Natural, refined, and pleasing in style, Marie Ebner Eschenbach, one of the most popular of German authoresses, never rises to sublimity nor sinks to vulgarity; and if she has not produced one single strong original character, she has been singularly successful in depicting types. Her young, highspirited, fast Contessen, clever spiteful dowagers, old tyrannical family servants, quaint country doctors and schoolmasters, correct world-weary men, and flippant young cavalry officers, appear over and over again in each of her works -always true to life, but always

the same under different names.

her subject, nor pierced them with such delicately pointed shafts of sarcasm. Her delightful story, 'Zwei Contessen,' is one of the most successful society skits ever written; and as a model of quaint pathos and refined humour, one of her sketches, entitled 'Die Freiherrn von Gimperlein,' has seldom been surpassed. It is in such brief sketches that this popular authoress is seen at her best, for in longer narrative she often fails, her plots being frequently strained and improbable, and her dramatic effects threadbare and hackneyed.

These faults are specially marked in her latest work, Unsühnbar,' 2 which title translated into English means Inexpiable.

Countess Marie Wolfsberg, the heroine (the authoress's heroines are invariably Contessen or Baronessen), is gifted with every grace of mind and body. Having lost her mother, she has been brought up by a fascinating worldly minded father, who occupies a high ministerial position, and by his sister, a clever freethinking old maid. Marie secretly loves Felix Tessin, but having been convinced of his unworthiness, consents to marry Count Hermann Dornach, who is honest as well as rich, and loves her sincerely. His mother-one of those frosty old Austrian dowagers whom we know so well, both in and out of print-is announced one day to Marie's pres

ence:

She came in with an expression as though she had been sent hither to deliver the key of heaven. In set dignified words she brings forward Hermann's petition of being allowed to pay his addresses to Marie.

"He would be overjoyed by your consent,' she concludes, and you can give it confidently. I flatter no one, least of all my own self in the person of my son. My opinion of him, however, which is shared by every unprejudiced person, is that there exists no truer, nobler, wiser man than he.' "She paused, expecting an answer; then as none came, proceeded

"If your mother had been alive, I would have told her first, and she then would have spoken to you. Regard me as her mouthpiece.'

"Marie lowered her eyes-her lips

trembled: still she was silent.

Marie marries Hermann, who, strangely enough, turns out to be very nearly all his mother had declared, and finds in her marriage a calm contented sort of happiness, which is further secured by the birth of a child. Soon after her marriage she has, however, experienced a severe shock on discovering the father whom she so adored to be a notorious and commonplace Don Juan, whose infidelities had cost her mother life and reason; and she likewise learns that Dolfi Forster, a ragged consumptive youth, who once or twice has accosted her with impudent familiarity, is her father's illegitimate son and her own brother. This knowledge is brought home to her by an exceedingly clumsy device, for she reads these painful disclosures in an old torn diary of her mother's, found in an ornamental desk which her father (in ignorance of its contents) had given her on the eve of her wedding-day.

When Marie's old lover, Count Felix Tessin, reappears on the scene, and renews his declarations, she refuses him with proper dig

nity; but another meeting, brought about by the treachery of her illegitimate step-brother, in a lonely pavilion in the park, ends more disastrously, and a second child is born who has no right to the name of Dornach.

Now that she feels herself to be unworthy of her husband's affection, Marie begins to realise its full value, and as a fallen and guilty woman, she loves him far more passionately than she has ever done in the bright days of her innocence.

Then Hermann and her eldest son are drowned by an accident, leaving Marie a widow with one boy. She has hitherto only kept her guilty secret in order to preserve the peace of a good and noble man: now that he is dead, she can keep silent no longer, and openly confesses that her sole remaining child has no right to the name of Dornach, and cannot therefore inherit the family estates. As a disgraced woman in the eyes of the world, she returns to her father's house, where, of course, she soon dies in the most edifying sentiments, after having refused to let her lover make atonement by giving her his

name.

