TRICOTRIN'.* Jr is not difficult after reading this novel to

understand the causes of Guide's success, a success which,'to judge from the dedication to the American people, has extended to the other side of the

Atlantic. Tricotrin, whatever its faults, is not tame, or common-place, or neutral in tint. On the contrary, it shows abundance of colour, often, we think, inharmonious, and often profuse, but always brilliant and frequently effective. Sentences which make little pictures meet us as we read. Here is one of a town in Southern France :— "The white long road, poplar-fringed and without shadow, which led to the small, still, grey tower, whose peaked roofs and pointed towers were rising faraway out from a mass of autumn-tinted orchards."

And here is one of a scene on the Loire :— " The hay-barge slowly floating in the moon-light with its load of freshcot grasses, odorous as violets. It drifted through the broad, sheeted, silver radiance lazily, charmingly, with its great sail Wick against the sky, and the fragrant dews on its huge soft mounds of fodder that were tossed loosely together, with the wild clover and the white marguerites, scarcely dead, that had been mown with them."

This would have been better, the reader will have observed, if two or three of the epithets had been retrenched. The next is more simply worded and more effective :—

" A thrush was singing his little heart out upon a plume of pear-tree blossom, the house-door stood wide open, with the sun streaming in over the bare, clean, wooden floor ; a cluster of pigeons were balanced on the edge of a brown earthern dish, eating its grain undisturbed ; a groat knot of white lilies and moss roses, thrust into a broad pan of water, filled the house with perfume."

Sometimes we come to good things of another kind. There is a certain bitter pungency of remark here, for instance :

"What will become of the world ? Nobody knows. If it disappear

to-morrow, it will not be missed in the ,universe. There is a falling star; look at it, my dear,' some man in Jupiter will say to his wife. That will be all the world's monody."

Why " monody," we may ask, as the word does not necessarily include any meaning of lament ? But Ouida does not always twe the fine words which he loves so much with perfect correctness. Re speaks of a tyrannis, for instance, when he means not a tyranny, but a tyrant, and the blunder is repeated too often to allow us to attribute it to the printer. Generally speaking, the style is wanting in restraint, in compression, and in taste. An ornament is never wanting wherever it can by any possibility be attached. When the attention is demanded by some crisis of action or passion, it is often called off to admire some felicity of description. And the rhetoric, which, after description, is the writer's strongest point, is often strangely incongruous. He endows all his characters with the gift. Dukes, duchesses, vagabonds philosophic or villainous, actresses, peasant women, fishermen, have all the same power of fluent, biting, epigrammatic speech. Here is a specimen of the oration of a wrecker, a mere savage, whom the hero Tricotrin has surprised in the very act of lighting a false beacon, and has brought down for the judgment of his fellows :— "Ye curs! ye were willing enough to take a stoup of my rich rod drinks for yourselves, and a roll of my bright silks for your light-o% loves ; ye were willing enough to have barrels of rice and tubs of salted meat rolled from the caves to your cabins, in the hard days of your hunger; ye were willing enough to have all that the beacon brought, and ye fed it, and fanned it, and called it a devil that was batter than a god, many and many a time. And now ve are goneagainst me, now ye are clamouring for my body, that ye mayfling it down on the rocks. Ye sharks t there is but one man on this shore this dawn. It is this man who has brought use rope-bound like a netted calf," Sc.

How unlike, we cannot help thinking, to what George Eliot would have made such a man say. It is not, however, with " Guide's" style, but with his drawing of character that we are chielly concerned, and here we have serious faults to find. Tricotrin is, to use a comparison that will be familiar to most of our readers, a hero of the Monte Christi) kind. there is the portrait. of him when he is first introduced to us:—

" He was a man of some forty years, dressed in a linen blouse, with a knaps.,ck as worn as an African soldier's lying at his feet, unstrapped, in company with a flask of good wine and a Straduarius fiddle. lie himself was seated on a fallen troo, with the sun breaking through the foliage above in manifold gleams and glories that touched the turning leaves as red as fire, and fell on his own head when ho tossed it up to fling a word to Mistigri [his pet monkey] or to catch the last summer song of a blackbird. It was a beautiful Homeric head ; bold, kingly, careless, noble, with the loyalty of the lion in its gallant poise, and thechallenge of the eagle in its upward gesture ;—the head which an artist would have given to his Hector, to his Phobos, or his Dionysus. The features were beautiful, too, in their varied mobile eloquent meanings ; with their poet's brows, their reveller's laugh, their soldier's daring, their student's thought, their many and conflicting utterances, whose contradictions made ono unity—the unity of genius."

