22 AUGUST 1874, Page 17

LONELY CARLOTTA.*

IT is not fair to allow its title to have weight in one's judgment of a book, but it is difficult to avoid being prejudiced by it to some extent. Lonely Carlotta is not attractively named, and dreariness, old-maidism, the set gray life, or else a determined eccentricity, are suggested by the phrase ; because we usually associate the title of a novel .with the outcome of the story, and in this instance we naturally anticipate that Carlotta is to leave off as she begins,—lonely. It is a kindness to both writer and reader to state at once that such is not the case, and that the book is better than its title.

No situation has been more extensively employed by writers of fiction than that of the young girl who has to leave the foreign country of her birth just at the dawn of womanhood, and come to England, to the house of stranger-relatives, and the trials of an un- known sphere and unfamiliar society. The ephemera among novelists resort to this central idea in many more instances than we could undertake to enumerate ; and even Mr. Trollope (with whose mother it was a favourite device, and one which she used with her characteristic effect, coarse, but telling,) has employed it in Ralph the Heir. It has passed into so well-established an ex- pedient in the mechanism of novel-writing, that no one thinks of reckoning its use as copying, borrowing, annexing, or any other flagitious meddling with the goods of preceding or contemporary writers ; the worst impression it produces is that there is less originality than might be desired, in the case of the novelist who appeals to its handy aid. The author of Lonely Carlotta has adopted the good old expedient, but has ingeniously in- vested it with novelty in the method of its application, and subjected the young stranger in a strange land to a succession of adventures and experiences anything but hackneyed and conventional. This would have been a better novel if it had been less ambitious, if it had given the kaleidoscope of society in London a less number of turns, and if the writer had made studies of journalists and their business from the life. The story of Carlotta Figueiras has all our attention and.

* Lonely Carlotta. By A. E. N. Bewicke. 3 vols. London: Bentley.

good-will, but when we come upon abstract disquisitions, and dreary dialogues upon the tendencies of modern philosophical re- search ; when we are expected to follow the mental processes of learned, lecture-loving young ladies—so that the book reads like a serious version of Mrs. Trollope's absurd, but caustic and amusing, Laurringtons—we are impressed with the conviction that all this has been frequently, and better, said before. Carlotta, the pretty, brown, convent-bred, Portuguese girl—who longs to know some- thing of the world, "if only to learn how wicked it is "—is introduced in a charming sketch of the island of Madeira ; and though her naiveté runs into epigram too liberally for nature, she is a very taking little person, though rather greedy, and decidedly given to flirtation. When she goes out of the convent at Funchal, to pass a day with a kind relative, for only the second time in her life, and finds her- self all alone on a terrace overlooking the sea, gazing through a telescope which she does not quite know how to manage, at a corvette slowly tacking into Funchal Bay, the experienced novel- reader knows at once that Lonely Carlotta's " fate " is on board that graceful corvette. That she should meet her fate at her very first party, and not only tell him that she "cares for" him, and will readily agree either to wait for him five years, or to marry somebody else, in the hope that the accommodating somebody may die just in time to make things generally pleasant ; but also should "meet his lips with a frank, hearty kiss, much as she had in years long ago given to her big wax doll," is perhaps rather startling, regarded as a result of conventual education, but simply read as a story, it is pretty and pleasant enough. The little ways of the girl, her rich and rosy beauty ; her funny similes, drawn from the intramural convent life ; her mutability, her quaint conviction that the marvels of the lives of the Saints are every-day occurrences, and that in her first white muslin dress she is very like, and quite as beautiful, as an angel, are attractive, and the contrast of the London home and the English cousins to whom she is going is worked out with considerable humour. When we get to the Andersons' house at Clapham, with its loud-ticking clocks, its prosperous orderliness, in which the decease of Mr. Anderson has made no difference, so perfect is the "manage- ment ;" where Liberal opinions prevail, and the household is never "put out" by anything ; a house "in which some people feel good at once, but which has quite a different effect on others, somewhat strangely constituted "—we feel that there is trouble in store for the pretty brown Papist, whose notion of enjoying herself before she meets her fate, and after she is tired of the telescope, is thus described :—

