RECENT NOVELS.*
THERM is no novelist of our time whose work exhibits a greater equality of excellence than that which is to be found in the books of Mr. W. E. Norris. If, pace Mr. Grant Allen, we may be allowed to use the old-fashioned terminology which that brilliant exponent of evolution declares to be exploded, we should say that Mr. Norris is a writer, not of genius but of great talent ; and while talent is undoubtedly less fascinating than genius, it has the countervailing advantage of being less frequently disappointing. In- spiration is doubtless a finer thing - than aptitede ; but, unfortunately, inspiration cannot always be relied upon, whereas aptitude can. The man who writes a poem of the highest order to-day may, with the best possible intentions, produce comparatively poor stuff for the next twelve months; but the men who produce the leading articles in to-day's Times will go on without lapse or intermission to the end of the chapter, producing work which, in all essential respects, will be equally good. Now, Mr. Norris has gifts which, while certainly rarer than the gifts which make a man a capable leader-writer, resemble them in being perfectly under the con- trol of their possessor; and, consequently, no new book from his pen ever fails wholly—or even in any large degree—to fulfil our natural expectations. He has taught us not to look for profoundly impressive portraiture, for moving or thrilling situation, for sudden revelation of imaginative vision, for any of the things in virtue of which fiction achieves greatness; but, on the other hand, we know that we are certain to find the results of keen observation, shrewd reflection, and bright, fresh humour, embodied in a story made attractive by thoroughly capable literary craftsmanship. Mr. NcuTis's work is good all round, for the simple reason that he is a capable man who never attempts what is beyond. him, but it is as a humorist that he shows himself at his best, and in Miss Shaft° this special gift is displayed very pleasantly. The love-story of the heroine and the aristocratic sculptor, Lord Walter Sinclair, though pleasantly told, is not of absorbing interest : we enjoy it mainly because it is the means of intro- ducing us to the entertaining circle which is composed of the horsey, hard-headed, but loyal-hearted young nobleman, Lord Loddondale, the ineffably conceited aesthetic poet, Mr. Basil Morley, who serves as a fine butt for the caustic humour of that terrible but charming old-maid, Miss Nell Travers, and Mrs. Limmergeier, the wife of the distinguished but not very scrupulous financier, whose devotion to her husband does not in the least blind her to his moral weakness and social foibles, or prevent her from making him the object of occasional sarcasms which, in spite of their superficial bon- homie, have an unmistakably keen edge. The good things of the two ladies would in themselves suffice to make Miss Shaft° a very bright book; but there can be little doubt that Lord Loddondale is Mr. Norris's crowning success. His two courtships of Norma, first on behalf of his brother and then on his own account, are capitally managed, arid the character as a whole has real humour, vitality, and originality.
The novel just noticed is a capital example of manly work in fiction : the most prominent characteristics of The Search for Basil Lyndhurst are, on the other hand, dis- tinctively feminine. There are, as a matter of course, a hero and other male characters of various conditions and ages; but the women are throughout the most prominent figures, and the most important actors ; while the men, with perhaps one exception, have that indefinable lack, not of manliness, but of masculinity, which we find so con- stantly in the work of lady-novelists. This is undoubtedly a weakness, but it is a weakness to which familiarity has reconciled all but the most exacting critics ; and the majority of tolerant readers will consider it more than half- • (1.) Miss Shaft*. By W. E. Norris. 9 vols. London: R. Bentley and Son —(2.) The Search for Basil Lyndhurst. By Rosa N. Carey. 3 vols. London: R. Bentley and Son.— (3.) Under a Strange Mask. By Frank Barrett. 9 vols. London: Cassell and Co.—(4.) A Ci *eked Path. By Mrs. Alexander. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett —154 Little Hand and Muckle Gold. By "H. L." 3 vols. Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood and Sons.—(6.) Princess Sunshine, and other Stories. By Mrs. Riddell. 2 vols. London: Ward and Downey.—(7.) Passe-Rose. By Arthur Sherburne Hardy. London : Sampson Low and Co. atoned for by grace and refinement of manner, happy treat- ment of details of portraiture, and well-sustained though unexciting narrative interest. Miss Carey is not, we think, so successful as she might have been in minimising the central improbability of her story ; but perhaps she felt it was better to leave it altogether unexplained than to hazard an explanation which—the circumstances being what they were— could hardly fail to appear lame and inadequate. It is in the' highest degree unlikely that a woman like Mrs. Lyndhurst, in whom the instincts of motherhood are of at least average strength, should deliberately allow twenty-fire years to pass without making any attempt to trace the son whom in his infancy she had so mysteriously lost, and it is well for the general success of the novel that this difficulty is left behind us when we have reached the close of the first volume. The relations between Basil, his little son Reggie, and Olga Leigh at the little French town where they meet for the first time, are very prettily pictured, and most readers will probably find this the most enjoyable part of the book, though there can be no doubt that its most powerful passages are those devoted to poor Aline, the low- born but beautiful girl whom Basil marries in the fervour of a. first youthful passion, only to discover that she is a victim to the drink-craving which she has inherited as a terrible birth- right. Aline herself is a really admirable portrait, and George Barton, the Holloway shopkeeper, who is Aline's brother, is the one exceptionally real masculine character to whom reference has been made. So much care is shown in the body of the novel, that we are surprised to note some extraordinary inaccuracies in the quoted headings of the chapters. A short passage of verse, beginning with one of the best-known lines in contemporary poetry, "Tin life of which our nerves are scant," is first misquoted, and then attributed to Wordsworth.
