RECENT NOVELS.* THERE is a pleasant, vivacious healthfulness in Mr.
Justin McCarthy's novels which is always attractive, and which is not absent from the pages of The Dictator, though it is a good deal thinner a book than most of its predecessors. The pre- sent writer has heard it called a dull book, and though he does not altogether agree with the judgment, he feels what it means, and sees what it is in the novel (or rather what it is that is not in it) which might give a certain impression of dullness. Mr. McCarthy has in him a good deal • of the idealist, and though he is familiar with many phases of the prose of life, and can present them with effectiveness and truth, he likes to have one figure—and it is generally his central figure—whose personality or career has something of the interest of romance. He has two such figures in the new story—Ericson, the deposed Dic- tator of the South American Republic of Gloria, and Captain Sarrasin, the simple, loyal soldier of fortune who has fought .1. (I.) Tho Dictator. By Justin McCarthy, M.P. 3 vols. London ; Matto and Windus.—(2.) Dm Two ImnrrIts. By 0. T Keary. 3 vols. London James R. Os,rood, MoIlvaine, and Co.—(3.) Mrs. Ephinstono of Drum. By Mrs. Stevenson. 3 vole. London: R. Bent'ey and on.—(4.) Robert Carroll. By M. E. Li Clem. 2 vole. London ; burst and Blaeketr.-15.) 21.n oql Holdover's Love-Story. By Thomas Pinkerton. 2 vole. London; Swan Sonnon.ohein and Co.—(64 The Great Chin. EM,ode. By Paul Cushing. London: Adam and Charles 13Mok.—(7.) For Marjory'; Sake. By Mrs. John WeAerhothie. London : Digby, Long, and 00.—(8.) The Heart of rapperary, a Romance of the Land League. By W. P. Roan. London: Ward and Downey. for many causes, but never for one to which he could not give his heart as well as his sword. Both of them have a certain charm, but neither is so substantial as we feel he ought to be; be somehow lacks the convincingness and palpability of flesh•and-blood. Ericson is the more disappointing of the two because he is more ambitiously conceived, and there- fore there is a greater disproportion between his promise and his performance. His appearance in London society has a vague impressiveness, but it does not justify the hearsay record of his great career in Gloria ; we have to take him on trust to a greater extent than is desirable in the case of a romantic hero, Indeed, Mr. McCarthy himself seems to have his doubts about Ericson, though he puts them into the mouth of a quite subordinate character, the quick-witted American- born Duchess of Deptford :- °°' What troubles me is this,' said the Duchess, don't see
much of the Dictator in him. Do you ? '—' How do you mean, Duchess ?' Helena asked evasively.—' Well, he don't seem to me to have much of a ruler of mon about him. He is a charming man and a brainy ono, I dare say ; but the sort of man who takes hold at once and manages things and puts things straight all of his own strength—well, he doesn't seem to be quite that kind of man—now, does he ? "
The reader will probably incline to agree with the Duchess, and as Mr. McCarthy evidently intended Ericson to be "quite that kind of man," the portrait is disappointing. Nor is the mere scaffolding of the story—so far, at any rate, as the attempted assassination is concerned—altogether satisfactory. A ruffianly South American convict could hardly assume the character of a Yankee professor of folk-lore in such a manner as to deceive Englishmen of culture, especially when one of them is a specialist ; and though the discovery of the impos- ture by the Duchess and Dolores is skilfully managed, it seems very improbable that the assassins should not have been earlier suspected. So pleasant and bright a book as The Dictator can hardly be called a failure, but it is certainly lacking in solidity and grip.
