NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
IT is curious to observe how the recent revival of the Napoleonic legend has affected contemporary fiction. Novelists who deal in adventurous or sensational romance are at the moment extremely fond of investing their heroes
with the "demonic" qualities of unscrupulous genius, and the latest, and by no means the least successful, outcome of this tendency is to be found in Mysterious Mr. Sabin. Mr.
Sabin is in reality a French nobleman of fabulous wealth, the aim of whose life is the restoration of the French Monarchy. He is also a wonderful mechanical and strategical genius, baying made a special study of the destruction of warships and fortifications by electricity. Passing himself off in England as Mr. Sabin, he obtains through spies all the informa- tion that can be known about our coast defences and war- ehips, and offers the result, coupled with his own destructive inventions, to Russia and then to Germany, the sole condition being that after annihilating England, the conqueror shall invade France and restore the Monarchy. The plot is further complicated by the fact that Mr. Sabin is everywhere accom- panied by an astonishingly beautiful niece, tho Princesse Helene, who is betrothed to the heir to the French throne ; that Lord Wolfenden, who is enamoured of the Princess, is the son of Admiral Lord Deringham, the greatest authority on naval affairs, whose unrivalled knowledge Mr. Sabin has contrived to " tap " by the means of spies, and that Lady Deringham in her youth had held compromising relations with Mr. Sabin. When it is added that great Ambassadors, gilded youths of fashion, enterprising journalists, and emis- earies of secret societies all play active parts in the plot, it will be seen that materials for excitement are not lacking. It would be unfair to the reader to reveal how Mr. Sabin encounters his Waterloo and his St. Helena, but we may mention that as an exile he enjoys one immense advantage over the great Corsican,—a passionate devotion to golf. A man of sixty whose handicap is scratch at three clubs and plus four at one, and who has ample opportunities of in- dulging in his hobby, can face the shattering of his political schemes with something more than equanimity. If Napoleon bad lived seventy years later, and there had been golf-links at St. Helena, British abhorrence of the Corsican ogre might bave given place to a crusade in favour of his restoration.
The text and temper of "George Paston's " novel are accurately set forth in the last chapter of A Writer of Books in a passage which we make no excuse for quoting in full :— " After all, man has been well advised in withholding as long as possible the opportunities for gaining knowledge or winning fame from his mate. No doubt it was jealousy by which he was actuated, but not so much the ignoble jealousy of being excelled rby an inferior as the instinctive jealousy of the most dangerous of rivals. Love may once have been a woman's whole existence, but that was when a skein of embroidery silk was the only other string to her bow. In the life of the modern woman, blessed with an almost inexhaustible supply of strings, love is no less episodical than in the life of a man. It may be eagerly longed for, it may be tenderly cherished, but it has been deposed for ever from its proud position of `lord of all."
Cosima Chndleigh, the only daughter of a provincial librarian, decides on her father's death to adopt literature as her pro-
fession. She comes up to London with £200 and a MS. novel, takes up her quarters in a Bloomsbury lodging-house, frequents the British Museum, and in her conscientious, if somewhat indiscreet, quest for experience sees a good deal of the seamy side of London life. Literature proving unre- munerative, and "ten months in a second-rate boarding-house in the society of, for the most part, uncongenial strangers, having destroyed any leanings towards Bohemianism and independence she might once have felt," she marries a young tea-merchant, the playmate of her childhood, who has grown up into a thoroughpaced Philistine, with no literary tastes, and a genius for exasperatingly facetious remarks,—just the coarse-fibred, sensual man whom the highly cultivated and
• (I.) Mysterious Mr. Sabin. By B. Phillips Oppenbeim. London : Ward, Lock. and Co.—(2.) A Writer of Books. By George Paston. London: Chap- man and 51s.l1.—(5.) Domitia. By S. Baring-Gonld. London: Methuen and Co.---(4.) Potshsrds. By Mabel 0. Birohenough. London : Ca..eII and 0o. —(51 The Cleverest Woman in England. By L. T. Meade. London : J. Nisbet and 00.—(6.) A Lotus-Flouer. By J. Morgan-de-Groot. London : William Blackwood and tiPI3A.—(7.) The Sultan's Mandate. By O. Olynthus Gregory. .g.,ondon: T. Pi-her Unwin.—(8.) Fortune's Sport, By Mrs. 0. N. Williamson. London: C. Arthur Pearson.—(9.) If ,Sinners Entice Thee. By William Le Quota. L0ndon: F. V. Wbite and Co —GO.) Across the World jor a Wife. by Guy Boothby. London : Ward, Lock, and 00.—(l1.) Heart and Sword. By John btrange Winter. London: F. V. White and Co.--(12.) Paul Carali, Cornishman. By Charles Lee. London: James Bowden.
refined modern heroine of the "emancipation novel" invari- ably does marry. Cosima's hasty repentance is accelerated by meeting her true affinity when it is already too late, and the story marches inevitably on the pathway towards disaster, but the conventional unhappy ending is given a new twist by the intervention, in the role of a deas eir machind, of a friendly reviewer. Cosima leaves her husband in a suicidal mood, but after reading the friendly notice of her last book, straightway sets to work on a new novel. It is only right to say that this bald summary conveys a most inadequate notion of the interest and cleverness of "George Paston'a " book. The pictures of the feminine side of New Grub Street are admirably done, and the ease and excellence of the style are so remarkable as to make one regret that the brilliant writer cannot find it in her heart or her conscience to take a happier view of the possibilities of married life.
