measure of success the novel of manners must be the novel of Society-with a capital S. Mr. E. F. Benson recognised that fact some time ago, and made his profit out of it; his last book, Mammon & Co.,' gave the public 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 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 moralisings is love. Consequently, one is led to the conclusion that the British public delights in novels which consist mainly in moralisings about love, and that it likes the moralisings 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, taken as outstanding representatives of their art, impresses our candid judgement.

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 shortcomings 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 may 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 moralising, which is a natural embellishment of the novel of manners, as, for example, in this passage:

'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 Augustus 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 accounted 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 realise 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 behaviour 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 the 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. 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

John

about many things-but especially 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 social 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.'

6.66

"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 afterwards, when we perceive with astonishment that the Rubicon has been crossed, do we realise 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 heavenwithout 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-de-lis. 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