RECENT NOVELS.* Ix Thou Art the Man, Miss Braddon is
far below her best, and we are not sure that she has not touched her feeblest. There is none of the character interest by which her melodrama is often agreeably supplemented; and the melodrama itself is poor, cheap, and altogether unconvincing. An educated man of the world may be an unmitigated scoundrel, but it is surely incredible that he should commit a murder by violence in the absence of anything like adequate temptation, especially when his safety from detection depends entirely upon the chapter of accidents. Nor is it reasonably probable that another man of similar condition, who has been rendered by untoward circumstances an object of suspicion,. should transform that suspicion into something like certainty by taking flight prior to the magisterial inquiry. These are crudely absurd narrative expedients, and the details of the work are equally rough and careless, with a roughness and a carelessness which, in the case of a writer of Miss. Braddon's standing, are simply inexcusable. It is nob enough to say that Thou Art the Man is vastly inferior to such books as Ishmael and Joshua Haggard's Daughter, it is hardly less conspicuously inferior to such early attempts as Lady Audley's Secret, John Marchmont's Legacy,. and Henry Dunbatr. That the book has a certain quality of readableness is matter of course, for to genuine dullness Miss Braddon—who is a born teller of stories—could not possibly descend. Here and there, indeed, there is a situation with something of the old effectiveness, but it comes rarely ; and even the mere narrative is feebler and poorer than usual. We can only hope for better luck next time.
For two reasons A Cumberer of the Ground is a somewhat depressing book. In the first place, the story told is decidedly doleful,—this being the more sentimental reason. In the second place, the novel presents the spectacle of what might have been an admirable piece of work spoiled by a lapse into sentimental unreality,—and this is the more intellectual reason. Even as it stands, however, it is in many respects exceedingly good. Miss Constance Smith has a pleasing style; her story hangs together in a workmanlike fashion ; and her three prominent characters—save where one of them breaks down and becomes incredible—are well-conceived and lifelike. But _unfortunately the one breakdown spoils the story, and spoils it all the more irremediably because without it there would have been no story to tell. Dorothy Temple has been unsuccessfully wooed by Brian Travers, and while he is abroad she meets and loves Anthony Lyon, but he, though he also loves her, does not speak until Dorothy, believing in his indifference, has promised Brian's mother that she will marry her son. Lyon and she are companions in a shipwreck, and Dorothy, under the impression that they are about to die together, confesses her love ; but when they are rescued from their peril declares that she must abide by her promise. The problem and its solution are equally familiar in the casuistry * (1 ) Thou Art the Man. By the Author of " Lady Audley's Secret." 8 vols. London: Simpkin, Marehall, Hamilton, Kent, and Co —(2.) A Clamberer of the Ground, 41y Constance Smith. 3 vole, London : Methuen and Co,—(3.) A Crud Dilemma. By May IL Tennyson. 3 vols. Loudon: F. Warne and Co. —(4.) Vietiane of Fashion. By A. M. Grange. 2 vols. London: R. Bentley and Son.—(5.) .A Hunted Life. By J. Fogerty. 3 vole. London : Swan Sonneneohein and Co.—(O.) The Mystery of the Patrician Club. By Albert D. "Tandem, 2 vols. London Chapman and Hall.--(7.) The Mystery of Clermont Dunraven. By Jean fdiddlemase. 3 vols. London : Digby, Long, and Oo.— (8.) A Daughter of To-Day. By Mrs. Everard Cotes (Sarah Jeannette Duncan). 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windue. of fiction ; and of course Dorothy spoils her own life and Lyon's, yet fails to do the slightest service to the weak, fickle, contemptible man whom she marries without doing him the bare justice of telling him that she has given all her love to his friend. There is nothing in the after-story that is " unpleasant " in the ordinary sense of that epithet, for both Dorothy and Lyon are unswervingly loyal to Brian ; but the denouement is dismal, with a dismalness which is gratuitous, though Dorothy's action has rendered it inevit- able. We might say, and should like to say, that, apart from this one blunder, A Cumberer of the around is an exceedingly good novel; but, unfortunately, the blunder is as the fly in the ointment ; and what the fly does when it gets into the oint- ment is well known.
That thoughtful essayist, best known by his pseudonyms, "s Henry Holbeach " and " Matthew Browne," once addressed a letter " to a young lady about to write a novel." It contained much good advice upon various matters connected with the art of fiction; and among its words of wisdom is the emphatic sentence, "Do, my girl, try and give us a story without a villain !" Miss Tennyson has probably not read this ex- oeedingly useful letter ; or if she has read it, she has decided to ignore it, for in A Crud Dilemma we are introduced not to one villain only, but to four. Nor are they half-and-half villains; they are wretches who know no scruples and no relenting ; they are steeped in scoandrelisin of full-proof strength. Two of them, the fraudulent picture-dealer and the feminine bigamist and poisoner, are also exceedingly clever villains— genuine artists in their way—and so we have not that feeling of contempt for their virtuous victims which is generally excited by stories of scheming wickedness. Of course to paint a truthful, convincing portrait of a great villain demands the pencil of a great artist ; and this was doubtless the thought in Henry Holbeach's mind when he advised the beginner to keep clear of the tribe. A really fine novel must, it need hardly be said, bear some sort of resemblance to life; but a novel in which there is no trace of such resemblance may be exceedingly readable; and though A Cruel Dilemma is open to various kinds of hostile criticism, no reader is likely to put it aside as dull. All books of this kind necessarily bear a certain family likeness to each other, but in the matter of detail Miss Tennyson shows some freshness of invention, and this happens to be the one thing in which the ordinary plot- story is conspicuously deficient. We may say in the words of an American humourist, that "for those who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they will like."
