MR. WILT JAM BLACK'S RECENT NOVEL.* Li none of Mr.
William Black's novels has be trusted to so slender a thread of story as in this one, in which, nevertheless, he breaks entirely new ground, and departs with daring inde- pendence from all the conventionalities of novel-writing, pro- ducing a book which is partly a story and partly a narrative of travel in America and its impressions. We do not anticipate that Green Pastures and Piccadilly will find a reception by the multitude at all so cordial as that which has greeted all the author's works since he won the public ear by A Daughter of Heth; it lacks many of the qualities of a thoroughly popular novel, but it has several admirable points, and for certain readers, those who like to dwell upon isolated passages of a book, and care more for the tone and the mind that are in it than for the story, it possesses a peculiar charm. Like other writers who have established themselves in public favour by previous achievements above the common, Mr. William Black is his own most dangerous rival. We did not compare his "Madcap Violet" with the heroines of Mr. Trollope or Mrs. Oliphant ; we compared her with Wenna, of Three Feathers, and that charming but provoking Cornish girl we compared with the peerless Shiela. Again the same process repeats itself, and in Green Pastures and Piccadilly we are bound to acknowledge that the historian of Lady Silvia Balfour and her matrimonial mistakes and miseries has no chance against the biographer of Mrs. Lavender. It is not that the hand which has sketched such charming combinations of feminine delicacy and strength, sweetness and wilfulness, rectitude and impulsiveness, has lost its cunning, but that the artist has been tempted into exaggeration by the demands of a disjointed subject, and has been satisfied with a weak motive, and has not justified it by so handling his characters as to make the weakness of the motive of the chief action of the book not only pardon- able, but natural. The fallings-out of lovers of the wedded order are favourite themes with Mr. Black, and no one has ever made the quarrelling ones so interest- ing, or when they "kiss again, with tears," so truly touching • Green Pastunts end .Pir,eadilly. By William Black, Author of" The Strange Adventures' of a Phaeton," Sc. London Macmillan and Co. and so little silly ; but in this particular case he makes the pretext of the quarrel too futile and the parties to it too foolish for belief—even, indeed, for make-believe—and the unreality, the sense that the husband and wife part merely that the scene of Mr. Black's admirable pictures may be shifted from Piccadilly to the "green pastures" of the Far West, spoil the effect of the story, as a story. At the same time, it is no small triumph for a novelist to be so good a writer that he can afford to, trifle with his story, and his readers, after such a fashion ; the question is whether he does not overstep the licence of a novelist, and break the unwritten laws of his art, by doing so ? We are of opinion that he does, and we do not think the fact that we have read the book with great pleasure, and re-read many passages in it with increased appreciation, is a plea in mitigation of Mr. Black's mistake.
In Green Pastures and Piccadilly we find the delightful party who drove through England in a phaeton a few years ago, and drew everybody in their track for many months, playing a professedly subordinate, but really important part. In this respect, and in another, Mr. Black has adopted Mr. Trollope's method, and though we like the ane„ being always glad to meet Bell and her Uhlan Baron, we do not like the other. Mr. Trollope's travelling troupe, with the Duke and Duchess of Omnium, and Phineas Finn and his rich wife, may make their tours to the end of time, and take in a few new characters at each stage, in order to produce combinations more or less comicallptragic, or- tragically-comic, without becoming intolerable. Bell and the Baron and Queen T— may have a finger in every pie, or plot, of Mr. Black's concocting, but he would do better not to make them accrete to themselves politicians. Mr.. Trollope is a master of the mechanism and the manceuvring of political life ; he understands its springs, can talk its jargon, and is especially conversant with its littlenesses. Mr. Black is not at home among these things, which are adapted to the inveterately prosaic character of Mr. Trollope's mind. Mr. Black's is as in- veterately poetic, and he can no more emulate the political " shop ' of Mr. Trollope, than the biographer of Lady Glencora could paint the earth and the sky, the rocks, the seas, the prairie, and the desert as the author of Green Pastures and Piccadilly paints them, getting at our hearts with his words, and making us thrill with elation or sink into sadness, as he wills. Mr. Balfour is a failure ; he is not real, he creaks like a mechanical toy ; he is not in love with Lady Sylvia, Lady Sylvia is not in