers by sheer audacity; Mrs. Parke has the true criminal cunning, and she disguises herself, more or less effectively, even from those with whom she might feel most safe. Her character is not only a vigorous creation, but a searching and truthful study in moral pathology, that would suffice to confer distinction upon any story in which it appeared. The Ileir-Presumptive, and the Heir-Apparent is not, however, a one-character novel, as was The Cuckoo in the Nest. Lord Frogmore, the septua- genarian bridegroom and father, and the colourless but. courageous Agnes Hill, who acts as mother to the practically motherless Mar, are both examples of that fine art which gives individuality and interest to intrinsically ordinary and commonplace material ; but perhaps the most striking of the minor portraits is that of the heavy, stupid John Parke, with his silent admiration of his wife's cleverness and his honest horror when he realises the end to which that cleverness has been tending.
In fiction, as in real life, dukes are much less plentiful than untitled commoners, earls, and even marquises ; but there is a fair sprinkling of them, and of all the imaginary dukes with whom we are acquainted, Mr. Norris's is the most delight- fully human. We were going to add, "and unducal," but it is wise to refrain from an epithet which might seem to indicate an ambition on our part to speak with authority upon the essential nature of dukes, and such knowledge is far too high for us,—we cannot attain unto it. Even the humblest of us, however, has his conception of the typical duke, as the German had of the typical camel; and it is this conception —of stateliness and reserve all compact—which is so courageously and engagingly set at naught in Mr. Norris's pages. His grace of Hurstbourne is a grown-up boy,—boyish in his tastes, in his recklessness, in his frankftood-nature, most boyish of all in his determination to outshine, baffie, and in every way discomfit that very adult cousin, Paul Gascoigne, whose wealth and cleverness make the contest from first to last a very unequal affair. Of course, we know all along that the duke will be victorious, for his victory is demanded by those conventions of fiction to which Mr. Norris always pays due respect; and there is real cleverness in the adoption of the- expedient by which, in the final encounter, the duke's strong muscles rather than his wits extricate him from the very tight Place in which he finds himself. The struggle on the floor of Gascoigne's chambers for the possession of the document with which the better-,equipped combatant has threatened a coup-de.gr(ice, may not be warfare of the legitimate kind, but it has a barbaric magnificence, and, dramatically, it is one of Mr. Norris's happiest effects. Still, good as ie the duke himself, we can hardly regard His Grace as one of its author's best novels. Though it has the intellectual skill and literary finish never wanting in Mr. Norris's stories, it is thinner in substance than some of its predecessors, and it lacks the touches of happy epigram which made The 1?ogue so brilliant as well as so charming a book.
The Step-sisters is in every way an admirable novel,—good in plan, in arrangement, and in execution. The characters are thoroughly alive ; the story, which has one or two subtle and difficult situations, is narrated with singular clearness and skill ; and, best of all, the author has that knowledge of the world and of human nature which is the one thing needful for effective fiction, though so many fairly popular novelists seem, if we may judge from their practice, to consider it the one thing needless. The principal heroine is possibly a shade too bright and good for human nature's daily food, a little too free from the weaknesses which beset frail humanity,—for her pride is such very proper pride that it can hardly be counted as a weakness. The rich, large-hearted, chivalrous, shy lover, Victor Thomson, and Julie Fitzgerald, the younger of the two step-sisters, with her gaiety, her audacity, and her warm heart, with its thin covering of surface selfishness, are, on the other band, refreshingly human, and as portraits, if not as persons, they may be pronounced faultless. All shy people ought to unite in a vote of thanks to Mr. or Miss—we incline to the Miss—Gray for her sympathetic delineation of the timid, faithful Victor. The shy man of fiction is generally an object of ridicule, because novelists generally seize upon that kind of shyness which is the result either of stupidity or morbid self-consciousness ; but Victor's shyness, which is of a kind often seen in real life, is the result of genuine modesty and entirely unaffected self-depreciation. The situations in which it lands him are not really ludicrous ; there is nothing in them of the low-comedy character, but they have a pathetic humour of their own, and Victor's most -obvious weakness accentuates his charm. We are inclined to doubt whether such a man as he could ever have believed that each a girl as Ruth was guilty of the offence with which she was charged by her kleptomaniac mother, who was the real criminal ; but it is quite possible that his general self-distrust might include a special distrust of his own insight into character. If, however, this be a defect, it is the only one of any consequence that we have discovered in a most able and interesting novel.
