MINE IS THINE.*
It is somewhat characteristic of English society that a soldier who. has followed the profession of arms from his youth until he has attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel, should enter the ranks of literature, and take as high a place as a penman as he did as a Gordon Highlander. If Fair to Sce obtained for our author a commission in the honourable army of novelists, Mine is Thine promotes him indubitably to the rank of a field-officer. There is nothing that "smells of powder," as the French say, about the British officer, and our Army has always furnished a larger proportion than that of any other nation in the world of quiet, thoughtful, intelligent men,—men who are no less devoted to their duty, and certainly no less brave as soldiers in the field of battle, for being just as fit to be Judges or Ministers of the Gospel. Now-a-days in Germany, where every man is a soldier, this com- parison is scarcely applicable; but we very much doubt whether, even in the Fatherland, there are many colonels who have served from their youth with the colours who would ever dream of sitting down to write a novel, or who, even if they tried, could write such a book as Mine is Thine. Indeed we think that Colonel Lockhart's work is entitled to take a high place among modern novels, and we hope that the gallant regiment to whose officers the book is dedicated will set as much store by this work of an old Gordon Highlander as by any of the cunningly wrought silver memorials of their former comrades which adorn their mess-room. If Colonel Lockhart wants a motto to inscribe under his new laurels, he must go back, like a distinguished namesake of his, to the records of the glories of Castilian chivalry, where he may read that "Nana: la lanza embota a la pluma,ni Ia plume a la lanza," Cosmo Glencairn is the son of a great ironmaster and financier, Archibald Glencairn, a merchant prince, whose birth in India is somewhat obscure, but who had married a lady of rank of the name of Wildgrave, from whose family Cosmo inherited the modest competence of 18,000 a year. Our hero is spending some time at Cadenabbia with an old friend, Tom Wyedale ;—or rather Tom, who has run through his own little fortune, finds it convenient to remain in company with a man so easy both in temper and in finances as this independent son of a millionaire. At Bellaggio they make the acquaintance of Lord Germistoune, a proud and testy old Scotch peer, and his beautiful daughter, Esme Douglas, who, although an only daughter, and prospectively a peeress in her own right, although she is the heroine of the book, and made specially and solely for the hero, is some- what uninteresting. Tom Wyedale flirts with her, and Cosmo falls seriously in love. Lord Germistoune, however, has taken a dislike to our hero, who accordingly retreats precipitately to Eng- land, to learn something about his pedigree, and to forget Earn& He fails to accomplish either object. He introduces us, however, to his father, Archibald Glencairn, who is a kind of financial Titan, and as proud, in his way, as Lord Germistoune himself; to his manager, Mr. Hopper; and his prim sister, Griselda. Colonel Lockhart seems ill at ease in this home circle, and be would have done better not to enter it at all. Mr. Hopper's want of " h's," and Miss Griselda's want of charity are by no means diverting, nor do they in any way advance the action or assist to develop the more interesting characters of the story. Having failed to discover anything to the advantage of his grandfather, beyond the fact that he was a Scotch indigo planter in India, and that his name was not Glencairn, Cosmo retired on or about the 10th of August to the moor which he usually hired in Scotland, and which chanced to adjoin Dunerlacht, the magnificent property of the Lord Viscount Germistoune, K.T., and there, also together with a large party, assembled for the "twelfth," was the beautiful Esme Douglas, quite ready to fall in love with the grandson of the Scotch indigo-planter, whenever it should please him and Colonel Lockhart to appear. But in the meanwhile, Tom Wyedale's sister, Mrs. Ravenhall, a London hack "of quality," has determined to provide for her impecunious brother by marrying him to the heiress of Dunerlacht, and with that view has manceuvred an invitation for him and for herself to Lord Germistoune's house. Tom, however, relieved from pressing difficulties by the liberality of this fair schemer, infinitely prefers the pursuit of grouse to that of Esme Douglas; and having driven his sister to the verge of despair by his volatile conduct, and shown an indisposition to marry a charming young heiress which we venture to think deters very few of his class from retrieving their fortunes by matrimony, promises, in consideration of £500 down and more to follow, to • Mine is 771ine. By Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence W. M. Lockhart. A Novel, in 3 role. Loudon: William Blackwood and Sons. " propose " to Miss Douglas,—proposes, and is made happy ever after by an agreeable refusal. Cosmo, in due time, of course, falls in with the Castle party, which includes some more or less interesting men, and some more or less impossible women ; and after a little shooting, and dancing, and lawn-tennis, he finds his love for Esme hourly increasing ; he tells her so, and she promises that she will be his. The love-scenes between Cosmo and Esme are in every instance admirable, full of genuine passion, earnest, warm, and true ; above all, not too long, and overstepping neither the modesty of nature nor of art. And even Cosmo's reflections and soliloquies about his lady-love, passages which in general are apt to be painfully dull to the ordinary reader, breathe a tone which is at once manly and refined, and present to us the true metal where we are wont to find but very thin gilding, and too often brass or copper, disfigured by verdigris and corruption.
