A GROUP OF NOVELS.* WE are reminded by the title
of Captain Hawley Smart'e novel, Saddle and Sabre, of the recent discussion on alliteration, when a well-known writer brought a charge against Vera Cruz and Valparaiso conjointly. By the unlearned in the lore of the racecourse, the betting-ring, and the training-stable, the large portion of this novel which is devoted to the deeds and the mis- deeds of horses, enlarged upon in that least intelligible and most tiresome of the various kinds of jargon invented for the de- gradation of speech—the horsey jargon—will be found simply fatiguing. To the reviewer it suggests, in addition to the wearisomeness of it, the consideration of its superfluity (even though he is bound to believe and remember that people really do exist to whom stable-stories, told in horsey language, are not only acceptable, but delightful), for the Saddle has so little to do with the Sabre, that the reader has to be jerked to and fro between Lincolnshire and the Deccan through- out the whole of the third volume, in order to establish the slightest link between the two. There is some pleasant reading in the book—we can always count on the author for extenuating circumstances—but much less than we usually find in a novel by the writer of Breezie Langton. We wish the young gentle- man whose exploits it narrates had been endowed with a little more moral worth. Charlie Devereux is so selfish, extravagant, and generally good-for-nothing, that it is difficult to sympathise with the people who are vehemently interested in him, and one feels that he might have been left in his self-made difficulties with advantage. Mr. Farzedon, the money-lender and pawn- broker who passes muster in society, and gets Devereux into his net, is a very poor adaptation of the part played by " Fascina- tion Fledgeby " in Our Mutual Friend. The best incidental character in the novel is Major Braddock ; he is admirable, and his method of judging his young friends by their more or less cor- rect notions of a good dinner is very funny.
Mr. Westall gives us a dramatic story on quite new lines in A Fair Crusader; but, although the plot is ingenious, and the persons principally concerned are very interesting—his heroine, in particular, surpassing all our recent acquaintances in novels, in lifelike charm—we cannot give the book unreserved praise, for the following reason. There are two criminals actively con- cerned in the story, in addition to the convict who is kept like a stone in the sleeve of the author until he is wanted for throwing at George Brandon. That the two criminals escape punishment, is perhaps in itself not to be objected to ; it is allowable for the novelist to let them off if he chooses ; but he makes his hero, George Brandon, a tacit accomplice of one of these criminals by concealment of his knowledge of the man's guilt, after he has been the unconscious victim of the other. The story—having been wound up to the sound of wedding-belle—leaves Brandon to the consciousness that the woman whom he has married owes her release from her convict- husband to the murderous hand of the Indian servant, who has Conroy out of love for Brandon. The situation is un- doubtedly a fine one, and it is led up to and worked out with remarkable ability ; but it seems to us to be inconsistent with the character of Brandon, and wanting in true art. The novelist who succeeds in awakening our interest in the love-story of two persons, and brings them to the safe haven of marriage, ought not to start them, with the fatal rock-ahead of a deadly secret, on a course in which, although we are not so desperately carious- as Mr. Raskin, we like to let our fancy follow them with the sym- pathy that is the reader's best tribute to a writer. Given the pure, elevated, beautiful nature of Evelyn Waters—the " Fair Crusader" of the story, whom we first meet at a gathering of the New Crusaders (the Salvation Army idealised and toned down), • (1.) Saddle and Sabre. By Captain Hawley Smart. London : Chapman and Han.--(2.) A Fair Crusader. By William Wastall, London : must and Blackett.—(3.) Miss Curtis. By Kate Gannett Wells. Boston, U.S.A.: Ticknor and Co.
