RECENT NOVELS.*
ME. WILMA 31 BLACK'S hand and heart are still in the High- lands, and as long as he can send southward stories like Donald Ross of Heimra, his readers will be quite content that they should remain there. The new story deals with the gradual drawing near to each other of two people between whom circumstances seem to have set an almost impassable barrier. Mary Stanley is an English young lady who has come into possession, by the will of her late uncle, of the High- land estate which he has purchased from the impoverished son of the last of its ancient lairds ; and Donald Ross is the young man who has been dispossessed of everything but the rugged island of Heimra, where he has raised a new and humbler home, and of his place in the hearts of the simple crofters, who refuse to acknowledge any other lordship than his. Miss Stanley, who may be described as a capable and practical Dorothea Brooke, has all kinds of beautiful schemes for promoting the happiness and welfare of her tenantry, but is stopped at every advance by a perfectly civil yet abso- lutely unconquerable reticence whiola she is quite shrewd enough to discern is but the disguise of mingled fear and hatred,—emotions which she is led to suspect, indeed for a time to believe, are kept awake by the revengeful machinations of the young man who to his old people is still Ross of Heimra. As Mr. Black is not one of those novelists who aim at securing effects of freshness by flouting the accepted traditions of story-telling, the reader knows what must be the end of a tale with such a beginning; but though the main lines of the structure are obvious enough, there is plenty of the best kind of freshness in the treatment of the relations of the simple yet shrewd tenantry to the landlord by law and the landlord by loyalty, and in the succession of inci- • (1.) Donald Ross of Heimra. By William Black. 8 vols. London Sampson Low and Co.—(2.) Ht. Katherine, by the Tower. By Walter Besant. 3 vols. London : Chatto and Winchis.-13.1 The Hallett,: a Country-Town Chronicle, By Leslie Keith. 3 vols. London : B. Bentley and Son.—(4.) A Child-Widow. By Mrs. F. H Williamson. 3 vols. London : Chatto and Windns.—(5.) Humbling his Pride. By Charles T. C. James. 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—(6.) Helen's Vow ; or. a Freak of Pate. By the Earl of Desart. 2 vols. London Swan Sonnensehein and Co.—(7.) Tarte gkeffington : a Sporting Nora, By Guy Gravenbil. 2 vole. London: Chapman and Hall. dents which serve as stepping-stones over which Donald Ross and Mary Stanley pass to meet each other. The personal interest is a little less diffused than it is wont to be in Mr. Black's stories ; the hero and the heroine are always in the foreground, and the rest of the figures are compara- tively subsidiary, though not one is ineffective. Pardie, the ill-conditioned factor, is admirable. Unlike most or his tribe in fiction, he is not too bad to be believed in, for he has a certain rude instinct of fidelity to his em- ployers, though he never fails to bring it into alliance -with all the jealousy and malignity of a nature which is contemptibly mean and small rather than hatefully vicious. It is hardly necessary to say that there is plenty of pleasant humour, for this is an element in which Mr. Black's stories are never deficient. The native policeman, with his policy of masterly inactivity and his habit of answering questions in the manner which he thinks most acceptable to the questioner ; the Free Church minister, whose passion for " ahmity" comes of the weakness of the flesh rather than the strength of the spirit ; and the three agitators, whose mission to the oppressed crofters collapses so ludicrously, are all really humorous figures; and the special kind of graceful pleasantness which gives Mr. Black's work its peculiar charm is plentiful enough in Donald Ross of Heimra.
