RECENT NOVELS.*
A WRITER with the fertile invention, the literary aptitude, and the long experience possessed by the author of Lady Audley's Secret, cannot fail to produce work possessing certain admirable qualities ; and these inevitable merits, as they may be called, are certainly not absent from One Life, One Love. Miss Braddon long ago found her audience, and it is hardly possible that she should lose it ; the critics are now powerless either to extend or diminish her repute ; and we may therefore, without the unkindness which such a course would entail in the case of a young and struggling author, allow the literary virtues of her new book to be taken for granted, and devote our attention mainly to the one defect which renders it a somewhat unsatisfactory performance. This defect is the utter incredibility of her conception of the principal character in the story. Ambrose Arden is a quiet, gentle scholar, living a secluded life in the country, with no intimates but his friends and neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Hatrell, and their little daughter Daisy, whose education he super- intends, and for whom he has a strong affection. The story has only just opened when Mr. Hatrell, during a flying visit to London, is decoyed into a house in a poor neighbourhood by a man unknown, barbarously murdered, and robbed of a large sum of money. The identity of the criminal remains undiscovered, and seven years afterwards Arden, who all the time has been a tender, loyal friend to the bereaved woman, tells her that he has long loved her, and asks her to become his wife. She consents, not because she loves him, for she has no second love to give, but because she knows that he loves her, and that only by becoming his can she pay her debt of gratitude. By this time the shrewd reader is pre- pared for the revelation, gradually made, that it is Arden who has murdered Hatrell, not, indeed, with his own hand, but by the hand of another, in whom he has found a willing tool, the crime being prompted by an unhallowed passion for the wife of the man whom he thus deliberately does to death. Even when the story is thus briefly summarised, the utter want of natural- ness in the character of Arden makes itself apparent ; but in the three volumes of the novel it is not merely apparent, it is obtrusive. Of course one can, with a little imaginative effort, conceive of a really sweet and kindly nature being betrayed even into so shocking a crime as murder by an overpowering temptation, say, of sudden anger or fear; but this description does not at all answer to the case in question. Arden de- liberately plans the murder of a man who has never wronged him, knowing that by the act he will inflict unspeakable misery upon the woman whom he loves; and his sole tempta- tion is the vague and doubtful possibility of some day securing that woman to himself. In its cold, relentless selfishness, the crime of Arden is the crime of a devil; it is the outcome of an essentially evil nature ; and to represent it, for the mere sake of %uprise, as an exceptional episode in the life of each a man, who is in all his known relations with others gentle, • (1.) One Life. One Love. By the Author of "Lady Andley's Secret." 3 vols. London : Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.—(2.) The House of Hank:mil. By Mrs. Henry Wood. 3 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.—(3.) Name and .Fame. By A. S. Ewing.Leater and Adeline Sergeant. 8 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.—(4 ) A Havome of Weeds. By Clara Lemore. 3 vols. London : Ward and Downey.—(5.) Blind Fate. By Mrs. Alexander. 3 vols. London : 1'. V. White and Co.—(8.) In Low Ethel: a Bohemian Transcript. By Morley Roberts. 2 vols. London : Chapman and Hall.—(7.) A Born Coquette. By Mrs. Bangerter& 8 vole, London: Eipencor Blackett.
kindly, and unselfishly chivalrous, is an outrage upon imaginative truth. In the mere telling of her story, Miss Braddon displays her wonted skill ; but in the treatment of such a theme it is impossible not to feel that such skill is wasted.
