RECENT NOVELS.* WHAT is true of literary criticism in general,
is specially true of the criticism of fiction,—that it is largely a matter of emphasis regulated by taste. There are many, nowadays, who say that it is wholly so; but even those who maintain the respectable old-fashioned view that there are certain immutable " canons of criticism," must admit that the appli- cation of these canons must always depend upon the personal idiosyncrasy of the critic. Brown and Jones being equally competent judges, will agree that Robinson's novel has certain merits and certain defects, and yet their estimates of the book as a whole may be perplexingly discordant, because these merits and defects impress them with unequal force, and also perhaps because one of them has a natural leaning towards tenderness, the other towards severity. Here, for example, is Miss Eleanor Holmes's novel, To-Day and To- Morrow. Only a critic who is disqualified by an entirely unsympathetic temperament will deny that the general effect of the story is pleasing, that its style is bright and agreeable, and that its tone is in every way com- mendable. The present writer feels that there is a human charm in the book which serves largely, if not wholly, to counterbalance its defects; but he is quite ready to admit that the defects are there, and those who emphasise them are not necessarily unjust. The intellectual or ethical motive of the book is indicated by the quotation— if it be a quotation—on the title-page, " So potential is
• (1.) To-Day and To-Morrow. By Eleanor Holmes. 3 vole. London : Hurst and Blackett.—(2.) Bewitched : a Lore-Story. By Emily Burnett. 2 vols. London : R. Bentley and Son.—(3.) The Grasshoppers. By Mrs. Andrew Dean (Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick.). London : Adam and Charles Black.—;4 ) A Business in Great Waters. By Julian Corbett. London Methuen and Co.—(5.) The Impregnable City a Romance. By Max Pemberton. London : Cassell and Co. —(6.) Honour of Thieves. By C. J. Oatcliffe Syne. London: Chatto and Windt'.
To-Day, that it not only holds To-Morrow in the hollow of its hand, but it can alter yesterday," and the story is devoted to the redemption of a middle-aged man whose youth has been foolish, or worse than foolish, by the influence of an exceptionally noble woman. Noel Heronden and Miss Helmsley are therefore the most important characters in the book, because round them the action revolves, but they are less satisfying to the imagination than other characters who are altogether subordinate. Major Heronden, as he stands, is perfectly lifelike; bat the author more than once intimates her intention to paint the portrait of a man who has delibe- rately followed the lead of his lower instincts, and as this intention is not carried out, his personality leaves on the mind an unfortunately confused impression, for the Noel Heronden whose acquaintance we make in the story, is a chivalrous gentleman, whose mistakes are the errors of his virtues rather than the consequence of his vices. Miss Helmsley is certainly a beautiful conception, and we should be sorry to indulge in the cheap and false cynicism of the remark that she is too good to be credible ; but there is no cynicism in the statement that it is very difficult to give reality to an ideal portrait, or in the suggestion that in the portrait of Miss Helmsley this difficulty has hardly been surmounted. Still, if Miss Helmsley does not seem real to us, she charms, and to be charming counts for a good deal ; indeed, it may be said of the book, as a whole, that it is pleasanter than many other books which are more nearly faultless.
It is not often that the famous publishing-house in New Burlington Street turns out anything quite so amateurishly crude as the two volumenovel, Bewitched. As the type is exceptionally large and well spaced, there is not very much of the book ; indeed it can easily be read in an afternoon without putting on the pace ; but like the sermon in the well-known anecdote, it is at once brief and tedious, and it achieves other ingenious combinations by being also improbable and tame, absurd and flat. It opens with far-fetched comedy ; it closes in the midst of far-fetched melodrama, and in neither can we discern anything to entertain or to excite. Maxwell Take, the painter, takes a railway journey in search of a background, and in the train he falls in love at first sight with an unknown fellow-traveller. He devotes himself to tracking the young lady down, and finds her living in seclusion with a grumpy old father, who fortunately sleeps a good deal, and spends his waking hours in writing scientific articles and playing chess with the curate. Dick Swiveller spoke of the Marchioness as being surrounded by mystery, but the en- vironment of Miss Sally Brass's small servant is common- place when compared with that of Suzanne Wildwood. In her case the mystery is complicated by a ghost with a clammy hand, but even in the presence of this spectre our flesh does not creep ; indeed, from the first page of the novel to its last, we know no sensation but one of languid boredom, and Bewitched is one of the least bewitching stories that has ever come our way.
