NOVELS OF THE WEEK.*
IT is related of the great doctor who passed away last Sunday that his only intellectual recreation when he was in the full flood-tide of his practice was the reading of sensational novels on his frequent railway journeys. As he put it, with characteristic bluntness, " I like a good lie." Those who hold with the late Sir William Jenner that the prime function of the novel-writer is to embroider, not to copy, fact, will find no lack of stimulating entertainment in His Counterpart, a romance of the early days of the great Duke of Marlborough, when John Churchill took service under Louis XIV. and distinguished himself with the army of Turenne. Mr. Gamier evades the difficulties and pitfalls which beset the path of the romancer who chooses for his hero a great historical personage, by a familiar device. The central figure and narrator is not John Churchill, but his cousin and double, Oliver Drake. The employment of this method is justified or condemned by results, and in the present instance Mr. Gamier need not fear a hostile verdict. Oliver's plunge into the maelstrom of adventure is led up to in artistic fashion, and once the plunge is made, incredulity is disarmed by the constant and breathless successionof exciting incidents. Oliver is not content with being mistaken for his illustrious cousin : to further his own ends, he must needs occasionally impersonate him. The temptation certainly was great, seeing that his main aim, as he himself puts it, was " single-handed in an alien land, with plenty of mortal foes, but not one friend about me, to out out a beleaguered maid from under the batteries of the most formidable potentate in Christendom." Oliver's ultimate • (L) His Counterpart. By Bassell M. Gamier. London: Harper and Brothers.—(2.) Ricroft of Withens. By Hatlliwell Sutcliffe. London : T. Maher Unwin.—(3 ) Coopet Folk. By Mary Hartier. London : J. Clarke and Co.— (1.) A World Bmcitched. By James M. Graham. Lou don : Harper and Brothers.—(5.) The Copper Princess. By Kirk Monroe. London Harper and Brothers.—(6.) The Associate Hermits. By Frank B. Stockton. London : Harper and Brothers.—(7.) The Adventurers. By H. B. Marriott-Watson. London Harper and Brother:.—(5. Sent to Coventry. By Bernd Stuart. London : John Long .—(9.) A King of Shreds and Patches. By Holly Pearson Ninnemore. Lon don : Lawrence and Bullen.—(10.) Mary Girard, M,B. By L. T. Meade. London: Wells Gardner, Medea and Co. success, it must be admitted, is due more to his fortunate resemblance than to his wits, or even his prowess as a fighting man. Herein, we may observe, lies one of the great drawbacks of the autobiographical romance of cloak and sword. If the hero exalts his own achievements he comes under the condemnation of the miles gloriosus. This, we take it, is why by writers of the neo-Damasian school of the day the hero is nearly always represented as a lucky blunderer.
Mr. Halliwell Sutcliffe gives us in Bicroft of Withers a lurid romance of Yorkshire in the '45, but although Prince Charlie figures prominently in some chapters, and the hero fights at Culloden, the Jacobite invasion only supplies an incidental interest. The main motive is the war between the moorland folk and the dwellers in the "Lonely Valley," a tribe of manslaying despera- does known as the Carlesses, who live by plunder and amuse themselves with abduction, arson, and assassination. This internecine conflict, conceived somewhat in the fashion of a Scandinavian Saga, is narrated by Mr. Sutcliffe in a manner which amply justifies the rubricated title-page. Indeed, so continuous is the carnage, so prodigal the effusion of blood, that the book might well have been printed in red ink throughout. The death-rate in many modern novels is abnormal, but in Bicroft of Withena it reaches a pos tively Armenian altitude. The number of victims accounted for by the hero, whose favourite weapon is a scythe, is not precisely stated, but it must have considerably exceeded the record of Mr. Rider Haggard's Umslopogaas. The extravagantly homicidal character of the book is to be regretted, because Mr. Sutcliffe has a rare sense of the sombre desolation of the Yorkshire landscape, and a gift of portraying the malign aspects of human nature, that render his constant excursions into the shambles quite unnecessary as a means of thrilling his readers. Really, after reading the rescue of the heroine from the stronghold of the Lonely Folk one is ready to turn vegetarian.
In welcome contrast to the gory gloom of this Yorkshire variant on Lorna Doone is the placid serenity of Miss Hartier's Chapel Folk, an idyll of dissenting Devonshire some thirty or forty years back. John Vernon, who is the central figure, has accepted a " call" to a remote district, and, in spite of trials and discouragements, finds justification for a decision which has estranged his father and entailed the possibility of disinheritance. The young minister is enthusiastic but impressionable, and his interest in the miller's handsome daughter, being misconstrued by the village gossips, provokes the animosity of a rustic rival who has established a hold upon the miller. Matters are not rendered easier by the visit of his father's ward, a sprightly young lady who wishes to marry the young minister, and awakens the miller's daughter to the true state of her feelings. But in the end everything comes right. The vivacious Jessie consoles herself elsewhere, her guardian is reconciled to his son, the rustic suitor is disposed of, and the minister marries the miller's daughter. As is so often the case, the minor characters are the most lifelike, notably the cantankerous Miss Susan Heard, who remarks : " You never can tell how marriage will turn out. 'Tie as uncertain as pastry."
