RECENT NOVELS.*
A. GREAT deal of very effective local colour and folk-lore ; a beautiful and high-hearted heroine ; abundant dialogue that is at the same time extremely colloquial and brilliantly dramatic; a strong situation and a feebly sustained moral directed against modern innovations in education,—these are the elements out of which Mr. Baring-Gould has compounded his tragic novel of The Broom-Squire. Mr. Baring-Gould told the world not long ago that, in writing fiction, the setting of scenery and the local colour always come to him before the plot and the personages of his stories ; and this is probably why he has called this novel The Broom-Squire, and not, as would have seemed more natural, " Mehetabel " or " Matabel," after the heroine. Matabel is a really heroic heroine, who re- mains good, pure, brave and loyal, through trials and persecu- tions in which it is little short of heroic even to follow her faith- fully in the written book. We do not quite understand with what motive Mr. Baring-Gould has dealt so mercilessly with the poor girl; and we are not sure that her silence towards the end about her husband's attempt upon their child's life was right. But we rejoice cordially in the final glimpse given us of her, when she has been acquitted of the charge of murdering her tyrant, and her baby is safe out of the world, • (L) The Broom-Squire. By 8. Baring-Gould. 1 voL London : Methuen and Co.—(2.) Heart of the World. By H. Rider Haggard. 1 vol. London : Long- mane, Green, and Co.—(3.) The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. By A. Conan Doyle. 1 Toi. London : George Newnes.—(4.) The Courtship of Morrice Buck- ler. By a. E. W. Hawn. 1 vol. Limdon: Macmillan and Co.--(3 ) A Gentle- man's Gentleman. By Max Pemberton. 1 vol. London : A. D. Innea.--(6.) The If ads, of TTEllaTIC6. By T. W. Speieht. 3 roles London: Cnatto and Winduz.—(7.) A Mine of Wealth. By Esno3 Stuart. 3 vol.. London : Horn and Blackett— (8.) Har:ow's Ideal. By Mrs. P.rreattr. 1 vo:. London: Hurst and Blackett.
and she herself has found content and usefulness in teaching village children to read, write, and sew, and to fear and love God. Jonas Kink, the broom - squire, is one of a set of squatters on the elopes of that hollow in the Sussex sand-ranges known as "The Devil's Punch- bowl," and he derives his title from his occupation of making and selling brooms. He is a repulsive character, harsh, selfish, and covetous; and Matabel is driven to marry him by a cruel complication of influences. The story of her misery and her constancy is very powerfully and pathetically told, but it is really too painful; and we confess to liking best in the book the early chapters which describe her coming on the scene, as a equalling baby carried topsy- turvy by a helpless seaman. There is much humour as well as pathos in the narrative of all the circumstances attendant upon the setting of her right way up in the parish where she is deposited ; and all the principal characters of the story are brought out vividly in these early scenes. Mrs. Ventage, the landlady of the ' Sign of the Ship,' is very good, and many of her sayings deserve to live. The vicar of Witley is perhaps rather too much of a caricature, and the boy Iver should have developed better; but then we should have had an altogether different novel.
Had Mr. Rider Haggard wished to allegorise the tragedy of the corruption of the civilised European by contact with the wild man of the American continent, he could not have devised a more appropriate plot than that of his latest romance, Heart of the World. The story is told in Mr. Haggard's most brilliant and easily followed style, and there is more in the book of sterling human character than he generally gives us ; but the waste of all this fine character is saddening. The root of the tragedy is in the irre- concilability of the standards of faith and honour of the several persons whom a strange series of accidents has made collaborators in a mighty quest. A mystic emerald, cleft in two, symbolises the broken Heart of the World; and, according to prophecy, when the two halves shall be reunited a new Indian Empire will be founded, and the white man's reign in Mexico will end. One half of the jewel is in the possession of Don Ignatio, a very interesting Christianised Indian, who would have liked to be a priest, but who has been shut out from the sacred office by a sense of loyalty to a vow of moat un-Christian vengeance laid on him by his father ; the other half is with Zibalbay, the hereditary high-priest of the City of the Heart. Zibalbay has a beautiful daughter ; and Dun Ignatio has for friend and comrade an English gentleman with a passion for adventure. How Ignatio, who is the heir of the Aztec Emperors, falls in with Zibalbay and his daughter; how the Englishman falls in love with Maya, and how devotedly Maya. serves him ; and how, little by little, all the characters we care most about are drawn into a network of degrading subterfuge and trickery, and how all their heroic deeds come to nothing and their tricks are baffild, we will leave our readers to find out for themselves. The narrative is as exciting and as rich in dramatic situations as Mr. Haggard's novels generally are. We only wish it came to a less depressing conclusion.
Mr. Conan Doyle provides excellent entertainment in his lively narrative of The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, Colonel in the army of the great Napoleon. The Brigadier is allowed to tell his own stories, and he tells them in a most charming vein of natural vivacity and simple-hearted vanity. He is bon enfant throughout, and obviously also a brave soldier and a chivalrous gentleman. When Bonaparte declares that he possesses the thickest head, as well as the stoutest heart in his army, he is not far wrong. But that does not hinder the Brigadier from priding himself—modestly of course—quite as much upon his acuteness as upon his courage. "I am an
excellent soldier," he tells us. " I do not say this because I am prejudiced in my own favour, bat because I really am so. I can weigh every chance in a moment, and decide with as much certainty as though I had brooded for a week."
