REGENT SHORT STORIES.*
A WRITER in one of the January magazines contends that we must, in our books, have an escape from the actual. We can see the outside of things for ourselves ; " what we require is some one who will show us what we cannot see for our- selves." Of all the available modes of escape from the actual, none is more obvious than the ghost-story ; none, • (L) The Shape of Fear, and other Ghostly Tales. By Dia W. Peattie. London: Macmillan and Co. [3...)—t21.) Capriccios. By the Duchess of Leeds. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [6.]—(S.) By Roaring Loom. By J. Marshall Mather. With illustrations by Lancelot Speed. London: James Bowden. [S1.1—(4 ) Dumb Foxglove, and other Stories. By Annie Trumbull Slosson. London: Harper and Brothers. P3s.1—(54 Some of Our Neighbours. By Mary B. Wilkins. Loudon : J. M. Dent. [29. 6et.)—(8.) The Book of the Bush. By George Dunderdale. London: Ward, Lock, and Co. [S.- When the Monate Calls. By William S. Walker ("Coo-ee"). London: John Long. [3.. Sti.[—(8.) A Romance of Canvas Town, and other Stories. By Rolf Bold,ewood London: Macmillan and Co. [6s.1--(9.) At Friendly Point. By G. Firth Scott London: James Bowdee. [Ss. tki.1—(10.) Turkitth Bonds. By May Kendall. London : C. Arthur Pearson. Dis.1—(1L) Sweet Audrey. By George Morley. London: Jerrold and Sons. [Si. Toe Man with Two Souls, and other Stories. By Edward W. B. Nicholson, Boilers Librarian. Loudon: David Nutt. IBA also, is harder to handle in a convincing manner, or more liable to perversion by the modern passion for the abnormal. We are glad, therefore, to welcome in the author of The Shape of Fear one who relies for the most telling effects on simple materials, and disdains all ghoulish explorations into the
charnel-house of a diseased imagination. In this domain of fiction half the battle depends on the creation at the outset of an atmosphere of suspense, and in this important essential of ghost-craft Mr. Peattie leaves little to be desired. To take one example, what could be better than the opening of " On the Northern Ice "?—
" The winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as the Milky Way. The silence which rests upon the solitude appears to be white also The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and not to earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls the ehon ether in vast liquid billows. In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actually peopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day after Cain killed Abel, and as if all of humanity's remainder was huddled in affright away from the awful spaciousness of Creation."
This strikes a note of loneliness admirably attuned to the midnight journey of the young Canadian across the frozen lake, to attend as best man at his best friend's wedding, where his sweetheart is to be bridesmaid. Suddenly it comes on him with a shock that he is not alone; that a white skater in fluttering garments is speeding over the ice in front of him as fast as ever werewolf went. He follows the phantom figure, diverging from his straight course in the vain effort to overtake it. The white skater fades away in the dawn, and as he reaches his destination his friend meets him with the tidings that his sweetheart had died in the night, after crying out that her lover was on the ice, and would perish in ignorance of a great wind-rift that lay in his track. The notion of a person being saved from imminent danger by the apparition of a friend or lover is not unfamiliar to students of ghostly literature, but the setting in the present instance is fresh and romantic. Mr. Peattie is equally happy in ghost stories of a more homely or domestic character; witness the profoundly touching tale of the little girl who, when she knew she was dying, begged her parents to keep her till after Christmas. "My presents are not finished yet," she made moan, " and I did so want to see what I was going to have. You can't have a very happy Christmas witeout me, I should think. Can you arrange to keep me somehow till after then ?" We will not spoil the enjoyment of the readers of this beautiful little story by describing how this "dear little ghost" was finally and happily laid. Then we have in "The Spectral Collie" a delightful and heroin dog ghost, who brought succour to her master in his urgent need, and will specially commend herself to many readers of the Spectator. One or two of the stories are a little aimless, but in nearly every instance there is some underlying poetic thought or ethical motive which, if not in accordance with the results of the investigations of the Society of Psychical Research, at least lends artistic or moral interest to the narrative. Strange to say, the only story which strikes a jarring note is that which gives its name to the collection. Mr. Peattie is evidently lacking in self-criticism, or he would never have given it the place of honour in his collection. Some vagaries of (presumably) American spelling, which include "horde" for "hoard" and "indict" for "indite,'' constitute our only other ground for complaint against this delightful little book.
