RECENT NOVELS.*
THERE are some novelists who never disappoint us, for the simple reason that we expect nothing from them, or, at any rate, so little, that their performance can hardly fall below our expecta- tions. Miss Linskill's first story sufficed to exclude her from the class to which such writers belong; and we therefore pay her an oblique compliment—for which, however, we can hardly expect her to be very grateful—when we say that The Haven under the Hill is decidedly disappointing. There is so much that is good in the book, and it is all no spoiled by what is not good, that it is difficult to review the novel save in sentences that must read like wilfully constructed paradoxes. True and beautiful senti- ment is mingled with false and unreal sentimentalism ; strong and veracious character-drawing stands side by side with work that is both unnatural and unreal ; and while one page is simple, natural, and charming, the next is only too pro- bably strained, exaggerated, fantastic, and therefore repellent. There is, fortunately, one portion of Miss Linskill's work which can be praised without hesitation and reserve. The haven which gives the title to the book is the harbour of Whitby ; and the descriptions of the little town as it was a couple of generations ago, and of the neighbouring coast and inland scenery, are not only singularly truthful and beautiful, but are written in such a way as to enable us to see with the writer's eyes. The principal figures—especially that of the heroine, Dorigen Gower—are picturesquely conceived, and so long as they are in repose, the landscape and they form a pleasing and harmonious composition; it is only when they begin to act that the irritating discordance comes in. We think • The Karen under the Hit/. By Mary LinskilL 3 vols. London: B. Bentley and Son.—ThisPicture and That. By Mrs. Charles Chapman. 3 vols. London Remington and Co.—Lore and Liking. By M. B. smith. 8 vols. London F. V. White and Co.—/n the Ring. By Mary Tinsley. 3 vols. London : Tta3ley Brothers.—The Senior Major. By Philip GaskelL 8 vols. Landon: F. V. White and Co.—A Modern Telemachus. By Charlotte M. Yong,e. 2 vols. Lon- don Macmillan and Co.—The Outsider. By Hawley Smart. 2 rola London F. V. White and Co. it was Mr. W. R. Greg who, many years ago, drew attention to the fact that a besetting sin of feminine novelists is the pre- sentation of useless and purposeless self-sacrifice as something noble, heroic, and admirable. It is this error which spoils The Haven under the Hill, by turning what might have been—and in part is—a very exquisite idyll into an irritating and harrowing tragedy. All Miss Linskill's eloquent pleading, which is often very beautiful and touching, will not blind the eyes of her readers to the fact that Michael Salvain and Dorigen Gower wilfully spoil their lives by a fantastic rejection of the joy of an elevating love ; and do this not in obedience to any recognisable principle, but under the influence of a shadowy and unreal sentiment that the highest life is neces- sarily a life of renunciation. As a matter of course, no one is enriched by this aimless impoverishment. The only result of the sacrifice is the introduction of a new element of discontent and unhappiness into the life of the selfish woman who alone could have been benefited by it; and the death of the heroine at the moment when the long-banished joy is at last welcomed home puts the top-stone upon an imaginative edifice which is of sentimental and gratuitous misery all compact. We are sorry to speak thus of what is in many respects not only an able, but a beautiful story ; but we are bound to point out what NOM to us the radical untruth which pervades its whole structure.
This Picture and That is a less impressive performance than The Haven under the Hill, but it is also much less uncomfort- able. It contains a little love-making of a placid and unexciting character ; a good deal of flirtation, which is perhaps a shade more interesting, because we do not, as in the case of the love- making, know what will be the end of it ; but nothing of romance,—nothing in the lives of any of the characters that has any suggestion of "Infinite passion and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn."
This Picture and That is, in short, an ordinary society novel, made up of the usual materials,—country-houses, lawn-tennis, shooting parties; a trip to the Riviera, with the inevitable scene at Monte Carlo, and suicide of a gambler; private theatricals, with the jealousies thereunto appertaining; flirting Guardsmen, with young ladies to match ; social schemings, plots and counterplots ; with a general feeling of cakes and ale, or rather of afternoon tea and dry champagne. The novel differs mainly from most books of its class in being better written than they, for the English and—what is more unusual—the French are quite satisfactory ; though we notice that when the matter rises into seriousness, as in Lady Flora's confession, the con- versational style becomes stilted and unreal, while once or twice we have a touch of coarseness, like the unpleasant phrase, " as sick as a dog." This picture is the portrait of a very beautiful and admirable young lady ; that is the contrasted portrait of a still younger lady, equally beautiful, but quite the reverse of admirable. Olyffe Fancourt, like many heroines of fiction, calls for no special remark; but of Eugenie Petre and the other unpleasant people in the book, it must be said that while their bad morale may be mournfully accepted, the quite unique badness of their manners is to be resented as simply incredible. Station and education do not make angels even of pretty girls and highly-bred country gentlemen ; but, like the ingenuous arts, they do soften the manners and prevent them from being brutal with the frank and fearless brutality of Miss Petre and Major West. Apart from these lapses, the characters are natural in a superficial sort of way, and the book is suffi- ciently lively to be read without sense of weariness.
