RECENT NOVELS.*

The Fiddler of Calve is a weird story full of romantic

beauty and pathos, which carries the reader away on the stream of its imaginative influence. It is a good tale, though a sad one, and we like it all the better for the author's dedicatory explanation of its allegorical significance. After telling that the story is an old legend worked up into new shape, to be judged in the main as a tale, Mr. Ernest Rhys goes on to say :—

" But as every tale worth the telling has its second intention, the Fiddler's, if you will, is a plain fable of the artist, devoted, self-absorbed, a little more or less than purely human it may be, in an unconscious and quite matter-of-fact and half-civilised community. He may teach it strange lore : the maiden in its midst to look to new horizons, the lover to follow his fate, hot youth to follow his ambition, or cold age to judge more coldly amiss ; but his lot is not theirs, and the chances are that he mingles with them, and that he fiddles to them, at his and their common peril, though the peril be as much a part of life, and as necessary to their growth, man and woman, as is the cutting ita teeth to a babe."

Mr. Rhys interprets life with the mind of a poet, and paints it with the tact of an artist, and the result is that his book has the rare charm of distinction. Marged Ffoulkes, the typical maiden of the story, is a creature of flesh and blood, with a real and concrete personality, as well as an abstract and ideal significance. And so is her lover, Audrer Foster, as he is called in ignorance of his true parentage, which links him disastrously with the eccentric noble family at Carrie Hall. Captain Ffoulkes, the father of Marged, well represents the kindlier common-sense of the village community, and " Mistor Fostor," Andrer's reputed father, its grudging pre- judice against the mysterious foreign fiddler who is cast by shipwreck on the charity of the fishing-village,—a prejudice which is pleasantly formulated by a semi-reverend personage, the verger of St. Michael's Church :—

" ` True, varry true, Mister Foster! If a man's not canny, an' hes a evil spirit, as in holy writ, he is not a man, properly speaking ; particular,' he made haste to add, hearing a slight murmur of disapprobation from the opposite corner, particular, if he's not a British subjick."

There are so many vivid and dramatic scenes in this novel, so many powerful and beautiful descriptions of moods and experiences, that one has a difficulty in select- ing any one passage or scene for special commendation. The coming of the fiddler to Ffoulkes' Inn, in the dead of night, when Marged wakes at his knocking, and opens to him with only a shawl thrown over her nightgear—makes not

• (1.) The Fiddler of Cure.: a North Sea Winter's Tale. By Ernest 'thy'. 1 voL Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and flouelignes.—(8.) His Honor and a Lady. By Sara Jeannette Duncan (Mrs. Everard Cotes). 1 vol. London Macmillan and Co.—(3.) Nobody's Fault. By Netta Byrett. 1 vol. London : John Lane. — (4.) Lesbia. By Anna O. Steele. 1 vol. London : George Bell and Bons. — (5.) Hasum-Scarum. By Mime Stuart. 1 vol. London : Jerrold and Bons. — (S.) Miss Drummond's De1emma. By R. Ramsay. 1 vol. London : Richard Bentley and Son.—(7.) Doctor Cougalton's _Legacy. By Henry Johnston. 1 vol. Lyndon: Methuen and Co.—(8 ) An Outcast of the Islands. By Joseph C,cnrad. 1 vol. London : T. Fisher U eerie.

only an admirably picturesque scene, but a significant pre- lude to the story that is to come. Then there is the great festivity at Came Hall on St. Andrew's Eve, when the stranger plays like one possessed ; and men and maids, tired, feverish, and reckless, dance on "as if they danced not for their own pleasure but under the bidding of some hard task- master, like a set of conscious puppets," while a storm rages outside and a ship is wrecked, and some who should have gone in the lifeboat forget their duty under the witchery of the magic fiddle. And again there is the collision at sea, which makes the catastrophe, when the fiddler forgets the maiden and saves his fiddle and himself, and Merged at last finds rapture—though it is the rapture of death—in the arms of the faithful Andrer.

One passes with regret from a story so full of fantastic poetry to even the cleverest of realistic novels. But His Honor and a Lady is certainly an exceptionally clever realistic novel, even in these days when everybody is clever or realistic, if not both. Mrs. Everard Cotes's novel is a story of Anglo- Indian life admirably told in an excellent style, full of local colour and knowledge of the machinery of Indian affairs, not without a certain grace and fascination; but hindered, accord- ing to our taste, from being a pleasant story by the cynical flavour pervading both its domestic and political atmosphere. John Church—that is to say, "His Honor "—is the typical hard-working public servant whose whole heart is in his work, and whose aims are all direct and single ; who deserves to rise and get honours, and who does rise and get honours, but is sure not to rise quite to the top. He is too little of a diplomatist and a time-server to fill satisfactorily an orna- mental post. He is also just a little of a pedant and a theorist, and not quite enough of a man of the world, in the good sense of that equivocal phrase. It is not his secret enemy, Lewis Ancram, but Lewis Ancram's sometime friend, Philip Doyle—himself an honest man—who sums Church up

