RECENT NOVELS.*
(1.) April's Lady. By Mrs. Hungerford. 8 vols. London: F. V. White and Co.---I2.) A Bolt from the Blue. By Scott Graham. 3 vols. London : Sampan: Low and Co.—(3.) Glonenonwo. By It. B. Sheridan Knowles. 3 vole. Edinburgh and London : W. Backwood and Sons.-14,) John Squire's Secret. By C. d. Wills. 3 vole. Loudon : Ward and Downey.—(5 A Mar- riage at Bea. By W. Clark Russell. 2 vol.. London: Mothnen and Co.— de,) Prisoners and Captives, By Henry Seton Merriman. 3 vols. London r R. Bentley and Bon.—(7.) A Sappho of Green Springs, and other Tales. By Brat Marts. London: Matto and Winde.s.
THE author of .Molly Bau,n never loses her brightness of manner, but in April's Lay a good deal of the matter is rather depressing, and readers with an inveterate prejudice in favour of cheerful fiction have to find support during its perusal in the remembrance of various novels in which Mrs. Hungerford has conducted them through very stormy weather into calm sunshine. The stormy weather in the new story is provided by a couple of aggravated misunder- sta.ndings,—one between a young man and woman who make themselves thoroughly miserable after the fashion of lovers in the more sentimental kind of fiction, and the other between a husband and wife who, though considerably older than the unmarried pair, are, if possible, even less sensible. The heroine of April's Lady is, as a matter of course, an Irish girl, and of course she has plenty of beauty, spirit, and wilfulness, is too fond of having more than one string to her
bow, and is troubled by the difficulty—common to her tribe —in knowing her own mind. Indeed, Mrs. Hungerford has made Joyce Kavanagh such a very unreasonable and wrong-headed young lady, that the reader's sense of her fascinations is somewhat dulled ; and as the burden of her self-made troubles grows heavier and heavier, he is apt to become impatient rather than sympathetic, and to express his feelings in the hard-hearted verdict : " Serves her right." Even Joyce, however, is almost a reasonable being when compared to Lady Baltimore, whose fixed determination to believe in the infidelity of a husband who is devoted to her really passes the bounds of perfect sanity ; and it is a relief when we are allowed to escape from the distressed ladies to the society of the ever vivacious Mr. Dicky Browne and the amusing enfant terrible, Tommy. Dicky's effervescence is perhaps too continuous to carry conviction with it, but it is admirable fooling ; while Tommy, who belongs to the family of " Helen's babies," is also a great comfort. In spite of the irritation excited by the dismal parts of the story, April's Lady has real humour of a kind that will cover greater literary sins than those committed by Mrs. Hungerford.
" Scott Graham " is a somewhat epicene name or pseudonym,
but we do not think there can be much doubt that A Bolt from the Blue is the work of a feminine hand. At any rate, the women in the story are much more successful than tle men, who, with two exceptions—the worldly club- haunter Leslie, and the easy-going Duke of Southport—are spoiled by either sentimentality or exaggeration of concep- tion and handling. John Le Breton, the most prominent of them, is certainly a failure. He is supposed to be a scoundrel of a particularly vile type, who has been divorced from his first wife under circumstances so disgrilkeful that he has become a social pariah ; but his actual appearances in the story are hardly consistent with the character and the record assigned to him. During the period covered by the novel, the worst thing related of him is the lie by which he convinced Mona's uncle that there was nothing in his past of which he had any reason to be ashamed; and though this was dis- honourable enough, the falsehood was told under the pressure of as strong a temptation as could well have been presented to him, and can therefore hardly be regarded as an indication of utter depravity. It is evident that Scott Graham has been in a difficulty. She has wished to depict a man who is bad to the tore, but who nevertheless has some kind of fascination which wins for him the devoted love of two noble women ; and in painting the portrait, she has so emphasised the fascination and so softened down the wickedness, that it is impossible to realise the identity of the John Le Breton whom we see and the John Le Breton of whom we bear. This is rather clumsy workmanship, but villains are kittic cattle, and in dealing with the more reputable feminine personages in her story, Scott Graham shows considerable power of grasping and delineating
character. Sir Robert Strange's gentle yet dignified mother is one of the most charming old ladies of recent fiction, while Angela Le Breton and the girls at the vicarage are very happily individualised. It should be added that the style of the book is easy and cultivated, and that tone or two of the situations are very strong in emotional interest.
