Comedies and Errors by Henry Harland (1898)

Harland is one of those who always seem to sit in the second rank of Aesthetic/Decadent era literature. He was literary editor of The Yellow Book, very well respected in his time, but somehow, when faced with Wilde, Beerbohm and others, he fades a little. This collection of eight novellas and four stories, many of which first appeared in The Yellow Book, confirms this analysis. Most are middling and pleasant enough; a couple are better. Many are stories of intrigues of identity and playful mischief between men and women, circling one another in the dance of love. But The Friend of Man, a novella about an obsessed ascetic social theorist whose monomania affects atrociously not only his own life, but that of those who succour him in admiration, is a stage more involving. The Invisible Prince, one of the novellas of mischievous love, twists the skeins a little more skilfully in its playful double-story of twinned deceptions. P'tit-Bleu, a novella of a demi-mondaine cursed with the love of a dissolute, brings more to the heart than Harland can usually manage. Flower o' the Clove, a novella about an altruistic heir to a fortune falling for someone she regards as its true inheritor, travels through its territory with a shade more subtlety, playfulness and awkward truth. So, yet again, Harland is becalmed in trite waters in some cases, and blows a greater headwind in others; the mixed story continues. His most famous books are looming on the horizon; I wonder...