RE CENT NO VE LS.* WITH the solitary exception of
Mrs. Oliphant, we have no living novelist more conspicuously distinguished for variety of theme and range of imaginative outlook than Mr. F. Marion Crawford. At this stage of a long and brilliant literary career, it is hardly likely that the first-named writer will again surprise us as we were surprised by Salem Chapel, and again in such a different way by A Beleaguered City ; but the latter is still bringing fortl . from his treasury things new as well as old. To mention only books which are com- paratively recent, no two stories could well be more un- like each other, in theme, in handling, and in atmosphere, than Greiffenstein and A Cigarette-Maker's Romance ; and Khaled seems to have nothing in common with either, save that stamp of an individuality which can never become wholly unrecognisable. The third book has neither the sombre power of the first nor the winning, pathetic tenderness of the second, but it has the life of quick movement, the stir of animated action, and the strong interest provided by a fresh and singularly attractive narrative scheme. Khaled exists for other and worthier artistic ends than the excite- ment and gratification of curiosity; and yet the most blase novel-reader will find himself awaiting with unmistakable eagerness the solution of the problem of that imperfect human life which has been given to the hero by the decree of Allah,—whether he will win the love of the Princess who has become his wife, and with it the immortality of the faithful, or, missing it, fade away into nothingness. The story of Khaled's conquest of the woman in whom the brain has so dominated the heart that his plea for love in addition to wifely regard seems a mere whimsical fancy, is told with skill, subtlety, and insight; and the concluding chapter, in which the apparently impregnable citadel suddenly surrenders at discre- tion, is quite equal in power and beauty to anything that we have had from Mr. Crawford's pen. It is the husband's courtship of the wife who has given him everything but the one thing he • (1.) Khaled : a Tale of Arabia. By P. Marion Crawford. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co.—(2.) There and Back. By George MacDonald. 3 vols. London : Hogan Paul end CO..—(8.) SOMB 0110 Mite Suer. By H. Cliffs Halli- day. 8 vols. London Chapman and Hall.---(4.) Her Evil Honium. By Frederick Boyle. 8 vols. London: Chapman and Hall.—(5) Bertha's Bart. By Lady Lindsay. 3 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.— ) A Bitter Birthright. BY Dora Russell. 8 vols. London : Hurst and Blackett.—(70 A Hidden Foe. BY G. A. Iienty. 2 vols. London : Sampson Low and Co.—(S.) Bight Dabs. By B. E. Forrest. 3 vols. London: Emith, Elder, and Co. most desires, which provides this Arabian tale with its main structural lines; but the romance deals much more largely with narrative of incident than with analysis of emotion. The fighting chapters in the early part of the book are capital, and plenty of excitement is provided by the machinations of the vengeful Almasta to bring about the ruin of the man who has proved unresponsive to her beauty and her blandishments ;. while the part played by that odd creation, the King of the Beggars, supplies the element of pleasant humour. .Khaled is, in short, worthy of its author, and to say this is to award high praise.
Considered as works of constructive art, the novels of Mr. George MacDonald exhibit an inequality which is little short of inexplicable ; but no reader who goes to any one of them in search of that which is most characteristic of their author will come away disappointed. To say, as we often hear it said, that there is too much preaching, both direct and indirect, in Mr. MacDonald's stories, is as much beside the- mark as it would be to say that Miss Austen has too much homely detail, or Mr. Wilkie Collins too much plot-complexity. In each case the thing complained of is the very thing for which the works criticised mainly or largely exist, and the com- plainer's wisest course is not to grumble, but to go elsewhere in search of food convenient for him. And, as a matter of fact, Mr. MacDonald has far too much imagination to indulge—save occasionally—in that hind of preaching which, we frankly ad- mit, goes a long way towards spoiling the work of fiction in which it appears. His books are, in essence, -what they ought to be,—dramatic, not didactic ; but the bent of his nature impels him to make his dramatic situations spiritual situa- tions as well, the relations of his personages to each other being determined not merely by exigencies of narrative, but of moral and spiritual character and condition. In this re- spect There and Back (which, by-the-way, does not seem to us. a very felicitous title), resembles its predecessors ; but it has a compact body of narrative which ought to satisfy even those readers who boast that they read a novel "simply for the story," as if such reading were a rare and highly commendable intellectual virtue. Some readers may think that the working bookbinder who is really the son of a Baronet, and is a master not only of bookbinding but of horse-shoeing and literary criticism, has rather too much of the Admirable Crichton in his mental and moral constitution ; but much of Mr. MacDonald's charm lies in his power to give life and imagina- tive credibility to ideal creations who in other hands would become either wooden lay-figures, or graceful phantoms altogether too bright and good for human nature's daily food. Barbara Wylder, who has certainly more of ordinary flesh and blood than the hero, is one of the author's most winsome heroines ; and in the encounter between her wild, passionate mother and our old friend the Rev. Thomas Wingfold, Mr. MacDonald is at his best. There is some admirable bookish talk in the first volume, and the story as a whole is certain to, be enjoyed by its author's numerous admirers.