This exceedingly faulty and hackneyed plot is redeemed by considerable merit. The character of the fashionable, fascinating, dissolute father, whose chief sensation on hearing Marie's declaration is that, in confessing her sin, she has added a bétise to a fault; the two young, fast, horsey, slangy Womsheim couples; Fräulein Nullinger, the nervous, irritable dame de compagnie; old Lisette, the lady's-maid, with her antiquated coquetry and her true devotion to her young mistress,—all these, and many others, are drawn in the author's best manner; and if we

have met them before, we are glad to meet them again.

Among the spirituelle innuendoes against the foibles of her caste may be quoted the following passage, in which she describes how the news of Tessin's intended journey to Asia affects the highborn ladies of the capital:

"All those hitherto ignorant from conviction, sworn enemies of geography, began now to cultivate that heretofore despised science. Maps of Asia are in unprecedented request in aristocratic houses; the routes by which Tessin would, should, or might travel are carefully indicated in red pencil. A hundred young female beauties are suddenly animated by a previously unknown Wanderlust."

Still the subject is not a pleasant one, and the title Inexpiable scarcely less disagreeable than the contents of the book. We have already heard too much of the "lovely woman who has stooped to folly," and who too late discovers "death to be the only art her guilt to cover," and would rather be excused her further acquaintance, either in English or German print.

intelligence and industrious habits, who has only got to peruse half a dozen of the earlier novels of Miss Braddon or Mrs Henry Wood in order to have imbibed sufficient literary ideas to last him throughout a long life.

In the opening scene of the present book, Eleanore Waddingdistractingly ton, one of those beautiful women whom we know so intimately-alas! only on paper

with delicately chiselled white marble features, red gold hair, inscrutable sea-green eyes, and the gait of an empress, has just lost her only child, and having therefore no sensible reason for remaining the wife of a man whom she had only married under a mistaken impression of his wealth, she casts him off, and announces her intention of henceforth pursuing her fortunes alone. The husband who loves her passionately, obligingly offers to drown himself; and in order that there may be no possible mistake about the matter, we are asked to accompany the wretched man to London Bridge, whence he makes his death-spring into the Thames, and are made to hear and see the dark gurgling waters as they close over his head.

Then the scene changes, and we are shown a wealthy middle-aged German count, a widower, with an only daughter of the ingenuous tom-boy species. Rhona has got a great many pretty dresses which are described to us minutely, but her hands are sadly brown and uncared for; and though nearly seventeen, she has acquired none of the indispensable graces of young-ladyhood which are requisite to accompany and set off Parisian toilets. Her doting father becoming aware of his daughter's defects, resolves to

give her an English governess, whose manner and conversation will no doubt have a salutary influence on his madcap darling. The governess, whose name Miss Eleanore Forrest, arrives, and startles every one by her wonderful beauty, her exquisite marble features, inscrutable sea-green eyes, red gold hair, and royal gait. Rhona, of course, takes an instinctive dislike to a woman whose beauty so far surpasses her own; and one can scarcely blame her, for within a few days of her arrival the beauteous Eleanore has stolen the heart of Count Herbert, Rhona's cousin and intended bridegroom, and by the end of a few weeks has so completely turned the head of the elder Count that he has asked her to be his wife.

Rhona, on realising that she has lost a bridegroom and gained a stepmother, very naturally gets brain-fever without loss of time; and even when she is declared convalescent, her former spirits and laughter are gone.

The old Count marries Eleanore, and for some time is quite happy in the possession of his beautiful, cold, inscrutable wife; but after a while, just when he is beginning to entertain grave doubts as to the wisdom of his second choice, a merciful Providence-the Providence of Woods and Braddons-sends a travelling circus to the adjacent country town. Rhona and her stepmother are present at one of the performances, and in the person of the celebrated horse-tamer, Mr Black, Eleanore, to her unspeakable terror and stupefaction, recognises her former husband, Waddington; for, as every intelligent reader will have guessed from the beginning, these sort of objectionable hus

bands have nine lives like a cat, and an inconvenient hand is always found to rescue them in time from their watery graves. Too late Eleanore hides her white marble face behind her fan, for their eyes have met, and the recognition has been mutual. Next day he comes to the castle and asks for an interview.

