15 JUNE 1867, Page 19

CALLED TO ACCOUNT.*

'1'ms is, we think, the best a rel Miss Thomas has yet produced, full of those feminine sketches in which she delights, and which she executes • so well, with an insight which always seems to us produced by the appreciation of hate rather than of love, but which is nevertheless so clear. She faintly hated the best single character she has ever drawn,—Kate Lethbridge, in Played Out,— and punished her of malice prepense much more than she deserved. Three of her characters in this story are admirably drawn, in outline • Called to dteoun't• By lilies Annie Thomas. London: Tinsley. •

of course, but still admirably,—Mabel Hamilton, Frances Burgoyne,

and Clara Dennet ; Mabel, the lovely, gentle, affectionate blonde, who advises her poet husband to take quinine to strengthen him

under the fatigue of Writing the' Song of Summer," tells all her friends that one day he will produce a book which will sell like

Proverbial Philosophy, asks him to " use " every pretty scene they

pass, and, conscious of her own occasional failure to comprehend him, is pitifully jealous of the woman who can ; Frances Burgoyne, the sweet, stately cow, so loving and so placid, who bears trouble so well because her nerves and digestion are so perfect, but has a grand nature, nevertheless ; and Clara Delimit, the narrow, orderly, right-minded evil genius of the book, who would not do a bad thing for the world, yet out of the very poverty of her nature is as bad as if she had a purpose of wickedness. This sketch has been to Miss Thomas a real labour of love, she has elaborated it through three volumes with a care she very seldom bestows on any of her personages, and openly confesses that as artist she has fallen short of the ideal in her own mind. She had set herself a very difficult task, that of describing a poverty- stricken, selfish nature, with a latent capacity for cruelty, urged on by one strong love to incessant small offences against the right, yet incapable of crime, of direct falsehood, or even of strong hatred—a woman of a colourless nature, who on

the moral side of it is simply not good, but who always wishes to be. Clara Dennet, a rejected admirer and cousin of Mr. Pollock, is, seven years after her rejection, taken into his house out of charity by his wife Frances, a good, right-meaning, right-feeling

"Duda," as Miss Thomas once or twice calls her. Clear-headed, efficient, and painstaking, Clara at once takes up the government of the house, diminishes its extravagance, increases its comfort, manages and conciliates the children, and poisons Mr. Pollock's mind against his wife. She is ugly and unpleasant, and resent- fully conscious of both facts, quite incapable of beguiling Mr.

Pollock or traducing his wife, but she cannot lose her deep interest in the husband, with his highly cultivated but tradestnaulike mind, cannot judge the wife, with her large, indolent, affectionate nature, rightly. Every sentence she utters, though she is truthful enough, makes Frances seem in fault, every reform alte.introduces stiffens while it improves the household, every excuse brings out strongly the difference, always latent, between the great tradesman and his lady wife, realizes to him the difference of their taste, and the fact, originally quite true, that she had married without loving him. Clara seldom fights, or if she fights, does it by way of making just excuses for her rival, but her mere pre- seuce, her mean efficiency, her rigorous literalness, introduce into the quiet house an element of discord which, as time goes on, con- stantly deepens and widens :-

" Not that she was altogether selfish ; the being so was one of the snares against which she had prayed in a regular form of words from her childhood ; but perhaps it was more her innate inability to be any- thing thoroughly' which saved her from being it, than the prayers she had used, without any very strong belief either in their efficacy, or in their efficacy being needed. She was not thoroughly selfish in act ; of old she had toiled to keep the household—of which her father, the inert surgeon, and her mother, his inane wife, were supposed to be tho main- springs—in greater comfort than it would have been kept without her toiling. How much of this effort that she made was the result of an instilled apprehension of duty ; how mach of it was filial love ; and how much was due to the mere instinct of order, which flourishes in every woman's breast, it would be hard to say. It cannot be regarded as a sin of either commission or omission on this woman's part that when her father and mother died she should have sorted their bills, and sold their furniture, and interred them respectably, without much emotion. She had to `think of herself,' as she said to her landlady, and she did think of herself without intermission, oven to the point of remembering that it would not he wholly unbecoming on her part to cry at her father's

funeral."

She wins the game at last which she is unconsciously playing, and drives Frances from the house, only to lose it again in a manner we will not betray, but which in the restrained completeness of the retribution is profoundly artistic. She is the most real por- trait Miss Thomas has ever drawn, except, perhaps, Kate Leth- bridge, and the one which displays, on the whole, the highest genius for portraiture. It is so difficult to paint truly the colourless or the grey, to describe restrained badness, imperfect evil, hatred which is not malignant, scorn which has no contempt, love which is unlawful yet not bad, and it has been well accomplished. If there is a defect in the execution, it is in a certain largeness of intellect which is occasionally assigned to her, and which would have been wanting to the real person. Clara Dennet in actual life would not, after Mrs. Pollock's departure, have urged Mr. Pollock to let her remain as his children's governess, to forget the world which for the time,—he had lost his fortune,—had forgotten him, would have been over-sensitive to the proprieties, over-dis- trustful alike of herself and of him. To that kind of nature the proper is the right, and Miss Thomas, in forgetting that peculiarity, has made Clara less narrow and mean in her selfish yet sad-coloured love than she meant her to be. Still, she is very good indeed, so good that the reader follows her with the tolerant annoyance most people feel in watching a toad. The toad will not bite you or sting you, and so you do not rush at and crush it, but none the less are you conscious, through every fibre of body and mind, that the creature is a toad, and, therefore, reason or none, a hate- ful thing. What business has it to be such a reptile, to snap its lips on the flies in that efficient, unenjoying, mechanical way ?

