DEAR LADY DISDAIN.*
MR. MCCARTHY has given us another pleasant story ; a clever, bright tale of nineteenth-century life, in at least one of its aspects, told without a tench of the bitterness which spoils so many of our modern novels. Mr. McCarthy has a very clear insight into character, though such insight sometimes fails to find adequate expression ; but in common with most men who see deep enough, he is never unkindly. And his book has a distinct merit—now exceedingly rare when the writing is good—it ends happily. We do not think we shall spoil any readers' pleasure by assuring them
" Dear Lady Disdain. By Justin McCarthy. London: Grant and Co.
beforehand of that little fact. The elements of which the story is made up are simple enough. There is no lost will, no murder,. no morbid or unhealthy passion. The clever, unscrupulous finan- cier and his high-spirited, kindly daughter, the young civil engi- neer and the ex-hairdresser's apprentice, with dear old Dione Lyle• for earthly providence, form the principal dramatis persona of the book,—that is, so far as the actual story is concerned ; from a literary point of view, the subordinate characters are worth far the most attention. Marie Challoner and Christmas Pembroke are- well-drawn and natural enough, with a touch here and there revealing a promise for their future, stronger than might other- wise be gathered, as where Christmas, telling Dione Lyle (his father's early friend) of his hopeless love for Marie, stops her- regret that they have ever met by saying, " Don't wish that : I don't want to lose the memory of anything that has happened s. I'll come all right,—I mean I'll fight my way on through life ! 'r words almost boyish in their simplicity, but with a true ring in them, telling of a love which, though unhappy, had strengthened, not embittered him. And so in Marie's interview with her- father, the father she bad well-nigh worshipped, and with whose- worser self she is only dimly beginning to be acquainted, the light-hearted, somewhat too unconscious girl, who up to that moment has struck us as a little hard, comes out in a new light, as she tells the father she has never in her life pained before, that she will not fulfil the engagement into which he has drawn her. But we will not spoil that scene by making scanty extracts. Sir John, Challoner himself we all know well enough,—the unscrupulous,. self-made man, against whom nobody has any direct charge, who contrives to keep within the letter, if not the spirit of the law, and who, having won money, thirsts for position. Kindly- and gentle-tempered at home, where money has in his case greased most of the wheels of life, loving no one but his child, he would sacrifice even her happiness to the chance of seeing her a peeress, and hopes to accomplish his object not by violence and tyranny, but by guarding against her ever having a clear understanding of any other possibility being open to her. Such clear understanding would, he was well aware, be fatal to his schemes, and he took care to be at hand to mystify or explain away everything that- might enlighten Marie as to her true position. "A timely muddying of the waters is often a great advantage in such cases, and Challoner had great faith in the muddying of the waters."- Of the character of Ronald Vidal, Pembroke's rival, we have clear- indication in a very few words. All through the story we see the shallow-brained, would-be clever dilettante, who understands no- thing, and can talk about everything ; a good-natured young man, but one who has found out that " conversations are more- freely carried on by means of censure than by means of praise." And " like most persons whoare quick in observing externals and noticing little weaknesses, Vidal had scarcely any perception of character, or faculty of arriving at the real feelings of others." The story opens extremely well. Pembroke's father dies on his way home from Japan, leaving his son with a fair education and small' means to make his way in the world. Chance makes him witness in the settlement of a street-quarrel soon after he lands in London, and his name gets into the papers, and is seen by an old friend of his father's. "had he hesitated in Pall Mall, or turned up St. James's Street, instead of walking on;. and then turning up the Haymarket,"—well, his story might not have been written. "' I begin to believe in Destiny,' Christmas- said to himself, pleased, as we all are, to think Destiny has a. particular eye upon us." In the course of his history Christmas meets Sybil Jansen; meets her at the house of one Mrs. Seagraves, who is so patent a caricature that it is impossible to read of her without wondering where we have met the original. " Mrs. Sea- grave's Sunday-evening receptions were generally well attended, but chiefly by people whom one never saw anywhere else. They had a sort of little fame in their way. The people even in Cavendish Square had probably never heard of them, but French artists and poets had talked of them in Paris, and owing to the descriptions given by several correspondents of the journals, New York was under the impres- sion that Mrs. Seagraves' receptions were about the most remark- able thing in London, while Chicago firmly believed them to be the principal object of a vi-it to Europe." Here is a passing sketch of the woman who reigns in this little world :— ‘" Now this is kind of you, you dear darlings, both l' Mrs. Seagraves exclaimed with fervour, as they entered her drawing-room, and she swirled towards them in her trailing tawny-green silk with pale yellow flowers worked into it. 'Yes, I call you dear darlings both of you, Sir John as well, for coming to see me. And Sir John so busy too—with finance and companies t I do so wish I understood finance. It must be so nice. But exacting isn't it?—oh yes, very, very exacting. That makes it so kind of Sir John, Marie dear, to break away from alibis occupations and come here with you.'"
