RECENT NOVELS.* THE central character in the anonymous novel, A
Superfluous Woman, is not the kind of person we expect. Whether any
woman is superfluous may be more doubtful than some con- fident theorists suppose, but when we, rightly or wrongly, use the term chosen for the title, we mean one of those " odd women," as Mr. Gissing calls them, who have found neither their mate nor their work. We certainly do not mean such a woman as the Jessamine Halliday of this novel, and though the author gives an explanation of her use of the term, it really explains nothing. These, however, are but needful preliminary remarks; and to say what the book is not, is very much easier than to say what it is. The writer is certainly a woman, probably a young woman; and if the hypothesis of youth be correct, she may have a future before her, for though A Superfluous Woman is crude, and largely un- real, it does break away from the grooves worn smooth by the literary amateur for whom hope would be vain. There are, moreover, certain passages in which there is no lack of reality; which, indeed, quite arrest attention in the vivid- ness of their imaginative power, and which, despite the ex- panses of vague, indeterminate work by which they are sur- rounded, suggest a suspicion that the author may show herself possessed not merely of talent but even of a spark of genius. The novel has the look of having been written for a purpose, and as a contribution to the burning "woman -question ; " but this purpose and the bearing of this con- tribution are not made very clear either by the story itself or by the conversation of a certain Dr. Cornerstone, who seems to be the author's mouthpiece. The heroine is a society beauty, of sensitive, emotional nature, great capacity for high aspiration, and terrible deficiency of staying-power either in conscience or will. She suddenly disappears from London, to escape partly from the importunities of the middle-aged roué, Lord Heriot, and partly, it would seem, from that something in herself which she fears may yield to them. Her refuge is a Highland village, where she meets with Colin Macgillvray, a peasant tenant-farmer, whose love calls out in her what is for the time an all-dominating passion. They have many meetings, the last of which takes place in a lonely barn at dead of night. In the course of an interview—which is really a very powerful piece of writing- Jessamine's words and actions seem to herself an absolute unconditional surrender to her lover ; and when he, mistaking the agitation of passion for that of terror, solemnly assures her of his regard for her honour, the mistaken thought that her overtures have been understood and rejected brings with it a great wave of shame, and she flies from him into the night. She returns to London, marries Lord Heriot, becomes the mother of his two imbecile children, and in ten years dies, Finding one gleam of comfort amid her wretchedness in the thought that in doing her duty to her repulsive husband she had done something to realise the ideal of life which pre- sented itself to her in the Highland solitudes. It is by no means easy to hit upon the writer's point of view, or to discern her precise aim in a gratuitously miserable story ; but miser- able as it is, the Scottish part of it has some chapters of great power and beauty. If the writer will only clarify her style, which is marred by vague, incoherent rhetoric, and will not put pen to paper until she has thought through her theme as well as felt through it, she may produce something much more satisfactory than A Superfluous Woman.
That bright book, Balmoral, sufficed to prove that Mr. Allar- dyce could write a very creditable historical romance ; but Earlscourt shows that he is still more successful in dealing with the quiet comedy of contemporary life. Breadth, move- ment and picturesqueness are the qualities that we most urgently demand in a reproduction of the life of the past ; and though Mr. Allardyce is able in some degree to impart them to his work, he seems more at home in the studious and subtle delineation of detail which is to be found in every page of his present noveL He calls Earlscourt on his title- page "a novel of provincial life," and this is not only a
* (L) A Superfluous Woman. 3 vols. London : W. Heinemann.—(2.) Earls. Court: a Novel of Provincial Life. By Alexander Allardyce. S vole. London and Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons.—(3.) Gold for Dross. By Mrs. Con- aey Svols. London: Hutchinson and C4.—(4 ) Such a Lord is Love : a Woman's Heart Tragedy. By Mrs. Stephen Batson. 2 vols. London : A. D. lanes and Co.—(5.) Maliara : an Australian Romance. By Noel Hope. 2 vols. London : T. Fisher Unwin.—(6.) A Woman of Heart. By Thomas Terrell. 2 vols. London: Ward and Downey.—(L) At Century's Ebb. By Oyprlan Cope. 2 vole. London: Horace Cox.