The literary dish provided by the author of Love and Liking has a general society flavour not unlike that of the book just noticed; but the ingredients are slightly different, and the cooking (to preserve the metaphor) is not nearly so skilful. The story, the scene of which is laid for the most part in a watering-place known as Sandycot, is an extremely amorphous affair, and it is clear that the author is naturally lacking in constructive power; but she—we think there is no doubt about its being "she," though the initials are sexless— need not have gratuitously emphasised her deficiency by intro- ducing a number of characters who have no connection with the action, and who, when not too shadowy for realisation, are devoid of a single point of interest. The raison d'être of the title is supplied by Judy Aylmere's two lovers, Lord Le Pole and Mr. Rawson, to the former of whom she gives her love, and to the latter her liking, a distribution at which Mr. Rawson has real reason to feel aggrieved, as Judy, though on the whole a very admirable
as well as engaging young lady, has certainly given him reason to expect something more substantial. As, however, neither of the young gentlemen impresses our imagination very strongly, we do not exult very loudly at the success of the one, or complain very querulously at the failure of the other. We are moved more strongly by the inaccuracy in detail which pervades the book. A distinguished political economist appears as " Stewart " Mill; an election under the Ballot Act is represented as occu- pying several days; and some of the quotations are, like Bottom the weaver, " translated" almost beyond recognition. It will be inferred that we think Love and Liking a very poor story, and the inference is just.
The first remark suggested by In the Ring is that it would have been much improved by being compressed into one volume, instead of being expanded into three ; but as this criticism applies to some hundreds of contemporary novels, it hardly serves as a sufficiently definite characterisation of any one story. Here, however, it is specially applicable. The hero is a clown in a circus, the heroine is a fancy rider in the same establish. ment, and the principal subordinate characters are the proprietor, the ring-master, the grooms, the assistants, the acrobats, more fancy riders, and so on. Calculating roughly, we should say that about half the book is devoted to descriptions of performances in the ring, and it will be easily imagined that this kind of thing becomes wearisomely monotonous. Then, too, the small spites, jealousies, and revenges of the various performers, masculine and feminine, provide but thin material for so long a story, and we often find ourselves complaining, like Punch's farmer over his claret, that we get " no forrader." Apart from these faults, which may have been forced upon the author by the never-to- be-enough-condemned three-volume system, In the Ring has a good deal of freshness and brightness. Mrs.—or Miss—Tinsley is evidently a disciple of Dickens, and her clown-hero Jerry, with his kind-heartedness, his devotion, and his unclown-like shyness, is quite in the manner of the master, though Jerry lacks the humour with which Dickens would certainly have endowed him.
We have seen The Senior Major described in an advertise- ment as a military novel ; but it deserves the description only in virtue of the facts that a large proportion of its masculine characters are military men, and that we are treated to several rather dull chapters of mess-room conversation. Major Beres- ford, who is, we suppose, the hero, is estimable to the verge —and once or twice beyond the verge—of priggishness, but is decidedly the least interesting of the principal personages, and though Mr. Gaskell tells us that his character was " far from an easy one to fathom," we have certainly failed to discover in it anything unfathomable. We are much more taken with the lively but certainly superficial Subaltern, Fred Conyers, who is nothing but an honest, likeable, wholesome-natured youth, to whom, as it seems to us, rather scant justice is done; and we also feel that the awkward hobbledehoy, Tom O'Moore, is a youth of whom more might have been made. The story as a whole presents no noteworthy features, being conventional both in conception and treatment; but it is quite up to the circulating- library average, and we do not suppose that the author's ambition has aimed at any greater distinction. We must, how- ever, enter a plea against Lord Dudley Falconer. A habitual seducer of women in his own rank in life would not long hold the position of Colonel in an English regiment.
Miss Yonge has taken a new departure, and though there is much in the matter of A Modern Telemachus that is interesting, and much in its manner that is very graceful and charming, we cannot be sure that it is altogether a successful one. Perhaps, however, our feeling of comparative disappointment may arise solely from the fact that Miss Yonge, having taught us to look for one thing, gives us another, and we are apt to say "the old is better" simply because it is the old, and has become endeared to us by use and wont. A Modern Telemachus is not a novel of English home life, but a romance founded on the strange adventures of a French family which Miss Yonge dis- covered in a work, entitled The Mariners' Chronicle, compiled early in the last century. The story deals with the mis- adventures of the family of the Comtesse de Bourke, the wife of an Irish Jacobite, naturalised in France, who, in the course of a voyage to a port in Spain, are captured by an Algerine corsair, and carried into Algiers, where they are subjected to terrible privations and dangers. The story is one which, as Miss Yonge remarks, does undoubtedly prove the truth of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction ; but whether
truth is the best raw material for fiction is another ques- tion, and one which we should be chary of answering in the affirmative. Still, whatever may be said of the structure of the tale, the characters are creations, and very pleasant ones, too. Lanty is a delightful Irishman, and little Estelle, with her childish aspirations after martyrdom, which are happily not gratified, is full of chorus.
Mr. Hawley Smart, though he has chosen a racing term for his title, is not quite so horsey as he is wont to be, nor is The Outsider quite as interesting as some of his previous works. The story, what there is of it, moves on easily and pleasantly, and never becomes absolutely dull ; but neither in the characters nor the situations do we find anything above the commonplace, and the literary style is deplorably careless,—so careless, that, without unfairness, it might be called slip- shod. The heroine, Mrs. Welstead, is perhaps the most real character in the tale, and is evidently a favourite of Mr. Hawley Smart's, who seems to think that, in being made " an outsider " by society, she was very badly used. This opinion we cannot share. A married woman who is separated from her husband, and who encourages the visits and attentions of a man who is known to be her lover, is so culpably careless, that if she finds herself accused of something worse than carelessness, we cannot feel that her accusers are mach to blame. On the race-coarse Mr. Hawley Smart is always at home, and there is real spirit in the account of the Derby at which, thanks to the tip of a grateful bookmaker, Hagh Musgrave wins back his lost fortnne. The Outsider is much better than one or two of the stories we have noticed, but it is not up to its author's average.
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