Even if this be not in itself a recommendation sufficient to enlist the interest of novel-readers, Olivia Raleigh is something more:  it is a work of art:  there is in it nothing crude or hasty or ill-digested.  Around the four or five prominent characters all the interest centres, and the attention is not distracted by any wearisome episodes that have nothing to do with the main story.  The characters are admirably thought out, and reveal themselves more by their actions than by any microscopical analysis of motives.  They pass before us like veritable human beings, and what they are we learn from what they do.  The transformation of one of the characters from a gay, debonnair bachelor past middle age into a penurious miser of the Blueberry-Jones type is bold, and in less skilful hands would be a blemish, but Mr. Synge has amply justified it, and admirably uses it to cement the structure of his plot.  There is no weakness in any chapter, and as we read so secure do we feel in the author’s strength that, had he chosen to end the story in sorrow and not in joy, we should submit as though to an inflexible decree of Fate.

Les Koumiassine.  Par Henry Greville.  Paris:  Plon.

It is always interesting to watch the course of French fiction, because while the novel is in all countries at the present time the favorite form of expression of those writers who eschew scientific work on the one side and stand aloof from poetry on the other, in France, which is noticeably the country where theories are put into practice as well as invented, all sorts of literary methods have their clever defenders, who furnish examples of what they preach.  Since Balzac and George Sand died, the post of leading novelist has been vacant, although there has been no lack of writers of the second or third, and especially of still lower, rank.  Octave Feuillet still produces occasionally a clever piece of workmanship; Cherbuliez at intervals writes a novel which proves how lamentable a thing is the possession of brilliancy alone apart from the seriousness of character, or of some sides of character, which must exist alongside of even high intellectual qualities in order that the man may make a lasting impression on his time.  Great gifts frittered away on meaningless trifles are as disappointing as possible, and are the more disappointing in proportion to the greatness of the gifts; so that the decadence of Cherbuliez—­or, if this is too severe, his lack of improvement after his brilliant beginning—­is a very melancholy thing.  Zola is among the younger men, the head of a number of enthusiasts who revel in the exact study of social ordure, and who threaten to destroy fiction by ridding it of what makes its life—­imagination, that is—­and substituting for it scientific fact.  Theuriet is an amiable but by no means a powerful writer, who so far has contented himself with following different models without striking out any special path of his own.