description of the theme, but a suggestion of the method. The story deals mainly not with the usual pair or trio, but with a group, and the group represents a community. We suppose that Stephen Brancepeth, the young banker who is secretly married to Lord Earlsfield's sister, must be called the hero, and that pretty Cloete Sparshott is cast for the role of heroine ; but Mr. Allardyce does not push them to the front, and though in such a case as this comparisons are more than usually odious, they are, we think—like some other heroes and heroines—less interesting than their fellow-actors in the narrative-drama. The people who make the book are the men and women of the noble Colpoys family; and Mr. Allardyce shows his skill mainly in his bright and happy individualisation of these essentially commonplace members of the aristocracy. Artistically most successful is the most commonplace of them all,—the woman whose cowardly terror forbids her to reveal the secret of her marriage to the head of her house, and who is nevertheless half-mad with a fever of jealousy caused by complications which she knows to be the inevitable result of her secrecy. Hers is certainly a most admirable portrait; but hardly less so is that of her brother, the Hon. George Colpoys, that happy-go-lucky politician, sportsman, and lover, whose principles are certainly nothing much to boast of, but whose sweetness of temper and facile goodness of heart seduce us into the kind of liking which has often to be a substitute for approval. Mr. Allardyce, in Earlscourt, rather reminds us of Anthony Trollope, and though the author of Barchester Towers has been somewhat neglected of late, there are many middle-aged readers to whom the reminder will be decidedly pleasant. There was a very agreeable something in Trollope which one misses in most contemporary novels, and which one finds here.
Gold for Dross—another very good novel—bears in many ways a strong resemblance to the book just reviewed. The mere stories told by Mr. Allardyce and Mrs. Conney respec- tively are as unlike as they well could be ; but they are both novels of quiet comedy, in which the mere march of incident is subordinated to, and dominated by, the creation, develop- ment, and grouping of character. In both novels, too, there is in the third volume an event of tragic interest which helps forward the dinouement, and by both authors this part of the story is told with considerable skill and effectiveness. Perhaps the main difference between the work of Mr. Allardyce and the work of Mrs. Conney is that the latter is brought out into faller relief than the former. In the pictorial—not, of coarse, in the literary—sense of the word, Mr. Allardyce keeps his work as " flat " as it well can be, with just sufficient modelling to produce the necessary effect,—and no more. Mrs. Conney throws up her characters and situations into somewhat bolder forms, and her literary style too has something more of obvious crispness and point than is to be found in the quiet equable sentences of Earlscourt. The title of the book finds its justification in the story of the married life of the dull, awkward, uninterest- ing, but loving and devoted girl, who gives herself and her large fortune to the weak, shallow, unprincipled Roddy Bethune, and in return for her coined and uncoined gold re- ceives nothing but dross. Roddy is a comparatively familiar figure, but Jean is almost a creation. Only a novelist of great courage would have attempted to enlist our interest in such an intrinsically unattractive figure ; only a novelist of great skill could have achieved the success which has fallen to Mrs. Conney. The other love-story—that of Roddy's sister, Barbara, and Lord Newnham—is, in substance, comparatively commonplace, and yet here also the writer's art is satisfy- ing; indeed, the only character who strikes us as being a little unreal and unconvincing is Ella Weston, the evil genius of the story. It may be regarded as a testimonial to feminine human nature, that the thoroughly bad woman of fiction seldom strikes us as being perfectly credible.