We fail to see the special appropriateness of the title Victims of Fashion, for of the two persons in the story who can be called victims, one is a victim of unscrupulous ambi- tion, and the other of misplaced love. A title is, however, important chiefly as an attraction to readers, and though this particular title is hardly good even from that point of view, it does not spoil a story which, in its slight way, is clever and interesting. It deals with the schemes of two handsome and rich young Americans to take a position in the best—that is, the smartest—English society. Their good looks and their money are in their favour, but their most valuable weapon is their claim to be numbered among the landed gentry of South Carolina, and also among the distant relatives of that old English family, the Warners of Tnrnipehire. This claim is a fraud, for they do not own a square yard of land, and they are utterly unknown to Carolinan society ; for though their father was indeed a genuine Wilmer, they are the illegiti- mate children of a quadroon mother. Prior to their ex- posure by a malicious fellow-countrywoman, Horace Wilmer has, however, succeeded in becoming the husband of that kindly creature, Lady Betty Brockle, who is certainly worthy of a better fate ; but Aurelia, who is not less stupid than beautiful, misses Lord Castlerack, and at the end of the second volume she returns to America as the perfectly satis- fied bride of her old saloon-keeping sweetheart, Jos Crawfurd. Victims of Fashion, is a very pleasant specimen of good narra- tive high comedy. Barring the American Wilmers and the Crawfurd contingent, all the people we meet have the bluest possible blood, and titles are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn ; but Mrs. Grange knows the society of which she writes, and some of her character sketches are very successful. In Lady Peggy she is especially happy, and indeed the whole book provides very pleasant reading. There is a good deal of uphill work in A Hunted Life, a novel which is by no means shapely, and which is also a great deal too long. In construction it may be a slight—a very slight—improvement upon its immediate predecessor, Juanita ; but in this respect there is still so much room for further improvement that the point is hardly worth emphasising. It seems probable (though we confess this to be a mere guess on our part) that the story con- tains somewhere in the second or third volume a little kernel of actual fact, which Mr. Fogerty has surrounded with a pulpy body of fiction,—a method of novel-making which always seems to attract the neophyte, though almost more than any other method it demands the skill of the master. The man who is " hunted " is an Irish landlord, who evicts his tenants in batches and transports them to America in unseaworthy ships. Two brothers constitute themselves avengers of their family and neighbourhood in the usual manner. Mr. Power is badly wounded, apparently by the same shot which kills his wife at his side, and just as he has escaped from his house in disguise, it is burnt down to the ground. There are some exciting episodes, or to put it more truthfully, there are some episodes which would be exciting did Mr. Fogerty know better how to deal with them. As it stands, one feels that the book ought to be interesting, and that it is, on the contrary, rather dull. The opening and the greater part of the first volume have absolutely no connection with what follows.
We will not say that in a novel of pure plot-interest it is always a mistake to reveal the central secret very early in the story ; but it is a method of narration which should only be adopted by a writer who has a very well-grounded confidence in his own resources. Mr. Vandam has quite enough clever- ness to justify him in straying from the beaten track, but in The Mystery of the Patrician Club he is, we think, a little too venturesome. Before we have read more than a few chapters we not only know that Lord Brackelonde is the murderer of Gustave Dubois, the card-room attendant at the Patrician Club, but we practically understand the main antecedents of the crime. The two volumes have, therefore, to be devoted to the hunting down of a murderer the evidence of whose guilt is all but complete; and the tenuity of the narrative scheme renders it necessary to retard the denouement by artificial and unnatural expedients. Seeing that James Drayton, the detective, is actuated not merely by professional zeal, but by relentless personal revenge, his deliberate dilatoriness in pouncing upon his prey is incon- ceivable ; and this inconceivableness does much to spoil a very clever story. For that the book is clever is indubitable ; though if we compare it with one of the detective stories of Mr. Conan Doyle, we feel the immense difference between the work of a master like the creator of Sherlock Holmes and that of a writer who, able as he is, just falls short of mastery.
