Noies on Novels.

The Pariah. By F. ANSTEY. Three Vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1889.

"THE

HE Pariah" is interesting, which is a novel's first and last virtue. But the deficient and underbred young man who furnishes the tragedy of the book is sometimes too stupid and sometimes too brilliant. The difficulty of getting a tragedy out of real life in modern days is that commonsense views and straightforward explanations are fatal to tragedy; and if we are introduced to commonplace people, we know and feel that such views and explanations would be ready when wanted. Margot, the superfine young lady whom the wretched Allen worships, sends him to misery and death by a misunderstanding which nine girls out of ten would have found out. As for herself, the reader conceives such a violent disgust from the first for her heartless shallowness, that he is really cheated and injured when she turns out, not only to be better than one thought, but to be in fact almost heroic. One feels she could not have been brave enough to carry her sister's secret so resolutely. The lover whom she affectsand as to him the reader indulges in legitimate satisfaction-is a dark-faced, terribly-in-earnest young man (handsome of course, and a barrister of wondrous prowess), who finds out that she is telling a lie, and casts her off; and then finds out she has not told a lie, and grovels once more at her feet. One is sorry the resolute young man did not marry her, as he would have been sure to "lead her a life." But she escapes with a middle-aged gentleman who has something to do with Burmah. The little girl, Lettie, is a pleasant picture of a precocious, fearless, and well-brought-up English child. There is an easy-going humorous Rector, whom we should have been pleased to have more of. Allen's father and his detestable stepmother are solidly drawn, but with rather too heavy a touch. Mr. Anstey should have put more humour into the book. If it had been really humorous, it would have been first-rate. As it is, it is respectable, and may be strongly recommended as a novel to read and enjoy.

Marooned. By W. CLARK RUSSell. London: Macmillan. 1889.

R. CLARK RUSSELL'S fertile inventiveness seems inexhaustible in giving variety to his special subject, the possible incidents and accidents of a seafaring life. The present work is in no degree inferior to any of its predecessors in interest, and is in some respects an advance on them. The title implies the central situation

of the tale, since the hero and heroine are lauded by a mutinous crew to shift for themselves on an uninhabited island, one of the numerous minor members of the Bahama group. The pair thus isolated from the rest of humanity are not, in the first instance, lovers, the young lady, Miss Aurelia Grant, having been entrusted to the care of her companion during the voyage to Rio Janeiro, by her promised husband, who awaits her there. As she is possessed of the astonishing beauty conferred on heroines by right, the loyalty of her escort to his friend is severely tried, even before the enforced tête-à-tête on the island makes the task of concealing his feelings from their object a still more difficult one. Their intercourse under these circumstances is well portrayed, and the incidents of their prolonged pic-nic are lively enough to prevent the recital from becoming monotonous. When the scene changes to the deck of a small schooner entirely manned by West Indian coloured people, we have a new phase of nautical character put before us with the author's inimitable felicity in sketching such types. Among the rude and halfsavage seamen with whom she is so long compulsorily associated, the sweetness and womanly dignity of the heroine stand out with enhanced attractiveness, and we are made to feel throughout that her inner nature loses none of its refinement amid the wild hazards and adventures she is compelled to pass through.

The Master of Ballantrae. By ROBERT L. STEVENSON. London: Cassell & Co. 1889.

THIS

HIS latest addition to Mr. Stevenson's works is one which only the author of "Kidnapped" could have written. We have the same vivid portraiture of Scotch character, the same gruesome farce of realizing tragic situations as in that heart-stirring tale of the Jacobite rising. Here, however, we find a more sombre plot, and a deeper sounding line for the dark gulfs of human passion. The subject, the rivalry and emnity of two brothers, though as old as the earliest generation of humanity, is a painful, if not a repulsive one, and its gloomy aspect is unredeemed by any softening influences of religion or charity. On the contrary the younger brother, who must be regarded as the hero, is a more depressing study than the Mephistophelian "Master" himself, as we have in him the perversion, through the working of a single evil passion, of a nature originally amiable and unoffending. True, his rapid deterioration is assisted by physical causes, inducing semi-insanity; but even with this suggested apology for his crime, the finale, which leaves him morally guilty of his brother's death, brought about by a train of circumstances deliberately prepared beforehand, is an artistic as well as a moral blemish. The tale is told by a dependent of the family, one Ephraim Mackellar, whose own character, with its combination of uncompromising fidelity with unscrupulousness in his patron's cause, is in itself a masterpiece. His intercourse with the

Master, their relations of avowed hostility softened by a strange intermixture of personal sympathy, and the powers of fascination and diabolical ingenuity in moral torture exercised by the latter, are portrayed with the subtlest penetration into the hidden springs of character. Religion as a restraining power is totally absent from Mr. Stevenson's pages, and his failure to take account of it among the motives acting on human nature leaves a sensible blank in his artistic powers.

An Irish Cousin. By GEILLES HERRING and MARTIN ROSS. London Bentley. 1889.

