NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* THE growth of Particularism in modern

fiction has been at- tended with diversified and disputable results ; but as illus- trated in the works of Mr. Quiller-Couch, whose local patriotism is free from the taint of provinciality, and who lays on local colour with the restraint of a true artist, omne tithe pvnctune. Mr. Quiller-Couch knows better than to deafen us with dialect ; he has a sensitive appreciation of the beauty of words restrained by the critical faculty which results in a picturesque yet elegant style—what could be more engaging than the title of his new book, The Ship of Stars 7—and an adventurous and essentially chivalrous imagination. All these qualities are exhibited in the volume before us, and yet the impression created by the novel as a whole is curiously disappointing by contrast with that produced by many of its episodes. The tale is that of the growth from boyhood to early manhood of the son of a poor and studious clergyman in the West Country who migrates from Devonshire to Cornwall on the invitation of a wild, fox-hunting, cock-fighting squire, anxious at all hazards to save his soul. Taffy—alias Theophilus —is educated along with the Squire's granddaughter Honoria, a young Cornish Amazon, the influence of whose positive, downright character so far affects his dreamy, imaginative temperament as to convert him into a man of action. Honoria marries the handsome son of a neighbouring Baronet, and is for a while estranged from Taffy, believing him guilty of having seduced a village girl, when all the while her husband was the offender. Honoria only learns the truth after her husband has lost his life in a gallant attempt to rescue life at a shipwreck, and the story ends somewhat inconclusively with her parting from Taffy, whose worth and innocence she has now come fully to realise at the moment when his practical ambition has absorbed his entire nature. " He and she had c langed places. He had taken her forthrightness and left her, in exchange, the dreams." The whole incident of the intrigue, which estranges Honoria and Taffy, though treated with perfect avoidance of offence, seems to us singularly unreal, and the conversion of the dreamer into the doer is less convincing than the consistent treatment of the companion figure in Mr. Neil Munro's recent study of the Celtic temperament. If, however, we cannot altogether endorse Mr. Quiller-Couch's psychology, it is impossible to gainsay the charm and vividness of many scenes and incidents in an admirably written and interesting story.

Piers Otway, the hero of Mr. Gissing's new novel, started heavily handicapped in the race of life. Hie natural diffi- dence was enhanced by the discovery that he was an ille- gitimate child ; his impecunious and unscrupulous brothers sponged freely on his modest resources, and on the eve of going in, with a moral certainty of success, for a Civil Service examination, a sudden, honourable, but undeclared attachment for a, beautiful young lady, of higher social status than his own, so unhinged his sensitive nature as to render him utterly unable to face the examiners. To make matters worse, he gets tipsy when dining with one of his brothers, and presents himself in that condition at an evening party at the house of his beloved. Thus hampered by parentage, by environment, and by his physical and mental qualities, Piers Otway, in the hands of Mr. George Gissing, seems destined to ultimate and utter fiasco. Happily, the unex- pected happens, and we are called on to witness the gradual rebuilding of Pieria's self-respect, the slow but final victory of spirit over flesh, the motive-power all along being the hero's apparently hopeless attachment for a pure and good woman. We welcome Mr. Gissing's tardy adhesion to the ranks of the mitigated optimists, but it cannot be said that he invests the hero 02 The Crown of Life with any of the glamour of romance. Take, for example, the passage which describes his return to London after his father's funeral, depressed by the prudish hostility of his stepmother, the selfish ingratitude of his

• (1.) The Ship of Stars. By A. T. Quiller-Couch. London : Cassell and Co. [6s.]—(2.) The Crown of Life. By George GIssIng. London : Methuen and Co. [6s..]—(3.) The Slave. By Robert Hichens. London : W. Heinemann. [6s.] —(4.) his Darling Sin. By M. B. Braddon. L01111011 : Simpkin, Marshall. and Co. [ss..]—(5.) on the Lees. Be J. A. Steuart. London : Hutchinson and Co. 16s.]—(6.) MeiTeague. By Frank Norris. London: Grant Richards. [6s.]--(i.) The Lord of the Harvest. By M. Bethatn-Ed wards. London : Rune and Blackett. [6s.)—(8.) The Scarlet Woman. By Joseph Hocking. London: James Bowden. [3s. 6d.]—(9.) Signors of the Night. By Max Pemberton. London : C. A. Pearson. [6s.]—(10.) Eiticidation. By A. Quarry. London : T. Fisher Unwin.

