THREE NOVELS.*

ADMIRERS of Mr. Julian Hawthorne's early efforts as a writer of fiction, who are even yet hopeful that be may justify that admi- ration if he can only be persuaded to do justice to himself, will not find Beatrix Randolph unsatisfactory in the same un- pleasant way and to the same unpleasant extent as For-

tune's Fool. He limits himself in the present instance to two volumes; and he does not crowd his canvas with figures. There are no plot complications in Beatrix Randolph ; it is, indeed, rather an episode than a story. It is unsatis- factory all the same, and unworthy of comparison with its author's best work. It is not carefully written ; it contains too many sloppy philosophisings ; and there is no perfect portrait in it, not even that of the heroine. The deception to which she lends herself, and which forms the central incident of the story, is, in its wild improbability, almost worthy of Bryan Sinclair, the villain-buffoon of Fortune's Fool. Beatrix Ran- do4A contains, besides, some incidents and passages which are objectionable, less on account of the flavour of vul- garity in them, than because this vulgarity is obviously forced and unnatural,—like the vulgarity of the refined young lady who, in sheer wilfulness, insists on smoking cigarettes or eating shrimps in the drawing-room ; or the vulgarity of the artist who, capable only of drawing scenes of decorum and tender domesticity, keeps thrusting glaring Bohemian interiors year after year under the eyes of his friends.

Thus, Beatrix Randolph is subjected to an insult from a tipsy musician, which we venture to say no prima donna, or even a second-rate singer, would run the risk of within the walls of any fairly regulated opera-house in the world. Then why should Beatrix be placed under the wing of the dubious Madame Bemax, and almost at the mercy of such a disreputable scoundrel as Hamilton Jocelyn, unless it be to show that Mr. Hawthorne can disgust his readers when he chooses ? Mr. Hawthorne gives as far too much writing like this :—

"There is a philosophy for the poor, and a philosophy for the wealthy ; but the philosophy that can console the debtor has yet to be discovered. Debt does not allow its victim to be either dignified or resigned. It afflicts him, as Job was afflicted, with sore boils, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, so that he can neither stand nor sit, nor move with comfort. He can find no peace, at home or abroad ; he is sought by those who love him not, and no barriers • that he can erect will keep them away."

This is the veriest "A. K. H. B."-and-water, and any fifth-rate essayist could produce it by the volume. We have referred to the central incident in this story as wildly improbable, and by way of proof it is only necessary to mention what that is. Beatrix Randolph, a proud Virginian beauty with a magnificent voice, consents, as a means of paying her brother's debts and saving her father's "honour," to personate before a New York audience Mademoiselle Marana, a Russian prima donna, who has broken off her engagement with the impresario, General Inigo. It is hardly possible to conceive such a girl—in his opening chapter Mr. Hawthorne gives a really charming sketch of her— doing such a thing under any temptation. But that her father and her professional advisers should try such a deception on the most " travelled " people in the world, and on an audience com- posed of persons tens, if not hundreds, of whom must have seen and heard every prima donna in Europe, is utterly preposterbus The real Marana turns up in the end. She proves to be the person on whom Beatrix's brother has squandered his father's money, and Mr. Hawthorne, for no reason which is necessary to his plot, leaves us to infer that she is no better than she should be. She proves a miracle of magnanimity, however. She listens to the pseudo Marana, confesses herself her vocal inferior, sets Edward Randolph free, and disappears. Beatrix's lover, Geoffrey Belling- ham, a man of the " still, strong" type, Mr. Hawthorne ought to have made something of. But whatever Bellingham may develop into after his marriage with Beatrix Randolph, he is before it little better than a rude, sulky fellow, full of opinionativeness and suspicions. The best characters in Beatrix Randolph, indeed, are the unscrupulous but not wholly bad Jewish. impresario, General Inigo (although surely Mr. Hawthorne makes him unnecessarily partial to alcoholics), and Waffle Dinsmore, a tolerant, good-humoured American man of the world. Mr.

* Beatrin Randolph. By Julian Hawthorne. 2 vols. London Matto and Windus. 1884.—Zero a Story of Monte Carlo. By Mrs. Campbell Freed. 2 vole. London : Chapman and Hall. 1284.—Miss Yandeleur. By John Saunders.

vols. London.: F. V. White and Co. 1884.