The publication of Mrs. Henry Wood's story, The House of Halliwell, raises a question in literary ethics which we should have thought admitted of only one answer, were it not for the fact that another and a totally opposite answer has been given by the son of the deceased novelist, Mr. Charles W. Wood. The question is, whether, in dealing with the literary remains of an author who has passed away, it is the duty of responsible sur- vivors to pay respect to the known wishes of the author, expressed explicitly or implicitly during his or her lifetime ; and our own answer would be an emphatic and unhesitating affirmative. Of course there are exceptions to this as to every general rule; but of the validity of the rule itself there seems to us no doubt whatever, and the facts in the present case present no exceptional features. The House of Halliwell, Mr. Charles Wood informs us, "was written by Mrs. Henry Wood many years ago—as far back as the days when she had not as yet written East Lynne ;" and he frankly adds that, while it was at that time prepared for publication in three volumes, it was "never offered to any publishing firm." Surely it is not possible to draw more than one inference from this latter fact. For a quarter of a century, Mrs. Henry Wood enjoyed such exceptional popularity, that any publisher would eagerly have accepted any book with her name upon the title- page ; and her withholding of this special novel daring so many years proves conclusively that, in her opinion, its publi- cation would have been injurious to her fame. This opinion, which is now set aside as a thing of no moment, is amply confirmed by the book itself. It has the author's usual narra- tive vivacity, but hardly one of the other qualities of matter or manner by which Mrs. Henry Wood's popular reputation was secured and maintained. In the symmetry and ingenuity of plot-construction which distinguished East Lynne and many of its successors, it is entirely deficient, and there is no single character in whom the reader can feel any strong interest; for even Aunt Copp, who is intended to be a humorous creation, is simply a meddlesome, domineering woman, who is tiresome rather than amusing. The publication of such immature work as The House of Halliwell does a real injustice to a conscientious worker who always gave the world the best she had to give.
The initials "A. S." are perplexingly epicene, and may stand either for Arthur Samuel or for Amy Selina ; but if Miss Adeline Sergeant's collaborator in Name and Fame be of the masculine gender, he is probably responsible for those portions of the story which deal with characters and incidents of political life; and if this be so, he is heartily to be con- gratulated upon his share in the joint work, for the political pages testify to their writer's possession of both knowledge and literary skill. This, however, is a remark by the way, for the book is not a political story like Coningsby, or even like Phineas Finn, but a novel of a more ordinary type, which seems to have been written as an arraignment either of the moral canons of society, or of the application of these canons to individual cases. Sydney and Lattice Campion are a brother and sister who are left, by the death of their father, an impoverished country clergyman, in a position of entire dependence upon their own exertions. The brother has passed from the University to the Bar ; the sister has entered upon a literary career ; and both lives are rich in the promise of success. In the characters of the two there is, however, a marked contrast, for Sydney is both selfish and conventional, while his sister is possessed by a chivalrous instinct of helpfulness, which is stimulated rather than en- feebled by the knowledge that the penalty she will have to pay for its indulgence is nothing less than social ostracism. Sydney is guilty of heartless seduction and desertion, but he wins a noble woman for his wife, and never loses his position as an idol of society. Lettice espouses the cause of a man who by sheer misfortune has become a social pariah, and in so doing sacrifices her own reputation. That such errors should be made, is, of course, unfortunate ; but it is difficult to see that society is to blame for them, because they are the necessary results of the limitation of human knowledge. We who read the novel know how contemptible was the character of Sydney, and how unselfishly heroic was the conduct of Lettice ; but, so far as the knowledge of the world went, Sydney was a popular politician with a stain- less record, while his sister was a woman who had com- promised herself by receiving into her house a married man who was believed to be in love with her, and who had been convicted (to all appearances justly) of attempting to murder his wife. From internal evidence, we judge that Miss Sergeant has had the larger share in the construction and telling of the story, and her workmanship has never been better. The misfortunes of the unhappy Walcott are narrated with real power and pathos ; but she might have done justice to him, and to her noble though indiscreet heroine, without doing injustice to those who, in ignorance, condemned them wrongfully. Sensible people do not abuse the law because once or twice in a generation a perfectly innocent man is hanged.
The name of Miss Clara Lenore is new to us, and as the title-page of A Harvest of Weeds does not give the names of any previous works from her pen, it may be assumed that this is_her first essay in fiction. If so, it is noticeably free from the crudity and amateurishness which testify to a want of literary experience. There is a strong, compact plot, over the intricacies of which the author has perfect control; and, what is more important still, the author has painted at least one really powerful portrait. Here and there we may find a touch of melodrama ; but, taken as a whole, the story of the fall of Enstace Grayabrook is as lifelike as it is impressive, and one portion of it is distinguished by unusually subtle truthfulness of delineation. The course of action to which the naturally high-minded clergyman is tempted by his mad jealousy of his young kinsman is not in itself a wrong course ; and yet when he has taken it, Eustace feels and knows that no action which the common conscience of mankind recognises as criminal could have plunged him into a lower depth of infamy. It might have been necessary, as a simple act of justice, to de- throne Hubert by proving that he had no claim to the name he bore, and to the estate he held; but Eustace's past had not been such as to make pleasant self-deception possible. He knew that justice had had no place in his mind,—that he had simply welcomed the opportunity of blighting the life of the young man who had never wronged, but always loved and trusted him. This narrative of the moral disintegration, wrought by one evil passion in a nature not essentially ignoble, amply suffices to raise A Harvest of Weeds above the level of ordinary circulating-library fiction.
