[In the following article from the Saturday Review, the unsigned critic compares Altiora Peto with Piccadilly, and discusses Oliphant's views on humanism as revealed in the former.]

This story is one of the most entertaining that we have met with for a long time. It groups together a number of very varied human beings, all of whom are vividly, if lightly, drawn, and abounds in pleasant descriptions and smart sayings. The variety of the characters who are collected in it gives it something of the air of a menagerie; but in few places can one spend an idle hour with more amusement and profit than in a good menagerie. The plot of the story, if an unnatural one to start with, is worked out with a great deal of ingenuity, and the combined interest of the tale and of the actors is such that there is hardly a dull page in the whole book. We make this qualification because there are certain pages in which the characters seem to be most in earnest, and in which they contrive to be obscure and tedious without throwing a ray of light on the high topics which they discuss. The contrast between the halting movement of these pages and the assured and easy vigour of the rest of the book cannot fail to strike the reader at first sight. But, with this exception, the story is most readable and interesting throughout, and is one of the few which we could wish to be longer, and the main characters of which we should like to see more fully and minutely described. The outlines are drawn with vigour and clearness; but there is not seldom a want of the more detailed psychological analysis which, in this class of fiction, is needed to make the characters act intelligibly and coherently under the conditions in which the writer places them. It may be said, on the other hand, that the author has attained his end by making the reader ask for more, and this is certainly a result at which very few novel-writers arrive.

The plot of the story is intricate and, considering its improbability, very cleverly managed. It opens with the confessions of the heroine, Altiora Peto, the posthumous child of a gentleman who, with an obvious punning intention, has bequeathed to her a name which is to prove characteristic of her aspiring nature. She is an original, independent girl, with a turn for solving the problems of her life in her own way, and not letting others settle them for her, which keeps the reader interested in her throughout the book. The first of these problems presents itself in the person of an admirer, Mr. Ronald MacAlpine, who preaches agnosticism and astheticism, and practises idleness and imposture, as well as any of his living counterparts. He is poor, and for this, as well as other reasons, Altiora's family are opposed to the match. However, it is neither the poverty nor the opposition, but the lover's inability on cross-examination to give a satisfactory account of his aims and beliefs, which causes Altiora to reject him. The family consists of the Baron and Baroness Grandesella, the supposed stepfather and stepmother of Altiora, and a certain Mr. Murkle, who is the Baron's partner in the financial operations by which they make their living. We are next introduced to a party of three American women. Two of them are young Californian girls, the plain heiress Mattie Terrill and the poor but beautiful Stella Walton. Lest the former should be made love to in Europe for her fortune and not for herself, the two girls decide to change names, and, to avoid hopeless confusion, we must follow the author's example, and call Stella Mattie, and Mattie Stella, only cautioning the reader to make the needful mental correction whenever he meets with the names. The companion and chaperon of the two girls, Hannah Coffin, is to our mind the best drawn and most interesting character of the book. She is the daughter of a Methodist minister in New England, and an ex-schoolmistress, and is a type of character not easily to be found elsewhere than in New England. She is a woman of great practical sense, of perfect rectitude and integrity, and of strong but undemonstrative religious feeling; but added to this she has a shrewdness and causticity and fearlessness which make her an awkward opponent for those who come into collision with her, blended with a mystic devotion to the welfare of those whom she loves. Stella, the beauty, is a girl gifted with all the coolness and capacity for taking care of herself, which is supposed to be peculiarly characteristic of the Western American woman; Mattie, her companion, is more commonplace. A distant cousinship between Altiora and some of the male actors in the book, and of one of the Californians with others, serves as one means to bring them all together, chance supplying the rest. In Paris Altiora's party, the Californian party, Keith Hetherington (a male counterpart of Altiora in aspiration and high resolve), and Bob Alderney, a good fellow who eventually marries Mattie, fall in with one another. Murkle, who has a secret hold on the Grandesellas, there declares his determination to marry Altiora, whose stepmother destines her for a second cousin, Lord Sark, a nobleman occupied in doubtful speculations in the City and in making love to a pretty married woman, falsely supposed to be a widow, at the West End. This lady, Mrs. Clymer, a serpentine person, plays an important part in the development of the story. She is one of those beautiful dubious, fascinating ladies, with a history and a mystery connected with her, whom a large class of men delight in, and whom nearly all women distrust and dislike, though they may fear to quarrel with her openly. The only difference between her relations with Sark and with other men is that her passion for him grows in time too strong to allow her to do without him or to supplement him by a fresh adorer. His entanglement with her, and the counter-attractions in women of a better sort which at length make his chains hateful to him, form one chief interest of the book. He, too, appears in Paris, and is much struck by Altiora. About the same time Miss Hannah Coffin and Altiora meet, and the former instinctively recognizes in the ardent and inexperienced girl some one on whose life she can have a helpful influence. Lord Sark's heart, however, is made of elastic material, and can find room, along with the new feeling for Altiora and the old and as yet unextinguished feeling for Mrs. Clymer, for a more than friendly liking for Stella Walton. The plot soon gets exceedingly complicated, and becomes a kind of lovers' game of hide-and-seek. As Mrs. Clymer wants to keep Sark in the meshes of her net, and Murkle wishes to marry Altiora, nothing is more natural than that the two should combine to attain their own wicked ends. Murkle, however, is not the man to have only one string to his bow; and the appearance of the lovely and, as he imagines, immensely rich Californian prompts him to make her an offer of marriage. She meets a proposal made up of sentimentality and finance with a business-like answer, and, without intending to accept him, enters on a kind of provisional half-engagement, and agrees to resume the subject when he shall have given a full statement of his affairs, and when she shall have received a satisfactory account of him from Altiora. Her object in returning this answer is to give Altiora a respite from his pursuit, backed as it is by the Grandesellas. Hereupon Murkle proposes in due form to Altiora, and, when refused, tells her that, though he could force her to accept him, he will leave her free, provided she gives him her good word with Stella. At this point Altiora, perplexed by the situation in which she finds herself, and outraged at being forced into connexion with Mrs. Clymer, and asked to enter London society under her chaperonage, resolves, with the advice of Miss Coffin and Hetherington, on sudden flight, and takes refuge in a retired part of England with her new friends the Californians.