Mr. Halliday has put a good deal of bright, lifelike por- traiture and pleasant descriptive work into a novel with an absurdly melodramatic plot which will do much to spoil for the more judicious class of readers a story which might have been wholly satisfactory. Of this defective feature of Some' One Must Suffer we will say nothing more, because it is. generally unfair to tell a novelist's story for him, and also. because in this case it would be specially unfair to dwell upon the one weak point in a book which is by no- means weak as a whole, though it is here and there- a little conventional. We incline to think that the light- hearted, affectionate, companionable young painter, David Amber, who thinks himself in love with his child-friend. Ethie Leigh, is the most successful of Mr. Halliday's characters; and certainly the homeliest and most attractive scenes in the narrative-drama are those in which he plays a prominent part. The early chapters, which deal with the happy,. careless childhood spent by Ethic—an affectionate modification- of the masculine-sounding Lameth—under the loving if rather indolent guardianship of good Mrs. Pilgrim, have a delightful open-air feeling, which is lost for a time when the girlie taken away by the rather ponderously heroic Mr. Ravensbourne, but is recovered when David and his Jonathan, Ullathorne, make their gipsy-like invasion of Ravensbourne Park, and. hold mildly Bohemian carnival in its somewhat solemn glades. Elsewhere—especially in that dreadful crypt with its two
coffins—the atmosphere is closer and less invigorating, and one need not be a carping critic to find material for hostile criticism ; but, notwithstanding all such material, Some One 3fu8t Suffer stands fairly above the line which marks average merit in contemporary fiction.
Many a book which is very much less clever than Mr. Boyle's story, Her Evil Genius, is as a novel decidedly more satisfactory. The fact is, that a good deal of the writer's cleverness is really wasted, very intricate intellectual machinery being invented and set in motion with a result which seems altogether disproportionate to the labour involved. The book is pre-eminently a novel of situations, and many of the situa- tions are fairly strong ; but they often seem to arise out of nothing, and to lead up to nothing. They are not sufficiently linked together into a narrative unity, and therefore the whole work is much less effective than its separate parts. Three of the principal characters—the beautiful Blanch Plowden, her dis- reputable brother Dick, and John Oliver, the painter of genius —are born schemers, and they spend their time in unscrupulous scheming, apparently for the mere love of it ; but though their wiles are most elaborately described, we never quite see their real object, or understand how the tortuous machinations can accomplish any object at all. We do not pretend to have devoted to the story that minute attention demanded by a philosophical or scientific demonstration ; but we have read it with that amount of care which it is a pleasure to give to any hook that is obviously written by an able man, and we confess that of much of the subtle plotting we can make little or nothing. The aims of John Oliver are specially puzzling, for it is in his portrait that breadth of effect is most con- spicuously sacrificed to minuteness of detail. On the other hand, his Croat servant, Stanko, a curious compound of fidelity and villainy, is as effective as he is picturesque, while Nelly Fairfax, the true-hearted, ingenuous girl who has spent her life almost entirely among Indians, and whose scanty broken English consists entirely of slang, is a triumph of fresh, pleasant humour, and every chapter in which she appears is delightful reading.