By average circulating-library fiction, we mean the kind of fiction represented by such a story as Mrs. Alexander's Blind Fate, which might, in virtue of the uninspiring conventionality of its characters, incidents, and treatment, be described as a machine-made novel. The machinery is in good order; it does not creak as it works, and the lines and colours come out just as they ought ; but they are such very familiar lines, and such old-fashioned colours, that only the very youngest novel- reader can pretend to be interested in them. When novel- readers who are not young take up a story with a murder which in the first volume is very mysterious, but which in the second volume is not mysterious at all, because all the evidence, assiduously collected by a professional or amateur detective, tends to incriminate one man, we— that is, those of na who are out of our teens—know quite well that that man is certainly innocent, and that the third volume will be devoted to fixing the crime upon the person whom nobody ever thought of suspecting. When we have said that Blind Fate hands on this old, old tradition with sturdy fidelity, nothing more is left to say.
A very different book in every way is Mr. Morley Roberts's story, In Low Belief, for, in addition to other admirable qualities, it has the stimulating freshness in which the work just noticed is altogether deficient. All the knowledge neces- sary for the production of a novel like Blind Fate is a know- ledge of the literature of fiction ; but to write a novel like In Low Belief demands a knowledge of life itself,—at any rate, of life of that curious little Bohemian world which the author sets himself to delineate. Various writers have portrayed for us the struggling artist, with his vaguely magnificent hopes and ambitions, his chronic impecuni- osity, and his genial camaraderie ; but we generally have a feeling—which may be relied upon—that the portrait is a fancy-sketch, whereas Mr. Roberts's Armour and Raebttrn, the painters, Mary Morris, the model, and Toning-. ton, the scapegraee man of letters, are evidently studies from life, by which we do not mean that they reproduce the features of living originals, but that the author has vitally indi- vidualised the characteristics of a type which he has studied at first-hand. Realism that is imaginative, and therefore not prosaic, is never without a charm ; but the book has other attractions than this fine veracity. It possesses both humour and pathos, and the story of the friendly rivalry of Armour and Torrington for the love of Mary Morris is one of the tenderest and most beautiful things in recent fiction. We seldom come across a book so clever as In Low Belk!, and at the same time so rich in those graces which are of much more value than mere cleverness.
Every reader who knows what is what, opens a novel by the author of Molly Bawn with a feeling of pleasant expectation ; and when be finds that A Born Coquette is an Irish story, he is assured that no disappointment awaits him. Mrs. Hunger- ford has never drawn a more attractive and lifelike group than that formed by the members of the Delaney household, and there have not been many heroines of fiction so wilful, so perverse, even so cruel, and yet so irresistibly fascinating, with that indescribable fascination which is peculiarly Irish, as Nan Delaney, the "born coquette." Her conduct to the devoted young husband whom she has chosen to marry under such extraordinary circumstances is in itself shameful ; but while we feel angry with her, our anger is an emotion like that with which we contemplate the caprices of a spoiled yet engaging child, though most readers will be of opinion that Mrs. Hungerford has allowed her very naughty heroine to escape from her self-made troubles a great deal too easily. The novel is as full of rich, fresh humour as a typical Irish novel ought to be ; the Delaney boys are delightful, and Murphy, the old servant, is worthy of a place on the line in any portrait-gallery devoted to his class. Gladys, the hungry sixteen-years-old girl, is indignant because her disagreeable relative, Mrs. Manly, has devoured a certain plum-tart, but consoles herself with the hope that it will disagree with her, —an expectation which Murphy relentlessly dispels :—
" Fegs, Miss Gladys, ye needn't hope for that,' says he, bumping a glass dish down upon the sideboard with rather un- necessary force, doubtless with a view to relieving his feelings. The plums isn't grown that would overcome her. The ould lady is tougher nor you think. The Lord might turn her heart,' says Mr. Murphy, with heavy scepticism, but '—solemnly—'
tell you this, Miss, that the divil himself wouldn' turn her stomach.'"
A Born Coquette is, in short, one of the brightest and most readable books which the present season has so far produced.
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