The construction of Miss Blanchard of Chicago is not quite so ingenious or symmetrical as was that of its author's first novel, An American Widow, and it certainly has no narrative expedient so fresh in invention as the artificial rattlesnake fangs. Still, it is a very fair specimen of the novel which is written for the sake of the story, and for little else, We might Hay for nothing else, did we not discern a special aim in the earlier American chapters. What Dickens did for the York- shire schoolmasters in his immortal picture of Dotheboys Hail, Mr. Kevill-Davies, in his sketch of the Emersons of Square Mile Farm, does for the Western swindlers who starve and otherwise maltreat the English lads for whose agricul- tural education they have received a handsome premium. The pages devoted to this portion of the experiences of Arthur Valiance are, we think, the best part of the novel ; but his later adventures have plenty of excitement and go, and every- thing in the book but its style is good of its kind, save, per- haps, the complicated story of the misfortunes of Mrs. Carlyle, which is a trifle wearisome. As for the literary manner, it has, at any rate, the merit of unpretentiousness; but Mr. Kevin. Davies might learn to write '4 different from," instead of "" different to," and not to substitute " like " for "as."
Mr. Frank Barrett generally succeeds in weaving a story of thrilling plot-interest, and he has not done anything ranch better in this kind than Out of the .falea of Death. The book is full of good material, which is handled in -a thoroughly workmanlike manner. There is, in the first place, a Russian Nihilist Prince, who has taken refuge in England, and whom the St. Petersburg authorities are specially anxious to see back again in Russia, Then there is the girl who tells the story, a nameless waif of the streets, who rescues Taros from the cellar of a Thames- side beerhonse, whither he has been inveigled by his foes, and
is in turn rescued by him from her life of degradation ; and lastly, there is the wily, false-hearted Irishman, Barry Kavanagh, who is at once in the secrets of the Nihilists and in the pay of the Russian police, and who does his best to betray the man whom he calls his friend. These are the principal characters, and it will be seen that in their relations to each other there are flue possibilities of exciting narrative ; but it would be unfair to catalogue the incidents and situa- tions in which these possibilities take form. The escape from Siberia is specially good, though hardly better than the opening scenes at the Mariner's Joy,' which give assurance that Mr. Barrett is in his best vein, and that some thrilling hours are ahead. There cannot be much doubt that Out of the jaws of Death will prove a decided circulating-library success.
In Nurse Elisia, which is an ordinary novel for grown-up people, Mr. Manville Fenn does not exhibit the good judgment so unfailingly present in his stories for boys. Boys are, indeed, as exacting and critical an audience as a man could well have ; and above all, they are an audience which demands substance, and will not be content with the most charming unsubstantiality. Nurse Elisia can hardly be called charming, and it is decidedly unsubstantial. Mr. Fenn deserves our gratitude for giving us only two volumes, instead of three ; but, as a matter of fact, all the story he has to tell might have been compressed into one volume, and that a very slender one. There is a terrible scarcity of body, and a superfluity of padding ; and while the padding has no special faults that obviously call for censure, it is alto- gether devoid of attractiveness. The main theme of the novel is the love-affair between Neil Elthorne, who is practising surgery at one of the great London hospitals, and the girl who is known as Nurse Elisia, and is not known to be the daughter of a duke. There is also a subsidiary love-story which, in the second volume, is made to provide a somewhat melodramatic situation ; but the inevitable complications have a. certain air of unreality, and the talkee-talkee which fills so many of Mr. Fenn'a pages is rather wearisome. There are, of course, worse novels than Nurse Elisia, which is, indeed, in- effective rather than bad ; it is simply the name on the title- page which makes us expect something better.
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