When Mr. Frank Barrett began to write, his matter was decidedly better than his manner. The former testi- fied to considerable dramatic imagination "made effective by careful workmanship ; the latter somehow suggested the creaking of new and imperfectly oiled machinery. Under a Strange Mask proves that experience has given him ease and fluency of expression, but in gaining these things he seems to have yielded to the temptation to neglect matters which are really of more importance. His latest book consists of two stories which divide the novel into two nearly equal parts,—the first volume being devoted to the love-affair of Lord Redland and Miss Sylvester ; the second to the fraud attempted by the scoundrel, L'Estmnge, who personates his deceased employer, a man of twice or thrice his age, with the intention of swindling his employer's granddaughter out of an estate worth E200,000. The method of the swindle is undoubtedly novel and ingenious, and for its novelty and ingenuity due praise must, as a matter of common justice, be awarded to Mr. Barrett ; but praise of anything else in the book—except its bright and easy literary style, to which reference has already been made—is impossible to any discriminating reader. Like some other writers of novels which owe their interest to the excitement and gratification of curiosity, Mr. Barrett seems to be under the delusion that one good idea is all that is necessary, and that when the good idea has been once got hold of, it may be safely left to take care of itself, the fact being that a conception of exceptional strangeness needs to be treated with special care in order that it may not be out of harmony with the circumstance of the story. No such care has been taken by Mr. Barrett, and the result of his carelessness is that his story is crowded with grotesque incredibilities which it is need- less to enumerate, because they will force themselves upon the attention of every reader. That the writer is an able man will be doubted by no one acquainted with his previous work ; indeed, signs of his ability are numerous enough in the pages of Under a Strange Mask; but for the production of successful work, the novelist needs not only a happy thought, but labour of a kind which is unrepresented here.
Mrs. Alexander is one of the most capable producers of what we have once or twice described as circulating-library fiction ; and though we cannot pretend to a detailed recollec- tion of all her numerous novels, we think it safe to say that she has never done anything better than A Crooked Path.. It is not altogether perfect in character-conception, for most readers who know anything of human nature will find it difficult or impossible to believe that a high-minded girl
like Katherine Liddell could, without even a serious struggle, yield to the temptation to suppress her uncle's will. Nor is any credible explanation of her crime provided by the fact that it was committed for the sake of her youthful nephews lather than for her own advantage; indeed, it is not too much to say that disinterested swindles of this kind, though common -enough in fiction, are practically unknown in real life. If, however, we admit that Katherine could have acted as she did act, we have to admit further that her subsequent emotions and history are very happily and harmoniously imagined, and the story, as a whole, is not only ingenious, but pleasantly natural. It is noteworthy that kindly and honest lawyers are making more and more frequent appearances in fiction, and Mr. Newton is a very agreeable specimen of the class ; but from a business point of view, he is hardly so satisfactory, for his search for the will of his crusty client, Mr. Liddell, must have been strangely careless and perfunctory, as no lawyer worth his salt would have left a parcel of papers un- examined simply because it was labelled, "MSS. to be burned." But criticism of details may easily become captious, and captious treatment of so readable a book as this would be specially ungrateful. Among the characters who are notably lifelike, are Mrs. Ormonde, Katherine's odiously selfish sister- in-law, and Mrs. Needham, the lady-journalist who, if not studied from a living original, is a well-individualised specimen of a new social type.
