WITH PAPER-KNIFE AND PEN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1202, 15 March 1895, Page 11

WITH PAPER-KNIFE AND PEN.

“ With Feet of Clay,” by Alice Mary D>ale - (Melbourne : George Robertson and Co.)

“ With Feet of Clay,” published though it is by an Australian firm and presumably written by an Australian lady, can hardly be termed an Australian novel, for only two or three of its scenes, and those of no great importance, are cast upon Australian soil, and the majority of the characters are such as are not frequently to be met with in' colonial life. The story is simple enough in its plot. A heartless, selfish prig, bearing the name of Julian St. yfohn—a name which smacks strongly of the London Journal and the penny novelette—marries one - of two sisters, the daughters of. a wealthy Australian. The lady has money, but is weak-brained to the verge of insanity. The wife has a younger and beautiful sister whom St. John had previously met in England, and with whom he was as much in love as his selfish nature would permit him to be with anyone. The wife dies, and the younger sister,'carried away by St. John’s flashy cleverness, succeeds her unfortunate sister as his spouse. Later on, St. John becomes, by the timely death of a relative, an English peer, and takes his wife—his first and deceased wife’s sister—to England. Here he meets with an old acquaintance who had rejected his suit in his days of comparative poverty, but with whom he now flirts desperately and for whom lie eventually deserts his second wife, on the mean plea that, although the latter is his legal wife in Australia, in England, where the Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill has not yet passed, he is a free man. Then comes prolonged litigation, but it eventually transpires that the mean fellow’s first wife was not, after all, the sister of his second, but a girl who had been secretly adopted by her so-called mother. Consequently, the second Australian marriage stands good. To the annoyance of the reader, the peer plays the repentant, and “makes it up ” with his second wife, who, though weak, is a lovable sort of creature, and the only satisfactory point about a very unsatisfactory conclusion lies in the fact that the intriguing English girl who had so dearly wished to capture her lord is foiled. The subsidiary history of a pragmatical young lawyer and a meek-and-mild and altogether I colourless governess is woven into the story only to increase, if that were possible, its general dreariness. “With Feet of Clay” is, we should imagine, a first attempt in fiction. The best thing that we can say about the book is that it is beautifully printed and most tastefully bound.

“ In the Year oe Jubilee,” by George Gissing. (London: Bell’s Colonial Library). „ Messrs Whitcom.be and Tombs send us a copy of Mr Gissing’s latest novel. . To those who read the same author’s “ New Grub Street,” “ Demos,” and “ Born in Exile,” there is little need to speak ip

general commendation of Mr Gissing’s stories. Some one—we forget who it was just now—once called him the “ English Zola,” but beyond the fact that both are decided pessimists there is very little in common between the author of the RougonMacquart series and Mr Gissing. The latter delights in realism, in photographic sketches of the pettiness, the meanness, the dreariness of certain phases of English middle-class life, but he rarely shocks the most sensitive member of the great Grundy sisterhood, and he gives occasionally a few touches of a humour which, if saturnine in its way, comes as a welcome relief. Whereas humour is an article in which Zola has never dealt. In the volume before us Mr Gissing traces the doings of two fairly typical middle-class Cockney families, the action of the plot being cast in the Jubilee year. For once he gives us a heroine who, with all her faults, is a most charming personage, and adds two or three character portraits, as Mr Stead would call them, of great strength and vividity. “In the Year of Jubilee” is no ordinary novel. The women are as far removed from Mr Besant’s idealised young ladies as the sun from the earth, and there runs throughout the story a strain of restrained sarcasm which is at times somewhat trying. Nevertheless one never puts down the book through a sense of weariness ; the attention of the reader, once . grasped, is held to the end; and for once in his life Mr Gissing writes a conclusion which is not altogether objectionable to that great class of novel readers who take delight in a “happy” termination. Some of the minor characters, /notably a weak-minded type of the suburban “masher” and a city advertising agent with a talent for push which., would make him a perfect godsend to a colonial insurance company, are exceptionally well drawn. . Altogether, “In the Year of Jubilee” is very well worth reading.

“ The Vagabonds,” by Margaret L. Woods. (Macmillan’s Colonial Library.). “ Peter Ibbetson.” by George Du Maurier. (Macmillan’s Colonial Library). Messrs Macmillan (through Messrs Whitcombe and Tombs) send us two new volumes as above of their excellent and new deservedly popular Colonial Library. The first deals with life with a travelling “circus in the English provinces. The life is not that of the inimitable “ Thleary ” and Co., who - were objects of such intense aversion on the part of Mr Gradgrand in Dickens’ “ Hard Times,” but a somewhat idealized and, we fear, rather unnatural family of “ ’ossy ” people; The story, however, is brightly told and will serve to pass away a few hours very pleasantly. The second volume is a cheap—wonderfully cheap it is—edition of Mr George Du Maurier’s, now famous first essay in fiction, “ Peter Ibbetson,” embellished with the author’s own and most graceful sketches; &c. An American critic of some considerable literary standing, Mr Brander Matthews, has recently, we notice, delivered himself of the somewhat daring dictum that Mr Du Maurier is “a second Thackeray,” but without agreeing altogether with the assertion, there is certainly much more than a ihere touch of the delightful grace and humour of “Pen’dennis ” in this story by the now famous Pitnch artist..; * - f ‘ Peter Ibbetson ” was reviewed at length, inthe Mail when it first appeared, some two years ago, and we need only to-day draw attention to the fact that the present edition contains the whole of the very beautiful illustrations of the original and more expensive edition. In its present form “Peter Ibbetson” should have a place in the shelves of every colonial reader’s library. C.W.