Page:The Overland Monthly, Jan-June 1894.djvu/282

218 questions, the refugee being merely a conveniently romantic figure for a plot of old-fashioned ingenuity, mystery, and long-drawn detail. The second is a story of the early abolitionists and underground railway. The third is an ideal study of a good millionaire, and its full title is "None-such? There will yet be Thousands." The moral is that millionaires should not leave their property to colleges, which are too rich already, but to favorite heirs, who will devote the whole to philanthropy: the man who makes the money is disqualified for philanthropies himself by the necessary hardness and absorption of the money-getter. The story is absurd, but there are clever points in it.

Among studies of social questions might also be named A Complication in Hearts. Public life in Washington has served as the background for many novels, some of them very good novels. "Through One Administration" will readily occur as an example of these. In many respects like that story is A Complication in Hearts. Its hero is that modern knight, the Mugwump leader, sent to Congress as a reformer by a strangely mingled constituency. The interest in the story turns on his love affair with the unhappy wife of an elderly man. The story lacks the delicacy and reserve in treatment that was the charm of "Through One Administration," and for that reason has more of directness and dramatic power. It offers several strong situations should it be put on the boards, especially the one where Yates Wolfe, the hero, stands behind the heavy curtain of the window, during the colloquy between Madame De la Tour and her husband, while O'Toole, Wolfe's enemy and the heavy villain of the plot, is peering in through the same window from the outside.

Mr. Peterson McBriar Hedge, the Kentucky gentleman of classical speech, is rather a good character though over- drawn. The whole book is open to the charge that its color and light and shade are laid on with a too liberal brush. It lacks finish and delicacy in many ways, both as a picture of modern political life and a study of individual character.

Mrs. Falchion is a book of much intelligence and force, but so rambling and unordered that no one will keep a connected recollection of it for many days after reading. Its purpose is as a character study, but while original and in a measure interesting, the study falls short of being powerful, and does not strike one as being true, or even made with much effort to be true. The local color, which is taken from various quarters of the world, for the characters are travelers, is fresh and pleasing, and seems real.

Matilda Betham-Edwards is certainly no new hand at story-writing, and would not have kept on publishing novel after novel had not people been found to buy and read them; but it is hard to see why any considerable number of readers should be expected for The Curb of Honor. With its unnatural, exaggerated characters, its labored humor, its stilted style, it is, to the critical, not even agreeable reading by way of pastime; while the uncritical will fail to find in it the lively narrative, or involved plot, or penetrating sentiment, they like. Yet it is an honest, high-minded little story, with honest, high-minded people in it, and a sound enough moral. The Great Chin Episode may be dismissed in but few words. It is an English detective story of the sort turned out by the better grade of hack novelists. Its denouement is fairly intelligible long before it is meant so to be, and the real murderer rather clumsily revealed at the end.