RECENT NOVELS.* WHETHER Mr. Black is at his best or
at something a little below his best, his work has a tender poetic grace which is always irresistibly winning. To compare Stand Fast, Craig .Royston ! with A Danghter of Heth or A Princess of Thule might be ungracious, for absolute equality of excellence is only attained—if attained at all—by writers who never rise above a dead-level of uninspired mediocrity ; and it would certainly be foolish, as it always must be, to pit against each other pleasures which differ less in degree than in kind. Mr. Black generally sets himself to interest us in the pretty love-story of a more or less charming hero and a perfectly charming heroine, the latter being—though the metaphor is too grossly material—the pike de resistance of the banquet of narrative. In the new novel the two familiar figures are not wanting, and they are as pleasant as ever. Mr. Black has the very rare power of drawing a young man who is intellectually well-equipped and morally blameless, without being the least bit of a prig, and Vincent Harris is a manly, chivalrous, altogether likeable fellow ; while Maisrie Bethune, though one of the quietest, is also one of the most captivating of the girl-friends to whom Mr. Black has introduced us. For once, however, neither hero nor heroine is the central figure. It is George Bethune, Maisrie's elderly father, in whom we are evidently intended to be mainly interested; and interested we undoubtedly are, though our in- terest is almost equalled by our puzzlement. Bethune, like Hippolyta's lover, lunatic, and poet, is of imagination all com- pact. The fabric of his life is woven of threads from Scottish ballads ; he has invented for himself a genealogy, an ancestral estate, and a family motto which provides the story with a title,—and he believes and lives in them all. Still, this habit, which has become second nature, of giving to airy nothings EL local habitation and a name, does not seem to have induced blindness to what is known as the' main chance; and his action is such that it is by no means easy to decide whether Bethune is a simple visionary, or a by no means simple adventurer. Indeed, it would seem to be Mr. Black's intention to paint one of those characters, more uncommon in fiction than in real life, in whom the elements are so mixed that a satisfying com- prehension of them is practically unattainable ; and if this be so, his portrait of George Bethune must be pronounced a great success. Perhaps the majority of readers will retain their faith in him all through, and some who lose it will recover it again; but with all of them it will be faith rather than sight; it will be acceptance of him based on personal charm and outside testimony, which combine to overpower certain unpleasant suspicions aroused by the old man's own conduct. It thus happens that, apart from the delicacy and beauty of Mr. Black's workmanship, Stand Past, Craig Royston! has the advantage of providing a topic for one of those discussions the interest of which lies in the fact that they can be prolonged for ever.
Armorel of Lyonesse is one of the pleasantest of Mr. Walter Besant's books, and. this is saying a great deal, for whatever Mr. Besant may be or may not be, he is emphatically a pleasant writer. Even Children of Gibeon, with its per- sistent turning-up of the seamy side of our London civilisa- tion, was saved from depressing dreariness by a breeze of hopeful optimism blowing through its pages; and when the writer gets away from such a dismal theme as' "the " (1.) Stand Fast, Craig Repton / By William Blaelcr 3 TON. London : Sampson Low and 0o.—(3,) Armee( of Lymieese a Romance of To•Day. By Walter Besant. 3 vols. London! Matto and Windus.—(3.) Pirginfo Tala Of One Ilandrod Years Ago. By Trd Prinsep. London, Longmans, Green, and Co.---(4.) Love's Lcoacy, By Riobard Aube King ("Buell"). 3 vole. London : Ward and Downey —(.5.) The Little Das. By Eleanor 0. Prioo. 2 vols. London : R. Bentley and sea Basil and Arenetfo, By B. L. Parjeon. 3 vole. London : F.n . 4.Whiteand 0.o.—(7.) A Colonial Reormer. By Rolf Boldrewood. 3 Vole London: Macmillan and Co.