THREE FEATHERS.*
We come to our task with a most dejected mien, feeling like a whipped hound, or, to employ an illustration that puts us in a more dignified position—for, after all, we are not to blame, though we feel as if we were—as Henry IV. must have felt when be endorsed the sentence of the Chief Justice on Harry Madcap. But justice must be done all the more rigorously on favourites, and the truth is that Mr. Black has made a sad step backwards. What inspiration could he hope from such a sorry title for his book as the emblem of the Prince of Wales, only because the Prince of Wales is Duke of Cornwall, and Cornwall is the scene of his story? Titles are indeed becoming worse than useless as sug- gestive of the contents of a book. If inn signboards will do, "The Royal Arms," or "The Lion and the Unicorn," or "The Union -Jack" would have been as much to the purpose, since Cornwall is in the British dominions. This is, however, a trifle ; neverthe- less, why should not so clever a writer epitomise the whole story in the title, as he did in the Princess of Thule' To what are we to attribute this undeniable falling-off? Can it be that Mr. Black has been spoilt with praise? If so, we are amongst those who are responsible, but how are we to know when an author will be benefited by encouragement and when by a snub? We can but speak the truth. Or perhaps he requires -the cold northern clime to brace his powers, and the bright sum- mer air of the Western Isles to clear his mental eyesight and spiritual nature ; and that Cornwall was too foggy in winter and too relaxing in summer to suit so sensitive an organisation. Or, more likely still, he divines accurately the simple, transparent nature of the Highland girl that he pictured with such delicate fidelity, and is at fault when he attempts to delineate the union, that is so rare, between the shy and loving and the guiding and ruling spirit supposed to meet in the character of Wenna Rosewarne. But Wenna, as we read her, is not this union of power and sweetness -that Mr. Black means her to be. She has no knowledge of her- self,—a want that is the invariable source of moral weakness, unless its place be supplied by high and pure impulse, waited upon by simplicity and directness of purpose. Wenna is a thinking, reasoning being, without the data that thought and reason want to make action beautiful, namely, a knowledge of her own nature and capacity. She seems to us a nice, unselfish, unwise, preachy girl ; a very ordinary type of good little person, under the Law rather than the Gospel, one who seldom knows her own mind, and who, when she does catch a glimpse of it, has to aid her only what we may call the conscientious form of moral courage, which nerves her to keep the road she is going because she has taken it and because it is a disagreeable road, and therefore in spite of what it leads to ; and has not the true, intelligent courage that looks boldly about for the really right road before it is too late, and can accept the temporary pain for others which the change of direction may bring. The influence she obtains over every one— and of which we are tired to death, for can there be a greater bore * Three Feathers. In 3 vols. By William Black. London Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle. than a person always right, and always quoted, and always looked to and relied on by everybody ?—is natural enough ; it is that of a practical person who has no scruple in speaking her mind, and who enforces her opinions by unselfish example, aided, perhaps, by the beauty of a pair of gentle brown eyes ; but hers is not the power of Sheila, who never thought of influence, but who, attracted by the clear spiritual light that shone from a nature where impulse was pure and high, and will gentle but resolute. And in detail we think Wenna a failure ; the simplicity with which she chatters to the birds and flowers in her walks, even when others are by, savours rather of the artificial childlikeness of the gushing spinster ; and her candour is sometimes rude, and her language occasionally leans towards slang ; and effusiveness, and rudeness, and slang are not quite consistent with the shy and considerate mentor we are told she is. Nothing, too, can be more ludicrously opposed to all her antecedents and all her characteristics than her selfish outbreak when a child is drowning, because her stalwart lover-- an athlete, and a master in all country exercises—jumps in to the rescue. It is an incident very clumsily invented to reveal Wenna's real feelings, but it is a monstrous artistic blunder, even more glaring than the episode of the elopement, startlingly absurd as that is, and weakly futile as is the upshot of the attempt.
But our discontent does not end here. We don't like any of the subsidiary characters much; indeed Trelyon is the only one we like at all. He is manly and faithful, but decidedly a bully, and takes a bully's way to obtain an end which, we agree with him, it was absolutely right should be obtained. But this is all we can say for this handsome piece of aristocratic flesh and blood. Roscorla is a very small-minded, but a reasonable, and eminently sober and respectable individual of fifty years of age ; and we should have thought him a very clever picture of that type of man, if he had not, with little fidelity to probability at his mature years, become cruel and vindictive, and what is still less likely, developed a taste for fast club life, as fastness is practised by elderly-gentlemen sinners. The only other characters that call for notice are Trelyon's mother—a very slight, but rather clever picture of a sentimental religionist—and Wenna's sister, a handsome, undisci- plined, reckless, self-willed and impertinent, but affectionate tom- boy. Everybody, except Treylon's nerveless mother, and not excepting Wenna, is more or less rough and rude ; they call each other names, as "you booby," "old fool," &c., speak of people as "beasts," order each other not to get into tempers, and generally patronise emphatic and uncompromising forms of speech ; and there is not one single ordinary well-behaved, well-educated lady or gentleman in the whole story.