Mr. Baring-Gould's appeal to the classic historian in the preface to Domitia is not misplaced. As a matter of fact, he has done a good deal more than merely "hurry from event to event" in the life of his heroine "with little indication of the lapse of time." For example, he has represented her abduction by Domitian as taking place on the very day of her marriage to Lamia ; he has represented her as childless, though she is certainly said to have borne a son to Domitian ; and not to mention other embellishments and deviations from contem- porary records, such as the new and blameless construction which he has put on her relations with the actor Paris, he has distinctly implied that she became a convert to Christianity. The only justification for this procedure that Mr. Baring- Gould is able to bring forward is that furnished by the busts in the Chiaramente, Capitoline, and Florence Galleries, which are reproduced in his book. In the first, " taken, I think, just when she was married to Lamia the face is full of possibilities of love, tenderness and laughter." That in the Capitoline and other portrait busts "show the progress of hardening and deterioration. Finally, in the Florence Gallery she may be seen after the death of Domitian, aged by sorrow more than by years, with the hardness giving way, and the glimmer of a new life, the breaking up of the sweet springs of her true nature, appearing again after a long night, a cruel frost. That face has haunted me for seven or eight years, and in this story I have endeavoured to tell what I thought was her inner life's tale as revealed to me by the study of that series of busts." As the novel is not described as a historical romance, the ethics of this disregard for the litera scripta as compared with the evidence of physiognomy in sculpture need not detain us, though we confess to a strong dislike for the practice of claiming converts to Christianity where no vestige of proof can be adduced. Still, when criticism has done its worst, Domitia belongs to a wholly different category from such novels as The Sign of the Cross. In spite of the disquisitions on Roman cus- toms, dress, &c., inartistically sandwiched into the narrative, in spite of the caricature of Domitia's mother, who talks like a modern woman of fashion, Mr. Baring-Gould, by virtue of that lurid imagination which never deserts him, has given a forcible picture of the horrors and the heroism of Imperial Rome.
In its essential significance Mrs. Birchenough's new novel reminds us not a little of Mrs. G-askell's North and South. That is to say, it illustrates, in the persons of hero and heroine, the contrast between Northern grit and angularity and Southern flexibility and charm. William Handley, it is true, is a Staffordshire man, and the Black Country is geographically reckoned as belonging to the Midlands, but in temperament and physique he is a typical Northerner, just as Philippa Jordan, the daughter of a London journalist and playwright, with her Parisian training and artistic gifts, is a typical specimen of the culture of Campden Hill. Thus, on the principle that extremes meet, Handley, the self- made man, is bewitched by the vivacity of Philippa and blind to the devotion of Helena Kirkham, the widowed daughter of the former owner of his pottery, a woman of his own age and neighbourhood. Helena's disinterested and unfaltering loyalty to Handley, culminating in the sacrifice of her life, to shield him from the knife of a crazy assassin, is the keynote of the novel. The mechanism of the plot is chiefly concerned with the efforts of Ashley Duke, a rejected suitor of Philippa's, to estrange husband and wife to his own advantage by raking up a vainful episode in
Handley's past. Ashley Duke, art-critic, egoist, decadent, is a personage with whom we have grown painfully familiar in recent fiction, a "short, plump man, with a bland, falsetto voice, a pale, hairless face, a sleek, mouse-coloured head, faded eyes, and an unwholesome complexion." Poetic justice in such a case can only be rendered by the application of a horsewhip, but Mr. Duke miraculously escapes, and the in- fluence he exerts over Philippa alienates our sympathies from
an otherwise attractive heroine. With this reservation, Potsherds is an excellent piece of work, the author's local knowledge of the great Staffordshire industry being turned to admirable account.
In The Cleverest Woman in. England Mrs. Meade sets forth the consequences of a love match between a brilliant, high- minded emancipated woman and a clever reactionary literary man. Dagmar's motives are noble, but her zeal outruns her discretion, and the inevitable estrangement is only avoided by her tragic death, due to an act of heroic compassion. The husband, whose name, by the way, is Geoffrey Hamlyn, is an uncompromising prig. A propos de bottes, we may mention that during one highly-strung interview he offers his wife "a cup of bovril," a most afflicting touch of actuality. Mr. Morgan-de-Groot, the Dutch author of A Lotus-Flower, a long-drawn, sickly tale of conjugal infelicity, betrays in his work a slight but unmistakable affinity with the morbidezza of D'Annunzio. The translation reproduces the spasmodic style of the original with a fidelity that occasionally borders on the grotesque. The Sultan's Mandate, an Armenian romance by an Armenian writer, is not without a painful interest, but the story suffers from the multiplicity of the author's aims. He has endeavoured, as he puts it, to give us "not only an attractive story, but an interesting picture of historical, geographical, social, economical, and political Armenia"! Mrs. Williamson's Fortune's Sport is written in her most uncompromisingly sensational manner, and deals with the abduction of a V.C. on the eve of his wedding. The tale abounds in tremendous impossibilities, and raises the early Miss Braddon to the nth. To the same category may be re- ferred Mr. Le Queux's If Sinners Entice Thee, a vigorous, elaborate, and undistinguished romance of the gaming-tables; and Mr. Guy Boothby's Across the World for a Wife, in which, after many vicissitudes, virtue triumphs, and the curtain is rung down to a doable peal of marriage-bells. The moral of Heart and Sword appears to be that in the present state of the divorce law it is dangerous to elope even with the cousin of a Duchess. Finally, we have in Mr. Charles Lee's Paul Carah., Cornishman, a fresh and delightful series of episodes in the life of a most engaging rolling-stone. We sincerely trust that we have not heard the last of Paul and Jennifer. The story clamours for a sequel.
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