• NOVELS'OP THE WEEK.*
IT was only the other day that we had occasion to congratulate Miss Dorothea Gerard—to call her by the name best known to English readers—on her return to her best form in The Supreme Crime, and it is pleasant to note that the same high standard of excellence is maintained in her latest work, The Million, a tragic story of contemporary Galician manners. As a delineator of cosmopolitan or fashionable society—a theme chosen by her in some of her recent books—Miss Gerard is readable, but not particularly impressive. But when she draws on her intimate knowledge of certain phases of provincial life in the Dual Monarchy the results are surprisingly superior in interest and vividness. Indeed, we should go so far as to say that no living English writer of fiction is a keener or more dispassionate observer of the byways of Continental life, or can enable a home-keeping reader to realise more vividly the clash of primitive tendencies and traditions with modern culture and materialism in the outlying districts of Central Europe. Morawek, the father of the heroine in The Million, is a wealthy notary in a small Galician town, a man detached by his early philosophical studies from all creeds, an avowed confessiondos, who has inoculated his only daughter in his secularist views, and cherishes the aim of devoting his wealth to securing her a brilliant social career in Vienna as soon as he has amassed his million. But when Romano, loses her heart at seventeen to a genial young German engineer, her father by a cruel trick gives her lover his congg, driving her out of pique to fall in with his scheme and marry a handsome but worthless young Polish Count. Soon after her marriage, which proves un- happy, Romana meets her lover, who has also married out of pique, discovers that they have been made the victims of is misunderstanding, and when, out of loyalty to his wife, the engineer refuses to take advantage of Romana's reckless mood of self-abandonment, she deliberately compromises her- self with another man in order to revenge herself on her father. A duel follows, the wrongdoer kills the Count, and is brought to trial, but acquitted on the evidence of Romana, who in open Court and in the presence of her father tells the whole unhappy story of her bringing-up, of her father's decep- tion, and her resolve to punish him, even though at the cost of her own ruin. The story closes with the reconciliation of Romana with her mother-in-law, Romana's entry into a convent, and her futher's bequest of his entire fortune to found an orphanage, under clerical supervision, for motherless girls. Reduced to its crude outlines the story may seem repellent and painful, but Miss Gerard's discreet and delicate handling of her theme reconciles one to her choice. The character of Romana, haughty yet impulsive, endowed with rich possibilities for good or evil, and blighted at life's high noon by the discovery of her father's relentless selfishness, is drawn with remarkable skill and sympathy. It is interesting to see, also, how Miss Gerard's study of racial characteristics affects her portraiture, Romana's impulsiveness being attn. butable to her Roumanian mother, while the German strain in her first lover is regarded as correcting and neutralising the shallow emotional temperament of the Slay.
The Ireland so poetically and gracefully described by Miss Barlow in From, the Land of the Shamrock is quite in keeping with the date of its publication,—it is an Ireland in which it is always autumn, in which picturesqueness is associated with decay, a land of regrets, resignation, failure, fatalism. And thus, though the narrative is enriched with delicate words painting and the dialogue abounds in faithful reproductions of quaint turns of speech, the net result of perusal is far from exhilarating, though Miss Barlow is never deliberately or gratuitously pessimistic. It is merely that to her artistic temperament there is something infinitely more attractive in the failure of simple lives than in the triumphs of the modern "hustler." The materials of these sketches and tales are often of the slightest, but their development is always interesting. Curiously enough, the higher are Miss Barlow's
• (L) The Million. By Dorothea Gerard (Madame Longard de Longgarde). London : Methuen and Co. [6s.]—(2.) From the Land of the Shamrock. By Jane Barlow. London : Methuen and Co. 16sj--(3.) An Episode on a Desert Island. By the Author of "Miss Molly!' London : John Murray. , s. 6d.1—(4.) Women Must Weep. By Sarah Tytler. London : John Long. 6s.]—(3.) Lore the Atonement. By Frances Campbell. London : Digby, Long, and Co. [6s.]—(6.) Sir Hector. By Robert Machray. London A. Constable and Co. [6s.]—(7.) The Major-General. By Montgommy Carmichael. London F. V. White and Co. [6s.1—(8.) The Strange D appearance of Lady Delia. By Louis Tracy. London : C. A. Pearson.
dramatis personae placed in the social scale, the more artificial and uninteresting is the portraiture. The longest story in the collection, that entitled "A Wedding Gown," depends for its dinouement on a double coincidence—the discovery of a lost wedding dress by the bridegroom's lost love, and his opportune arrival on the scene when she is about to enact the part of Ophelia—and is, for all Miss Barlow's sedateness of treatment, mere melodrama when reduced to its essentials. With these deductions this volume can be most cordially commended to all who prefer the elegiac to the Donnybrook methods of delineating Irish character.