Little Hand and Muckle Gold cannot be called a pleasant book, but there cannot be two opinions concerning its clever- ness and its power. The writer is clearly a man of culture and a man of the world, with literary rigour, dramatic skill, and a much wider and more accurate knowledge of the grand monde both in France and England than is usually displayed by novelists who introduce us to the society of socially dis- tinguished people. He possesses, moreover, one qualification which has at any rate the value attaching to rarity,— the power to conceive and present a character who is at once an unmitigated villain and a human being in whose existence we can believe. Just now the average man seems to have lost faith in the existence either of ideal goodness or thorough-going scoundrelism ; and contemporary fiction— which appeals to the average man—becomes weak and unreal as it approaches either of the ethical poles. Whatever be the reason of the fact, it is a fact that our novelists fail when they attempt to create a character who, like Iago or Richard III. or Goneril, is throughout bad and yet dis- tinctively human,—an entirely wicked person who is not a melodramatic puppet, but a flesh-and-blood man or woman. Now, Laurence Farquhar is such a character : he is a mean and unscrupulous scoundrel, who is absolutely destitute of any redeeming virtue; but his villainies have a per- sonality behind them to which they stand in vital relations,—they are felt to be the evil fruit of an evil tree. The fact that Farquhar is nearly the most prominent and quite the most impressive character in Little Hand and Macke Gold, suffices to justify the description of the book given in our opening sentence, a description which is still further justified by a gratuitously elaborate and realistic description, at the close of the third volume, of tie death of a noble and beautiful woman by hydro- phobia, which nervous and imaginative readers will do well to avoid ; but notwithstanding all its unpleasant- -nesses, the book has an intellectual grip and a literary brilliance which are decidedly out of the common. The sketches of Parisian life during the early years- of the Second Empire are admirable, and the lighter passages have a bright humour which often crystallises into genuine wit. The novel is, in short, a painful but intensely interesting story, the work of a man who is evidently a master of his tools.
Mrs. Riddell is, as all the world knows, a capable and attractive writer, but her persistently indulged preference for the minor key is at times somewhat irritating. A tale entitled "Princess Sunshine" ought really to have something of gaiety and brightness, and in these pages gaiety and brightness are conspicuous by their absence. The story is not so acutely doleful as some of its predecessors, but it is chronically depressing, and though, as the common phrase has it, it "ends happily," the satisfactory nature of the goal hardly .2empensates us for the dreariness of the path by which we have reached it. We are evidently' intended to regard Gregory Gifford, the hard-working man of letters who
sacrifices himself for the sake of his unspeakably selfish sisters and his thoroughly unscrupulous brother, as a very heroic person, while most sensible readers will agree with the outspoken Lady Hester in thinking him weakly and even culpably wrong-headed. Still, there is a vein of weakness in many of us which disposes us to look with a measure of sym- pathy upon the wrong-headedness of so gentle and kindly a soul as Gregory, and there are pretty and pathetic touches in: the story which are very charming; but we must say that we prefer to "Princess Sunshine" the two shorter stories with which the thin volumes are padded out. "Why Dr. Cray Left Sontham" is slight enough, certainly ; but it is brisk and vivacious—if these epithets are not inappropriate to a tale about poisoning—and "A Terrible Vengeance" is certainly one of the creepiest of recent ghost-stories. It may be a per- verted taste, but we would rather have our blood curdled than our spirits depressed.
Even when the nineteenth century presents itself in a more cheerful guise than that in which it is wont to appear in Mrs. Riddell's pages, an occasional change of period and scene is decidedly refreshing, and a very agreeable means of enjoying it is provided by Mr. Arthur Sher- burne Hardy's mediaval romance. It is not by any means easy to describe the charm of Passe-Bose, but we think there are few readers who will fail to feel it. Perhaps the two most noteworthy characteristics of the book are its unfailing grace and its frequent picturesqueness. There is a certain slowness in the movement of the narrative which may possibly repel readers of the more impetuous class, and the outlines have here and there some of that indistinctness which is seen in objects observed through the sunny mist of an August afternoon, the book presenting in this respect a strong contrast to such an old-world tale as The Cloister and the Hearth, where the draughtsmanship is so sharp as to be almost hard. Mr. Hardy is, however, wonderfully successful in exciting that feeling of strangeness and far-away-ness which is so welcome a relief from the prosaic actuality both of ordi- nary life and of much contemporary art. The early chapters, which describe the incidents attending the carrying of the sick Abbot Rainal to the shrine of St. Gervais, have a richness of light and colour which is sumptuous without being florid ; and numerous little cabinet pictures, to be found up and down the succeeding pages, amply fulfil the promise of the opening. Passe-Rose herself is a bewitching figure, and her story from the pen of the author of that striking though very different novel, But Yet a Woman, comes not only as a pleasure but as a surprise.
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