In St. Katherine's by the Tower, the parts are greater than the whole. The novel is not one of Mr. Besant's conspicuous successes ; indeed, it is hardly saying too much to declare that it is, for him, a failure. Nor is it, we think, very difficult to understand how this failure has come to pass. The author has repeated, with aggravations, the mistake made in Herr Paulus, by introducing events which seem to demand a supernatural—or preternatural—explanation, and at the same time discrediting the only hypothesis which makes the occurrences intelligible. The question suggested by St. Katherine's by the Tower is, whether there was anything .abnormal or uncanny in the influence exerted by the melo- dramatically villainous Richard Archer over Sylvia Comines and George Baysallanee. The young woman and the young man are apparently in the possession of perfect physical and mental health, when the former is unaccountably seized with one of those sudden antipathies which are generally indicative of some cerebral aberration, and the latter exhibits the symptoms of suicidal mania, placing himself finally at the head of a revolutionary mob for the simple purpose of sub- jecting himself to the penalties of high treason. If there were such a thing as the Evil Eye—or, rather, if we were but allowed to entertain the belief provisionally for purposes of imaginative pleasure—there would be little to complain of ; but while Mr. Besant's invention insists on supplying him with fantastic material, his intellect insists on subjecting that material to a rationalising process which deprives it of the only interest to which it can make any claim. It would matter less if the preternatural element in the story were simply episodical; but it is not so : it is interwoven with the whole narrative fabric, and therefore the reader can only escape from it when he becomes absorbed in some one of the parts of the novel where Mr. Besant's special command of description, conversation, or reflective monologue is for the moment uninterfered with. For these parts are indeed excellent, with a very enjoyable kind of excellence. Mr. Besant has shown ere this that he can write a more or less faulty book, but a dull book he could not write if he tried. He sees everything so vividly that he makes it equally vivid to his readers—witness the charming opening of the present novel, and the powerful prison scenes—and he has a remarkable power of entering into the minds of commonplace people, and making their expression of themselves dramatically interesting. In the hands of most writers, the comments of the representa- tives of physic and divinity upon the strange case of poor Sylvia would have been tiresome, but in his hands they are delightful. If there be, strictly speaking, too much padding in the story, it can at any rate be said that the padding is always attractive.
The general character of The Hallefts is well indicated by its sub-title, "A Country-Town Chronicle." There is a fairly .solid structure of plot, provided by the complications arising out of the will of old Mr. Hallett, of Hallett Place; but the interest of the story really lies in the quietly truthful delineation of various types of character which, while familiar everywhere, are specially prominent in those semi-urban,
semi-rural communities where their idiosyncrasies have room in which to develop themselves. The rather colourless and helpless wives of the shrewd, scheming lawyer, Hallett, and of the kindly, weak-willed banker, Mellish, are perhaps too much alike ; and so far as they are concerned, there is a certain flatness of effect resulting from insufficient differen- tiation. In the other members of Leslie Keith's little group of Melchisford folk, there is, however, no lack of variety. Even Lawyer Hallett and his son Andrew, though there is between them the similarity of moral as well as of physical kinship, are strongly individualised ; for though the younger man has all his father's selfish unscrupulousness, and is by no means wanting in the instincts of caution, he has more courage and enterprise than the older man, and is not prevented by weak timidity from running a risk for the sake of a big prize, when he perceives that a moment's hesitation will ruin his chance for ever. Andrew Hallett is really the most skilful and subtle of Leslie Keith's portraits, but her most obviously effective sketch is that of Mrs. Smee, the doctor's wife, whose vivacity and mordancy of conversational comment recall the ever-delightful Mrs. Cadwallader. The relations between Lady Hem mingway and her submissive son have also a good deal of humour; but here there may be just a suspicion of caricature,—of forcing the note for the sake of effect ; whereas Mrs. Smee is rendered with a photographic, or rather, mirror-like, accuracy of feature and expression. In two respects Leslie Keith has had more courage than is common among novelists. She has chosen as her second heroine a girl who is absolutely deficient in beauty, brains, or charm of manner—an entirely awkward, un- interesting creature—and has made her attractive by simple trustfulness and goodness ; and she has also chosen to run counter to poetic justice by giving Andrew Hallett a large share of the prize for which he has so unworthily schemed, instead of bringing him to utter confusion in the concluding chapter. In the latter instance there is, indeed, something of the strain of conscious effort to avoid a conventional denoue- ment; but it is certainly a step in the right direction.
Mrs. Williamson, in A Child Widow, has produced a very readable novel, with an attractive story and two or three by no means badly drawn characters; but her book would have been better than it is, had she made some attempt to minimise the improbability of the incident which provides it with a scheme and title. It is true that Nancy Bell at the time when she became a child-wife, and in a few hours a child-widow, was but seventeen, and that she was not even a wise girl for her years ; but it is nevertheless impossible to believe that, in the circumstances invented by Mrs. Williamson, she would at a moment's notice have married a dying man old enough to be her grandfather, even in order to save the younger man she loved from the result of disinheritance. When, however, poor Sir Peter is dead, and the youthful widow is left to make the best of the dignified but difficult position in which she has placed herself, the story goes on very smoothly and plea- santly, with a minor improbability or two by the way, but with a general fidelity to the natural and lifelike. Nancy's elder sister Millicent, who is the real heroine, has, it may be, a too well-regulated mind to be as interesting as she might have been, though as such minds are found occasionally in real life, even in young ladies, there is no sufficient reason why they should be ignored by the novelist. Indeed, Miss Bell is rather a relief from the ordinary young ladies of fiction, who are becoming more and more ill-regulated every day, without being one whit more credible than the really noble girl who is at once sister and mother to the foolish but still charming Nancy. Mrs. Williamson's men are, on the whole, more conventional, and therefore less satisfactory, than her women; but the sketch of Sir Peter—whose mind might have been better regulated with advantage—proves that mere masculinity is not an obstacle which the author is powerless to overcome, and this is saying more than can be said for the majority of feminine novelists.