Hawthorne's sub-sarcastic sketches are the best things in this book. Take, by way of example :—

"Mrs. March, of the Women's Political Association, slim, erect, holding her elbows close to her sides, with a tight business mouth, and yearning melancholy eyes ; possessing an insufferable command of language, enhanced by a faculty of seeming to repress more than she uttered Mrs. Bright, a beauty, the wife of a wealthy brewer, bolding herself as if she were on horseback, rushing at a topic or an enterprise as if it were a five-barred gate, and forgetting it the next moment,—headstrong, enthusiastic, blasde. She had em- braced Herbert Spencer during the last season, and reproduced him in jets and sparkles Our people have what may be called a New. York look, but there is no New-York type—the former being a trick of facial expression merely, the latter a matter of feature and structure. But we are preparing to.people a hemisphere, while the European nations have to pack themselves together like sardines in a box or pickles in a jar, mathematically, economically, and irre- vocably, and by natural selection have long since lost their elbows and idiosyncrasies. We are all elbows on this side of the water, especially since we have ceased to be all fists and shoulders."

This does remind us, though ever so little, of the author of Saxon Studies, and is something to be thankful for.

Zero is in truth very sad stuff. So far as plot goes, it begins with love and Jesuitry, and proceeds, through gambling and poisoning, to "the dynamite explosion at Monte Carlo, the miraculous escape of the heir to a throne, and the tragic fate of Colonel Cazalette and Varuna Fano." Monte Carlo is a remark- able place, as everybody knows, frequented by people whose on-goings—and sometimes whose goings-off—are very dreadful indeed. There is a great deal of gas there, and high play, and wild talk. There is "glorious sunshine, the sky sapphire, the sea like an amethyst; a touch of mistral in the air which sets the eucalyptus trees rustling, and the palms waving." When night comes, "stillness and wild solitude blend curiously with the fret and fever of human life. The grim heights, majestic and time- worn, which tower in the background, look sullen sentinels of this pleasure-ground of vice and frivolity. Nature, serene and chaste, seems to rebuke silently the meretricious devices of Art. Far to the south stretches the sea, pallid and moon-tipped."

It is frequented seemingly by all sorts of people,—princes, and folks that have "deep-set eyes, bistre-shaped," and other folks that drop their " h's " and hold Mr. Cook's excursion tickets. Murder, misery, and intrigue personified, lounge or move wearily about—preparatory to suicide—while the band is

playing "a crisp precise gavotte, by Corelli, a passionless piece of harmony, full of quaint roulades, delicate appoggia- turas, and carefully premeditated affectations." This should be all very tragic and soul-depressing, we suppose ; but somehow it seems to be essentially unreal; while what is not unreal, such as the incident of Mrs. Featherstone's "Quart-pot Tea," is poor comedy. Mrs. Freed would seem to have set herself to imitate " Ouida," but she has happily failed. Not one of her characters is interesting,—neither the murdering and morphiated Mrs. Kilsyth, nor George -Warrender, the lover of her two daughters in succession, nor those daughters themselves, though the one is a devout simpleton and the other a gambler, nor Colonel Cazalette, conspirator, scoundrel, and Jesuit agent. It is a pity that the closing dynamite explosion had not destroyed

them all—before Mrs. Freed put them into Zero. Yet tha read- ing of this novel leaves behind it the impression that Mrs. Praed has literary power of a kind, and might exercise it to purpose. Why should she not continue to give us pictures of Austra- lian life ? By far the best characters in Zero is Mrs. Feather- stone, a pretty Australian, although even she talks a great deal of affected nonsense, and "turns from Lord Bretland to whisper softly in her husband's ear with a sweetness which seemed to declare that an effete civilisation had not robbed her heart of its bloom."

Mr. John Saunders's new novel deserves special notice, not because of its literary excellences,—it is in some artistic respects one of the poorest this author has ever written,—but because of one or two truly original characters in it. Miss Vandeleur, the heroine, for example, even though she goes to a modern fancy fair, is much superior to the "bread-and-butter misses" and Monte Carlo adventuresses that threaten to drive feminine beauty and simplicity and self-control out of the region of fiction. Her coquetry, vivacity, and humour are genuine; she is a woman, and not a mere bundle of fads, impulses, or affectations ; and the

development of her character is traced in a manner not un- worthy of the late Mr. Charles Reade. Then her two lovers—

the pseudo Lord Harlaxton, and the Hon. Stephen Fronde—are men of a kind that are too rarely met with in present-day novels ; and if Mr. Saunders had bestowed a little more pains on "Gentleman Jack," a queer rogue who is by no means a knave, he might have been accorded a place beside some of Dickens's out-at-elbows heroes. The plot of Miss Vancleleur is deficient in "go," and as a story it is not sufficiently con- densed. One gets a little tired of the Hon. Stephen's ex- periences at the time of the Fenian rising in Ireland, in spite of their being detailed with care, and although Mr. Saunders assures us that they "are a faithful reflection of the career of a living personage, who entered the Army as a private, and is now an officer of rank." lilies Vandeleur would be more successful as a play than it is ever likely to be as a novel.