Nor is our disappointment with the people all. Mr. Black has been so wrapped up in the love-affairs of his Devonshire heroine and Cornish heroes, that he has had almost no thought for the sea-coast scenery which he loves so well and describes so exquisitely. When it has come into the story, his hand has touched it with almost its old delicacy, but, compared with the pictures to which Mr. Black has accustomed us, it has been only a touch, and nothing more ; and perhaps the highest inspiration is wanting that was awakened by the solitariness and sadness which seem to brood over the lonely islands of the distant North, and by the solemn strangeness of the summer twilights that in midnight stillness brighten into dawn. But we are not ungrateful for the sketches we do get, from time to time, when Trelyon drives his lady-love and her friends about, with his mother's horses in his mother's phaeton, to various romantic spots on the Cornish coast. We have pictures at the Land's End, at Penzance, at Tintagel, on the Tavy, and at the little imaginary village where they all live, in winter and summer, storm and sunshine ; and though they seem few enough to read, they are too numerous to extract, and we must be content with a very few. We will begin with the scene of our story in summer :— "Over there was the sea—a fair sunnier sea ; and down into the south-west stretched a tall line of cliff, black, precipitous, and jagged, around the base of which even this blue sea was churned into seething masses of white. Close by was a church; and the very gravestones were propped up, so that they should withstand the force of the gales that sweep over those windy plains. She went across the uplands, and passed down to a narrow neck of rock, which connected with the main- land a huge projecting promontory, on the summit of which was a square and strongly built tower. On both sides of this ledge of rock the Sea from below passed into narrow channels, and roared into gigantic caves; but when once you had ascended again to the summit of the tall pro- jecting cliff, the distance softened the sound into a low, continuous murmur, and the motion of the waves beneath you was only visible in the presence of that white foam where the black cliffs met the blue sea. She went out pretty nearly to the verge of the cliff, where the close, short, wind-swept sea-grass gave way to immense and ragged masses of rock, descending sheer into the waves below ; and here she sat down, and took out a book, and began to read."
But,— Eglosilyan in winter time is a very different place from the Eglosilyan of the happy summer months. The wild coast is sombre and gloomy. The uplands are windy, and bleak, and bare. There is no shining plain of blue lying around the land, but a dark and cheerless sea, that howls in the night time as it beats on the mighty walls of black rock. It is rather a relief, indeed—to break the mournful silence of those projecting cliffs and untenanted bays—when the heavens are shaken with a storm, and when the gigantic waves wash into the small harbour, so that the coasters seeking shelter there have to be scuttled and temporarily sunk in order to save them. Then there are the fierce rains, to guard against which the seaward-looking houses have been faced with slate ; and the gardens get dank and wet, and the ways are full of mire, and no one dares venture out on the slippery cliffs."
Now we will peep at the Land's End --
"They clambered down the slopes, and went out among the huge blocks of weather-worn granite, many of which were brilliant with grey, green, and orange lichens. There was a low and thunderous noise in the air ; far below them, calm and fine as the day was, the summer sea dashed and roared into gigantic caverns, while the white foam floated out again on the troubled waves. Could anything have been more magical than the colours of the sea—its luminous greens, its rich purples, its brilliant blues, lying in long swathes on the apparently motionless surface ? It was only the seething white beneath their feet, and the hoarse thunder along the coast, that told of the force of this summer-like sea ; for .the rest the picture was light, and calm, and beautiful. Out there the black rocks basked in the sunlight, the big &karts standing on their ledges, not moving afeather. A small steamer was slowly making for the island further out, where a lighthouse stood. And far away beyond these, on the remote horizon, the Scilly Isles lay like a low bank of yellow fog, under the pale blue skies."
One more extract about the neighbourhood of beautiful Penzance, and we have done, with a fervent hope that Mr. Black may resume his unrivalled scenery-painting, and recover his power of drawing character also :—
" She remembered the rough and lonely road leading up sharp hills and getting down into valleys again ; the masses of ferns and wild flowers by the stone walls ; the wild and undulating country, with its stretches of yellow furze, its clumps of trees, and its huge blocks of gray granite. She remembered their passing into a curious little valley, densely wooded, the winding path of which was not well fitted for a broad carriage and a pair of horses. They had to watch the boughs and branches as they jolted by. The sun was warm among the foliage ; there was a resinous scent of ferns about. By-and-by the valley abruptly opened on a wide and beautiful picture. Lamorna Cove lay before them, and a cold fresh breeze came in from the sea. Here the world seemed to cease suddenly. All around them were huge rocks, and wild flowers, and trees; and far up there on their left rose a hill of granite, burning red with the sunset ; but down below them the strange little harbour was in shadow, and the sea beyond, catching nothing of the glow in the west, was grey, and mystic, and silent. Not a ship was visible on that pale plain; no human being could be seen about the stone quays and the cottages ; it seemed as if they had come to the end of the world, and were its last inhabitants. All these things Wenna thought of in after days, until the odd and plain little harbour of Lamorna and its rocks and bushes and slopes of granite seemed to be some bit of fairy- land, steeped in the rich hues of the sunset, and yet ethereal, distant, and unrecoverable."
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