where she delivers a very striking discourse—the misery into which her marriage with Conroy brought her, and her exalted notion of Brandon's character, we know that she could not learn the secret of the murder without feelings which must change her mind and attitude towards him. We also know that as Brandon proposes to go out again to India, and there to meet the faithful Ali, to whom he has said, " You have served me faithfully and well, almost too well, some would think," the odds against the secret's being kept are very large. Of course, we see Mr. Westall's position ; he does not intend to make George Brandon a pattern man, and he certainly has not done so ; there he is in his right ; but he has made Evelyn just the sort of woman to discover his faults unfailingly, and to suffer from them acutely. He has created a very strong and striking situation, and he has set it forth with skill which we gladly acknowledge ; but we regret that it is one which makes us "drop" the wedded pair as we close the book. F9r Mr. Westall's treatment of the character and deeds of Brandon's sister-in-law, Rufine ; for his delineation of his brother's household, with the boisterous, pleasure-loving, covetous girls, always wanting to kiss Uncle George for his past and future presents ; the mean, boasting, secretly embar- rassed father ; the frank, honest, manly son, abhorred of the handsome young stepmother, whose one redeeming point, her intense love of her own delicate child, is at the same time the source of her temptation, the incentive to her crime,—we have nothing but praise. The superficial cleverness of Rufine, her total want of moral sense, her ignorance of the laws and customs of the country she has been brought to, which enables the doctor who, by Ali's assistance, detects her slow poison- ing of Brandon just in time to save him, to bring her to abject confession, but without the least touch of repentance or even remorse in it ; her callousness, hardly sufficiently conscious to be called cynicism, produced by selfishness so absolute as to be almost incredible except to those close observers who know that it is to be met with in ordinary life—these are admirable. Very clever, too, is the cool dealing of the men of the world who have to act in Brandon's affairs at a crisis to which no
tragic element is wanting, but which does not turn to tragedy because it is so uncommonly well managed, and Brandon's own treatment of the transaction, when it comes to his knowledge. When the author makes Evelyn urge as an explanation of the crime, in her pleading with Brandon for his pardon of Rnfine and her husband—for George has declared that he believes his brother Peter "was quite as bad, that he
knew all the time, and was egging him on," that "both Rufine and Peter have been brought up to think money and social position the two things needful, and that, of all misfortunes, poverty is the greatest "—he puts a great truth with unobtrusive neatness. Mr. Westall's sketch of the Salvation Army and its work is interesting, impartial, and quite free from ridicule. His portraiture of a drunkard in the person of Harold Minton, the husband of Brandon's sister, whom Peter and Rufine have com- placently allowed to " go under," but for whom George dives into the depths—is so terribly real, so touching, so convincing, that it deserves special attention. The chapter (Vol. I.) in which George finds his sister in her wretched home, and having heard her story, told with the matter-of-factness of long suffering, asks her why she does not leave her wretched husband, and she makes him a true woman's answer, is one to be read otherwise than as a mere episode in a story. We wish we could do it greater justice than by giving the following extract from the interview between the two men when Minton returns, sober for the moment, and finds George at his house :—
" He knows—he has heard ?' interrogatively, to his wife. Mary made an affirmative gesture. ' Of course you have heard. Who that knows Mary has not ? The very fact of your finding us here is enough. Besides, you are her brother, and it is only right you should know all. Yes, it was the other man that insulted Peter. He is always doing the most damnable things, that villain who, instead of being cared for and cherished by the best woman in the world, opght to be hanged —no less. The other man is my other self. I am two men, George. You see now my true self,—the man who wooed and won your sister, and is still as much in love with her as ever. The other is a hideous caricature—a ruffian—lost to all sense of decency and honour. The effect of drink, you will say. No; I am the least mischievous when I am the most stupefied. It is the craving—the terrible craving —and when that is on me, and I am just beginning, I seem to lose both conscience and personality, and become literally another being. Let those who never feel thus, thank God. Yes, let them thank God."
Brandon leaves his sister encouraging her husband with brave words ; but he sees that she does not " flatter herself with the
vain hope that the demon that possessed him would ever be exorcised." And it never is : we see Minton with the craving on him, and with the craving satisfied—fine scenes, from both the moral and the literary point of view—and we repeat, after the spectacle, Minton's words :—" Let those who have never felt thus, thank God. Yes, let them thank God."
Although we would rather not know Miss Curtis, and feel bound to protest against the self-consciousness, self-questioning, self-concentration, to which her training, her surroundings, and her intellectual atmosphere condemn Olive Cadwallader, we readily acknowledge that Miss Curtis is an amusing book, and well worth reading. It is eminently Bostonian ; that is to say, it is a little pretentious, not a little shrewd, somewhat affected, genuinely humorous, really thoughtful, oddly original, just a little difficult for us to follow, on account of that peculiar American quality which we can only describe as provinciality, although that is a vile phrase—but everybody has felt what it conveys—occasionally picturesque ; finally, it is quite unlike our English books about girls, their mothers, their ways, and their friends. Miss Curtis, with her scolding good sense, her character-book keeping, her strong opinions upon marriage, her domineering benevolence, and her touching, long-hidden love-story, is decidedly interesting ; but we cannot get up any enthusiasm for either Olive or her brother Owen ; they are, perhaps, too much "in the van" of all sorts of things, for us. " Oh, you wise, funny mamma !" says Olive, when she is discussing her succession to Miss Cartis's property, "clients," and townspeople. "I am going to apply philosophy to my study of my people." And says Owen : " Leave mamma to moralise. She must settle for us the proportions of life, between purpose and hobbies, conventions and freedom." Rather a trying kind of boy, don't our readers think ?
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