love with him, and Mr. Black does not care about either of them. He merely uses them as Mr. Trollope uses Ferdinand Lopez, and Emily Wharton in his latest avatar of " Planty Pall" and Lady Glencora, because he wants to give us his own impressions of travel in America, through the media of his pleasant friends of the famous phaeton, and finds it necessary to introduce some new blood (and thunder) into the narrative. Lady Sylvia is never interesting until after her friends take her to America, when the absurd separation between herself and her husband, on the grounds of his attending the House of Commons as M.P., and her not choosing to live in London during the :session (it must be con- fessed this is a little audacious on Mr. Black's part), has been agreed to. From that time we begin to like her, because Mr. Black takes a real interest in her ; he has surmounted, or at least disposed of, the mechanical difficulties of his task, and he is in his element—that of high spirits, free air, and movement, the music which he hears in the voices and the poetry which he reads off from the face of mature, and be is at liberty to indulge the play of a keenly humorous fancy, which revels in escape from artificial forms of life_ All the personages of the story profit by exchanging Picca- dilly for Green Pastures, and even those readers who never come to care for the people at all, must yield to the charm of the picturesqueness and the drollery of the author's style. We should have been disposed to defy even Mr. Black to write a description of Niagara which should force us to read it, had we known beforehand that he intended to describe Niagara ; never- theless he has forced us to read his description much oftener than once, and to feel lost in its grandeur, likewise to laugh suddenly at his funny picture of the Baron in the Cave of the Winds, "with Niagara tumbling on his head, trying to keep his spectacles dry" by the aid of a wet pocket-handkerchief. A more enticing description of an ocean voyage has surely never been written than we find in this book. The Atlantic " passage " has been narrated probably some hundreds of times, but this story of it reads like something new ; and so it is all through the "Green Pastures" division of the book. A delightful sense of enjoyment, leisure,
and yet briskness, quick observation, but of an original and humorous kind, and the constant presence of such an intense love of Nature as might make Mr. Black an eligible high-priest of pantheism, pervade the second and third volumes, which abound in passages that we should like to quote. The following, selected almost at random, is a beautiful picture of the "widening of the St. Lawrence River which is known as the 'Lake of a Thousand Islands "—
" But surely this is neither a river nor a lake that begins to disclose itself,—stretching all across the western horizon, with innumerable islands, and grey rocks, and dark clusters of firs, and bold sweeps of silver where a current passes through the dark-green reflections of the trees. It is more like a submerged continent just reappearing above the surface of the sea, for as far as the eye can range there is nothing visible but this glassy plain of water, with islands of every form and -magnitude, wooded down to the edge of the current. It is impossible to say which is our channel and which is the shore of tho mainland ; we are in a wilderness of water, and rock, and tree, in unceasing combinations, in perpetual, calm, dream-like beauty. And as we open up vista after vista of this strange world, seeing no sign of life, from horizon to horizon, but a few wild duck that go whirring by, the rich colours in the west deepen ; the sun sinks red behind some flashing clouds of gold ; there is a wild glare of rose and yellow that just misses the water, but lights -up the islands as if with fire ; one belt of pine in the west has become a deep violet, while all around the eastern sky there is a low-lying flush of pink. And then, when the sun has gone, behold ! there is a pale, clear, beautiful green all across the west, and that is barred with russet, purple, and orange; and the shadows along the islands have grown dusky and solemn. It is a magical night. The pale, lambent twilight still Hs the world, and is too strong for the stars,—unless we are to regard as golden planets the distant lights of the lighthouses that steadily burn above the rocks. There is a grey, metallic lustre on the sur- face of the lake, now ruffled by the cool winds of the night. And still we -go gliding by those dark and silent islands, having the sharp, yellow ray of a lighthouse now on this side and now on that ; and still there -seems to be no end to this world of shadowy foliage, and rock, and gleaming water. Good night, good night,' before the darkness comes down! The Lake of a Thousand Islands has burned itself into our memory in flashes of rose-colour and gold."
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