brothers, and the loss, through his father's intestacy, of the promised assistance on which he had counted to start him in business on his own account :-

"He arrived at his hotel in London late at night, drank a glass of spirits, and went to bed. The sleep he hoped for came imme- diately, but lasted only a couple of hours. Suddenly he was wide awake, and a horror of great darkness enveloped him. What he now suffered he had known before, but with less in- tensity. He stared forward into the coming years, and saw nothing that his soul desired. A life of solitude, of bitter frustration. Were it Irene, were it another, the woman for whom he longed would never become his. He had not the power of inspiring love. The mere flesh would constrain him to marriage, a sordid union, a desecration of his ideal, his worship ; and in the latter days he would look back upon a futile life. What is life without love ? And to him love meant communion with the noblest. Nature had kindled in him this fiery ambition only for his woe. All the passion of the great hungry world seemed concentrated in his sole being. Images of maddening beauty glowed upon him, glowed and gleamed by he knew not what creative mandate ; faces, forms, such as may visit the delirium of a supreme artist. Of him they knew not; they were worlds away, though his own brain bodied them forth. Ho smothered cries of agony; ho flung himself upon his face, and lay as one dead."

That is finely said, and yet the impression is seriously im-

paired by that detestable and gratuitous touch of realism at the outset about the glass of sprits. In his perfect but

inartistic sincerity, Mr. Gissing insists on playing the valet to his hero, with the result of destroying any sentimental attachment on the part of the reader. He is most successful in his sombre portraits of two middle-class emancipated women, the wife and daughter of an odiously selfish inventor, united for a while by their common dislike of husband and father, and afterwards estranged by the daughter's engage- ment to a feckless artist.

Mr. Hichens has achieved a very fair measure of success in

his new and ambitious novel, The Slave, in spite of the in- herent difficulties of his task. The mysterious bond existing

between the life of a woman and the possession of her precious stones, especially that of a certain large emerald, ought to make a heavy draft on our credulity, but Mr.

Hichens has contrived to lend a certain verisimilitude to the notion. Again, the " jewel-woman " should be too fantastic a figure to be set in the frame of an ultra-modern story, yet the author's art overcomes this incongruity, and as we read we become fully reconciled to, if not actually convinced of, the true secret of Lady Caryll's personality and character, and we applaud the insight of the semi-Oriental husband, who plays so cleverly on her weakness. Although this part of the book is steeped in a quasi-Eastern atmosphere, and the hero, Aubrey Herrick, is described as "the true, the eternal dreamer," yet, as we have noted above, the surroundings of the novel are ultra-fashionable and mun- dane. We are bound to confess that we find Mr. Hichens's cleverness fatiguing. The perpetual coruscations of epigram dazzle the brain just as the rockets at Mr. Brock's benefit

dazzle the eye. It may be added that while the minor characters of the book, who belong to the "smart" world, are as wicked as is usual in the pages of modern fiction, their conversation is not in the least like that generally heard in modern drawing-rooms.

There is some ambiguity as to whom the pronoun refers to in

His Darling Sin. Probably "he " is the gentleman, Colonel Bannock, whose unsuspected murder is diseovered at the end

of the book, and whose habit of travelling about foreign countries in compromising circumstances with an actress wbo closely resembles the heroine, Lady Perivale, implicates that unfortunate lady in a very awkward scandal. The inevitable detective, by name Faunce, solves the mystery of the scandal, and also discovers that the actress's husband has murdered the Colonel, not from any paltry feeling of jealousy, but for the sake of his cash. The story is hardly up to Miss Braddon's usual mark, and she really ought to know by this time that no lady talks to her friend as " Marchioness."

