RECENT NOVELS.* THERE have been few better judges of fiction
than Charles Dickens, and had he lived to read his grand-daughter's first novel, the veteran writer would have found pleasure in the • O.) Cross-Currents. By Mary Angela Dickens. 3 vole. London : Chapman and Hall.—(2.) Interference. By B. M. Croker. 3 vole. London: F. V. White and Co.—(3.) A New Saint's Tragedy. By Thomas B. Pinkerton. 2 vole London : Swan Sonnenschein and Co.—(4.) A First Family of Tasajara. By Bret Harte. 2 vols. London : Macmillan and CO. — (5.) The Heiress of Beech,- field. By M. E. Baldwin. 2 vole. London : Digby and Long.—(6.) Through Rifted Clouds. By Annabel Gray. 2 vole. London : Eden, Remington, and Co. —(7.) A Wasted Life and Marr'd. Be Lady Gertrude Stock. 3vole. London: Hunt and Bleekett. thought that, after he was gone, the name of Dickens would still be honourably associated with imaginative literature. Cross-Currents is not only an excellent novel, but it is die. tinguished by a kind of excellence which is exceedingly rare in the work of a beginner. There are in the book no strainings after cleverness, no attempts at describing worlds of action and emotion which the writer knows only by hearsay,—there are, in short, none of those qualities of immaturity which characterise the sort of writing which a popular essayist has called " veal ; " but, on the contrary, a singular and satisfying ripeness of conception and expression. Just now, the novel of society is, as a rule, neither a very inspiriting nor a very elevating performance; but though in Cross-Currents—after the bright first volume—we breathe hardly any air but that of London drawing-rooms, the atmosphere is always sweet and wholesome. Of course, so long as there are women like John Tyrrell's evil genius, Lady Latter, society will have its seamy side ; but it has another side as well, and without any optimistic unreality of presentation, Miss Dickens keeps that other side well in evidence. Selma Malet is a charming heroine,—all the more charming, perhaps, because so very human in that submission to a stronger will than her own by which she impoverishes a life that might have been so opulent, and loses for ever one great joy without gaining the substitute which she had been persuaded was so much nobler. Selma misses life's beatitude, just as it was missed by the pair in Browning's " Youth and Art," though she does not miss it in quite the same way. In her case, failure comes not of the timidity of selfishness, but of the less culpable though equally fatal timidity of compliance. She dares not trust her own instincts when their prompting is in opposition to the authority that has so long been supreme with her; and when Tyrrell claims her as a sworn servant of art, and denounces the new service of love as dis- loyalty to her true nature and vocation, she is awed to a submission that she never would have made under a less insistent pressure. There is boldness approaching temerity in the situation disclosed in the early chapters of the second volume, where Selma, with a half-broken heart, turns her back upon the noble, loyal Roger Cornish, and goes back to the Tyrrells ; but it is not by any means impossible, and Miss Dickens's vivid realisation of it compels our imagina- tive credence. The Cornish family and the sweet Mervyn Ferris form a very pleasant group, and every page of Cross- Currents inspires one with a desire to meet its author again.
Mr. Croker could not be expected to refrain altogether from utilising his knowledge of Indian society, which was made so manifest in that clever novel, Diana Barrington ; and towards the close of the second volume of Interference, the course of narrative takes its way eastward. The Indian chapters are very good in their way, but the novel is made what it is by the earlier portion, the scene of which is laid in the little Irish town of Ballingoole. Mr. Croker seems to know Ireland as well as he knows India ; and in his treatment of Irish character, he is very successful in hitting off national feature and ex- pression, without any of the exaggeration of line or chiaroscuro which produces caricature rather than portraiture. There is, of course, nothing specially Irish in the selfish domestic tyranny of the contemptible Major Malone, or even in the light-hearted indifference with which he regards his pecuniary obligations —though this latter manifestation of character is very familiar in the Emerald Isle; but Mr. Croker has managed to give to the man's irrepressible braggadocio and superficial bonhomie a certain quality of their own which is racy of the soil. Then, too, the impecunious, scheming Mrs. Redmond and her husband-hunting daughter Belle, represent types only too well known at every English watering-place or garrison town, and Mr. Croker shows his skill and subtlety of handling by preserving all the simply typical characteristics, and at the same time individualising and Hibernicising them. Miss Dopping, the busy old-maid, with her acrid tongue, her keen eye for humbug, and her thoroughly good heart, is not less national, and a good deal more pleasant, save to her victims ; while everywhere Mr. Croker's pages are sprinkled with that salt of pleasant humour which makes a really characteristic Irish story the best of all light reading. Opinion may possibly be divided on the question whether, in the situation which gives a title to the story, George Holroyd acted as a fool or as a man of punc- tilious honour. While in Ireland, Holroyd has successfully
resisted the blandishments of that old campaigner, Belle,—all the more easily because his heart has been won by her pretty cousin Betty, who lives with Mrs. Redmond and her daughter. He writes from India proposing to Betty, enclosing the letter in one addressed to Mrs. Redmond. The proposal is so worded, that by a single judicious blot upon the word " Betty," it can be made to serve for "Belle." The unscrupulous old woman yields to the temptation; writes to tell Holroyd what she has done, and to implore his mercy; and sends Belle off to India, where Holroyd meets and marries her. The sentimental view of the situation will probably be that the young man's action was most chivalrous and high-minded. The verdict of sensible people will be that, in contracting the loveless marriage, Holroyd was unjust to Betty, unjust to himself, and even to Belle, who had been persuaded by her mother that she was the object of his affection. The conclusion of the novel is clumsy, for the rather awkwardly introduced suggestions of Belle's insanity prepare us for a catastrophe altogether different from that provided by the final chapter, which has the look of being a sudden afterthought. As a whole, however, the story hangs well together, and the book is a very pleasant one.
