THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD.* THE fertility and occasionally the

power shown by the author .of this book distinguish him very broadly from the general host of novelists. The fertility, indeed, is on the whole greater than the

power,—which, for a young writer,—and this is, as far as we know, Mr. Le Farm's first acknowledged effort,—tnay be of good promise for his future success. Very impressive single results are some- times produced from very limited materials by a concentra- tive mind. Mr. Le Fanu's book shows rather a large and 'varied surface of light imaginative resources, than any ten- dency to knit closely together such conceptions as he can command into one striking effect. The composition of his book is loose and straggling, at times perhaps, a little slovenly. It contains episodical sketches, which do not add to the effect, some, perhaps, which detract from it, and many traces .of the periodical shape, in which, if we are not mistaken, it first appeared in the Dublin University Magazine, that should have been carefully expunged from this its more permanent form. A little padding may be tolerated in periodical instalments of a story (like the chapter attempting to pourtray the clatter of a dinner party by long paragraphs, in which a few scattered words from each group of talkers are divided 'by the imita- tion of inarticulate sounds conveyed in " hubble-bubble- rubble-dubble"), which sadly mars and dilutes the artistic effect when the whole is seen together. But with slight excep- tions, even the episodical sketches in this story, which might be suppressed without injury to the whole, perhaps, even with benefit to it, contain strong indications of the wealth of the author's resources for fiction, proofs that he can, without effort, adorn even the margins of his canvas with a host of outlined characters, as remarkable for vraisemblanee as the figures which are needed for his main plot.

The writer with whose manner Mr. Le Fanu's style is most deeply impregnated, and whose genius his own skill most nearly resembles, is Mr. Thackeray. Though dealing with a much lower level of social culture, there runs through the whole book the same half cynical kindliness and condescension of manner towards the creations of his own brain which we see in Mr. Thackeray. In describing their little troubles, Mr. Le Fanu just turns a phrase so as to show that he is quite • conscious of; and, perhaps, amused at, the chafing and tossing of their spirits ; and yet that he looks upon them as independent beings, who have quite enough real " objective " existence to warrant a smile or a sceptical lunge at their true mo- tives. Just as Mr. Thackeray speculates over his "puppets," and says," I think Arthur was not quite satisfied with his own apology for himself to Warrington,"—or "did Mr. Pendennis grieve the less for his mother, because he had got a white hat?" and so forth,—just so Mr. Le Fanu half quizzes his own characters, and half conveys to you, after Mr. Thackeray's fashion, that there is a point not very far down, at which his own

knowledge of them completely stops, and beyond which he is as much in the dark as his readers about their spiritual secrets. The impression produced by this treatment of fictitious conceptions as half-explored real beings, is, no doubt, extremely effective and dramatic in its influence upon the.

reader. It is scarcely possible to disbelieve in characters

which the author himself treats as so independent of himself as to excite his own curiosity, and to be the object of the sort of irony which a shrewd man enjoys rather as an exercise of intel- lectual insight and on the chance of hitting, than from any absolute knowledge. The realism of this artifice as it may

appear to some (though it is far more than an artifice, since it springs naturally, we believe, from the exceeding vividness with which the social surfase of character is perceived, and the loss of the clue a very little way below the surface), is of the exactly op- posite kind to the realism of De Foe. The latter carries you away by the extreme minuteness with which he specifies the commonest

and most oppressive details in the external life of his heroes— details which you would say could occur to no imagination that • The House by the Churchyard. By J. Sheridan Le Fenn, Three Vols. Tinsley.

nad not actually experienced them. Mr. Le Fanu, following Mr. Thackeray, produces much of the same illusion by treating the hidden part of his heroes' or heroines' nature as if it were as much a subject of interest, innuendo, and surmise to hint, as are the persons of real life. He says "I think," and "I dare say," and "I wonder," over them, wherever he passes beyond the recorded surface of their social life ; and yet, so far as the surface of that life goes, he outlines a very clear and sharp im- pression.