Glencoonoge can be described, to its advantage, as an Irish story which is quite innocent of politics; but it can also be described, not altogether to its advantage, as an Irish story which is innocent of humour. It is possible, indeed probable, that the traditions of drama and fiction have left on the mind of the ordinary Englishman an exaggerated impression of the joke-making and bull-perpetrating propensities of the Irish peasant ; but, making all due allowances for exaggeration and caricature, the fact remains that Paddy is an essentially funny fellow, and a book which endows him with the stolid serious- ness of Hodge seems to be a book with something wanting. Apart from this lack—which is certainly a rather serious one —Glencoonoge presents a picture the general fidelity of which will be recognised by all who have travelled in the rural districts of Ireland; and as the story which Mr. Sheridan Knowles has to tell is not without a certain old-fashioned interest of its own, the novel is decidedly readable, if not specially absorbing. Father John is an admirable specimen of the best type of parish priest in the good old days when the P.P. was the guide, philosopher, and friend. whose aim was to keep his people out of mischief, rather than to lead them into it, and his virtues and graces might have been trusted to make their due impression without the introduction of so very unamiable a foil as that ridiculous bigot, the Protestant clergyman. That Mr. Fleming may have been drawn from the life, is possible enough ; but his relations with his Catholic parishioners are in no respect representative, and therefore be mars the general lifelikeness of the group in which be appears. The wedding of Conn Hoolaban, and the subsequent feast at the "Harp," are capital examples of literary Dutch painting ; and if Mr. Sheridan Knowles had only been able to sprinkle his pages with the missing salt of humour, his book would have left little to desire. As it is, the fare provided is sound and wholesome, but hardly so appetising as it might have been.
Dr. Wills, in his vivacious and entertaining novel, John Squire's Secret, utilises very skilfully his knowledge of life in Persia, which has already provided materials for his readable books, Persia as It Is, and In the Land of the Lion and the Sun. Jack Cumberbateh, clerk in the Post Office, is a bibliophile in a necessarily modest way ; and at a book-sale he picks up an ancient manuscript volume, containing the diary of one John Squire, an English traveller in Persia during the reign of James I. This diary, the important passages of which are written in cipher, relates the concealment in the tomb of a Jesuit priest in Ispahan, of a magnificent treasure in precious stones, and the entries which immediately precede the abrupt close of the record point to the inference that Squire came to a sudden and violent end, and suggest the possibility that his almost priceless jewels may still be concealed in their sepulchral hiding-place. Cumberbatch is not an avaricious youth, but be has fallen in love ; and to an impecunious clerk who is eager to be married, a collection of diamonds waiting for a finder offers a temptation too strong to be resisted. In com- pany with his friend, Abiram P. Skinner, a smart American journalist, whose case, both as regards presence of love and absence of money, is identical with his own, Jack starts for Ispahan ; but those who wish to know how the travellers fared, must seek satisfaction of their curiosity in Dr. Wills's pages. The novel is one of those brisk books which give one the impression of a full mind, a running pen, and the best of high spirits. Its notable fault is a certain flippancy, which sometimes amounts to a decided lapse from good taste; and the caricature-portrait of Mr. Delver, the missionary who gambles at a public table and habitually takes too much to drink, is gratuitously offensive. Some vigorous "cutting" would improve a book that is quite good enough to be worth improving.