This marvellous man does everything ; in every art he has reached the perfection of skill to which only the greatest master can attain.. He plays on his Straduarius as a Paganini might have played ; he dashes off in an idle moment on a piece of panel a head which might have been taken for a Titian :—

" He had the genius of a Mozart,—to make music only to a peasants' festival or his own solitude; the eloquence of a Mirabeau,—to remain a bohemian and be called a scamp; the sagacity of a Talleyrand,—to he worth no more in any pecuniary sense than one of the vintagers at work amongst the grapes ; the versatility of a Crichton—to shed his talents' lustre forth on French hamlets' bridal feasts, Italian olive-growers' frugal' suppers, Spanish muleteers' camp fires, Irish cotters' wakes and revels, Paris labourers' balls and wino bouts; the wisdom of a Beethius,—to laugh at life with the glorious mirth of an Aristophanes, to need as little in his daily wants as Louis Corner°, to love all pleasure with the Burgundian zest of a Piron."

Now all this is easy enough to write, and in a way it is pleasant

to read. We are all disposed to rebel against the weary effort by which alone, as experience is always preaching, excellence is to be' attained. We all cherish a lurking fondness for royal roads, whether they lead to learning or mastery of any kind. But, after all, the old unwelcome common-place belief is probably true, that " practice makes perfect." Those great artists who rise once in am age excel their fellows in the gift of application as much as in any natural aptitude of hand or brain. A Paganini spends every day from his childhood who shall say how many hours with his violin ; a Titian lives in his studio, and scarcely lays aside his brush Irons year to year. We refuse to believe in nameless wanderers who can take up bow or pencil at long intervals and show themselves masters without being students. Such monsters are an offence to true art, which knows better than to concede honours that are not earned by labour. But Tricotrin is represented not only as the greatest of artists, but as the most perfect of men. Self-restrained, self-sufficing, incapable of baseness, fear, or selfishness, with the widest and most generous sympathies, equal to the most sublime self-sacrifice, he wanders about, a visible Providence of the people. Yet we are given clearly enough to understand that the man was pleasure-loving ; if plain words are to be used, licentious :

" His life, if it was one perpetual fete, was also one continual benediction. Turn by turn, his life had been full of mirth, and passion, and poetry, and revelry, and pain, and all the delights of the sense and the soul in changeful sequence; but in it one thing reigned over, never sleeping, never shadowed, never silent, never cold, a thing of which men have little, and saints less—charity."

And the same thing is said again and again, and in atilt plainer language. Now, we have heard this cant, for we can call it nothing else, before, and it is offensive, more offensive in a way than the cant of hypocrisy. We do not believe that the perfection of virtue, any more than the perfection of art, is to be reached without practice. In Tricotrin, indeed, Guide, repeats an old fault. He is an exaggerated copy of the young heroes with whom he has already made us familiar, who drink curacoa all day and claret all night without injuring the freshness of their cheeks or the sparkle of their eyes, who can be reckless and vicious without

debasing their moral instincts or blunting their intellects. We believe, on the contrary, that excess will make a man pale and crapulous, and that profligacy will make him selfish. Traits of goodness and devotion, indeed, may be seen in vicious lives, exactly as traits of genius may be discerned in very imperfect work ; to assert that they can ever be found there in their highest development seems to us as great a blasphemy against morality, as to assert that the casual touch can ever attain the mastery of toil is a blasphemy against art.

To the other great character of the book, the character of Viva, Tricotrin's protegee, we have, while acknowledging that it is brilliant and attractive, to make an objection almost equally grave. The whole picture, taken with that which is subsidiary to it, appears to us like a bitter satire upon women, and than satires upon women there are few things more noxious in literature. Viva, a foundling whom Tricotrin rears, is a figure to whom the writer gives all the charm his skill can command. She is exquisitely beautiful, pure if never to fall is purity, not incapable of gratitude and affection ; but one great weakness, represented, as it seems to us, as the frailty not so much of the individual as of the sex, mars her character, and ruins every life with which hers is connected. The glitter of gold and gems, the luxurious belongings of wealth, the splendour of "great life," attract her with a force which she is wholly unable to resist, which bears down her conscience, her love for her preserver and the friends of her childhood, all her better thoughts and impulses. The sparkling gifts of a profligate young lover, the attractions of the worthless actress Coriolis, bring her once and again into imminent peril ; and the dignified life which she attains at last, the loveless marriage and the greatness purchased at the cost of all that was real in her life, if more decorous than vice, is also more base. Linked with her story is that of the woman Coriolis, exhibiting the same tendencies acting on a lower type of nature and in less favourable circumstances, and making a courtesan instead of a heartless woman of the world. All this might be made to yield a salutary, even a noble moral ; we do not find that it does. We take the key of the story to be Tricotrin's soliloquy when he finds the little Viva, whom her mother has left to die. " You will have nothing," he says, " as your career except to get rich by snaring the foolish, or to be virtuous and starve on three halfpence a day, having a pauper's burial as reward for your chastity ;" and the upshot of the whole seems to be that he was right.

The plot shows some signs of hasty and careless construction. The incident which first leads to Tricotrin's wandering is utterly improbable, and the chronology is sometimes curiously at fault: The old peasant woman, for instance, who had reached, we are told, to more than ninety years, could hardly have been born " when the waters of the Loire were choked with the corpses they floated to the sea."