" All on a sudden she grew tired of her solitude, hung her head, and looked as sorrowful as a dog when nobody pats his head She walked, pouting, up a long gravel path that led up to the house, situ- ated in the midst of its garden, as is the case in most of the Quints& about Funchal. But as she walked along this path between its two thick hedges of sweet-scented wild geraniums, she passed under a corri- dor over which was trained a magnificent cloth-of-gold rose, and pressed one of the great golden flowers against her little finely-shaped nose, that distended itself to suck up the sweet perfume, quite regardless of all laws of beauty. Then for a moment or two she stood quite still, smiling very sweetly and showing her pretty white teeth. As she did so, anyone might have thought some pretty girlish vision of the future had come into her mind ; but no, in a minute the little brown hand was stretched out shyly, and two large red strawberries were conveyed. to the greedy little mouth. Carlotta was decidedly greedy at this time. of her life, and quite capable of over-eating herself. These strawberries had the great additional charm that she was not quite sure if she was. allowed to gather them, and she went on sedately towards the house, with the full intention of being particularly good after having committed so many doubtful actions that morning."

The dog has to hang its head a good deal at the Andersons- where the male cousins are going to marry "prudently," and_ the female cousins are absorbed in advanced science and afternoon receptions — and when the hand comes to pat it, it is a very wrong hand indeed ; the hand of a married man, and of a journalist, equally brilliant, successful, dishonest, and impossible. Our serious cause of quarrel with the author of Lonely Carlotta is Roscoe Digby. The novel is more than read- able ; the style is brisk, pleasant, and clever ; some amusing oddities are brightly- sketched ; the perplexities of Jack Ander- son, sorely tempted to waver in his fidelity to his prudent betrothed, by the brilliant Portuguese girl, with all a cousin's bewitching familiarities, and all an odd little foreign beauty's fascinations, are put with ready humour ; the tragical story of the banished Russian, Prince Vladimir, his Nadine, and their treach- erous friend, is told with real power—(it is a little too like Enault's novel, Les Perks Noires; but the borrowed material is admirably, used)—and the fanciful little heroine is really charming. But the- story is spoiled and the common-sense of the reader is offended

by the exhibition, as a man held in admiration among his fellows, of the individual thus described by one of the Andersons :—

"Digby, the barrister, writes for the Tontine,' does he not?" asked Harry Anderson.—"Yes, for the ' Tonans,' and for the Fulminans ' too, and half-a-dozen more. He took the advanced Ritualistic line about vestments when that controversy was going on, and was the man the Evangelicals relied upon about Baptismal Regeneration. Of late he has rather abandoned religious controversy, and confines himself to sup- porting diametrically opposite views upon science. He says that it economises men, and that the man who has written upon one side of a subject has necessarily thought out all the objections, and is therefore best calculated to write upon the other."

This gentleman is the shining light of the Anderson circle, and in their well-ordered and liberal-minded society, he feels inclined to write for the Tonans ' and the Fulminans ' both at once. He gives his young wife, a Calvinist by education, an account of himself thus, when he has shocked her into remonstrance by talking materialism with his accustomed brilliancy :— " Yon read those papers of mine in the Tonans Did you ever dream I wrote an answer to them in the Ftilminans 7 No, of course not ; you would never read that paper, any more than you would read the 4 Free-Thinker.' I have written for that, too, written for anything that -would take my papers and pay me. To-night I was in the humour for the 4 Free-Thinker ;' to-morrow, very likely. I may be in the humour for the 4 Fulminans;' the day after I may be in the 'Essays and Reviews' line."

We do not believe in the possibility of a Mr. Roscoe Digby, but the writer of Lonely Carlotta has a right to invent the dreary _figment. What the author has not a right, to do is to repre- sent him as a shining light in the profession of journalism, and in respectable and cultivated society. We hope the author's next novel will have all the qualities of this one, and will be free from its defects ; which are chiefly the cultivation of smartness at the expense of truth, and a tendency to mistake mere oddity for

the eccentricity with which it is a lamentably common error to couple genius.