Mr. Clark Russell is one of the best of living story-tellers, but the two volumes of A Marriage at Sea suffice to prove that, if he has only the ocean and a ship sailing upon it, he can produce an interesting narrative with next to nothing in the shape of a story, properly so called. Mr. Herbert Barclay, who has money enough to keep a-yacht, is enamoured of Miss Grace Bellasys, a young lady not quite eighteen years of age, who is at school in Boulogne. She has been placed there by her aunt and guardian, Lady Amelia Roscoe, an ardent Roman Catholic, whose plan is to have Grace brought, by judicious pressure, within the fold of the Church, and who may there- fore be depended upon to refuse consent to her niece's
marriage with a Protestant. The eager but indiscreet lovers plan an elopement in Barclay's yacht, which is to sail from Boulogne to some port on the Southern coast of England, in the hope that three or four days of compromising companionship may force Lady Amelia's hand. The pair get safely away in the Spitfire,' but the inevitable storm sweeps down upon them, the yacht springs a leak, and hope is all but dead in the hearts of the lovers, when they are rescued by the ship Carthusian,' which is on its way to Australia. The Captain, seeing the situation, assures Barclay that he is as officio legally qualified to perform at least one clerical function, and as his pretensions are supported by a lawyer who is on board the vessel, the marriage at sea is per- formed accordingly. A homeward-bound yacht being sighted, the couple are transferred to it, and are safely landed in England, where all unpleasant possibilities are averted by a second wedding in church, and Mr. and Mrs. Barclay live happily ever afterwards. A slighter story could not well be spread over five hundred pages ; but Mr. Clark Russell can make lee m uch of the incidents of sea-life and the developments of human character on ship-board, that though A Marriage at Sea is a good deal less exciting than the majority of its author's tales, no reader is likely to find it dull.
The opening chapter of Prisoners and Captives, which describes the discovery of the two living creatures —a man and a dog—upon the fever-stricken ship in the South Atlantic Ocean, is very striking, and the closing pages, which tell the story of the flight of the exiles from Siberia, are full of sombre power. Not even Tolstoi himself has written anything stronger and more impressive in its combination of the terrible and the pathetic than the death of the wife of Pavloski, and it is all the more impressive because of the entire absence of anything like rhetorical touching-up,—the situation is realised so intensely by the writer, that all merely literary aids to realisa- tion on the part of the reader can be dispensed with. Nor, as pure intellectual work, can it be said that the rest of the novel is unworthy of its opening and its close ; and yet the book as a whole can hardly be considered entirely satisfactory. There is something unnatural in. the inscrutability of three or four of the principal characters of the story. Their thoughts, feelings, and motives are concealed by an apparently purpose- less veil of mystery, and they spend their time in endeavouring to find each other out by a series of bouts in conversational rapier-play which at last becomes irritating rather than interesting. The reserve of Claude Tyars, Agnes Winter, and Matthew Mark Easton, and their attempts to surprise .each other into self-revelation, are overdone and unreal, and the mere eleverness of the handling—which is very clever indeed—does not serve to atone for the lack of essential life- likeness. Of the great ability of the book there can, however, be no question ; and its faults are not the faults of a bungler, but of a true artist who for the time has deviated from the right track.
The earlier short tales of Mr. Bret Harte could only have been written by a man of unmistakable genius. They had great vividness, humour, and pathos, and were pervaded by a strong and impressive individuality of treatment ; but after reading a number of them, one became conscious of a certain monotony of theme. The shiftless, stupid man, who was regarded by his acquaintances with a mixture of pity and con- tempt, became in the moment of trial an almost sublime hero ; the reckless desperado, when touched by an appeal to his honour and compassion, displayed the chivalrous tenderness and self-abnegation of a saintly knight of old,—and these two figures appeared and reappeared in almost every sketch of rough Western life. Recently the author's range seems to have widened, and in "A Sappho of Green Springs" and its companion stories, there are all the old charms, with the added attraction given by variety of subject and tone. The simple-hearted millionaire who is the hero of the last of the four stories, "A Maecenas of the Pacific Slope," is the nearest approximation to the familiar type, but his surroundings are so different from those of the earlier heroes, that all needful freshness of impression is secured. Not one of the tales falls below the author's level, though probably the title-story, with its quaint, pathetic grace and beauty, will be the general favourite. Some of the landscape passages here and in ".Through the Santa Clara Wheat," are specially arresting and attractive.
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