thus :—" I don't mind telling you that, personally, His Acting Honor represents to me a number of objec- tionable things. He is a Radical, and a Low Church- man, and a Particularist. He's that objectionable ethical mixture, a compound of petty virtues." When the story opens, Church has just been appointed Acting Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal, the real Lieutenant - Governor, Sir Griffiths Spence, being invalided home. "His Honor's" wife, -the " Lady " of the title, is a provoking person, and we do not know that she quite deserves to be so pointedly called 4' a Lady." For a lady is among other things a woman with a sense of chivalry, and a chivalrous woman uses her finer gifts to supplement the blunt honesty of her husband Of she is the happy possessor of an honest husband), not to ornament her platonic relations with other men. Mrs. Church should have been better or worse. Recognising her husband's good qualities as much as she did, she should have been acute enough, if not loyal enough, to be proof against Ancram's -superficial charms. There is something over-subtle in the -drawing of the relation between these two. And the same applies to Ancram's relations with the girl he engages himself to. But Miss Daye is a person we altogether fail to under- .stand, though we applaud her judgment in breaking with Ancram and marrying Doyle instead. The catastrophe when -John Church receives the letter asking for his resignation makes a fine chapter, in which the honest man has, for a time at any rate, the complete sympathy of the reader. Of Church's death, and the events that follow, we will tell nothing, or the reader will have no discoveries to make for himself. The conclusion is as clever as anything in the story, and the story rather errs in the direction of being too clever.

Nobody's Fault is another very clever story. And it is also a thoroughly miserable one. It treats of the weari- some and unpleasant problem of union without marriage v. marriage without love. The best thing in the book is the extremely realistic description of the life in lodgings of a girl of twenty who has broken away from an uncongenial home to try earning her living as a high-school teacher in London on a salary of £80 a year. The girl is the daughter of a rich provincial publican, who has made the mistake of sending her to a boarding-school where the other girls are gentlewomen. She acquires tastes above those of her own people, loses her religious faith, and makes only one friend, who happens to be abroad when she begins life in lodgings. Her loneliness and dullness in London are appalling; and, if the picture of it will do anything to deter girls from attempting a life so fall of misery and temptation, the book will not have been written for nothing. But we fear this is not the effect produced upon the minds of girls by reading books of this kind. They skim the misery, and jump at the consolations in the form of charming men like Carey to be met at concerts. Unfortunately, Bridget Rnan's charming man disappears for five years as soon as he has made an impression on her heart. And before he comes back she has made the marriage she cannot put up with. This marriage is plumped into the story so very uncere- moniously that the reader cannot judge of the rights and the wrongs of it. The husband is only shown to us on the day on which Bridget makes up her mind to break with him. He is made to talk in an exceedingly offensive and insulting manner ; and for the rest we know nothing of him but what is sketchily mentioned by the author, by Bridget, and by Bridget's friend in extenuation of the marriage. Bridget, having thrown off the yoke, becomes with great alacrity her schoolgirl self again, instead of an artificial society woman talking cynical cant. Her lover, now returned, is bewitched once more, and they contemplate setting up together on the principle advocated by Mr. Grant Allen's heroine. But at the last moment Bridget. gives up the idea, for a reason which is certainly better than none, but much too accidental to justify the motive of the book.

In Lesbia, Mrs. Steele takes for her subject the excruciating and, just now, very much overdone situation of the man with a heart married to the woman without one. And she treats it with passion and tenderness, with dramatic force and what is called realism, but not with very delicate fidelity to the proba- bilities of life and character. Lesbia, after her marriage, and when her idolising lover has been rudely awakened into a disillusioned and resentful husband, explains herself a great deal, and much of what she says is very true, though she was not at all likely to have said it then. But some of the things she is made to say are altogether inapplicable. For instance, when she insists that she has not allowed her lover to kills her, and makes a great point of the difference between a woman like herself who must have "admirers," and one who will go all lengths with a lover,—neither she nor the author appear to be aware that the unpardonable thing about her is simply her total want of heart. Whether she has sinned much or little, grossly or delicately, is not the question—but whether she can "love much," or indeed at all, anything but her own pleasure. Frankly, the less said about a woman like Lesbia the better, unless it is said by some one who has the spiritual as well as the literary gifts necessary to show bow an infinitely good and patient husband may, by his own Mal tyrdom, win a soul from heaven for her. Mrs. Steele's conclusion does not leave us at all hopeful about L -shift's redemption ; but then many of the things she makes the husband say to the wife suggest that, though he took for granted something spiritually fine would be thrown in, he married her for her physical charm, and even when his eyes were open to her soullessness, went on regarding her beauty with a kind of satisfaction, alternating with revulsion, that had little of an elevating nature in it. The minor characters are much better drawn than the principal ones. Cecilia is nice, and we could believe in her making a man of Lord Ulick. And the old print-fancier is interesting and attractive, and his daughter deserved to be made more of. But the beet things in the book are its epigrams and aphorisms, and clever little sketches of character. Mrs. Steele has a great gift for hitting off the paradoxical aspects of life in a few pithy words. And when she does this in her own person, she does welL But rather too often she puts her words of wisdom into the months of one or other of her personages to whom they do not lawfully belong.

