II.—"The Yellow Danger."

"None of your gaudy colours for me," said an old pit wife, "give me good plain red and yellow." Those persons who share the taste for such simple hues will find them gratified to the full in Mr. Shell's romance, "The Yellow Danger" (Grant Richards, 6s.) For the yellow is in it in the shape of the Chinaman, while as for red, it is supplied by a "blugginess" which, for horror, dwarfs the boldest efforts of Mr, Rider Haggard. Those who do not like murder, torture, and bloodshed on the largest scale, had better give Mr. Sheil's book a wide berth, page 331 for as a record of carnage it is quite unequalled, so far as I know, in modern fiction. But the majority of human beings, who would spend a sleepless night if they gave the most objectionable of their fellow-creatures a bloody nose, nevertheless revel in blood when it is shed for them vicariously by the pen of the romancer. Such persons, and they probably constitute an enormous majority of the human race, will find Mr. Shell's "Yellow Danger" the book of all books with which to enliven their holiday by the seaside. It is a seasonable book, and no mistake. All the year the newspapers have vibrated and throbbed with the sound, imaginary and otherwise, of the cannon thunder supposed to be echoing in the West Indies and in the Philippines; while the last exploit of Parliament was to listen, with cheers, to Mr. Goschen's proposed addition of eight millions to the already Atlantean load of our naval expenditure. For "The Yellow Danger" is a book in which navies play a great part. The hero is a sub-lieutenant, who blossoms into an admiral of dimensions far exceeding those of Lord Nelson, before he is old enough to have obtained a captaincy, and the whole volume, from cover to cover, simply reverberates with battle thunder.

The motive of the story is simple enough. In my humble way I ventured to touch upon the same theme in "The Splendid Paupers," or "The Yellow Man with the White Money," which indulged in a more or less fantastic vision of the economic triumph of the Chinese over the Western World. Mr. Sheil paints with a much bigger brush, and dabs it on with much more glaring tints. Therein lies the probability that "The Yellow Danger" will be a great and sensational success, for a public which in the course of the last six months has seen two Spanish fleets wiped off the face of the sea in a couple of battles, is apt to be exacting in its demands upon those who attempt to outvie the realities of actual life. Mr. Sheil rises to the occasion, and in his romance he has constructed a story which for extravagance of horror and for colossal Gargantuan scale upon which everything is drawn, leaves all competitors far behind. If you could imagine a man who has spent a year in constructing gigantic scare-heads for the "New York Journal" during war time turned loose with a free hand to invent a story which would outvie even his wildest imaginings in the shape of horror and bloodshed, we might conceive him producing something like this book of Mr. Sheil's. As a story it is a distinct success even apart from the carnage in which the romance literally welters from first to last. There is a severe simplicity and unity running through it all. In brief the story is this:—

Yen How, a Chinaman of marvellous genius, with a brain of ice, in which he is able to concentrate all the science of the world, has so much intellect that he has no conscience, and only sufficient heart to fall in love with an English servant lass whom he meets on his visit to London. He conceives the idea of wiping the Western races out of existence. China, with its vast reservoir of four hundred millions of the human race, must be mobilised on a war footing, and launched as a tremendous weapon of conquest on the white section of the world. The description of Yen How, as a man with the intellect of a friend, uniting the genius of a Napoleon and of a Tamerlane, who pursues his policy with the ruthlessness of a Bismarck and the savagery of a Red Indian, is powerful, almost appalling from the vividness with which it is worked out from first page to last. Against Yen How Mr. Sheil pits John Hardy, a consumptive English lad alike marvellous in naval warfare and for political insight. The story which Mr. Sheil has to tell is the conflict between two supreme representatives of the white and yellow races, a conflict, the theatre of which is two continents, both of which are fairly well depopulated before the story finishes. Yen How's scheme for the conquest of Europe has its germ in a thought which undoubtedly animates the mandarins at the court of Pekin. Not that they contemplate the conquest of the world. Their objective is far less remote, being limited for the most part by a desire to protect themselves against being conquered by Europe, but their idea and Yen How's is the same. The true policy of the Chinese must be to sow dissension among the European nations. Let them quarrel among themselves. When rogues fall out, the honest Chinaman will come to his own. So concession after concession is forced into the hands of England, France, Russia, and Germany, with the result that before long Yen How attains his end and England finds herself at war with the allied nations. Universal war convulses Europe from Archangel to Sicily. Then when all the European fleets have been reduced to a decimal point of their former strength, when every nation on the Continent has exhausted its resources in men and in munitions of war, then Yen How launches his thunderbolt in the shape of the mobilised millions of China on a distracted and impotent Europe.