Lady Lindsay has the root of the matter in her, and though Bertha's Earl is not devoid of faults which are both obvious and provoking, it has also substantial merits which are really more important. Lord Delachaine, the reticent, formal, and externally most uninteresting member of the peerage, who has lived to be fifty-seven years of age without ever having been attracted by a woman, and then falls deeply but very undemonstratively in love with Bertha Millings, who supports herself and her sister by painting iu a very an- aristocratic studio, is a well-conceived and well-delineated character,—thoroughly natural and consistent from the first page to the last. The matrimonial worries—which finally develop into real troubles—of the kindly, chivalrous, but somewhat stupid gentleman, which are partly due to himself, partly to circumstances, and partly to the essentially vulgar spite of his sister, Lady Theodosia, are related with real truth of imagination and not a little gentle pathos, which rises to intensity in the last chapters, where the husband and wife who have drifted apart from each other are brought together by the widowed Duchess of Baynham, who has left her beloved dead to do the work which she knew had been near to his heart. The Duchesses of romance are fairly numerous, Some of them are admirable, some of them are awful, some of them are hateful ; but a really loveable imaginary Duchess is a new thing, and "Mary Baynham " is one of the most loveable women in recent fiction. It is the details of the book that are badly managed. The anonymous letter, for example, is a very clumsily contrived expedient, and Dr. Jackson's conduct when Bertha goes to him in her trouble is either the conduct of a cad or of a weak fool entirely destitute of self-control, while it is abundantly clear that Lady Lindsay does not intend him to be regarded as either the one or the other.
There can be no doubt whatever that Miss Dora Russell knows how to tell a story, and such knowledge is not to be despised; but it is a great pity that she could not find a story better worth telling than the narrative of vulgar folly, vice, and crime with which she has filled the three volumes of A Bitter Birthright. Of all the prominent characters, there is not one whom a respectable reader would care to number among his or her friends, for even the heroine, who is perhaps the least offensive, conducts herself before her marriage with
Hugh Gifford in a manner much more befitting an unscru- pulous adventuress than a well-bred English girl; while the records of the drinking-bouts of the hunchbacked Lord Gil- more, and the illicit amours both of himself and the younger brother whom he has dethroned, are as devoid of pleasant entertainment as they are of edification. We must not be understood to say that there is anything in A Bitter Birthright that is " objectionable " in the special and restricted sense in which that word is frequently used by reviewers ; indeed, the author, conscious of her inno- cence in this respect, may wonder what we find in her book to complain of. As a matter of fact, we find nothing besides a common, unimaginative treatment of disagreeable themes ; but we do not think we are alone in feeling that this is sufficiently uninviting, or in thinking that Miss Dora Russell in her latest book has done herself less than j ustiee.
It may be taken for granted that an author who has won popularity as a writer of successful stories for boys, will not fail conspicuously when he takes a temporary leave of the juveniles that he may appeal to an audience of their seniors. At any rate, Mr. G. A. Henty has not failed in A Hidden Foe, for though it does not belong to the highest class of fiction, and is hardly a book which any one would think of reading twice, it may be read once with pleasure and interest ; and even among fairly good novels there is hardly one in twenty of which more than this can truthfully be said. Mr. Henty?s new novel is a story of the quest of an amateur detective, and though the person who tries to equal or break the record of Scotland Yard" off his own bat," is to be found much less frequently in real life than in fiction, where he is generally a gentleman of quite incredible knowingness and resource, Mr. Henty does not put too great a strain upon our powers of belief, but makes his young barrister, Robert Harbut, reasonably lifelike and credible. The majority of his clan set themselves upon the trail of a murderer, but A Hidden Foe is not concerned with infractions of either the Sixth or the Seventh Commandment, and Mr. Harbut's self-imposed task is to find evidence of a marriage which, if forthcoming, will put a very charming young lady into possession of a fine estate. In the main idea there is nothing specially new, but the details are handled with a good deal of freshness, and the novel achieves to the full the modest measure of success at which it aims.
Eight Days is a story of the Indian Mutiny. So—as some readers may possibly remember—was its immediate prede- cessor, The Touchstone of Peril ; and the author who writes two novels based on the same series of historical events runs a serious risk of failure—at any rate, in his second attempt. In this ease, curiously enough, the second attempt is the more successful, partly because both the locality and the time of the action are more narrowly circumscribed than in The Touchstone of Peril, and partly, we think—though here we may be altogether mistaken—because there is in Eight Days a closer adherence to actual fact and less of inventive manipu- lation than in the earlier story. Indeed, the Indian Mutiny is a dangerous theme for the novelist, for the simple reason that the bald truth has such tremendous impressiveness ; and any attempt at artistio dressing-up is almost certain to weaken this impressiveness rather than to strengthen it. The scene of Mr. Forrest's story is the city of Khizrabad ; the eight days are those extending from the 8th to the 15th, both inclusive, of the month of May in the year 1857; and when we reach the end of the third volume, but a bare half-dozen of the score or more of Englishmen and Englishwomen to whom we are introduced in the bright opening chapters remain alive. It is almost impossible to criticise the book as a novel ; it has the truth and the terror of authentic history; but howsoever we classify it, it is a narrative of the most absorbing and pathetic interest.
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