YOLANDE.* Ix is unfortunate that novelists are not exempt from

the law which precludes us all from having more than one ideal woman

• Yulande. 3 vols. By William Black. London: atsemivan and Co.

or man, and we should like to rule that they should also differ from other mortals in having an equally enthusiastic love for every different aspect of nature, and an equally graphic power of portraying it. If we could have these little matters arranged to our liking, a great novelist might retain the power of in- venting enchantment for us to a green old age. But as it is, how much too soon the mind ceases to command the power of creating these charms for us, or only repeats and executes the same orders, till we turn away disappointed. William Black was once inspired to create a Princess of Thule ; or, rather, probably, to endue with all sweet perfections some

faint living resemblance to that lovely and loveable ideal of his spiritual imagination ; and only once, alas ! could he describe, to us, for the first time, that Hebridean archipelago lying in the luminous, misty light of northern summer seas. No doubt,. his Daughter of Heth was very attractive, and won a place in our hearts ; but no man can have two princesses to rule over him equally, and so it happens that having met early with his ideal woman, and having been inspired to describle her vividly, Mr.. Black attained at once his highest powers of enchanting, and. ever since has had to take a humbler place, through no fault of his own. In as far as Yolande succeeds in delighting us, it is by her modest resemblance to her elder and diviner sister, and_ if Allt-nam-ba becomes a local habitation and a name around which our affections cluster, it is because it is still in the Scotch Highlands, and can therefore claim a very distant relationship to Stornaway and Lewis.

But how can Yolande, daughter of the independent, obstruc- tive Member of Parliament, the self-possessed young lady, product of the intensely conventional French pension or ladies' school, compete with the island-born lassie, the child of nature, self-educated, or rather nurtured by nature and her own inborn or heaven-born instincts and impulses P Loving and loyal as Yolande is, she Was not a chance against Sheila ; or even against the solitary Coquette who has had no fond and we may almost say foolish father to spoil her to her heart's content, but, instead, has had to fight her way to the citadels of the affections of a stern, Scotch, Presbyterian uncle, and her manly but unmannerly cousins. Yolande is full of strength of character and devoted affection, and she is tall and beautiful, as a heroine always should be ; but she is matter- of-fact and practical to a painful extent, and self-confident over- much, and a trifle stern in what should be her tenderest relation,—her relation to her much injured and gentle invalid mother. And then she is scientific, and prepares a hortus siccus, and is exercised about the welfare of her drying-boards and blotting-paper, and interested and even anxious for the safety of her specimens, and goes the extravagant length of proposing to restore the tone of her poor mother's mind, amongst other means, by teaching her botany. We may be wrong, but we get unhappy under the influence of a scientific heroine; and our depression turns to indignation when we find her boring her long-suffering mother, by con- tinual stoppages of her pony-carriage to cull another inter- esting object of research. But above and beyond all these reasons for not feeling as entirely in captivity to Yolande as we did to Sheila and to Coquette, beyond her name, and her science, and her matter-of-factness, and her self-satisfaction, is an objec- tion which, perhaps, only an evil-minded critic, bred to censori- ousness and captiousness, would feel,—namely, inconsistency. We know that this is not really a failing in Yolande. We are sure she would never have done it. It is entirely Mr. Black's fault ; only, as he has misinformed us, and wo cannot disprove his statement, we must take it as proved that this calm, wise, eminently practical, sound-judging Yolande, this girl of prices and inventories, of foresight, prudence, punctuality, economy; this sensible girl; this model housewife, head agent, head gamekeeper, head groom, head cook, head waitress, and housemaid, actually so lost her head—no, not lost her head ; any one, even an Old-Bailey pleader, might have done that—but so contradicted all the maxims of her life, and all the results of her own reasoning and of her own experience, as deliberately to plan the reform of a poor victim of demoralising and debasing drugs by the expedient of taking the same doses herself, so as to shame and frighten her exemplar. Of course, in a. novel, the plan succeeds, but even then only by an accident ; but what becomes of the sound common-sense of a girl who does not calculate on the different effects of the same dose on an old stager and a young beginner ? and what becomes of her conscientiousness and high ideal of duty when she intentionally

and of set purpose risks self-murder, on the chance that good may come of it ? • We are quite sure that Yolande would never have agreed to the Quixotic scheme proposed to her by the excellent but high- flown Melville, and sanctioned by Mr. Shorthands, a business.

like Member of Parliament, and by her nervous and mistaken father. She would, when she understood the matter, have put them all in their right places, and urged the usual and sensible means. Mr. Black mast have been hard set for a plot, when be arranged what we may call this ridiculous conspiracy of three sensible men against the peace of the girl they all loved so well.