Yet it wasn't a bad little world that gathered itself together in that drawing-room; there were at least, as Mr. McCarthy observes, no vapid people in it, and that is saying a good deal. And it was here, as we have said, that Christmas Pembroke met Sybil Jansen, the young and pretty, but bitter, and to a casual and unsympathetic observer the certainly very disagreeable, advocate of the rights of women. But though on her small platform, she finds it easy enough to clench her pretty hands, and in somewhat different phrase exclaim,— " You men have done it ; how I hate you all!"
She cau cry herself to sleep for the bitter things which, in spite of her truer self, she has said to Pembroke in particular. And Pembroke finds it difficult to understand the little priestess of the future as he finds her in her own home (one of the homes of which Belgravia knows so little), in which she is simply the loving, un- selfish daughter of a deeply-wronged mother who dotes on her :—
"'Have you looked at mamma's portrait?' Sybil asked; and she held up a lamp for him to see the painting. 'It was done by Westwood —ho was an Academician, you know.' (Christmas did not know, but was ready to believe.) 'Is it not a wonderful likeness?"'
The portrait is of a slender, soft, and handsome woman, wearing a bat and feathers ; and Christmas finds it difficult to trace the likeness in it to the feeble and wasted woman who is beside him mildly deprecating Sybil's enthusiasm, and reminding her of the changes wrought to other eyes, by age and altered circumstances :—
". It seems wonderfully like, to me,' Sybil said, holding up her lamp, and gazing fondly at the picture. cannot see any change. The farthest memory I have, mamma, is of you just like that ; only not the same kind of dross; and I cannot see any change.'—' One good thing about common misfortune,' said the elder lady, ' is that it keeps up a sympathy and love that perhaps other people don't have. Sybil is everything to me, Mr. Pembroke; and I suppose I am a good deal to her. Sybil, dear, will you make tea?'"
Sybil making toast and tea; with feminine tact supplying the lack of servants without an apparent effort, and brightening the life of the well-bred but heart-weary and faded mother, was altogether another person to the fierce and palpitating little prophetess of the platform whom Pembroke had known. We give Mr. McCarthy credit for his knowledge of human nature that even so, Christmas does not, even for a moment, fall in love with her. The pale grey sky which overshadows the lives of mother and daughter, and against which poor little Sybil rebels so fiercely, is never lifted as far as we know.
After all, the cleverest scenes in this book are laid in America. The author has not studied American manners for nothing, and the career of Natty Cramp, ex-hairdresser's as- sistant, in search of fame is extremely edifying. The civilisa- tion of the Old World has not been propitious to Natty Cramp's advancement,—he has found certain social barriers very difficult to overleap. Nor are his talents of an order to command the attention of a pre-occupied public. He resolves to try America, and landing at New Jersey, tries to persuade himself that the fresh breath of freedom is already filling him with new manhood. " But New York," observes Mr. McCarthy, " is in some ways a discouraging place to land at." And he proceeds to describe the absence of cabs and street- porters, the vexations of Custom-House examinations, and the difficulty of finding one's way generally, till we quite under- stand how poor young Cramp must have felt when he found himself for the first time in an unknown world, thrown entirely upon his own resources. He had an idea that the United States, and New York in particular, were waiting eagerly to be instructed in anything by European, especially by Englishmen. " Having failed utterly in London, he thought he must be qualified to suc- ceed in New York. His idea was to give lectures and write books, poems especially. He soon found that every second per- son in America delivers lectures, and that every village has, at least, three poets,--two women and one man." He makes the acquaintance of the editor of a spiritualist journal, of a German baker who has a small shop in Fourth Avenue—and Fourth Avenue, Mr. McCarthy observes, is to Fifth Avenue as Knights- bridge is to Park Lane or Piccadilly—and he is introduced to a lady who wears trowsers and calls herself the Rev. Theodosia Judd. This aspect of American life is held up to quiet, not unkindly ridicule, and is very cleverly enlarged upon in its various phases as existing in New York, in" Acroceraunia "and " Pancarusky City." But when the foes of everything American have had their laugh, the author does not fail to remind them, with a lurking smile which nearly turns the laugh against themselves, that "the influence of these persons over New York was decidedly limited," and although they endeavoured to get up an audience for Natty at "a very little hall in a cross-street far up town," the public did not rush
in ; and even though the Spiritualist Journal had announced him as Professor Cramp, and even as "Dr. Cramp, the cele- brated author and lecturer from London, England," New York, as a community, remained absolutely unawakened to any know- ledge of his existence. Natty Cramp could scarcely have earned five shillings a week by penny-a-lining in England, yet he does get on to the staff of a " New Paduan paper" through the help of Professor Clinton, " whose name is distinguished even in Europe," and who in "New Padua " is Professor of Astronomy, and is in charge of the Observatory. And apparently be does not discover the hopeless ignorance of the young Englishman whom he starts in a new career ! The extreme ability with which Mr. McCarthy has sketched the growth of some of the huge yet mushroom cities of the Great West, with the state of society developed therein, has tempted us to be somewhat hypercritical when the situation betrays an anachronism, as we think it does in the relation established between Professor Clinton and Natty Cramp ; but the general interest of the story is not affected thereby, and it is not as a political or literary essay on the growth of American civilisation, but as a clever and amusing novel, that we heartily recommend the book.
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