Apart from a certain artificiality of style, manifested in elaborate but unconvincing pieces of word-painting—e.g., Mr- Graham talks of giant trees "heavy-laden with their frondose armour "—and a certain rhetorical quality in the dialogue, A World Bewitched is an impressive, and at times engrossing, romance of the Basque Provinces in the days of Henry of Navarre. As is well known, these provinces were the scene of a great epidemic of superstition in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and it is on the exploits of the witchfindere and the retaliation of the innocent victims of their diabolical oppression that Mr. Graham has built up a story which exerts in a minor degree something of the fascination of Michelet's La Sorca.re. The characters, notably those of the fiendish Madame de Mercalme, of the indomitable Madame de Bellerive (whose escape from the ordeal by water forms one of the most thrilling chapters of the book), of her heroic protectress Henriette de Parthenay, and of that delightful Basque Orson, the peasant Fernando Vergara, are excellently contrasted and realised. Nothing is more impres- sive or unexpected in the story than the death scene of Madame de Mercalme, who in the end falls a victim to the deletion which she had so often organised against others, The part assigned to Henri IV., who in the end interposes on behalf of the persecuted Basques, and proclaims his intimate relationship with their champion, Pere Eustache Gontaat, is somewhat audaciously conceived, but in order to secure a temporary triumph for those who are fighting against such terrible odds nothing short of a Royal champion would avail. Mr. Graham is evidently well read in the literature of lycanthropy, and his book appropriately enough bears on its cover a representation of one of the Devils of Notre Dame. We do not say that A World Bewitched is to be placed on the same level with Sidonia the Sorceress, that lurid story which so vividly impressed the imagination of the Pre- Raphaelites, but it is undoubtedly a vivid and exciting romance in which the element of the gruesome, though inevitably prominent, is not pushed to repulsive extremes, The Copper Princess has for its hero that somewhat familiar figure, the famous 'Varsity athlete who, by no fault of his own, is suddenly reduced to penury and destitution. Thus we find Dick Peveril, within a few months of stroking the Oxford eight, working as a common miner at Red Jacket, Michigan. He makes friends with the Cornishmen in the mines, conquers the goodwill of an Irishman who is possessed with homicidal jealousy by saving his life, and after various disquieting and dangerous adventures above and below ground, finds his fortune in the abandoned mine, a half-share in which is his sole property, and marries the daughter of his father's partner. The villain of the story is a University contemporary of the hero, a reading-man of nnathletic tastes. But in justice to Oxford it should be mentioned that both hero and villain are Americans.—Mr. Stockton's new story, The Associate Hermits, tells how a middle-aged couple, on the marriage of their only daughter, went off themselves on a honeymoon while the young people settled down quietly at home. Mr. and Mrs. Archibald are joined on their travels by a charming young lady named Margery, a creature of im- pulse and boundless loquacity, and decide on camping out in the forest country. Mr. Stockton, as we need hardly remind our readers, is great on camping out, and contrives to extract a good deal of mild amusement out of the adventures of the middle-aged honeymooners and their impulsive charge. Mr. Frost's illustrations enhance the attractiveness of the story, which is written with a refreshing freedom from all literary artifice.—Artifice, on the other hand, is of the very essence of Mr. Marriott-Watson's literary method. The narrator of The Adventurers is a young barrister, who, for a trifling service rendered to an elderly gentleman in Wales, is left a castle containing a quantity of treasure. A desperate gang of cutthroats lay siege to the castle, and, after a prolonged struggle, succeed in carrying off the treasure. Then the thieves fall out, and Captain Seroombe—the commander of the desperadoes—makes common cause with the garrison in order to be revenged on his treacherous lieutenant. Mr. Marriott-Watson apologises in the person of his narrator for the discrepancy of his narrative with " Victorian suavity," —the time of the story being that of to-day,—but this discrepancy is greatly accentuated by the mannerism of the style,—e.g., "I perceived against the caliginous mass of fore- ground," &c., "Even to this hour I have never been able to dissever the sequences of that tragic moment." Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile is as true of Stevenson as of Dickens. —Miss Esme Stuart's Sent to Coventry is a pleasantly told novel in the style of Miss C. M. Yonge. The social ostracism of the heroine's family, simply because of her father's loss of money, casts a slur on the generosity of Devonshire, where the scene is laid, and Miss Stuart might have chosen a less unmistakably Hebrew patronymic for her German Count than von Wurm.—Miss Finnemore's work is unfamiliar to us, but A King of Shreds and Patches prompts a desire to extend the acquaintance. Here we have the "life-history" of the son of a ne'er-do-weel mechanic raised by his love and his luck to the level from which his father had sunk. The atmosphere is rural, but never provincial, and the sentiment idyllic. We fear that very few newsboys of real life would have found the occupation of butcher's assistant " extremely repulsive" to their tastes. But one can readily forgive an occasional idealisation in a writer whose delicate and poetic imagination recalls the work of Miss M. E. Wilkins.—The lady-doctor has long since invaded the realm of fiction, both as author and heroine. In Mrs. Meade's book she is an energetic rather than attractive figure, and the display of expert knowledge somehow detracts from the charm of the story. Professional experi- ences do not lend themselves to romantic treatment, and our admiration for the hero of Mary Word, M.B., is not in the least enhanced by the knowledge that he is suffering from "aneurism of the descending aorta."
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