None the less his most heroic exploits are heroic blunders, in which the laugh is all against him, though he does
not see it. We like him particularly in the chapter called
"How the Brigadier held the King," in which he playa ecarte for his freedom against a young English officer
who has taken him prisoner, wins the game, and in the moment of victory finds himself confronted by Wellington,
upon whose English coldness he can make no impression by eloquence that " would have moved a Frenchman to weep upon his shoulder." The sequel, "How the King held the Brigadier," is even better. Gerard's escape from Dartmoor. Gaol and masterly theft of Sir Charles Meredith's great-coat with the letter in the pocket of it, which contains his own dis- missal from prison ; his honourable conduct in not opening the letter; and the delightful clenouemeni when he has blun- dered back under the prison walls and into the arms of the Governor, to whom he surrenders himself and the despatch, make admirable comedy. The book is pleasantly contrived in a series of episodes, each complete in itself, though strung together by the thread of the Brigadier's personality.
Mr. Mason's Courtship of Morrice Buckler is a thrilling romance, with a most ingenious and mysterious plot. The story is excellently told, and, though none of its characters are drawn much below the surface, they are all sufficiently individual and alive to hold the reader's interest, if not his deeper sympathies. It is a novel of action much more than of character, and we become too much absorbed in wondering what its personages will do, to trouble ourselves about the probability of their motives. Among many vividly dramatic scenes, two stand out with exceptional brilliancy,—the group at the gaming-table, into which the young student from Leyden is drawn by inevitable fascination when be arrives in hot haste at Lord Elmscott's house in London, and should proceed without delay to his friend, lying in prison at Bristol; and the duel between Buckler and Count Lukestein, in the course of which the Countess, walking in her sleep, passes between the combatants without seeing them. The kid- napping of Buckler, and his term of hard labour in the mountains of the Tyrol, makes a highly picturesque episode in a novel of singular interest and brilliancy. We had almost forgotten to say that the tale is of the seventeenth century, the incidents following upon the Rebellion of Mon- mouth and the Bloody Assize.
Very bright, humorous, and altogether clever is "Max Pemberton's " chronicle of the adventures of Sir Nicholas Steele, Bart.—a Gentleman's Gentleman, as the title of the book defines him. But, having said that the novel is racy and clever, we must make haste to add that it is an unprofitable book, calculated even to do mischief, inasmuch as it casts a glamour of romance over an exceedingly discreditable career. Sir Nicholas Steele and his valet—who is also his master's biographer—are a pair of rogues ; and the novel is a shame- less chronicle of intrigue, swindling, gambling, and duelling. But for the use made of the railway and the telegraph one would take the story to be a tale of a hundred, or two hundred, years ago, when scoundrelly gentlemen — and especially impudent baronets—were the vogue in fiction, and a man of fashion was not expected to have even a show of morality. As a tale of to.day the book is an anachronism, if not some- thing of an impertinence.
The Master of Trenance is less clever, and it has a conven- tional moral in so far that the brilliant villain dies dis- honoured and the obscure honest man comes to prosperity. But one wonders with what object the author keeps us so long in such very bad and unpleasant company as that of Arthur Vipond, the supposed Master of Trenance, and his friends, Duke Jevis and Alfred Danby. Everything is very melo- dramatic in this book. There is a great family secret which is dug up out of a vault at the end; there are two witches, one a rustic crone of the old-fashioned sort, one a modern lady who deals in card tricks and prisms. Arthur Vipond kills a man, and Alfred Danby is hanged for the crime. A wife is shut up in an old tower and falsely declared mad, and finally a supposed fisherman turns out to be the real Master of Trenance, and his beautiful, humbly born wife, who married him in his days of poverty and reproach, becomes one of the most perfect ladies of the land.
One feels provoked with A Mine of Wealth because it might so easily have been much better than it is. The idea of the plot is rather clever, but it is not well or pleasantly carried out. The mistake that spoils the construction of the story is the development upon a common plane of interest and dis tinctness of two love-affairs, one of which involves the inclinations of a son and daughter, the other the affections of the son's father and the daughter's mother. The loves of the children are, or seem to be, an obstacle to the marriage of the parents, and unpleasant rivalries are thus developed which ultimately lead the mother to attempt the life of her daughter. Her evil designs are frustrated by a clever and devoted man-, servant, but she marries Lord Stretton none the less, and after her marriage confesses her guilt. The situation is too strong for the conclusion, and it is altogether unpleasant. By way of criticism, one is tempted to apply to the book the answer made by the serious young man whose gay father rallied him on not dancing and flirting,—" one generation at a time, my lord." It would be impossible to lay down exact principles in these matters, but it is certain that there is something offensive to taste in the spectacle of young people thwarted in love by the counter-stream of their own parents' belated affections.
Short stories may be roughly divided into two classes,— those that are of the nature of poems and those that are of the nature of epigrams. The collection of society sketches which Mrs. Forrester gives us in the volume called Harlow's ideal belong to the latter class. They are brisk, pointed, and " up- to-date," all thoroughly complete and clever, and if we had read them one at a time in magazines or newspapers, instead of collected together in a volume, we should probably have appreciated their readable quality more and felt their defect of solid merit less. But we are of those who prefer the short story that is of the nature of a poem, and who weary quickly of a succession of pictures of society which show us only a very superficial and common aspect of the life of well-born and well-dressed people. Fashion - hunting, flirting with neighbours' wives, playing fast and loose with honest hearts, these things go on we know in society; but better things go on in society too—and to write too much about the vulgarity of the world, even for the sake of showing it up, is one of the surest ways of increasing the sum of its vulgarity.
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