The force and " go" which are undoubtedly to be found in Humbling his Pride, are attained largely by the use of what may be called limelight effects; and one has an uneasy sus- picion that if Mr. James abjured melodrama in plot, and Dickens-like caricature in portraiture, he might degenerate into something like flatness Humbling his Pride is a euphemism for hounding a man to death, the acting villains
being a country doctor and a country vicar, and the victim a noble blacksmith, who is a sort of Bayard of the forge. Dr. Specifer hates John Horlock because be is the illegitimate child of the woman with whom the doctor has been in love ; Vicar Marden hates him because he has criticised the vicarial administration of parish affairs : ergo, they conspire together to commit perjury in order that Horlock may be sent to the scaffold for a murder of which they know him to be innocent. Certainly human nature has its incalculable elements, and it is not always safe to say that this or that alleged manifesta- tion of it is absolutely incredible ; but still, there are such things as ludicrous improbabilities, and in the practically motiveless criminality of the medical and clerical scoundrels we have our fill of them. On artistic as well as on social grounds, it is a relief to pass from their companionship to that of the more reputable persons in the story, though even among them we do not always find a perfect conformity to the modesty of Nature. "Long Willum's " bashfulness and Mrs. Morrison's references to her " flyin' pains" are terribly overdone; but, on the other hand, the old Squire, Farmer Morrison, his pretty daughter Rose, and her London milliner- friend, Madge Hamilton, are as lifelike as they are pleasant. The fact is, that Mr. James's faults are irritating because they have the look of being deliberate. He has virtues as well ; and if he will remember that Dickens, though a great writer, is not a safe model, the virtues will have a chance of coming to the front. A day may dawn in which such a cheap conceit as that about ancestors being "done in oil like sardines," will be impossible to him. - As Mr. James is a follower of Dickens, so is Lord Desart a follower of " Ouida," as that writer appears in those stories in which she deals with the more tumultuous manifestations of the passions of love, hatred, and revenge. The vow of the title- page is the vow taken by Helen Moore to discover and punish the man who in Paris has seduced her young sister, ruined her brother, and practically murdered them both, and of whom she knows nothing save that he is an Englishman, and that his name is Dallas. While engaged in her quest, accident makes her acquainted with the popular statesman, Mr. Leger, who is distinguished not less for his lofty character than for his commanding abilities and marvellous eloquence ; and Helen, though she has determined that love can have no place in a life devoted to but one purpose, soon has to admit that her heart has gone out of her keeping. Mr. Leger is in a similar condition, though he too seems to have reasons for struggling against the master-passion ; and on the wedding-morning, when the bridegroom has for once put off his habitual sombre- ness, and the bride has almost forgotten her vow, the latter learns, what the simplest reader has known all along, that the man whom she has married and the man whom she has been seeking are one. Here is a fine Ottidaesque situation, and those who find it attractive and wish to know what Lord Desart makes of it, can place Helen's Vow upon their library lists. They must, however, be warned that the book, though not wanting in cleverness or in a certain feverish kind of interest, is from first to last about as depressing a story as was ever written even by a disciple of the author of Folle-Farine.
Jack Skellington is a bright, wholesome story which improves greatly as it proceeds. The majority of middle-aged readers, even if they happen to be enthusiastic sportsmen, will almost certainly become rather tired of the runs and the steeple- chases and other events of the kind to which the first volume is almost exclusively devoted, while the undergraduate slang, interspersed with cheap tags from the Eton Latin Grammar, is decidedly trying ; but the hero and his friends are such manly young fellows, and there is in the book such a healthy open-air feeling, that as we read on we gradually lose con- sciousness of its defects, and become increasingly alive to its simple merits. The latter half of the novel is certainly the better half as well, if only because there is so much more variety of human interest. Horsy and doggy chronicles are all very well so far as they go, but they go only a short way ; and there is no doubt whatever that when Jack falls in love after the fashion of an honest English lad, and migrates westward to make a home for Violet, be becomes more interesting than he has been before. Some of the American chapters are full of spirit, and though there is nothing remarkable in Tack Skeffinglon, it is a very 'night and readable novel.
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