To pass from this very ineffective book to a bright, clever story like The Grasshoppers, is an unspeakable relief ; though when we speak of Mrs. Andrew Dean's novel as bright, we refer to its literary manner rather than to its narrative matter, for the latter deals largely, indeed almost exclusively, with the seamy side of life, and introduces us to a set of people who, with one or two agreeable exceptions, are about as un- comfortable as they well can be. Vanity, selfishness, cruelty, and greed are made to turn themselves inside-out, after the 'manner of the born satirist, and yet Mrs. Dean's portraiture, mordant as it is, is hardly cynical, or even ungenial. Such a character as that of the good Dutchman, Herr Hansen, would suffice to give an engagingly sympathetic quality to any novel in which he made an appearance, and his artistic value is immense, for as a "high light" he gives chiaroscuro to a picture which would otherwise be unattractively murky. Even to Mrs. Frere and her daughter Nell, who, by their selfish extravagance and vulgar love of display, bring poor, weak Mr. Frere to ruin and nntimelpdeath, we become at least half reconciled. In the early pages of the book the writer empties upon them the vials of a contempt which is all the more biting because it is so absolutely passionless ; but when the poor miserable creatures learn the full bitterness of the harvest they have sown she allows pity to have its full and natural effect, without a single lapse into that false senti- mentality which ignores the working of a just Nemesis. The sketches of bourgeois society in Holland, which have obviously been studied from the life, are exceedingly clever ; and Hilary Frere, the girl with the fine, strong, untrained character, who has to learn all the lessons of life in a school of bitter experience, is an admirably conceived and not less admirably executed figure.
No reader of A Business in Great Waters will doubt that Mr. Julian Corbett knows how to construct and tell a stirring tale of adventure, though in his opening chapters he some- what fails to do himself justice, and throughout the book he follows the tantalising method—beloved by Dickens—of jumping from one set of characters and situations to another. Of course there are some narrative schemes which render such a method almost inevitable, but it is one to be avoided whenever possible, because it interferes in a most irritating way with the continuity of interest. In the present book, for example, the stately and pathetic figure of the Countess who, in order to save the lives of her children, consents to marry the unspeakable ruffian who has just murdered her husband, suddenly disappears from view early in the volume, and does not reappear till the story is nearing its close. There are other and slighter indications that Mr. Julian Corbett, though not an inexperienced writer, has hardly made himself quite a master of the difficult art of narrative architecture ; but some of the single episodes of adventure have a vigour and " go " which carry the reader along in a delightfully exhilarating fashion, and A Business in Great Waters—the period of which is that of the French Revolution—provides capital reading for the holiday season.
Mr. Max Pemberton has what Mr. Corbett lacks,—a fine feeling for narrative form, and The Impregnable City has the organic symmetry which is the one thing wanting in the story just noticed. In his new romance, as in its two pre- decessors, The Iron Pirate and The Sea Wolves, Mr. Pemberton follows the advice of the famous Mrs. Glasse; he first catches his hare in the shape of a fresh and attractive narrative idea, and then devotes all his energies to the task of cooking it in the most attractive fashion. Here the raw material of invention is provided by an island in the Pacific Ocean, the interior of which can be reached only by a subter- ranean water-way, an expedient which recalls a similar con- trivance in Mr. Rider Haggard's Alan Quatermain, though there are important novelties and differences of detail which neutralise any possible charge of plagiarism. The island has been discovered by the Count Andrea Javanowitz, and utilised by him as the home of a community composed of the pariahs of European civilisation, over which he rules as a benevolent but inflexible autocrat. At the opening of the story the island kingdom is in the zenith of its glory, and the Count is well assured that external attack can be triumphantly repelled ; but there are elements of danger within, and the events which lead up to the down- fall of the impregnable city are imagined and narrated in the spirit of genuine romance. As a contribution to what may be called the Haggard school of narrative, the story could hardly be bettered, though the more critical kind of reader is kept face to face with one tremendous intellectual incon- sistency. Had the Count extended his protection only to political offenders, his great scheme would not have been marred by prima, facie incredibility ; but no sane man—and he is represented as very sane indeed — could have deemed it possible to establish a stable community by opening the water-gate of his impregnable city to such off-sconrings of civilisation as the scoundrels who are confined in the valley prison. This lapse from probability is the one flaw in an otherwise admirable romance.
Honour of Thieves is not literature, but it is good, brisk narrative. Mr. Hyne writes of the doings and misdoings, especially the latter, of three of the most thorough-going villains one would wish to meet with even in fiction, with the apparent aim of showing that there are degrees in villainy which divide the scamps who are quite hopeless from those who are not. Mr. Theodore Shelf, who embezzles trust-money, sends vessels out to sea with infernal machines on board, and promotes bogus companies at meetings which are opened with prayer, belongs to the former class, while his accomplices, Patrick Onslow and Captain Kettle, are just squeezed into the latter, apparently on the ground that they do not add hypocrisy to their sufficiently numerous vices. The London part of the book seems a little crude, and the conversation in which Mrs. Shelf cajoles the Cabinet Minister into the promise of a baronetcy for her husband is flagrantly im- possible; but the story of the fateful voyage of the doomed steamer Port Edes ' has enough of incident in matter and vivacity in manner to give momentum to the whole novel. Kettle, the dare-devil skipper who can overawe a united mutinous crew by force of will and sheer brute courage, and whose favourite leisure occupation is the writing of sentimental verses, is almost a creation; at any rate, he is a character who testifies to Mr. Hyne's possession of both insight and humour. If Honour of Thieves is not a book to call for superlatives, it can, at any rate, be honestly said that many more ambitious stories are a great deal less entertaining.
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