But the story before us does not go in for the probable at all. The father is as weak and timid as the daughter is strong and brave ; but, like her, he is, at Mr. Black's command, thoroughly inconsistent. He has sacrificed his life, all his public obliga- tions and his highest domestic duty, to 'protect and pet his Yolande, and yet allows her, without a struggle, to be exposed

to personal danger, bodily fatigue; loneliness, and anxiety, in taking up a work to which he has himself ignominiously suc- cumbed, at the bidding of two uninterested advisers,—unin- terested as far as he knew. For here comes in absurdity number three. One of these advisers, represented to be a man of deep and profound judgment, and passionately in love with Yolande, urges on the father and daughter this risky scheme, which breaks up all the daughter's happiness, but relieves the pusillani- mous father from the onus of his grave and pressing responsi- bilities.

Mrs. Winterbonrne's character, again, is anything but con- sistently drawn,—the tender, loving, docile, gentle woman is about the last person we should have picked out as likely to throw stones at and break a London hotel window. We can, in fact, say very little for the sense, not to say sanity, of the group of which Yolande is the centre ; though Mrs. Bell, indeed, is a hearty, loving, natural woman, who redeems the rest from a charge of wholesale silliness. The sketches of the other per- sonages seem to us to embrace all the talent which Mr. Black devotes in this book to his dramatis persona. We have seldom seen a better picture of what may be called sensible selfishness than that displayed in the delineation of the Master of Lynn. The de- scription of his unblushing devotion to his own absolute and unadulterated comfort rises to humour—a quality we do not remember to have often noticed in Mr. Black—in the sympathy it seems to demand from us for the Master of Lynn's simple good-faith in his own reading of his position, and for his im- perturbable good-bu mour. We should like to quote his conver- sation with the friend who comes to enlighten him as to the private history of Yolande's family, but that it is too long, and reveals too much of the story. There is something quite child- like and innocent in the simple, common-sense, and pachyder- matous insensibility to social opinion which his calm and im- moveable selfishness generates. But we will give part of the Master's letters before and after his engagement is broken off :—

" Station Hotel, Inverness, October 2nd.

"MY DEAREST YOLANDE,— Weil, the plain truth is, dear Yolande, that I have quarrelled with my father, if that can be called a quarrel which is all on one side—for I simply retire, on my part, and seek quiet in an Inverness hotel. The cause of the quarrel, or estrangement, is that he is opposed to our mar- riage; and he has been put up to oppose it, I imagine, chiefly by my aunt, the elderly and agreeable lady whom you will remember meet- ing at the Towers. 1 think I am bound in honour to let you know this ; not that it in the least affects either you or me, as fur ns our marriage is concerned, for I am old enough.to manage my own affairs; but in order to explain a discourtesy which may very naturally have offended your father, and also to explain why I, feeling ashamed of the whole business, hero rather kept back, and so failed to thank your father, as otherwise I should hare done, for his kindness to me. Of course, I knew very well when we became engaged in Egypt that my father, whose political opinions are of a fine old crusted order, would be rather aghast at my marrying the daughter of the Member for Slagpool ; but I felt sure that when be saw you and know you, dear Yolande, ho .would have no further objection ; and indeed I did not anticipate that the eloquence of my venerated aunt would have deprived him of the use of his senses. One ought not to write so of one's parent, I know ; but facts are facts ; and if you are driven out of your own home through the bigotry of an old man and the cattish temper of an old woman, and if you have the most angelic of sisters taken to nagging at you with letters, and if you are forced into the Rweet seclusion of no hotel adjoining a railway station, then the humour of the.whole affair begins to be apparent, and you may be inclined to call things by their real names I should not be at all surprised to hear from you that you had imagined something of the state of the case; for you must have wondered at their not asking you and your father to dinner, or something of the kind, after Polly taking you to the Towers when you first catne north ; but at all events, this is