The Two Lancrofts is a clever, irritating, and enervating book, which testifies to Mr. Keary's admiring study of a certain school of contemporary French fiction. It is a novel of artistic and literary society in Paris and London, very skilful in its swift impressionist rendering of the outline and atmosphere of the life:with which it deals, and even strikingly truthful up to a certain point, but—or so it seems to us— almost amazingly inadequate in the incompleteness of its rendering of life as a whole, and often even tantalisingly so in its presentation of individual character. Some time ago a very able and intelligent critic, Mr. Frederick Wedmore, tempered a generous appreciation of this journal by a protest against what he considered our error in ap- praising products of literary art by ethical rather than by reathetical canons. We do not think that the Spectator has ever given occasion for such a protest ; but we have always insisted and always shall insist that to ignore or misrepresent the moral element in life is primarily an offence not against morals but against art. The instinct which approves certain states or actions as morally attractive, and disapproves others as morally repellent, is not less'a fact of nature than is any one of those other instincts which:distinguish between the wise and the foolish thought, the beautiful and the ugly spectacle, the sweet and the sour article of diet ; and to ignore any of them in a presentation of humanity is to throw the picture out of drawing. Here, for example, is:Mr. Keary's story of the two cousins, Hope and Willie Lanoroft. Of entirely different types in all other respects, they are both clearly-marked examples of the artistic temperament ; and the novel deals with the turn given to their lives by the dogged brute strength of the former, and the pliant sensitive weakness of the latter, and especially with the manifestations of that strength and weakness in their relations with the woman who is loved by the one and who loves the other. The studio chapters in the Paris section of the novel are excellent, with much more of real knowledge than the similar chapters in David Grieve ; and many of the single situations, such as the coming together of Willie and Thyrza, and their final parting, have the warmth and reality of life ; but the book in its entirety gives us the same feeling of unreality, or rather of intangibleness, that we have in looking at an entirely flat design—say that of a willow-pattern plate. And this is solely due to a presenta- tion of human nature denuded of one of its essential and normal elements. The people in Mr. Keary's book are highly organised animals, and as studies of the play of emotion and intelligence his portraits are skilful, and in a way interesting; but they are mot, to our view, men and women.
There is no such lack in the characters whose acquaintance we make in Mrs. Elphinstone of Drum, though Mrs. Stevenson has heavily handicapped herself by choosing a situation which strains belief almost to the breaking-point. James Elphin- stone, in the course of an Australian sojourn, has married a girl socially his inferior, who has nursed him through a long illness. After two or three years, during which a child is born to them, he returns to England, 'whither his wife is to follow him ; but the vessel in which she sails founders at sea, and all on board are supposed to have been lost. Only on the eve of his marriage to a girl of his own rank, do• he and his bride elect learn that a boat-load of women and children from the lost Hooghly ' have been picked up and rescued, and they resolve that, in spite of the doubt concern- ing Elphinstone's freedom, they will go through the ceremony of marriage, to separate immediately afterwards until such time as they shall know the whole truth. It will be felt that it is difficult upon such a foundation to build a very stable narrative structure ; but the reader who can manage to forget the foundation and to give his attention to the structure alone, will find in Mrs. Elphinstone of Drum, a novel rich in power, pathos, and strongly conceived dramatic situation. Miriam Flintoft, Elphinstone's true wife, has the love which finds sufficient satisfaction in the happiness of its objeot, and, like Enoch Arden, she determines to efface herself; but her attempt, unlike his, is unsuccessful, and her failure provides Mrs. Stevenson with an effective crisis, in the management of which she shows herself a true creature and dramatic artist. The mere writing is admirable throughout, with a frequent epigrammatic condensation and brilliance ; but some of the conversations are a little too highly finished, and their purely literary charm lacks something of the simplicity of nature. There is, however, more intellectual and human interest in Mrs. Elphinstonc of Drum than in half-a-score of ordinary novels.
Like Mr. Allardyce's Balmoral, which we reviewed last month, Robert Carroll is a story of the Jacobite rising of 1715, and Miss Le Clero has been conventional or courageous enough to utilise again the motive of nine out of every ten novels of civil strife. Robert Carroll is the son of a decayed Jacobite squire, whose lonely, desolate mansion is the meeting- place of the neighbouring country gentlemen who plot for the dethronement of the Elector of Hanover and drink the health of "the King over the water." Verena Lyle is the daughter of a sturdy Hanoverian whose words have weight in the councils of the first George ; and when Miss Le Clero bringer the two young people together it does not require much experience of fiction to give the reader something more than an inkling of the story that is to be told. There is, however, so much quiet beauty, grace, and pathos in Miss Le Clerc's telling of it, that he feels little temptation to resent the trite ness of the theme, though he may, unwisely as we think, resent what is really a conspicuous virtue of the book,—the loyalty to imaginative truths which has led the writer to refrain from the commonplace happy ending. Robert Carroll, though by no means a noteworthy novel, has a winning tenderness, and it is certainly worthy of the pen that wrote the story of Mistress Beatrice Cope.