Eleanore bids him meet her in a solitary corner of the park near a deep pool, said to be haunted, and therefore shunned by the country people. She first offers him money to induce him to go away and leave her undisturbed in her brilliant position; but he loves her still, and finding that she insists on preferring to be the wife of a wealthy old Count to that of a penniless circus rider, he solves the question by seizing her in his arms and jumping with her into the water. Their corpses, tightly locked together, are withdrawn from the water some hours later, on hearing which the old Count has a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he subsequently recovers to realise that he is well quit of a bad bargain; and Rhona, reconciled to her lover, is happy for the rest of her days.

As a feuilleton writer, Karl Emil Franzos has not got his equal in Germany; and his short, vigorous character-sketches, some of which are already known to the English public in the translation of The Jews of Barnow,' can scarcely be overrated. But, like Madame Ebner Eschenbach, he is not equally successful in detailed narrative, and his plots are frequently improbable and involved,

faults specially apparent in his latest work, 'Die Schatten.'1

The defects of a novel may,

however, be the merits of a drama, and we feel convinced that only a few strokes of the pen are required to transform a rather inferior novel into an undoubtedly good drama. It reads in fact, throughout, as though, by an inverted process from that which usually takes place, the story had been first conceived and written in dramatic form, and only subsequently transformed into a novel. There is hardly a page of description in the book, no analysis of character, and all narrative is put into the mouth of the principal actors. Everything here is action and dialogue, and the story is not told but shown to us.

The shadows which give their name to the work are the shade of past misdeeds, which invariably rise up again in after-life in order to punish the sins of youth cording to Goethe's dictum that "Alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden."

ac

The story, filling two moderatesized volumes, occupies exactly a space of fourteen hours. It begins at 8 A.M., and by 10 P.M. that same evening is concluded with the death of the principal actor, all the secrets of whose long and ill-spent life are disclosed to us in that short time, by a series of chances and accidents habitual enough on the stage, but seldom employed in novels in such profusion; and as it will be easier to treat the book as a drama rather than as a novel, we shall merely indicate the principal scenes into which it naturally resolves itself:

Scene I.-Count Dietrich von Thernstein, an elderly man, with a great reputation for hardness and cruelty, has lately married a young and lovely girl, Countess Sophie. To-day his mood is more

bitter and cynical than usual, for having accidentally found his wife's diary, he has read in its pages that she fears and hates him as a tyrant, and that her heart is still given to a former lover, whose name, however, is not disclosed in the journal. It is Count Dietrich's birthday, and when the curtain rises, the Count, together with his old and faithful servant Hans Friedinger, is looking over the presents and letters sent on the occasion.

Hans Friedinger has been in the Count's service over thirty years, and he alone of all fellow-creatures has reason to regard his master with feelings of attachment and gratitude. As a young man, Hans had been betrothed to a fair innocent girl in his own rank of life, who, during his temporary absence, seduced by some unknown scoundrel, had drowned herself to hide her disgrace. Then Count Dietrich had taken the despairing and halfcrazy youth under his protection, and had made of him his valet and confidential servant, in which capacity he had induced Hans to accompany him to Spain, where they both endeavoured to bury in oblivion the sorrows or follies of their youth. He, Count Dietrich, had killed a man in duel, and Hans has driven his bride Hanna to her death. All this had happened thirty years ago, and the Count might surely have found an earlier opportunity of relating the details of his history to his servant. He, however, chooses to do so on this particular birthday morning, and we learn thus how Dietrich had seduced the beautiful and virtuous Countess Agnes, wife of Baron Friedrich Thernstein, belonging to the younger branch of his own family, and had. subsequently shot the husband in duel. He now proposes to repair these crimes by marrying the son of the