If it were not that musical titles had been somewhat dia• credited by their association with a peculiarly lurid school of modern fiction, Capriccios would be a well-named, as well as a pleasing, collection of stories. They have daintiness and fantasy, though the whimsical humour which one naturally connects with the element of caprice is absent throughout. The story of the little Breton girl lured to Paris by the specious promises of a young artist named Dreyfus—the Duchess of Leeds is not always judicious in her choice of names—is almost entirely in the minor key, while the sketch of the lonely woman who has waited ten years for the return of her lover only to realise, when he does come, that loyalty, not love, will keep him faithful to his promise, is a tragedy in miniature. Then the story called "A Shepherd Lover," by far the moat ambitions and successful thing in the book, is an antique idyll pure and simple in which the writer has so skilfully and artistically reproduced the Theooritean
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atmosphere, landscape, and dialogue, that we can forgive her such a solecism as " Zanthippe." The opening story, "Pan : a Memory," is a fantastic but graceful romance of an Italian foundling, an elf-like child, brought up by a wealthy lady, who finally quite his patroness to become an operatic tenor— rather a sad falling off from his Donatello-like boyhood— loses his health, and breaks his heart over a heartless enchantress. The element of actuality is so successfully avoided in the earlier part of the story that one regrets its partial intrusion at the close. Novelists should always bear in mind Hans von Billow's remark about tenors. "The Soul of Daphne" has a suggestive eeriness, which is due quite as much to what the writer leaves unsaid as to what she says, while the last dialogue between husband and wife, as the latter disappears into the sea mist, proves the Duchess of Leeds to be a sympathetic student rather than a servile imitator of Maeterlinck. The "Capriccio" which com- pletes the volume is the love-romance, with an unexpectedly, and even absurdly, happy ending, of a poor country girl who pays a visit to London, loses her heart to a young but impecunious nobleman, and is ultimately enabled to marry him by the unexpected generosity of the beautiful heiress with whom he was on the point of making a match. The theme calls for more gaiety and vivacity than the author has at command. Though her talent is in great measure assimila- tive, and her work suffers from its excessive plaintiveness, these stories have a delicacy and elegiac charm that largely redeem their lack of force and contrast.
Mr. Mather prefaces his sketches of Lancashire life, By Roaring Loom, with an interesting introduction, in which he calls that county "a rich ground for the garnering of romance "—with which statement we cordially agree—but adds that " Lancashire remains unknown, un- noticed, and uncared for " in fiction, which is a highly disputable assertion. Mrs. Gaskell, he admits, "wrote beautifully and touchingly of its operative life, but she wrote from hearsay." Miss Fothergill "lacked realism." Edwin Waugh and Ben Brierley " wrote from their heart's experi- ence and with their heart's blood, but they were local and vernacular, and never succeeded in nationalising in literature the Lancashire life." Now it seems to us that Mr. Mather is quite needlessly distressed on this point. Whether Mrs. Gaskell's knowledge was from hearsay or not, she not only wrote "beautifully and touchingly" of industrial life in Lancashire, but she invested it with such poetry, dignity, and romance that no one could impute provinciality to her work. If, however, we differ from Mr. Mather in some respects as a critic. we have little but praise for his efforts as a delineator of factory life. Fifteen years' residence in the heart of industrial Lancashire has familiarised him with every phase of his subject. He has learned to recognise the "dumb drudgery, the silent sorrow, the quaint philosophy, the dry humour, and the sturdy independence" of the men and women of both the old and the new schools of labour as something "far too precious to be lost," and has given his admiration literary expression in a aeries of short and striking stories, chiefly of a tragic complexion, put for the moat part in the month of an old engineer and told in the most uncom- promising vernacular. Mr. Mather defends the practice on the score of the fitness between the Lancashire character and the Lancashire speech—which, by the way, he calls a " fast- dying tongue "—but we fear that his loyalty will handicap him as he tells us It handicapped Edwin Waugh, and for the rest we believe that Sir Walter Scott is a better guide in this matter than, say, Mr. Crockett. However, the Lancashire dialect is far easier than that of Galloway, and those who are not rebuffed by its angularities in the first story will be well rewarded for their perseverance.