The great difficulty now remains to obtain Lord Germistoune's consent ; and his answer to Cosmo's demand is not merely a refusal, but an insult. Esme is neither to see nor to think of her lover again. Cosmo neither meditates suicide, nor swears that he will have Lord Germistoune's blood, nor does he forget Esme ; he determines to win for himself such a position as may entitle him to claim the daughter of even the proud Lord Germistoune ; and he enters Parliament for a borough in which his father has con- siderable influence. He has scarcely taken his seat, however, be- fore misfortune overtakes the great Company whose shareholders, protected by Archibald Glencairn's guarantee, have incurred liabilities of some three-quarters of a million sterling. Lord Germistoune is one of the shareholders, and the anticipated failure affords him a fresh source of indignation and hatred of Cosmo, and the very name of Glencairn. By sacrificing the whole of his fortune, Cosmo enables his father to save the Company from ruin, and then writes to Miss Douglas to inform her of his altered fortunes. The tone of this letter is conceived in a spirit of the highest art. Instead of the hack- neyed sentimentality of telling his love that he is unworthy of her, now that he is no longer rich, and begging her to forget him, Cosmo, like a true gentleman and a true lover, merely writes to tell Fame what he had done, and to assure her of his undying love and devotion. The vulgarest mind could suspect nothing sordid in the character of Cosmo Glencairn, as developed by Colonel Lockhart, yet most writers would have thought it neces- sary to guard against the readers' possible misconception of their hero by making him false at once to his troth and to his nature.
Who Cosmo Glencairn really is, and how he eventually marries Esme Douglas, we leave to the readers of the novel the pleasing task of finding out for themselves, though we think the actual catas- trophe is somewhat hurried, and not very artistically brought about. One merit Colonel Lockhart possesses to a remarkable degree. He may not have the depth of thought or the grandeur of expres- sion of Bnlwer, or the mingled wit and pathetic humour of Dickens ; he may be inferior to Thackeray in force and knowledge of humanity, he has not the easy flow of Scott, or the dash of Whyte-Melville ; but he excels them all in the way in which he presents to his readers, in every position and under all circum- stances, that rare plant of home growth, so difficult to describe, no impossible to analyse, but so easy to recognise,—an English gentleman.
Bulwer's gentlemen are too magniloquent, too theatrical, to be completely natural. They are rather poetic ideals. Dickens had not the smallest apprehension of what a gentleman was, and if Thackeray had any, he chiefly used it for the purpose of satire and not of portraiture, while Sir Walter's heroes are all gentlemen of the fashion of older days. But Cosmo Glencairn is a slightly glorified type of men whom one meets every day in the best society in England,—in London drawing-rooms, or at country breakfast-tables, on moors in Scotland, or on the pavement of Piccadilly, riding in Hyde Park, or yachting at Cowes. But it wsa comparatively easy to make a gentleman of a hero who is endovred with every virtue, who is handsome, brave, intellectual, pure, true, and rich ; but it is a very different thing in the case of. Lord Germistonne, who is imperious, and obstinate, and gouty, and stupid, and irritable, who insults the hero, scolds his daughter, breaks off the marriage, and makes himself generally .offensive; or in the case of Tom Wyedale, who is a selfish, good- for-nothing young fellow, with loose notions as to the value of other people's money, and with very little respect for himself, and none for anything else in the world beyond "mixed shooting ;" or in the case of Phil Denwick, who has lost all his fortune in foreign stocks, and being unable to get anything to do, is intro- duced to us skulking about the Park in shabby clothes, and who rises, by the help of some of Cosmo's money, which is lost,
to be a sub-manager in an ironworks company. And yet Lord Germistoune, Tom Wyedale, and Phil Denwick are as true and I unmistakable specimens of English gentlemen as ever existed or were described. A gentleman is no less a gentleman because he has no very good quality, than a thorough-bred horse is any the less thorough-bred because he cannot gallop a mile in a minute, like "Eclipse." Colonel Lockhart describes people whom one may meet every day exactly as they are, and having laid his scenes among ladies and gentlemen, he has been content to invest them with disagreeable as well as noble qualities, without think- ing it necessary to call in vulgar people to perform the disagree- able duties which were needed to give shade as well as light to his work. No one can be leas noble or gentle than the slightly- sketched character of Lord Ribston. Colonel Lockhart knows well enough that £30,000 a year and a title can no more make a gentleman than—most novelists, and that is saying a good deal.