We have found it quite impossible to spare any sympathy for the self-imposed trials of the heroine and narrator of An Episode on a Desert Island, a young woman endowed with a "rich unhappy contralto," a painfully invertebrate nature, deeply attached to a distant detrimental, yet constantly thrown, by the machinations of meddlesome brothers and sisters, into the society of a highly eligible lout. Moods of maundering reminiscence alternate with moods of frolicsome levity, and it is hard to say in which Louise Mauvesyn is more trying. Part of the scene is laid on board a yacht, the company on which may be gathered from the following extract :—" She's a cat, I am sure,' Janetta informed me after a few days: but as there are no girls it doesn't matter what tricks she plays—I don't count you, of course. And if men like Geof or Jock choose a woman for this kind of thing, one must expect a catty one. She does not appear amusing. Once Don Vassal arrives, he will look after her, I suppose." These futile philanderers make one long for the company of a robust rogue.
Although Miss Tytler's new book, Women Must Weep, is fairly readable, it fails to reach the standard of interest attained in many of her former works. The heroine certainly occupies an original place in life, being the illegitimate child of Captain Hepburn, whose discarded mistress casts her daughter on the tender mercies of Mrs. Hepburn just before the birth of the latter's first baby. Mrs. Hepburn, being an extraordinarily excellent woman, gives the little intruder an eldest daughter's welcome in the family, but the whole situation naturally produces a certain tension between the husband and father on the one side, and the wife and children on the other. The main action of the story takes place when Colonel Hepburn, who has had an Indian career, retires and comes to live in his little country house, he and his wife being middle-aged people, and the two daughters (counting Jane, the intruder, as the elder) grown up. Fate, of course, rules that the wife of the local millionaire should turn out to be Jane's mother, which is a situation which should promise "fruitful hot water to all parties." And yet, whether it is that the opening of the story is too spun out, or that the characters are not very lifelike, the reader's interest in the book wears a little thin before the end. Lovers of Miss Austen will owe Miss Tytler a grudge, first for speaking of " Lucy " Smith in Emma, and secondly for allowing Mrs. Hepburn to say to her younger daughter :—" You remind me of a clever book which everybody read and admired when I was young. I mean Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey." It is difficult to forgive an author who talks of Northanger Abbey as a clever book popular about thirty years ago.
There is a great deal of very charming reading in Miss Campbell's story, Love the Atonement, and a touch of poetry, which greatly brightens the reviewer's prosaic task, about Deelish, the fantastic little heroine, and her dreams. But it is a pity that Miss Campbell makes Deelish marry so brutally Ouidaesque a gentleman as Teddy Wynne. This individual has literally nothing but personal beauty and good nature to recommend him ; he is too dissolute even to remain faithful to the wife to whom he is in the main as devoted as she is to him. Yet at the end of the book, after his death, Deelish in a dying vision sees his ghost, and goes with ecstasy to rejoin him in another world. Beautiful material bodies may be very attractive here, but that they should still render their quondam possessors irresistible hereafter lends an anything but spiritual complexion to dreams of a future world.
Sir Hector is an historical romance of the '45 and the years before. But Hector Maclean, contrary to the habit of the heroes
of fiction dealing with the young Chevalier, is a good Whig, ana undazzled by Jacobite brilliancy. The scene is chiefly laid London, and de:.ls with the stockbroking adventures of our ancestors. But Mr. Machray has not been able to resist the piquant seasoning of a duel, an adventure with highwaymen, and the momentary appearance of Prince Charlie. as a matter of fact, the chapters which deal with the eighteen& century city are by far the most interesting in the book, and honourably distinguish it from the mass of fiction of this particular kind.
In The Major-General Mr. Montgomery Carmicha.el gives us a picture of a retired officer of that rank, who, seduced by the sweet smiles of Italy, takes up his abode there instead of retiring discreetly to Cheltenham and bringing up his daughters in the odour of provincial sanctity. But Nemesis, hot-footed, tracks down the unworthy son of Mars who succumbs to this temptation and does not remain an English. man, with the result that when his daughters grow lap his lot is pitiable in the extreme. The mise-en-scene is very pretty and well contrived, and although the story is by no means devoid of improbabilities, it will serve pleasantly enough to speed the passage of an idle hour.
Mr. Tracy's previous exploits in the domain of sensational forecast caused us to look forward with agreeable anticipation to his new and alluringly named novel. The Strange appearance of Lady Delia, however, is seriously handicapped by the stilted style of the dialogue, and the author's extra- orclieery ignorance of the usages of polite society. To take only one instance, when Sir. Charles Lyle's wife suddenly disappears, the afflicted Baronet, an ex-Guardsman, a popular figure in society, handsome, quiet, gentlemanly, &c., turns for advice to his butler :—" Look here, Thompson,' he cried, her ladyship has not written. Don't you think I had better wire P'" Nor are the ways of Mr. Reginald Brett, barrister and amateur detective, any easier to reconcile with the facts of ordinary life. However, in spite of these disconcerting absurdities, the clue to the mystery of Lady Delia's disappear. ance and death is carefully concealed, and the construction of the puzzle shows no little ingenuity.
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