The series of intrigues which now takes place cannot here be even indicated. The scene shifts from London to a large country house, and again to the quiet country village where Altiora has taken refuge. She and Hetherington exchange ideas, and find one another to be living in a congenial moral atmosphere. The latter's "Solution of the Problem" is set forth at considerable length, with the result of leaving an observant reader in the dark as to what the problem is, or how it is to be solved, and thus producing that weary sensation which forms a contrast to the lively impressions which we otherwise receive from the book. "Egotism" is the enemy to be conquered, and accordingly "the love of country and love of family are to be set aside, in order for the evolution into new and higher potencies of the love either of God or humanity, or both"; and as a consequence "all the minor egotistical emotions, such as love of rule, love of fame, love of money, love of ease, must be discarded." In direct contradiction to this threadbare humanitarianism, and as an instance of the old maxim that blood is thicker than water, the author represents old Hannah Coffin, who turns out to be the aunt of Altiora, as having been drawn to her from the first by the force of the natural ties of which this young prophet makes light. The ending of the whole matter is that Altiora and Keith Hetherington agree to marry; that the intrigues of Murkle and the Grandesellas are laid bare and frustrated; that the latter have falsely claimed their supposed connexion with Altiora; that Mrs. Clymer is shown to be a married woman, and eliminated from a society in which she has been very mischievous; that Sark is blown up in Ireland by a new dynamitic compound invented by the husband of this interesting lady, but gets well and marries Stella; in short, that the villains are all defeated and that the honest people come by their own.

There is a fertility of ideas and a clearness and force of style in this novel which is not often to be met with in contemporary fiction. The story never flags, and, except when the apostolic vein is struck, the conversation is never dull. There is much in Altiora Peto to remind the reader of Piccadilly. In both there is the same constant attack—at one time serious and at another cynical—on the vices of society; there is the same point and liveliness of style, and there is on the part of some of the characters the same energetic reaction against the meanness and futility of the life by which they are surrounded. The belief that the conventional standard of right is not only a great deal lower than it ought to be, but that to accept a wholly different one and to live accordingly is both feasible and is a source of untold happiness to those who dare to do so, is the leading thought of both books. Those who can thoroughly agree with this when stated as a general proposition are by no means forced to accept the means suggested for attaining the desired end. We need not hold the author in any way bound by the utterances of the characters whom he creates; but it is obvious that the following quotation from the gospel according to Mr. Keith Hetherington, who is the best man in the book and the one most influenced by motives higher than those of the mass of people, will be of little practical value in the regeneration of mankind. "For instance," he says, "the sentiment called Patriotism, being perhaps the highest to which some can attain, and therefore a good one for them to work from, is an obstacle to the experimenter on the love of humanity; he feels that he must denationalize himself in feeling, if not in fact. He feels that he belongs to no country, but to the universe. So he next becomes conscious that all family ties conflict with the due development of the force he is attempting to evolve. All the men and women in the world become his brothers and sisters.… It is the elimination of these egotistical forces from the organism which is so painful." It is by a course of experiments of this nature that Mr. Hetherington would qualify us to serve mankind in our day and generation; but he might as well tell us to eliminate from the organism the desire of food and of sleep. Whether or not it is "egotistical" to care more for those whom you know and are near to, and with whose needs you are practically acquainted, and whom you are able to help, than for persons whom you have never seen or heard of, is a question which Mr. Hetherington does not discuss. But perhaps Mr. Oliphant means of set purpose to represent him as a person of high sentiment but weak power of observation and reasoning. However this may be, Altiora Peto is a very clever and readable book.