a story, none who is such an emotional centre as Tess. But on the other hand look at the skill with which this subtle artist marks off not only individualities but the gradations between group and group in the very limited section of society that she knows and treats of. The county families, the stray visitors from the world of London, the professional men like the clergy and barristers, the indigent gentlefolk of country towns, who barely escape social relations with the shopkeeper-all these are differentiated so perfectly that every character which figures is true not only to its own nature, but to the class from which it comes. Miss Ferrier, aiming at a similar result, was forced to employ the most glaring contrasts-to plunge fine ladies into the house of a Highland laird, or bring a Highland lass in among the blue-stockings at Bath; and her work is superannuated these fifty years. Even Thackeray makes his task easier for himself than Miss Austen did; his oppositions were obvious; the life of the soldier or the Bohemian is naturally incompatible with that of the stockbroker or merchant, and a less skilful hand could have drawn out the contrast between Major Pendennis and old Costigan. But after all Thackeray would be the novelist of manners par excellence if he were not so much more. When subtlety of discrimination is needed it never fails, and the households of the prosperous Osbornes and the brokendown Sedleys are rendered in every detail with the same certain touch as Becky's card parties, or Lord Steyne's ball. But the genius of the novelist half obscures his art, and in thinking of Becky and Amelia we forget that, just to fill in the picture, he has accomplished what is the lifelong effort of laborious artists.

Recent fiction never attempts such a range as Thackeray's; it is prone to limit its study to a single class.

Mr.

George Gissing, to name a typical example, has written the novel of manners with genuine talent. His "New Grub Street" is an amazing study of the people who live the most uncomfortable of all lives, between two classes; meeting on the stair that leads up and down from the recognized literary world. It is a sordid ascent, a squalid descent, as Mr. Gissing sees it, and that, perhaps, is why he is a neglected excellence. Mr. George Moore in "Esther Waters" gained a wider popularity with a study conceived in a similar spirit, but dealing with a class-the hanger-on of racecourses-whose lives are of more general interest, and have less frequently been treated in literature. But for the full measure of success the novel of manners must be the novel of Society -with a capital S. Mr. E. F. Benson recognized that fact some time ago, and made his profit out of it; his last book, "Mammon & Co.," gave the pub. lic what it wanted, a story about the sort of people with titles who not only are, but call themselves, "smart" (an adjective we find it hard to reconcile our ear to), with details about a baccarat party thrown in. The book was clever enough, but, without entering into the questions of taste which it suggests one has to object to its insincerity. A lady who misconducts herself without the excuse of passion is made to develop scruples which she certainly would not have felt; and this tampering with truth out of a desire to conciliate sympathy for a person who does not deserve it appears to us an offence against the morality of art. Mr. Benson gratifies at the same time the taste for scandal and the taste for false pathos; it is an achievement, but not one on which he is to be congratulated. Let us talk rather of two other novelists who come under the same classification-Miss Cholmondeley, who is much more talented than

1

Mr. Benson, and Miss Fowler, who is much more successful.

The first fact that strikes one about these ladies is the fact of their sex. They are both novelists who write stories exclusively about love, but who write them as social philosophers. They are both somewhat sententious and the main text of their moralizings is love. Consequently, one is led to the conclusion that the British public delights in novels which consist mainly in moralizings about love, and that it likes the moralizings about love to be done by unmarried women. One must distinguish however. Miss Cholmondeley, who is not nearly so lavish of her aphorisms, writes, it is true, like a woman with a limited outlook upon life, but she writes like a woman of the world. Miss Fowler writes like a clever girl. It is true that the public thinks her, and with some reason, to be extremely witty; but we have a shrewd suspicion that her readers also admire and buy her because she is so wise-almost as wise as Miss Corelli. That, however, is merely a matter of conjecture; our business is to say how the work of these two ladies, when taken as outstanding representatives of their art, impresses our most candid judgment.

Miss Cholmondeley does not date from yesterday, though her first notable success came after Miss Fowler's. "Red Pottage," the only one of her novels which "took the town by storm," appeared last autumn. The first of them, a story of less than the orthodox length, called "The Danvers Jewels," was published in 1887. As a piece of work it has no great merit, but it is of interest as proving that Miss Cholmondeley's first interest was in plot, and her first model Wilkie Collins. In this book the story-a story of wildly improbable robbery-is narrated in the first person by an elderly colonel who has that childlike faith in his own

knowledge of the world, which is certainly more characteristic of elderly colonels, when they happen to be stupid, than of any other type of stupid man. The trick of making a narrator unconsciously expose his own oddities and short-comings is one that had been worn rather threadbare in the generation to which Wilkie Collins belonged, and Miss Cholmondeley was no doubt conscious of the fact. But in one of the other characters she hit upon a type that interested her, and she made him the hero of her next novel which bore his name, "Sir Charles Danvers." About this book one need only say that it is a decidedly clever book with a good plot of the mechanical kind; that is to say, a plot in which interesting circumstances happen as they might conceivably have happened to those very people, and throughout which the characters behave consistently. A great plot is one like that of "Vanity Fair," in which the events arise naturally and inevitably out of the characters, with nothing arbitrary about it; but it is a difficult matter to invent a story, even with arbitrary elements, which shall be interesting and probable, and Miss Cholmondeley fairly claim to have mastered this accomplishment at her second attempt. The book was in other ways characteristic; it showed a decided talent for that species of pointed moralizing, which is a natural embellishment of the novel of manners, as, for example, in this passage:

may

If conformity to type is indeed the one great mark towards which humanity should press, Mrs. Thursby may honestly be said to have attained to it. Everything she said or did had been said or done before, or she would never have thought of saying or doing it. Her whole life was a feeble imitation of the imitative lives of others; in short, it was the life of the ordinary country gentlewoman, who lives on her husband's property, and who, as Au

gustus Hare says, "has never looked over the garden wall."

It is tolerably obvious that this paragraph would have been materially improved by the omission of the last sentence; and in the book the effect of the opening epigram is further diluted by two full pages of expansion. However, satire always tends to be diffuse; and satire was in that novel, and in its successors, a main part of Miss Cholmondeley's intention, and the objects of her satire have changed very little. Intolerance of provincialism, intolerance of stupid women, intolerance of stupid religion-those are natural marks of a clever woman living most of her time in the country. There was a positive glut of stupid women in that book, and one of them, Mrs. Alwynn, the almost imbecile wife of the kind and scholarly rector (a marriage not ac counted for by Miss Cholmondeley), was a positive caricature. Indeed, Lady Mary, Sir Charles's matchmaking and religious aunt, is little more human. Satire has a license to overcharge traits; but Miss Cholmondeley has throughout failed to realize that all the characters in a novel ought to bear the same relation to life. If you overcharge consistently, as, for instance, Lever did, or Disraeli, or Dickens, the general effect is consistent; but if you obey the modesty of nature in one chapter, you must not affront it in another. This point must be raised here; but it can best be illustrated from "Red Pottage."

"Diana Tempest," which appeared in 1893, was at least as good a book as the one which made such a sensation last year. It had really a capital plot, though, again, of the arbitrary Wilkie Collins order. Colonel Tempest is brother to Mr. Tempest, of Overleigh, and Mr. Tempest is dying. Mr. Tempest has an heir, born in wedlock, but illegitimate. Mr. Tempest knows this,

Colonel Tempest knows it, every one knows it; and the boy, though brought up as the heir, has never been treated as a son. But there is a deadly feud between the brothers, since Colonel Tempest ran away with his brother's fiancée; and for that reason the owner of Overleigh lets the hereditary home pass to one who has only his name, and not his blood, sooner than see it go to a Tempest who first robbed him of the woman and then maltreated her. Nevertheless, Colonel Tempest hopes against hope, and at the very last makes an attempt, described in an admirably dramatic scene, to win the succession for himself and his son, Archie. But by the plea he uses-invoking the memory of the woman whom he stole, with a lack of imaginative sympathy that is, as Miss Cholmondeley insists, the mark of the entirely selfish-he only embitters the wronged man; and Colonel Tempest returns to London separated from the great inheritance by the barrier of this boy John, who is called John Tempest. A disreputable ruffian, hanger on of gambling dens. learns the situation, and makes a horrible suggestion. Will Colonel Tempest lay ten bets of a thousand to one that he never succeeds to the estate? Colonel Tempest yields to the temptation; the tempter, Swayne, disappears; and thus a machinery is set in motion which the first mover cannot control. All this is a kind of first act or prologue; the real action of the book begins when John Tempest has come to manhood, after a youth of unaccountable dangers and escapes. He is on friendly terms with his uncle and his cousin Archie (whose debts he pays), and the woman he is in love with is Colonel Tempest's daughter Diana, who lives not with her father, but her grandmother, Mrs. Courtenay. The psychological crisis of the book comes when John, who has been arrested in the very act of declaring his love by a

last attempt at assassination, and has virtually learnt Diana's love for him by her behavior in his peril, discovers his illegitimacy in the first stages of his convalescence. The melodramatic climax follows, when John, having divested himself of name and estate, that his uncle, the legitimate heir, may succeed, accompanies Archie to Paris, before the affair is made public, and Archie is killed by the assassin in mistake for John.