Mr. Pinkerton is emphatically a clever writer, with plenty of good material of various kinds, and a literary style which is always bright, generally forcible, and occasionally epigram- matic. Unfortunately, he spoils the general effectiveness of his new novel by exhibiting his cleverness in the wrong place and in the wrong way. He has a pretty gift of character- analysis, and he is rather apt to exploit it just at the time when what is really wanted is dramatic presentment in speech or action. For example, the heroine's sister, Muriel Penolver, does not become a prominent person in the story until Mr. Pinkerton is well on into his second volume ; but long before this point is reached, and while she remains a person to whom the reader is entirely indifferent, he turns her morally and intellectually inside-out with an elabora- tion which is simply tiresome. There are other defects of the same kind ; but in spite of them all, A New Saint's Tragedy is a novel of more than average intellectual in- terest. The heroine is a modern Lady of Shalott, who lives in a world of illusions, and who is suddenly made aware of the miserable realities which have been arrayed in an attractive disguise that has deceived and mocked. On her marriage with her cousin, Rudolph Penolver, she is to inherit a vast fortune, which is to restore the prosperity of her bankrupt family; and she, believing that a Penolver must be a man of unstained honour, has given to the arrangement a passionless but unquestioning acquiescence. The relatives to whom the marriage means rescue from ruin, have tacitly con- spired to conceal the fact that her fiancé is a mean and selfish profligate; and after the first shock of the discovery of his real baseness has passed away, the feeling that it has left her an absolutely free woman absorbs her consciousness, and she really lives for the first time. This emancipation is the leading motive of the novel, and it is most freshly and ably handled; but we think Mr. Pinkerton is at his best in the light comedy which is provided by the subsidiary characters and situations. The opening of the novel is specially good, and all the appear- ances of the faithful Jerry Galindo are charmingly bright and spirited.
Save in a few passages here and there, A First Family of Tasajara is not specially characteristic of its author,—that is, the precise kind of humour and pathos by which Mr. Bret Harte first won his audience is not largely represented. This will naturally be a disappointment to those readers who demand just the thing that they expect, and will not be satis- fied with anything else; but their disappointment will hardly be reasonable, for the story is a very good one in its way, though it does not happen to be the way for which they have acquired the liking born of use and wont. There is more of the original Bret Harte in the first chapter than anywhere else in the book, and no one could make a wrong guess con- cerning the authorship of the passage in which Ned Billings discourses upon the weaknesses of the broken-down drunkard, 'Lige Curtis :—
"‘ Why, look here,' he continued, momentarily raising himself up to a sitting posture in his disgust, it was only last week he was over at Rawlett's trying to raise provisions and whisky outer his water rights on the creek ! Fact, Sir—had it all Written down lawyer-like on paper. Rawlett didn't exactly see it in that light, and told him so. Then he up with the desp'rit dodge and began to work that. Said that if he had to starve in the swamp like a dog he might as well kill himself at once, and would too, if he
could afford the weppins. Johnson said it was not a bad idea, and offered to lend him his revolver. Bilson handed up his shot-gun and left it alongside of him and turned his head away, considerate and thoughtful, while Hewlett handed him a box of rat pima over the counter, in case he preferred suthin' more quiet. Well—what did 'Lige do ? Nothin' ! Smiled kinder sickly, looked sorter wild, and shut up. He didn't suieide much. No, Sir ! He didn't kill himself—not he.'" The poor ne'er-do-weel mysteriously disappears, and the miserable property which he has been so ready to get rid of is acquired—in a manner which will not bear curious investi- gation—by Harkutt, the storekeeper, who blossoms into the great magnate, Mr. Harcourt, founder of the city of Tasajara. He, his son John Milton, and his daughter Clementina, are the three most interesting members of the "first family." Harcourt is one of the author's strongest creations, and the children have their father's decision of character, unmarred by the moral obliquity to which he owes his material success.