how we situated now, and I should be inclined to make a joke of the whole affair, if it were not that when I think of you I feel a little bit

indignant. Of course, it cannot matter to you—not in the least. It is disagreeable, that is all. If dogs delight to bark and bite, it does not much matter so long as they keep their barking and biting among themselves. It is rather hard, certainly, when they take possession of your house, and turn you out into the street ; especially when you have a lovely sister come, and accuse you of having no higher ambition in life than playing billiards with commercial travellers. I shall bang on here, I expect, until our other tenants—they who have the forest— leave for the south ; then I shall be able to make some final arrange- ments with our agent here ; after which I shall consider myself free.

Perhaps, if I go away for a while, the people at Lynn may come to their senses. Polly has been at them once or twice; she is a warm ally of yours; but to tell you the truth I would not have you made the subject of any appeal. No word of that kind shall come from me. Most likely when the lath of the people that the Grahams have with them at Inverstroy have gone, Polly may go over to Lynn and establish herself there, and have a battle-royal with my revered aunt. Of course, I would not bother you with the details of this wretched family squabble if I did not think• that some explana- tion were due both to you and to your father. I shall be glad to bear from you, if you are not too much occupied.—Yours affectionately,

ARCHIE LESLIE."

" MY DEAREST YOLANDE,' he wrote, am inexpressibly grieved that you should have given yourself the pain to write such a letter ; and you might have known that whenever you wished our engage- ment to cease I should consider you had the right to say so ; and so far from accusing you or doing anything in the tragedy line, I should beg to be allowed to remain always your friend. And it won't take any length of time for me to be on quite friendly terms with yon—if you will let me; for I am so now ; and if I saw you to-morrow, I should bo glad of your companionship for as long as you chose to give it me ; and I don't at all think it impossible that we may have many another stroll along the streets of Inverness, when you come back to the Highlands, as you are sure to do. Of course I am quite sensible of what I have lost—yon can't expect me to be otherwise ; and I clammy, if all the circumstances had been propitious, and if we had married, we should have got on very well together—for when Polly attributes everything that happens to my temper, that is merely because she is in the wrong, and can't find any other ex- cuse; whereas, if you nud I bad got married, I fancy we should have agreed very well, so long as no one interfered. But to tell you the honest truth, my dear Yolande, I never did think you were very anxious about it; you seemed to regard our engagement as a very light matter—or is something that would please everybody all round ; and though I trusted that the future would right all that—I mean that we should become more intimate and affectionate—still, there would have been a risk ; and it is only common sense to regard these things now, as some consolation, and as some reason why, if you say, Let us break off this engagement,' I should say, ' Very well ; but let us continue our friendship.' But there is a tremendous favour I would beg and entreat of you, dearest Yolande ; and you always had the most generous disposition—I never knew you refuse anybody any- thing (I do believe that was why you got engaged to me—because you thought it would please the Grahams and all the rest of us). I do hope that you will consent to keep the people at Lyun in ignor- ance—they could only know through Polly, and you could keep it beck from her—as to who it was, or why it was, that our engagement was broken off. This is not from vanity ; I think you will say I haven't shown much of that sort of distemper. It is merely that I may have the whip-hand of the Lynn people. They have used me badly ; and I mean to take care that they ddn't serve me so again ; and if they imagine that our engagement has been broken off solely, or even partly, through their opposition, that will be a weapon for me in the future. And then the grounds of their opposition—that they or their friends might have to associate with one professing such opinions as those your father owns ! You may rest assured, dearest Yolande, that I did not put you forward and make any appeal; and equally I knew you would resent my making any apology for your father, or allowing that any consideration on their part was demanded. It's no use reasoning with raving maniacs; I retired. But I mention this once more as an additional reason why, if our engagement is to be broken off, wo should make up our minds to look on the best side of affairs, and to part on the best of terms ; for I mast confess more frankly to you now that there would have been some annoyance, and you would naturally have been angry on account of your father, and I should have taken your side, and there would simply have been a series of elegant family squabbles. There are one or two other points in your letter that I don't touch on ; except to say that I hope you will write to me again —and soon ; and that you will write in a very different tone. I hope you will see that many things justify you in so doing; and I hope I have made this letter as plain as can be. I have kept back nothing ; so you needn't be reading between the lines. If you have nc time to write a letter, send me a few words to show that you arc in a more cheerful mood. If you don't, I shouldn't wonder if I broke through all social observances, and presented myself at your door—to convince you that you have done quite right, and that everything is well, and that you have given me a capital menus of having it out with the Lynn people when the prope?time comes. So please let me have a few lines; and in the meantime I hope I may be allowed to sign myself, yours most affectionately, A. LESLIE."