Mr. John A. Steuart has undertaken in Wine on the Lees

to utilise the resources of fiction for the furtherance of the cause of temperance. The cause is laudable, and in the szecntion of his design Mr. Steuart undoubtedly shows a good deal of literary ability. The late Mr. Sala told an &musing story of bow Mr. Delane, who used occasionally to supply headings for paragraphs, attached to an account of

some festivities at the house of a famous brewer the legend " Ale-Kings at their Revels." In Mr. Steuart's book we see a good deal of ale-kings at their revels, including a tremendous prize-fight, but in justice to the writer it must be admitted that he is very far from painting them in an unfavourable light. Lord Twickham, the great brewer, who is the central figure of the story, is on the whole a humane and just man, and compares very favourably with the landed aristocracy introduced in these pages. But as students of fiction will readily admit, freedom from class prejudice is no guarantee of accurate delineation. Mr. Steuart's satire is perfectly unobjectionable,:but his portraits are absurdly artificial. Strange things are done in smart society, no doubt, but people do not do or say things in the way represented by Mr. Steuart. The book is spoilt by a perfectly harmless extravagance,—in nomenclature, senti- ment, incident. It has vivacity without vitality ; it is lively but not lifelike.

We cannot congratulate Mr. Frank Norris on McTeague, a robust, but extraordinarily repulsive, story of low life in San Francisco. The central figure is a quack dentist, who after his marriage "reels back into the brute," batters his wife to death, kills her avenger, and perishes miserably of thirst in the burning wastes of the alkali desert. The brutality of some of the scenes is quite indescribable. Mr. Norris showed, along with a certain undisciplined violence, such promise in his earlier novel that we regret to find him in his present venture appealing mainly to the instincts to which the bull-ring owes its continued existence. In IfcTeague he is simply an animal painter, who, while he entirely fails to touch the heart, is often completely successful in turning the stomach.

Miss Betham-Edwards tells in The Lord of the Harvest a very pleasant story of English country life in the early years of the century. The portrait of the sturdy Suffolk farmer is carefully drawn, and the wooing and winning of his half- French wife, the governess at the Rectory, under the very nose of his own housekeeper, who longs to marry him herself, is very prettily told. The prosperity bestowed on the farmer by Protection is painted in the rosiest hues, while the reverse of the medal is carefully kept out of sight. But if the writer's political economy is open to question, in the domain of senti- ment she is guided by a sound instinct. In particular she is to be congratulated on the skill with which she has worked in all the old-world names and customs connected with the harvest-time as a setting to a peaceful and attractive little story.

An illustration of a gentleman descending a ladder with a nun in his arms, combined with the title, The Scarlet Woman, tell us what to expect from Mr. Hocking's book. When nuns want to leave a nineteenth-century convent in the British Isles a far more convenient method is to walk out of the front door. Roman Catholics, to say nothing of worthier motives, are far too much afraid of public opinion to act in the way described in this book. Had Mr. Hocking confined himself to the moral persuasion exercised over Jack Gray and Gertrude Winthrop, who both take their vows and become distinguished in the monastic world, his novel would have gained in subtlety as well as in verisimilitude.

Mr. Pemberton's new volume is a collection of short stories, mostly with a historical basis, treating of the romance and crime of Venetian life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a connecting link being supplied in the mysterious figure of a princely " frate." The stories entitled "A Sermon for Clowns" and "The Daughter of Venice" may be com- mended as decidedly amusing, but as a whole the book is a little dull. " The Wolf of Cismon " may be described as lurid, but there is a pasteboard and " property " air about the gondolas and dungeons. Mr. Pemberton is happier in his treatment of modern themes.

Elucidation, in spite of its title, is a rather involved and obscure story. It opens in a vault and ends in convents and ducal halls ; but a reader must be not only benevolent, but conscientiously attentive, if he is to follow the course of the narrative. We are not prepared to say that the result will repay the exertion, but at least the book is not absolutely unreadable.