--(8..) An Austraiinv 3 vols. London; R;Bentley and Son. gospel of elevenpence-halfpenny," he is wholly bright. Mr. Besant can do many things well, but he is specially happy either in the description of scenery which he loves, or in the exposure of humbug which he hates ; and the scheme of his new story enables him to taste both kinds of happiness. Through the whole of the first volume we are among the Scilly Isles (which have been strangely ignored by novelists in search of a new stage) ; and in the little island of Samson, with its seven inhabitants, he finds the subject for a, "landscape (or seascape) with figures," which provides that combination of beauty and oddity always dear to Mr. Besant, probably because he knows he can turn it to such capital artistic account. Armorel Roseveau, the child of the rock and the sea-breeze, strong-limbed, beautiful-bodied, simple-minded, passionately pure—with all the natural grace of budding womanhood, unspoiled by the contact or even by the gave of a world which is all unknown to her—is a heroine after her creator's own heart, a younger sister, one might say, of that Phillis Fleming who took us all captive so many years ago, and from whose fetters some of us are never likely to escape. It would, indeed, be difficult to supply a girl like Armorel with a mate worthy of her (even Phillis's Jack seems a young man who is lucky beyond his deserts), but Roland Lee is really rather too trying. Of course, when he sold his pictures to that arch-humbug, Alec Feilding, and enabled the rascal to win a factitious reputation for genius by signing them with his own name, he had the excuse of starva- tion; but then, a young man in good health, who is painting pictures by which a reputation can at once be made, has no right to be starving. As for Feilding himself, he is doubtless impossible ; but he is in his way as great a success as the author's other humbugs, Mr. Lilliecrip, the Jaganel twin- brethren, Herr Paulus, and the rest. He is at once painter, poet, and story-writer—" the cleverest man in London" is society's description of him—but his pictures are painted by Roland Lee, his poems are written by poor Effie Wilmot, his stories are told by Lady Frances Hollington, and he himself is simply a dull scoundrel, with no intellectual aptitude but that of "getting up" art-jargon from text-books. A novel which contains Armorel and Feilding, and the Scillonian chapters that fill the first volume and close the third, demands and deserves the gratitude of every reader who knows what is good.
The use of the proverb, Ne Bator ultra orepidam, as a canon of literary criticism seems to have been abandoned by common consent of producers and critics alike. When Mr. Ruskin turned political economist, it was hurled at him as the most convenient missile; but since the publication of Unto This Last (let the tempting pun be understood rather than expressed) it has been allowed to rust disused. Of late years so many painters have made attempts, more or less praise- worthy, to show themselves poets, that no one will see any- thing extraordinary, or even specially noteworthy, in the fact that Mr. Val Prinsep has published a novel. Probably there will not even be any expectation of its being very much better or very much worse than the novels of other writers of equal culture, and assuredly, if such expectations have been enter- tained, Virginie will altogether disappoint them. In one respect only is the book in the least surprising : it exhibits no sign whatever of literary inexperience. There is a certain kind of crudity, the result of general immaturity, that no sensible person would expect to find in Mr. Prinsep's pages ; but there is some justification for a, feeling of pleasant surprise that his use of the pen as an implement of artistic presentation is well-nigh as deft as his use of the brush. He writes with that peculiar adequacy of effect, that freedom from strain after something never quite realised, which is seldom attained save after long years of apprenticeship. The book lacks something, for it does not move us as we feel we ought to be moved by a story dealing with the incidents of that great tragedy, the Dickens's Tale elto.-t. tion,—as we were moved, for example, y Two Cities, or even by Henry Kingsley's now forgotten Mademoiselle Mathilde ; but our comparative listlessness may be due to the fact that the author has written without strong emotion, and not that he has felt emotion which he has wanted the skill to render. So far as we are able to judge from this one work, Mr. Prinsep's power of correct and facile execution runs ahead of his power of vital conception : he knows what he can do and what he cannot do, and adapts artistic means to artistic ends with a conscious deliberate- ness which is alien to the self-forgetful swiftness of genius. He preserves the lifelikeness of his characters by pre- senting them always in one, or at the most in two, rela- tions; and his incidents are so arranged as to give this special pose the look of inevitableness. Le Blanc is always either the tenderly worrying father or the self-satisfied chef: we arc lIt'Ver allowed to see him playing any other part; and the action of every other important character in the novel is similarly restricted. The book has cleverness, grace, sym- metry, proportion,—all the gifts which. go to make up what we call technique : nay, more, it has real interest ; but, as Sir Joshua said when he snapped his fingers before a faultless bat vaguely unsatisfying picture,—" It wants that !"