WE

E do not remember any novel since "The Collegians" worthy to be ranked with this as a presentment of Irish life and character. The national traits of language and turn of thought are reproduced with all their quaintness, and without that exaggeration by which other writers on the same subject try to make up for the absence of such grasp of the facts as is conferred by perfect knowledge. The scene is laid in the extreme south of the County Cork, within sound of the Atlantic breakers, and the experiences recorded are those of an American girl, Theodora Sarsfield, come for the first time to visit her Irish relatives, a widower uncle and his only son. The society in which she moves is that of the provincial gentry, whose households, manners, and oddities of speech and mind, are all vivid transcripts from life. The Sarsfield ménage, in which the fire is encouraged to light by dropping candie-grease on it, and the labour of the recognized domestics is supplemented by a system of "illicit apprenticeship" of the junior members of their families maintained in the establishment without the knowledge of its head, could be paralleled in many an Irish country-house. The hunting-field, the ball with its rollicking drolleries, and all similar social gatherings are equally true to local colouring, while the melancholy minor of Irish life underlies its grotesqueness in the tragic background of the Sarsfield family history, and the dreary figure of the head of the house undermined by the national vice. The romantic interest is conferred by the heroine's love-story, which is as true to nature as the rest of the book, as well as by her relations with her cousin Willy, and the ultimate fate of the latter. The system of dual authorship is in this case, as in so many others, justified by success.

The Secret of Croix-Fontaine. By MARGARET FIELD. London : F. V. White. 1889.

THIS gracefully written narrative recounts the fortunes of a young English girl who enters a French household as teacher and companion to the only daughter, Yvonne de St. Hilaire. Intricate family complications connected with the Revolution have VOL. XXIII.—NO. 1. [Third Series.]

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brought about this young lady's betrothal in childhood to her cousin, the Count of Croix-Fontaine, between whose ancestors and hers there existed mutual relations of dependence and gratitude. Yvonne, childlike though charming, is gradually eclipsed in her fiancé's affections by the more solid gifts of character and sympathy adorning the English girl, but the struggle between loyalty and inclination finally results in his sacrificing the latter, and fulfilling his engagement. The ensuing marriage, if not an ideal, is a fairly happy one, but Yvonne's indiscreet curiosity as to the secret hidden in the disused wing of the old château draws down severe penalties on her household, ending in a conflagration, her mother's death from injuries by fire, and her own from shock and nervous agitation. This is, of course, a fortunate circumstance from the reader's point of view, as it enables the former lovers to be happy with clear consciences, and virtue to enjoy its due reward. The weakest part of the story is the secret of the Bluebeard's Chamber, which is far-fetched and unnatural, giving an air of incongruous melodrama to what is otherwise a charming story of domestic life. The characters are lifelike, and that of the widowed Madame de St. Hilaire, with its innate nobility overshadowed by a tragic memory and a fixed idea bordering on madness, is sympathetically placed before us.

Matron or Maid.

MR

RS. KENNARD has chosen a painful and, it may be almost said, a repulsive subject, in the hopeless struggle of a woman past her youth to retain or recall the fugitive attachment of a man several years her junior. A widow with a large jointure, terminable on her second marriage, Lydia Stapleton engages herself to Beaumont Dornay, a young hussar officer, with the intention of marrying him when she has saved a sufficient sum out of her income to supplement his limited means. During the five years required for this process, passed by the fiancé with his regiment in India, the natural result ensues, and he returns to see his boyish flame with eyes from which all illusion has vanished. While recognizing this with a woman's infallible instinct, she refuses to release him, and still continues to insist on the fulfiltment of his engagement, even when the growth of another attachment renders it doubly odious to him. The recoil of her passionate nature drives her to attempt his life and finally to take her own, by which tragic solution the way is cleared for his happiness with her rival. English country life and the vicissitudes of the hunting field form episodes of a lighter character in this unpleasant tale, which places the man and woman principally portrayed in an equally degraded and unworthy position.

Captain Lobe. By JOHN LAW. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

THE

1889.

HE machinery of the Salvation Army is at least a novelty among the threadbare subjects taken as the foundation of romance. Captain Lobe, the protagonist of the present work, is one of its officers, and the slender thread of story is only the connecting link between the scattered interests illustrative of its operations. As a sketch of East End life in its more gloomy aspects of abject poverty and degradation, it is instructive, though the crude exposition of human misery, and equally crude handling of religious topics, make it rather painful reading. Its claims for the Salvation Army are based on its power of reaching and reclaiming those who are beyond the range of all other influences, and the picture of its ministrations tend to show it as holding the field in quarters where no more regular religious organization can succeed in penetrating. We make no doubt that, despite the travesty of sacred observance which renders it repulsive to the reverent-minded of all creeds, there are many earnest workers in the cause of charity among its ranks.

The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh. By BRET HARTe. London: Macmillan. 1889.

THE

HESE two volumes of sketches, rather than tales, have that quality of aërial perspective which is the author's peculiar characteristic. Mr. Bret Harte's transcripts of border life are never presented to us with bald definiteness, but carry with them their own atmosphere of artistic illusion. The first narrative of this series draws a sharp contrast between the picturesque savagery of life on the marsh, and its more conventional aspects as displayed in the neighbouring military station, the exchange of the one for the other being attended with anything but happy results to the untrained natures suddenly brought into contact with artificial civilization. "The Secret of Telegraph Hill" is a semi-humorous episode, in which a new lodger inherits some of the embarrassing complications left by his predecessor, and adds to them a small romance of his own. The two shorter stories are not above the ordinary level of magazine padding, as in " A Don Quixote of the Foot Hills" the humour, and in "Captain Jim's Friend" the pathos, are alike exaggerated.

Paul's Sister. By FRANCES MARY PEARD. London: Bentley. 1889.

M

ISS PEARD has woven a life-like and charming tale out of the relations, often recurring under various phases in real life, between unscrupulous selfishness on the one side, and exaggerated self-abnegation on the other. The heroine is a widow rejoicing in