Another set of excellent American short stories is that given us by Miss Slosson under the fanciful title of Dumb Foxglove. The story which gives its name to the collection is a memoir of a little cripple girl who found her sole consola- tion in devising fantastic cookery recipes based upon her study of the Bible. The ludicrous and the pathetic are subtly blended in this quaint narrative, and the efforts of the child's friends to humour her strange fancy are delightfully told. Very charming, again, is the portrait of the old apple- dealer, "Apple Jonathan," who finds in his favourite fruit illustrations, suggestions, and even moral lessons for every emergency. Best of all, however, is the story of the old maid who devotes her whole life to the service of the suffer- ing brute creation, winning from her neighbours the name of "Animal Ann," and living "in a little house that looks as if folks was movin' or cleanin' house, and sounds like a menagerie." It certainly does not detract from the charm of the story to learn that the life of this female horse-doctor and dog-missionary is still being lived and her work still being carried on in a New England hamlet. A specially attractive feature in these sketches is the author's intimate and loving knowledge of fruit and flowers.—With Miss Slosson's volume we may bracket Miss Wilkins's Some of Our Neighbours, a set of short sketches of New England village worthies, charmingly illustrated and marked by the author's delicate appreciation of the finer traits of rustic character. Here, curiously enough, we find a parallel to Miss Slosson's " Animal Ann " in Amanda Todd, the " friend of cats," a home-missionary, weak in faith but strong in love.
Of the four recently published volumes of Australian short stories and sketches, we unhesitatingly give the preference to Mr. George Dunderdale's Book of the Bush, which contains, in the author's words, "many truthful sketches of the early colonial life of squatters, whalers, convicts, diggers, and others who left their native land and never returned." The minute circumstantiality of Mr. Dunderdale's narratives, and his avoidance of fine writing and melodrama—the curse of Australian fiction—add to the effect of these grim "human documents," which we have found extraordinarily vivid and infinitely more interesting than the great majority of modern novels of adventure. Australia and New Zealand were not colonised with kid gloves ; indeed, the methods adopted are calculated to give "expansionists" pause, and we are glad to see that Mr. Dunderdale is occasionally moved from his im- passive attitude in his recital of the cruelty practised on the blacks. Mr. Dtmderdale, as a rule, abjures sentiment and avoids word-painting, but there is a beautiful passage in which he describes the glories of the English landscape as recalled by him in exile; and fine feeling marks the curious sketch of "The Happy Convict" which closes the collection. Mr. Dunderdale, we may note in conclusion, deals freely with historical personages, his portrait of Colonel Arthur, the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, being peculiarly caustic.
When the Mopoke Calls is a brightly written volume of sketches, on conventional lines, of the trials and humours of Colonial life some thirty or more years back. " Midnight," the story of a bushranger who for a while evaded suspicion by successfully impersonating a captain of police, is a favour- able specimen of Mr. Walker's powers. He, too, we are glad to see, has a kind word for the blacks. Mr. Vedder's pictures are good, but the page references are all wrongly given. Thus that which faces p. 189, and has "p. 189 " printed at its foot, refers to p. 217.—" Rolf Boldrewood's " A Romance of Canvas Town, like much of his later work, marks a sad falling off from Robbery under Arms, and is in great part made up of sheep, sentimentality, and poetical quotations.— Mr. Firth Scott's latest contribution to the literature of the " back blocks" dwell too insistently on submerged humanity to be cheerful reading. The dramatis personx in At Friendly Point are almost without exception wastrels,—" broken-down wrecks, wild sons, and harem-scs.rum fellows," to quote the author's words, and these squalid little tragedies too often inspire repulsion rather than pity.—The series of episodes, founded on the tragical events of the last few years, which Miss Kendal has given us under the title of Turkish Bonds, are not only animated by righteous indignation and generous sympathy with unmerited suffering, but marked by considerable literary power.— Mr. Morley's scenes of rustic life in Warwickshire, collected under the title of Sweet Audrey, are designed, so he tells us, " to illustrate the power which the glamour of the town has upon the mind of the homespun lass." Mr. Morley has considerable command of the Warwickshire dialect and a certain oleographic picturesqueness. But his humour is generally of the unconscious order, witness the following passage which describes the eloping couple in " The Waxen Woman" They were a beautiful pair, she with her dark demonian [sic] style of beauty, he with a style that might appropriately be called semi-angelic." Mr. Morley is very fond of the word " demonian," also of applying most exasperating ineptitude.—The little booklet put forth by the librarian of the Bodleian contains a touching story of the hallucination of a mesmerist who came to believe, on the death of hie betrothed, that her spirit bad passed into his body. " The 'Varsity Mile " is a vigorously humorous story illustrating what may be achieved by force of will, and a graceful Oriental sketch and a legend of the Angel Gabriel complete the collection, which, as the author tells us in his preface, comprises all the prose-tales he has ever written. We hope he may be tempted to persevere; The Man with Two Souls should ensure a friendly hearing to any further venture from Mr. Nicholson's pen.
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