New-York tribune., 1901-10-05
NEW NOVELS.
STORIES BY G. W. CABLE s. WEIR
MITCHELL, THE CASTLES
AND OTHERS.

THE CAVALIER. BY George w Cable. With IL
instratiOns at IS, by Howard Chandler Christy l2mO.
CIRCUMSTANCE. BY S Weir Mitchell NJ. D..
Ii Ii D. Harvard and Edinburgh. Emo PIP ls5,
THE 56 SECRET II; ORCHARD; BY ASnes and Egerton
vii. Sis. Frederick A Stokes Company.
fAPA Pa B9UcHARD @ baIi1 By Molly Elliot eawe lso
THE SIGN OF THE PROPHET Tale of Te-
or STnseh 95a and TiPPecaR1e s noe BY James Ball Nay;
Publishing Company.
BLENNERHAssETT: Or THE DEGREES OF
Fate Romance Founded Upon Events in
with Illustrations By Charles h s stephens he.
12no. PIP. 442. Boston: C. NJ. Clark Publishing
D'RI AND l. a Tale of Daring Deeds in the Sec
ond War with the British. Being the Memoirs
a5fated Kam2n 6f IL 6 5 yabn By a Irving
Se2 Boston; Lothrop Publishing Company.
a DAUGHTER OF NEW FRANCE. With Some
Colony Colony on the Detroit; BY Mary Catherine
pp.' 4oS Boston: Little Brown & Co.
THE RED CHANCELLOR. Romance. By Sir
william Masnay. Bart. 12mo PIP. 3O3 Bren-
A novelist dealing with the Civil War must be
strongly tempted to get much of that war
9 into his pages as possible. His position in the
matter, indeed, is TO excite sympathy. for II
is not unnatural for the reader TO test first of all
his hdelity TO the facts of the great conflict and
anticipation of this may well make him nervous
moving him to more elaborate employment of
historical data than is really agreeable to him.
We have seen more than one writer struggling
between the claims of recorded actions and those
OF his own imagination. Mr.. Cable in The
Cavalier has been uncommonly successful IN
satisfying both claims. His novel is charged
with the atmosphere of the war He writes as
one thoroughly familiar with il. Yet he also
writes as one capable of putting the tragical
events OF that historic time in exactly the right
perspective-the perspective that is of fiction
and not Of history. He is not concerned to set
the historians straight the ins and outs of
any grAt battle he does not pretend TO draw
solemn contrast between the North and the
South. All that interests him is the telling of a
good story, and he tells it,
His hero rejoices in the humble name of Smith
and instead of introducing him on an heroic
note MIR. Gable is willing to present him to us in
his earlier pages something of a prig 1t is
a tacit and very engaging recognition of the
fact that the too utterly heroic hero has grown
to be bore. Master Smith is in his teens when
the story opens, and he behaves just as a lad
might be expected to behave when thrown into
the cockpit of war, and compelled to purge him
self by degrees of the natural crudities and
tfmidities OF his years. One way-the obvious
way-of exhibiting his transition from boyish-
ness to manhood would be to show him among
strangers, getting licked into shape" by them
and by circumstance. Mr.. Gable prefers to
illustrate familiar enough phase of life in both
Southern and Northern camps the making of a
soldier out of a recruit fallen among friends.
The men and women whose fortunes are mar
rated in this story more less linked
gether by family interests, and they form a
group so homogeneous that it keeps the centre
of the stage throughout the serving simply
as a background. At the same time and here is
where Mr.. Gable is particularly skilfu the
stress of military happenings runs through every
chapter, and there is a certain effective tension
present even when the main point seems be
nothing more nor less than romantic sentiment.
In other words. the drama is well balanced from
beginning end. 1t is packed with incident.
eith soldiers adventures but each detail is
deftly adjusted to a single aim which is to
carry certain lovers and their sweethearts