Mr. Bret Harte's manner here is very much like that of Mr. Howells, whose influence has been manifest in several of his recent stories ; and it is a manner which seems to snit him almost as well as his own. The failure of the book is the re- appearance of the half-forgotten 'Lige Curtis as the prosperous, clear-headed, businesslike journalist, Mr. Fletcher. Even apart from the vice that dominated him, the squatter of Tasajara Creek was a poor thing; and though he might have become respectable, it is hardly credible that he could have developed into the strong, self-reliant man who gives the son of his old enemy a start in life. The descriptions are as excellent as ever; and the flood which destroys Tasajara City is, dramatically as well as picturesquely, a most effective close.
The few remaining old-fashioned people who object to fiction as unwholesomely exciting literature, may exempt The Heiress of Beechfield from their censures ; for it provides no excite. ment of any kind, good, bad, or indifferent. Beatrice Leslie is a young lady who, though wanting in " actual beauty," is pleasant to look at, and is in every way a nice girl, whose only weakness is a habit of moralising at a rather wearisome length. As she possesses an immense fortune, she has more than the usual number of chances of marrying the wrong man ; but at the end of the second volume she chooses the right one, which is, of course, satisfactory. This is the whole story, and it might have been told with all needful elaboration in a hundred pages. The writer, however, chooses to give us some five hundred extra pages, devoted to the afore- said moralisings of the heroine, to similar moralisings of the virtuous Mr. Arthur Grey, and to painfully long-drawn-out descriptions of the very familiar Continental scenery visited by Miss Leslie in the fascinating but dangerous society of Mr. Seymour Ferran. The main objection to this Mr. Ferraris as a suitor for the hand of the heiress of Beechfleld, is that he has a wife hidden away in Brittany ; but as this fact comes to light in time to prevent him from committing bigamy, no great harm is done, and the story ends in an appropriate and highly respectable manner. Though this is doubtless as it should be, the book is nevertheless most depressingly dull.
There is, perhaps, as much high-flown absurdity in Annabel Gray's novel, Through Rifted Clouds, as could by any possibility be packed into two volumes. The story is so unmitigatedly doleful that it would be quite harrowing did it make even an approach to lifelikeness ; but it is so very much up in the air, that though readers may possibly laugh—indeed, there are passages at which they are bound to laugh—weeping is altogether out of the question. We are early introduced to a certain Lenore, who is as " rare and radiant " a maiden as the young lady over whom Edgar Poe made musical moan;
but the pearl is, so to speak, found upon a dunghill, for Lenore is but a London " slavey," and her master and mistress are Mr. and Mrs. Blackadder, the baby-farmers. She is, however, discovered and appreciated by one Philip, a virtuous carpenter, with a heart of gold and a tongue of silver, who addresses his sweetheart in this simple and natural fashion :—" Yes, Lenore, you are awaking from the stupor cast upon your senses, from the bondage of sin. You are passing out of the deadly
lethargy to life Have you never felt a yearning after another life P' whispered Philip ; a clinging to purity and goodness ; self-denial and nobility P Believe me, Lenore, ill- doing never yet brought happiness; crooked paths lead to death. Remember, also, that conduct is destiny.' " Poor
Lenore, however, does not remember, and the melancholy consequences of her forgetfinInesi are narrated in a style which our single extract fairly represents. It is needless to say more.
A Wasted Life and Hared is at once an anomaly and an anachronism. Instead of being published as a novel in the year 1892, it should have made its appearance as a melodrama in the palmy days of the transpontine stage, when South London in its thousands gloated over the dying agonies of the wicked baronet, and cheered the final triumph of the 'umble 'ero. There is a wicked baronet here, to whom Lady Gertrude Stock has given the usual black eyes (natural, not artificial), and the appropriate diabolical expression which is the badge of his tribe. There is also the humble hero, who is in the bread-baking business, and who has lovely sentiments at his command, though it must be admitted that in their expression he is not quite so eloquent as Annabel Gray's Philip. In her conception of the character of the heroine, Lady Gertrude Stock has, however, struck out in a new direction, for Maud Deering is by no means a wholly estimable young person, and her conduct to the faithful Jack would bring down upon her the deserved disapproval of the gallery. Still, her punishment suffices to fit her offence, or rather, her offences, and the story, which ends with her release from penal servitude for shooting the wicked baronet, is not wanting in general ingenuity, or even—strange as it may seem—in occasional lifelikeness. It has, moreover, one virtue of the melodramas which it so closely resembles, inasmuch as its moral tone is irreproachable. There is no tampering with ethical distinctions, but rather a robust blackening of black and whitening of white.
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