To say point-blank that a novel is ungrammatical, absurd, or offensive, when such is really the case, is perfectly just and perfectly safe, because any one of these statements, if correct, is susceptible of proof. To say that a novel is dull will very likely be less just, and therefore less safe, because there is no fixed criterion of dullness, and the verdict may simply mean that the critic's liver was out of order, or that from some other cause he failed to be interested in something that people in general would find interesting. Therefore be it noted that we expressly refuse to say absolutely that Such
a Lord is Love is characterised by extreme dullness; we will only say that this is the impression stamped by it upon the mind of one reader, who may, of course, be entirely wanting in proper sensibility. If, however, Mrs. Batson herself be responsible for the impression, her responsibility is due to something else than literary incompetence, for her novel is by no means badly written. We think she misses the mark by a certain lack of dramatic force. When dealing with the case of a generally sensible and well-meaning person who at a certain crisis acts very foolishly, a novelist ought to get sufficiently inside that person to enable us to see the foolish action from his or her point of view; for if this is not done, we are left without comprehension, without sympathy, and therefore without interest. And this is just our feeling with regard to Adria's desertion of the husband whom she de- votedly loves,—an act which is the corner-stone of the story. It seems such a tremendous storm in a very small tea-cup that it violates our sense of congruity. Mrs. Batson describes her novel as " a woman's heart tragedy ; " but Adria's matrimonial life is as much a comedy as is the love-affair of her sister Elizabeth and the farcical Oxford professor, only it is a comedy that is grim rather than gay. Such a Lord is Love is in many respects an able book ; the provoking thing is that its ability is displayed in a most disappointing, indeed almost irritating, way.
One or two reviewers have of late talked wisely of the new Australian school of fiction; but, alas, there is no such thing! Distinguished only by a few inevitable dashes of local colour, the many novels recently written under the Southern Cross have been even as are the novels written under the Great Bear,—they have been good, bad, and indifferent, with an unmistakably English goodness, badness, and indifference. Milliara is one of the good ones, for it is a thoroughly bright, pleasant, and wholesome story. It has a delightful heroine, and this is a personage who goes a long way towards making
a book enjoyable ; and there are some equally delightful • children, who are at the same time real children, not
grotesque puppets disguised as children, like those enfants terribles in that ridiculously overrated book which takes its name from a sign of the zodiac. Even the schemer, Miss Bentinck, is better than most of her tribe, for she is human enough to have tempers in which she gives herself away, and this is just as it should be, though it is also just as it is not in the ordinary female villain of fiction. There is no great substance in Mr. Noel Hope's novel, but what there is in it, is decidedly agreeable.
A Woman of Heart is a better book than we expected to find it after reading the somewhat silly dedication and a few of the opening chapters, which promised nothing but an un- comfortable story dealing mainly with the seamy side of life in what is called Society. This, indeed, is the theme, and therefore bad Mr. Terrell followed the lead of many pre- decessors, his book might have been not only uncomfortable but tiresome as well. And tiresome it certainly is not, for the author has hit upon a narrative scheme which has a some- what unusual novelty of conception, and he has elaborated it with still more unusual neatness and finish of execution. As narrative pure and simple, the latter portion of A Woman of Heart is French rather than English, and in the art of narra- tion the Frenchman is certainly superior to the Englishman. There is certainly one rather crude resort to the deus ex machine" in the expedient of the robbery from Sparrow of the documents which solve the problem of the death of Bob Fenvrick, but elsewhere the entangling and disentangling of the knots are as inevitable as they are ingenious. Mr. Terrell has written a book which, if it lacks all high qualities of fiction, is at least clever and readable.
At Century's Ebb is the silly and irrelevant title of an aggressively absurd novel. There are passages in the book which, to our personal taste, seem unpleasant or vulgar, or both,—a kissing incident on pp. 70-1 of the second volume may be taken as a sample of them ; but it would perhaps be unfair to press hardly upon them, for they are but occasional, whereas the absurdity is constant. The caddish peer of the realm, whom the author evidently intends to be a gentleman; the fatuous father of the heroine, who interlards his most familiar conversation with tags of Italian ; the shrewish mpther, whose religions talk is a grotesque caricature; the frisky heroine herself, and the villain whom she marries at a moment's notice, are such obviously impracticable puppets that their jerky movements do not even excite the interest of wonder. The odd thing is that though Cyprian Cope is guilty of the Wise of classing together Mr. Besant and IL Zola, it is clear that he or she is not an illiterate person. Indeed she—we are pretty certain about the " she "—is not wholly wanting in literary ability of a kind ; but she has produced a novel which has no more coherence than a modern Christmas pantomime, and of which even faint praise is impossible.
Previous page