In the case of the ladies, we do not think Colonel Lockhart is by any means so successful. Even the heroine is interesting chiefly through her misfortunes, and we think that both as re- gards plot and characterisation, what may be called the female element is the weak part of the book. The following is a fair specimen of the style :—
" The mere routine work of each season produces, for a certain class of society, topics enough to supply with the materials of many hours' dialogue, the most brainless he or she who drifts through the regulation amount of duty or pleasure prescribed by the rubric of fashion. The veriest parrot, from the blessed iteration of the same phrases (if not ideas), heard hourly, for three or four solid months can scarcely fail to have glibly on the tip of his tongue sufficient small-change of talk to pay his way, without difficulty, among the initiated. And then, there are always one or two great salient events in the history of each season, which, independently of the smaller gossip, fend off from the talker the necessity of plunging, without a cork jacket, into the hopeless waters of originality. Let us cast back an eye over the last few seasons; at once it is struck by a dozen things of the sort. For instance, a royal savage—the blacker the better—visits the country, and reduces the nation to a state of infantile imbecility. In his honour there are Court entertainments, where he is puzzled ; and municipal banquets, where his inner man is compromised ; a review at Windsor, where he is again puzzled; an exhibition of ironclads, where he is frightened and again sick. What a fund of topics in all this ! What possibilities of earnest question and response ! Were you there ? Were you ? Had you the entra to the privileged places ? Did you see him? Is it true that he was sulky and rude? Can it be conceivable that his teeth chattered ? Then the Duchess of —, in giving a fancy ball, supplies another fertile theme. It was beautiful, but she gave it too late or too early. It clashed with the festa of some other potentate. Such a pity ! And was royalty really offended or not? If so, why ?—if not, why not ? Then the Prince's garden-party,—if you were at it, it is well ; if not, still it is well, for much time can be consumed in giving every reason, but the true one' for your absence. The Academy has a sensation picture, painted by a girl blind from her birth. Here art-talk a discre- tion. She is equal to Salvator Rosa, or Horace Vernet, or Paul Potter, or any other painter—no matter whom—to whom the vox populi has taught you to liken her. There is a new reading of Hamlet, by a Hindoo, which (in Hindustani) edifies society. Such a mellifluous language Hindustani ! So perfect a vehicle for Shakespearean thought ! Seine curled darling of society cheats at cards, or helps himself to his neighbour's wife. Here is breathless interest Why did he do it ? When ? How ? Where? What does Sir John say to it ? Will the countess ever get over the shock? Moral,—how can people do such things ? Some one else, who ought to have known better, commits some other faux pas, scarcely discussible, but which can be sniffed round, with titillating innuendoes, and low, confidential murmurings. Burnand has a new farce, the scream of which has been loud enough to cross the Channel and be echoed in Paris. Doubtless you have heard it in both languages? Offenbach outdoes himself in a new opdra bouffe,—' Suzanne et lee Vieillards.' A little shocking, is it not ? but then so bright and clever ! That atones for moat things. And then comes the 'music of the future,' and sets the whole queer jumble to appropriate strains. You heard Lohengrin?' You did? It was a perfect enigma to you,—or entirely comprehensible. You sat through the whole of that first suffocating night? to the end ? and wished for more ? No wonder! Or wished yourself dead ! How natural!"
Previous page