We do not think that Mr. Pinkerton is quite at his best in Arnold Bolsover's Love.Story, for while there is in it a good deal of scattered cleverness, there is also a lack of proportion and form, and once or twice—perhaps because of some dull- ness of apprehension induced by tropical weather—we have found some little difficulty in following the course of the nar- rative. We know, of course, that whenever a bank which inspires universal confidence appears in the pages of a novel, it is destined to failure, but in the case of Bolsover's bank, the causes of the collapse are involved in impenetrable mystery. Nor is the action of one or two of the characters much more explicable. The lawyer Lenardo, generally known as "the wrecker," is, of course, a rascal; but even rascals do not devise complicated schemes of villainy without some prospect of advantage, and here there seems to be none. Then, too, Arnold Bolsover's conduct in tempting his cousin—who turns out to be his younger brother—to an act of felony, is surely inconsistent with the character of an honourable man, and such Arnold is surely meant to be. It is in the subsidiary sketches of men and things in the brewing town of Milling ton that Mr. Pinkerton exhibits to the best advantage those aptitudes for quietly satirical portraiture and reflection which have made much of his previous work so exhilarating. Here and there are bits in his best manner; the pity is that they are only bits.
The remaining novels on our list are comparatively slight affairs, and may without injustice be somewhat briefly des- patched. The amateur detective has of late years become so popular a character in fiction that even a novelist like Mr. Paul Cushing has been tempted to make use of him, though he has deviated from the beaten track by giving success to the old Scotland Yard official instead of to his gentleman rival. There is something of originality, too, in making a Major and a V.C. take service as a butler in the house of the woman whom he suspects to be the murderer of his uncle, in order to satisfy himself of her innocence or guilt. The Great Chin Episode differs, however, from most novels of its kind in making the detective interest subordinate to the more intellectual incident excited by a handling of character which is thoroughly lifelike and dramatic. The portrait of Emiline Knivett who, though not a murderess, has nevertheless yielded to a very ignoble temptation, and who— sinner as she has been—still retains so much womanly charm, is truthfully imagined and effectively executed, and Mr. Alabone, the old auctioneer and antiquary, is one of Mr. Cushing's pleasantest studies.
When one has said that For Marjory's Sake is a very bright, readable story of country life in South Australia, written by a lady who is evidently well acquainted with her background, and can make her local colour effective without being obtrusive, there really seems very little to be added. It is a book entirely devoid of those defects which bring a savage joy to the heart of a reviewer with a turn for "slogging," and yet it somehow lacks the qualities which arrest attention and inspire strong interest. The various persons who figure in the story are well individualised, and the story itself hangs well together; the style is simple, correct, and businesslike, with nothing that is crude, meretricious, or even flat; and, indeed, the only thing lacking in For Marjory's Salm is the something which really fascinates the imagination. It reminds us of some people who have so many good qualities, that we are annoyed with ourselves for feeling indifferent to them. The in- difference, however, remains ; and we feel that it has a reason, though we may not be able to give it.
The fact that Mr. Ryan's story, The Heart of Tipperary, appears with an introduction by Mr. William O'Brien, M.P., is a sufficient indication of the author's standpoint. The introduction is more entertaining than the story, for though Mr. O'Brien has not much to say that is of any consequence, his crow of triumph over the achievements of the Land League has a shrill vivacity which is very characteristic, and, in its way, not unattractive. The Heart of Tipperary is, of -course, the work of an enthusiastic partisan ; but its tone is for the most part one of which no reasonable opponent can fairly complain, for it would not be fair to resent the absence of the judicial quality in a rhetorical ex parte plea. Nor is Mr. Ryan wanting in imagination and literary facility, but he lacks experience in the art of construction ; and he would have done better had he written half-a-dozen or a dozen short sketches, instead of weaving his materials into a continuous .story. Some of the episodes are really effective and picturesque ; but the book, as a whole, has no organic life, -and is therefore a good deal more wearisome than it ought to be.
Previous page