The Master's sister, Polly, is another admirable sketch of a good- humoured and affectionate woman and warm partisan, with a great love of admiration, and a healthy-minded desire to lessen the family difficulties and add substantially to the family property.

The exquisite descriptions of scenery and atmospheric effects which, in his earlier novels, were such a notable feature of Mr. Black's writings, are not to be found in Yolande; hints of the

well-remembered beauty are given here and there ; a few lines of description in the Mediterranean, and again on the Nile, re- call the delight we once had in them ; and in the Highlands the whole tenor of the story, the incidents and the daily order of life, make one entirely realise that one is living almost amongst the clouds, on the edge of the boundless, lonely moors, and amongst the corries and glens and streams of the mountains, liable to squalls and freshets and blinding mists, and protected by almost inaccessibly steep and bad roads from the rest of mankind ; a realisation sometimes bringing a sense of delight- ful exultation, sometimes of pleasing sadness, not seldom of fear, according to the prevailing state of mind. But the im- pressions of the grand and the wild and beautiful thus given are not quotable, for the scene in each case is too mixed up with incident. The opening of the second volume, however, is almost an exception, and gives so exhilarating a sensation of the long-vacation holiday of which we are on the eve, that we will close our notice by exciting this delightful feeling :—

" Far up in the wild and lonely hills that form the backbone, as it were, of eastern Inverness-shire, in the desert solitudes where the Findhorn and the Foyers first begin to draw their waters from a thousand mystic-named or nameless rills, stands the lodge of Alit- nam-ba. The plain little doable-gabled building, with its dependencies of kennels, stables, coachhouse, and keepers' bothy, occupies a pro- montory formed by the confluence of two brawling streams ; and faces a long, wide, beautiful valley, which terminates in the winding waters of a loch. It is the only sign of habitation in the strangely silent district ; and it is the last. The rough hill-road leading to it terminates there. From that small plateau, divergent curries—softly wooded most of them are, with waterfalls half hidden by birch and rowan trees—stretch up still farther into a sterile wilderness of moor and lochan and bare mountain-top, the haunt of the ptarmigan, the red deer, and the eagle ; and the only sound to be heard in these voiceless altitudes is the monotonous murmur of the various burns.

Since she (Yolande) had come to live at A.11t-nam-ba she had acquired the conviction that the place seemed very close up to the sky ; and that this broad valley, walled in by those great and silent hills, formed a sort of caldron, in which the elements were in the habit of mixing up weather for transference to the wide world beyond. At this very moment, for example, a con- tinual phantasmagoria of cloud-effects was passing before her eyes. Far mountain-tops grew blacker and blacker in shadow ; then the gray mist of the rain stole slowly across and bid them from view ; then they reappeared again, and a sadden shaft of sunlight would strike on the yellow-green slopes and on the boulders of wet and glittering granite. But she had this one consolation—that the pro- spect in front of the lodge was much more reassuring than that behind. Behind—over the mountainous ranges of the moor—the clouds were banking up in a heavy and thunderous purple ; and in the ominous silence the streams coming down from the corries sounded loud ; whereas, away before her, the valley that led down to the haunts of men was for the most part flooded with brilliant sunlight, and the wind-swept loch was of the darkest and keenest blne."