The figure intended as a contrast to Clara Dennet, Leonie Geneste, is not quite so successful. She is intended to be one of those women of whom most men have met, or fancied they met, at least one,—a woman whom Miss Thomas, by a blunder for which a man would be ridiculed, calls a Lamle, but who is really a good enchantress, whom no man approaches without .a feeling of incipient regard, no woman without a faint twinge of possible jealousy,—who brings men to her feet unconsciously, or, when conscious, saves them from themselves. A certain largeness and richness of nature in such women, a power of sympathy with men in their intellects as well as their hearts, in their weaknesses as well as their strength,—and of sympathy with many kinds of force, seems to be the secret of the spell; and this Miss Thomas sees, but she rather writes about Leonie Geueste than creates her. Tact is, in such women, we conceive, only a medium for the exorcise of their real power, which is insight, intuitive insight, not the insight produced by calculating ability ; and in Miss Geneste tact seems to be the power itself, and manner is exalted into a quality. That thorough enjoyment of existence, too, that " rejoicing in herself " on which Miss Thomas dwells so strongly, though often found in such women,—the power of being glad, which half the world lacks, being a great element in attractive- ness,—is, after all, only an accident, not an essential condition. Leonie Geueste melancholy would fetter as many men as in her most gladsome mood, and the repetition of the other idea diminishes her reality. She is a beautiful figure, but somehow we never can catch her in precisely the right light, whether with Fred Greville, when she appears a flirt, which she is not ; or Claude Hamilton, when she displays a missish timidity wholly foreign to her ; or with Percy Burgoyne, with whom she is and is not in love in a scarcely intelligible style. Leonie Geneste might have stood in all these attitudes, but still there is some one pose always natural to her which we either never see, or see only in an imperfect light. No one would venture from the account of her in this story to predict what she would do under given circumstances, whether passion would ever carry her away, whether her goodness is anything more than gentleness, whether her intellect has any power other than that given by its bright receptiveness; and the absence of this cer- tainty shows that somewhere or other there is a failure in the de- scription. Miss Thomas herself seems to see that, for she calls her " a Cleopatra with sweeter attributes," a description almost as unlike the girl she is drawing as it is possible for a description to be, so unlike as to suggest that Miss Thomas began her work with one model before her and ended with another, or as if her last very remarkable portraiture of a flirt, Kate Lethbridge, in Played Out, hung about her, and embarrassed her pen. Leonie Geneste does not seek, she only finds, love and admiration,—unconsciousness of guile is part, and great part of her power. A good Mary of Scots is a hard character to draw, and Miss Thomas has not absolutely succeeded.

The story is absolutely without a plot in the ordinary sense of the word, the authoress inventing no secret, but simply describing bow certain people comported themselves during certain events of their lives, yet the characters being real, the reader will find his interest very powerfully excited. He does not expect to be startled by any revelation, but merely to see what Leonie will do in her puzzling relation to her lover ; how Mrs. Pollock will emerge from her troubles, what will be the ultimate relation between the prosaic beauty Mabel Hamilton and her poet husband. We will not anticipate his enjoyment by a sketch of the story, merely remark- ing that nobody does anything remarkable, that Miss Thomas avoids entering that atmosphere of adultery which seems to hang like a fog over the love stories of to-day, and that he will read on to the end satisfied with everybody except the men, who are all more or less unreal. Percy Burgoyne is the least so, his enjoying yet pure nature harmonizing if not with reality, at least with the common idea of the reality of poets of his kind ; but Claude Hamilton is merely concrete Love ; and Mr. Pollock, with his love for his wife and savage harshness towards her, his careful cultiva- tion and City narrowness, his hunger for his wife's affection and belief iifher mean-natured rival, an impossibility. The men, how- ever, seldom matter in a woman's novel, and in this one the women are quite sufficient to prevent the majority of readers from even perceiving that the men are only necessary evils, to find purposes, objects, and disturbing forces for their wives and betrotheds.

Miss Thomas having a young poet to sketch, has ventured to write one or two songs for him. They are melodious, but we wonder if Percy Burgoyne wrote like that, why his writings so, charmed Leonie Geneste, or any one else out of the schoolroom_ They are quite as bad as the songs sung in most drawing-rooms.