The conversation of two undergraduates of Trinity College, Dublin, who are introduced to us in the first chapter of Love's Legacy, is sufficiently serious to recall the discourse of those
Miltonic personages who—
"reasoned high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute ; " and though we are expressly warned that it is not to be taken as a sample of the story to which it serves as a prelude, it certainly leads us to expect some fare more intellectually satisfying than that provided by a rather commonplace novel of the detective species. Quotations from Heine, Pascal, Congreve, Bishop Butler, and Mr. Coventry Patmore, do certainly give an appetising literary flavour to a work of fiction, especially when they appear with a natural and spontaneous grace, and are clearly not dragged in violently to make a show ; but they, and the brightly serious conversations into which they enter, are simply thrown away when used to lead up to such a tale as Mr. Ache King has thought it worth while to tell in. the three volumes of Love's Legacy. Apart from the mere writing, of which no complaint can be made, the book cannot even be praised as a good specimen of a poor kind of art, for in a novel of this class the one thing needful is the constructive ingenuity which can devise a plot-scheme at once complex and symmetrical ; and here the one thing needful is the one thing wanting. The means taken in the first instance to fix suspicion of Gwynn's murder upon Rollo, and to divert it from Mr. Morris, are deplorably clumsy; but really no other word than " fatuous " will suffice to characterise the expedient by which the true criminal is finally saved from the fate he so richly deserved. Mr. Ache King is not the first able man who has failed where a much less able man might have succeeded, because he has attempted a task away from the line of his ability.
Miss Price's new novel is somewhat slight in narrative substance, and her few characters are drawn in outline, with the minimum of elaboration essential to an effect of life- likeness ; but her literary workmanship has never been more finely and gracefully finished than in the pages of The Little Ose. The book is, however, much too sad to be kenerally popular, and though there is something shallow in the criticism which objects to all art that is not "comfortable," we think that the objection to Miss Price's story on the ground of its unrelieved gloom is one which can be reasonably sustained, In the picture of the ruin of an innocent young life, brought about by no moral weakness, but by the loving, trusting ignorance of a girl little more than a child, exposed to the machinations of a scoundrel whose character is wilfully con- cealed from her, there is nothing of beauty, nothing of moral stimulation: it is simply harrowing, and to be harrowed is an experience which is devoid of both pleasure and profit. There is nothing inevitable in the misery of The Little One. It is deliberately contrived, and the emotional effect is very similar to that which would be produced by the spectacle of the wilful torture of a dumb animal. We have spoken of the fine work- manship of the book, and Miss Price has never done any- thing better than the character of Mrs. Murray, with her quiet charm of manner and her cold selfishness of heart ; but no mere literary skill can suffice to render such a story as that of poor Agnes D'Alby anything but enervatingly depressing.
It happens, rather curiously, that three of the novels on our list have an Australian background,; and though their background is all that they have in common; they may con- veniently be noticed together. In whatever quarter of the globe we find Mr. Farjeon, he always carries with him the same artistic properties, and the scenery in the front of which they are displayed is a thing of little account In Basil and Annette, some of the most venerable of them are brought well to the front, and the stage-manager arranges them with as much gusto as if they were the most attractive of novelties. The hero, who is melodramatically heroic, and the villain, who is even more melodramatically villainous, bear such an extra- ordinary resemblance to each other as to deceive the nearest relatives and dearest friends of both ; and as a matter of course, this resemblance suggests to the villain a gigantic scheme of fraudulent impersonation, which he puts into execu- tion with splendid success until the sear approach of the end of the third volume warns Mr. Farjeon that it is time for stage justice to assert her claims. The book is not worth much, but the unsophisticated novel-reader may find it mildly exciting; and for this reason he will probably prefer it to A Colonial Reformer, which is much less startling because much more lifelike. Mr. Rolf Boldrewood's new book is, in- deed, a quieter affair than either of its predecessors, Robbery under Arms and The Miner's Right; necessarily so, as it deals, not with the author's old acquaintances, the bushrangers and the gold-seekers, but with people whose less eventful lives are spent in the prosaic virtues and vices of the cattle- station or the settled town. No one, however, would think of calling A Colonial Reformer a dull book, for though its interest is hardly of the kind which belongs to the ordinary novel, Mr. Boldrewood's observation has provided him with capital material of character and incident, and his style never lacks the vivacity which carries the reader pleasantly along. Happily, tastes are so various, that some readers may possibly feel that they are being carried pleasantly along over the pages
of the last of the three novels, An Austra1irin ; but we must confess that we are not numbered among these happy persons, having found the book all hut unreadable. It is not that it is badly written, for the mere style is generally of average merit, and is often exceptionally good. What the anonymous writer lacks is the sense of form. The conver- sations are, as a rule, both bright and natural, and there are some little bits of description which are little less than perfect ; but the people and the events—though there are not many of the latter—are so huddled together that three-fourths of them are quite out of focus ; and it requires more mental concentration than most people care to devote to a novel, to discover even what the story is about. As a matter of fact, An Australian Girl is a typical example of the misapplication of good material. There is reason to think that the author might write a capital volume of essays or sketches : that she will ever make a novelist, is beyond our present power of belief.
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