We like .Harum-Searum much better than the three-volume novel by the same hand which we noticed last month. Antonia Whitbum is certainly a young lady of surprisingly uncon- vended manners and conversation, even for a Colonial girL But she is fresh and good-hearted, and her exploits are decidedly entertaining. Altogether there is an atmosphere of wholesome high spirits and natural kindness about the book, which makes it refreshing to turn to after two or three novels full of social problems and subtle characters. We recom- mend it to readers who look to novels for enlivenment rather than for instruction or perplexity.

Tragedy and comedy mingle rather incongruously, but not unpleasantly, in Miss Drummands Dilemma. The circum- stance upon which the plot turns and out of which the dilemma arises is a mistake of such a trivial, accidental, and improbable nature that it is only fit to hang a farce on. The circumstance that makes the motive of the story and gives the colour and tone to its sentiment is the extremely painful one of a marriage marred by the insanity of the wife. The relation between the husband and wife, which is one of persisting loyalty and affection, is handled with great tender- ness and delicacy ; and even the story of the girl who is supposed to be deranged when she is not, is managed so as to avoid anything affrontingly ludicrous in spite of the absurdly arbitrary peg upon which this episode is hung. Tom's chivalrous constancy in returning to the girl in spite of the warning he receives from Mrs. Yool, will probably not meet with the approbation of the majority of readers. For the discovery that Ranee was not mad after all, though it absolves Providence, can hardly absolve Tom from a charge of great imprudence. Whether the author means any moral to be found in the story we do not know. The suggestion is that, after all, love, so it be of the right sort, may defy this calamity as well as all others, and we are not sure that this is a bad moral.

Dr. Congalton's Legacy has many good things in it, but it wants concentration to make it a good novel. It is too scrappy. One suspects that the material was first collected with a view to a series of separate sketches of character and manners, and only turned into a story as an after-thought. Some of the minor characters and some of the episodes that are least im- portant to the plot, are much the best things in the book. Indeed the best thing of all is the action of Saunders M'Phee in the matter of the Doctor's degree, which he long ago aspired to gain himself, and now cannot bear to see his respected friend, the retiring minister, foregoing because of the expense. Saunders is only a poor schoolmaster, but he has a little hoard of sovereigns in his desk carefully treasured away among more sentimental relics ; and not without natural regret, but still with very generous and deliberate determina- tion, he takes twenty gold pieces from his store to pay for the honour he feels his friend should have. The action speaks for itself, and we wish we bad space to quote the prayer by which he consecrates the action.

We do not often come across a novel of so much power as Mr. Conrad's Outcast of the Islands. The action takes place on an island of the Malay Archipelago, and the descriptions of tropical scenery glow with life and colour. There is not less power in the descriptions of character. But unfortunately the situation yields a richer crop of evil passions than of noble ones, and the book on the whole suggests the view of the well-known hymn that in the tropics it is as mach a matter of course for man to be vile as for Nature to be beautiful. There is, however, one grand character in the book—that of the old seaman, Tom Lingard. This personage, who is conceived on the colossal scale of primitive romance, looms through the lurid atmosphere of crime and sensuality like a legendary type of rugged, incorruptible manhood. The man who plays the largest and most detestable part in the story is a protege of Lingard,—one, Peter Willem, whom he has taken compassion on as a runaway boy and put in the way of making a fortune. Willems is as incapable of loyalty or even honesty as Lingard is incapable of the opposite faults. Willems cheats his employer, and is turned out of a good berth, and flung disgraced upon a prospect of ruin. But Lingard gives him another chance, and he plays false again. This time he falls in love with a native woman, who is a magnificent embodiment of savage passion, and by his treachery causes a disastrous revolution in Lingard's island. The description of this revolution is extraordinarily graphic, and it abounds in horrors which are, however, partly condoned by the beauty and poetry of the style. The redeeming human point is the magnanimity of Lingard towards Willems. There is an exquisite poignancy of pathos in the words with which the hardy old sailor finally takes leave of the man he has benefited, and by whom he has been betrayed :—" You are not a human being that may be destroyed or forgiven. You are a bitter thought, a something without a body,

and that must be hidden You are my shame." Much is forgiven to genius, and there is genius in this novel. But even genius will not win forgiveness for the

repulsive cynicism of the dialogue between Almayer and the Professor in the last chapter.