New Novels (article 6 april 1889)
New Novels is an article published in The Evening News (Portsmouth) on 6 april 1889.
Review of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel : Micah Clarke (1889).
Review
(6 april 1889, p. 374)
It has become impossible to overlook an exceedingly remarkable phenomenon of recent fiction — the extent to which the younger generation of novelists has been drawing for its materials upon the Revolution period. Probably more stories which assume an intelligent interest in the affairs of from 1685 to 1750 have appeared during the last two years than during the preceding twenty, despite the conventional belief that historical romance has been crushed out of the field by the superior interest of Theosophy and the Divorce Court, Central Africa and Scotland Yard. We trust we need not enter into reasons for welcoming so essentially wholesome a departure, and for congratulating the novel-reading and writing world on unmistakeable signs of a return to its senses. We also trust that we have yet stronger reason for doing so hereafter: and, meanwhile, Mr. A. Conan Doyle's "Micah Clarke" (1 vol. : Longmans, Green, and Co.) is to be welcomed as an important contribution to the literature in question. Captain Clarke's narrative of the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion, and of his own adventures as a rebel, is altogether so good that but little is required to give it a place in the first class of historical fiction. That little is unquestionably wanting; and it is easy enough to point out wherein it consists — chiefly, for example, in the lack of that magic touch which brings all periods together in the common atmosphere of human nature, and makes old-world thoughts and ways, without loss of quaintness, as fresh and as real as if they were but yesterday's, as in, to quote an especially appropriate instance, "Lorna Doone." Mr. Doyle sees the soldier's harness, the Court gallant's finery, and the peasant's smock frock, and all the outward trappings of his fiction, all the differences between those times and these, so clearly as to be a little blind to the resemblances which the trappings cover. But what he does see, he sees not only clearly but brilliantly. Very few battle-pieces are equal to his description of Sedgmoor — an oft-told story, but never told better. Some of his portraiture, also, is superficially admirable, particularly in the case of Decimus Sexton, the soldier of fortune, who has the additional merit of owing nothing to Captain Dalgetty. It need scarcely be said that the author's sympathies are on the popular side, while he appreciates at its true worthlessness the character of the most despicable of all popular leaders. And probably he is right in regarding the crazy outbreak of fanaticism in the Western Counties as merely the premature explosion of what became the "Glorious Revolution" in less honest hands.