The whole thing is melodramatic, perhaps; but it is very good melodrama. Once you concede the possibility of a gentleman who has given a commission to effect a murder of his nephew, there is no reason why the holder of the commission should not, so to say, sublet the actual killing to ten different persons, each of them ignorant of the other's mission. It is an ingenious idea, but the criminal classes do not lack for ingenuity; and the position in which it leaves Colonel Tempest, of continual intercourse with a man against whom he has directed an engine, without knowing when or how it will strike, is admirably melodramatic. It is not one of the situations which arise directly out of nature; it is too ingeniously contrived to be poetic; but it is certainly very well planned. The tension of never-ending suspense is excellently suggested, and the futile efforts to undo the work half done already in a moment of remorse, when he sees John half burnt to death, are fully in keeping with the nature described. For there is a great deal in the book that rises high above the level of melodrama. Colonel Tempest and his son are finely drawn types of the selfish spendthrift, whose leading passion is self-pity. John Tempest, the hero, is strongly and consistently presented from his lonely childhood upwards, and his personality makes a vehicle for Miss Cholmondeley's own thoughts about many things-but es

pecially upon the moral influence of birth, and the passion of an ancient race for the beauty and associations of its hereditary home. Miss Cholmondeley, at all events, knows what race means, and what breeding means; and she does not exaggerate the moral qualities they connote, for Colonel Tempest and his son are strongly stamped with the mark of noblesse; but their noblesse repudiates its obligations. Mrs. Courtenay, Diana's grandmother, the old lady who retains her position at the top of the ladder, defraying by tact and personal charm her deficiencies in wealth, is a portrait of the grande dame, who is worldly and wise, without being more worldly wise than is quite excusable.

And Diana is charming-brilliant, high-spirited, and intolerant, with the natural intolerance of youth for mediocrity and pretence. She is one of the people who had rather be disappointed than expect too little; and the first scene in which she figures is one of keen satire upon loveless marriage. She uses all her eloquence to dissuade a friend from her engagement to an elderly and unattractive fiancé, and she half prevails; but at the critical moment the French maid brings in two rolls of brocade, between which the bride that is to be has still to make her choice.

Madeleine sat up and gave a little sigh.

"If she gives them up, she will give him up too," thought Di. "This is the turning-point." "Di," she said, earnestly, "which would you advise the mauve or the white and gold? I always think you have such taste."

Di started. She saw by that one sentence that the die had been thrown, though Madeleine herself was not aware of it. The moments of our most important decisions are often precisely those in which nothing seems to have been decided; and only long after

wards, when we perceive with astonishment that the Rubicon has been crossed, do we realize that in that half-forgotten instant of hesitation as to some apparently unimportant side issue, in that unconscious movement that betrayed a feeling of which we were not aware, our choice was made. The crises of our life come like the kingdom of heaven-without observation. Our characters and not our deliberate actions decide for us; and even when the moment of crisis is apprehended at the time by the troubling of the water, action is generally a little late. Character, as a rule, steps down first. It was so with Madeleine.

Sir Henry owed his bride to the exactly timed appearance of a mauve brocade sprinkled with silver fleurs-delis. The maid turned it lightly, and the silver threads gleamed through the rich pale material.

"It is perfect," said Madeleine in a hushed voice; "absolutely perfect. Don't you think so, Di? And she says she will do it for forty guineas, as she is making me other things. The front is to be a silver gauze over plain mauve satin to match, and the train of the brocade. The white and gold is nothing to it."

"It is very beautiful," said Di, looking at it with a kind of horror. It seemed to her at the moment as if every one had his price.

That is decidedly good satire, delicate and intelligent; and the scene is dramatically sound, for it indicates better than anything else could, Diana's fundamental characteristics-a youthful generosity of courage and of scorn. We have only to regret that the chapter is injured by a fault of taste where Madeleine Thesinger, in her defence, says: "I can't go back now. It is wicked to break off an engagement. God would be very angry with me." And Miss Cholmondeley comments: "It is difficult to argue with any one who can make a Jorkins of the Almighty." Witty enough, no doubt, but Miss Cholmondeley can afford to leave out such witty things.

One criticism should be made before

we leave "Diana Tempest." On the whole the motives assigned to the characters are sound and natural throughout, though an arbitrary plot almost always entails a conventional psychology. But at one point the action lapses into pure convention. When John Tempest discovers the secret of his birth he is already morally bound to Diana. She is in London waiting for him to speak, and he knows what her answer will be. Let it be granted that from his point of view the marriage has become impossible; he owes to her at least the promptest explanation. Instead of that, he is made to leave her in doubt, presumably with the expectation that when she learns the secret she will guess his motive; but for the time being the bitterest of wounds is inflicted on her pride. Now, it is only in plays and books that people behave like that; in real life they have a common-sense instinct to avoid the infliction of unnecessary pain. Miss Cholmondeley overlooks this elementary fact, and in order to secure an extra complication in her plot makes John Tempest behave as no considerate man could have behaved to the woman whom he loved, and who had all but openly avowed her love for him.

"Red Pottage" is, at all events for the purpose of the present review, the most important of these books; it conforms more closely than the others to the type of the novel of manners. There is, of course, the same leading interest of a psychological study under arbitrary exciting circumstances. As most people know, in the first chapter Hugh Scarlett, at the very moment when he desires to escape from his liaison with Lady Newhaven, finds himself forced by Lord Newhaven into a duel of a novel kind. Lord Newhaven presents two paper lighters, one of which Hugh is to draw; the man with whom the short lighter remains is to kill himself within five months.