If the book just reviewed is not a masterpiece, it has at any rate merits which entitle it to the compliment of serious criticism. This cannot be said of The Mystery of Clement Dunraven, which is, not to put too fine a point upon it, simply rubbish. It deals with the doings, or misdoings- principally the latter—of our very old acquaintance, the wicked baronet, of whom, since the days of our ingenuous boyhood, we have been growing more and more weary. Sir Clement, however, is presented to us in the pages of Miss Middlemass as a genuinely amiable creature who is anxious to make things pleasant for everybody—himself included— but who is driven by sheer stress of adverse circum- stances into bigamy, murder, perjury, and miscellaneous villainy. It is with unfeigned annoyance that he informs the village girl who is his first wife that want of money renders necessary his marriage with Lady.Gertrude Verschoyle; be is really quite uncomfortable when circumstances compel him to suppress the inconvenient Pierce Vaughan by drowning him in the lake; and his feelings are so fine that when he has to allow his wife's father to be tried for his crime, it makes him positively ill. Every one, except indeed the ill-conditioned Vaughan, regards this unfortunate gentleman with true sympathy. When the baronet informed his wife that he was going through a form of marriage with another woman, "to her unsophisticated mind it seemed a kind of honour to her- self that her Clement should be called upon. to make such a grand alliance ; " and if there are other unsophisticated minds to whom this seems an inexplicable emotion, they must be content with the explanation offered by Miss Middlemaes, that "uneducated people like Lisbeth Glendinning have strange ways of looking at the circumstances which arise in life." It is only necessary to add that the style of the book is worthy of its substance : the elegance of the one and the rationality of the other are precisely on a par.
Absolute justice is almost unattainable in this world, and the relief of passing from crude, clumsy melodrama to intel- leotnal comedy is so refreshing that the critic who experiences it may well be tempted to praise A Daughter of To-Day above its deserts. One is, however, perfectly safe from suspicion of exaggeration in saying that it is, without any doubt whatso- ever, the ablest of the eight novels to which this review has been devoted. The book differs from the ordinary novel— even the ordinary clever novel—in belonging to literature; and the style, with its delicacy of outline, its harmony of subdued colour, and its subtleties of expression, is in itself a delight to the literary connoisseur. Mrs. Everard Cotes is evidently an ardent admirer of Mr. George Meredith. We are inclined even to think that the distinguished novelist finds a place in her pages, in the person of Mr. George Jasper, who in one chapter received from Elfrida Bell an embarrassing tribute of homage; and we speak with- out any hesitation at all when we say that Mrs. Cotes has modelled her own literary manner upon that of the writer who is surely referred to by the worship- ful Elfrida as " the most consummate artist in human nature that the time has given." A Daughter of To-Day is, however, an exception to the almost universal rule that imitation, whether conscious or unconscious, reproduces the characteristic defects and idiosyncrasies rather than the true qualities of the work imitated. In these pages we have much of Mr. Meredith's intellectual alertness and literary finesse, his fine feeling for an ingenious metaphor or an arresting phrase, with hardly any of the strain, the extravagance, the bizarrerie, which in his books irritate us so unspeakably. And the theme of the novel too, with all its opportunities for subtle intimacy of portraiture, is a theme that would have been after Mr. Meredith's own heart. When Elfrida Bell died as she had lived— dramatically — they put upon her tombstone the epitaph she had herself commanded, " Pas femme— artiste ; " and in these words the idea of the book finds a concentrated rendering. Elfrida, a sort of American Marie Baehkirtseff, is as much a woman as any of her sex,—indeed, more so than many of them, for her attempt to ignore and repress the essential feminine elements in her nature have given to them a feverish intensity; but the histrionic instinct in her compels her to dramatise her life,— to assume the role of the sexless artist. She never ceases to pose, and has both delight and belief in her own posing. When she finds herself in London alone and penniless,— "Almost gaily she walked into a pawnbroker's shop, and ob- tained, with perfect nonchalance, five pounds upon her mother's watch. She had no idea that she ought to dispute the dictum of the bald young man with the fishy eyes and the high collar ; it did not occur to her that she was paid too little. What she realised was that she had wanted to pawn something all her life —it was a deliciously effective extremity. She reserved her rings with the distinct purpose of having the experience again."
To Elfrida, life—her own life and that of others—is so much picturesque and dramatic material ; it is her delight to feel herself an actress-manager; she plays her own part with such subtlety and yet with such broad effectiveness that she de- ceives others and even herself ; and the tragedy of the latter half of the second volume is due to the fine illusive quality of her histrionic endowment. We have spoken of this one char- acter alone, for the other persons in the story are to the reader what they clearly were to Elfrida herself,—interesting mainly, if not exclusively, in virtue of the relation in which their per- sonalities stand to hers. She is often repellent,—oftener repel- lent than attractive ; but she is always fascinating, and she makes the book. We would not commend A Daughter of To. Day indiscriminately. Its interest is too purely intellectual and literary to allow of its being a novel for everybody, and even the audience to which it appeals may not be unanimously favourable ; but those who enjoy it at all will enjoy it much. Its limitation is happily rendered in Elfrida's criticism of the books of Mr. Cardiff:— "These things were indeterminately present to her, and led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr. Cardiff's work ex- pressed him so little. It seemed to her that the one purpose of a personality like his was expression, otherwise one might as well
be of the ruck. You write with your intellectual faculties only; she said to him once ; 'your soul is curiously dumb."
There is, perhaps, some dumbness of soul in A Daughter of To-Day.
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