Mr. Le Fanu also resembles our great satirist in his mode of describing passion. While he throws himself into it with a sort of voluntary abandon, and a half-enjoyment of the rising fury; while he shows more cynical sympathy with despera- tion than with any other mood of mind, he always 'avails himself of the opportunity of such a gust of passion, to name the subject of such desperate moods familiarly and almost contemptuously, as if he would shrug his shoulders at it as a sort of fatal folly. For instance, one of the best sketches in this book,—entirely non-essential to the main story, by the way,—is of a certain Captain Devereux, a clever, mischievous, irregular, dark-complexioned, passionate, and intellectual officer, capable of high feelings, capable, also, of great licence. One scene of proud and furious passion between this hero and the worthy old rector, a learned and humble Christian, who is also extremely well sketched, is given with great power ; the Captain talking fast and furiously, and spoken of throughout the scene, therefore, by various half-patronizing epithets as "the handsome captain," "the strange captain," "Dick Devereux," "poor Dick Devereux," and so forth, the rector "marshalling the crumbs on the breakfast cloth sadly with his finger, in a row first, then in a circle, then goodness knows howl and sighing profoundly over his work." The scene is remarkable, as illustrating both the depth and the limits of the author's power. It would in no way have disgraced Mr. Thackeray himself, and has many of the peculiar characteristics of his manner.

The power of broad fun, however, in the book, is more peculiarly the author's own, and many of the scenes, though a little verging on farce, are penetrated by the truest humour. This broad humour is not of the highest class, for it is the humour which enjoys ridiculous situations more than the deeper contrasts in human nature, but still it is genuine enough ; so far as it goes, and where it is engrafted on the essentially generous and noble nature of so grotesque a little figure as Lieutenant Puddock's, it is of a kind much higher than carica- ture.

After all, however, the central power of the story is the new kind of interest with which the author has contrived to invest the evil genius of the piece,—a character whose naturalness one doubts, and yet whose face and demeanour are so strongly painted that they contrive to work themselves into the imagination, and to haunt it, not without a certain sense of illegitimate pleasure. Here is the first impression produced by him on his subsequent victim, Dr. Sturk :—

"The face, relieved against the dark stamped leather hangings on the wall, stood out like a sharply-painted portrait, and produced an odd and unpleasant effect upon Sturk, who could not help puzzling himself then, and for a long time after, with unavailing speculations about him.

"The grim white man opposite did not appear to trouble his head about Stark. He ate his dinner energetically, chatted laconically but rather pleasantly. Sturk thought he might be eight-and-forty, or perhaps six or seven-and-fifty—it was a face without a date. He went over all his points, insignificant features, high forehead, stern counten- ance, abruptly silent, abruptly speaking, spectacles, harsh voice, harsher laugh, something sinister perhaps, and used for the most part when the joke or the story had a flavour of the sarcastic and the devilish. The image, as a whole, seemed to Shirk to fill in the outlines of a recollection, which yet was not a recollection. He could not seize it ; it was a. decidedly unpleasant impression of having seen him before, but where he could not bring to mind. He got me into some confounded trouble some time or other,' thought Stark, in his uneasy dream ; the sight of him is like a thump in the pit of my stomach.'

"And he lay awake half the night thinking of it ; for it was not only a puzzle but there was a sort of suspicion of danger and he-knew not what, throbbing in his soul whenever his reverie conjured up that im- penetrable, white, scoffing face."

Mr. Le Fanu makes as much use of the sheen cast from this dangerous gentleman's silver spectacle, as Mr. Dickens does in Dombey of the whiteness of Carker's teeth, but -with better taste and more effect ; they add to the cynical effect of the counten- ance; their metallic glitter constantly attract the eye, and are likely enough, therefore, to be a prominent feature in the expression. We must give one of Dr. Sturk's miserable dreams, as he vainly tries to recover the train of association which this

ill-

omaned face rouses within him

"There was an ugly and ominous consistency in these dreams which 3flight have made a less dyspeptic man a little nervous. Tom Dunstan,

sergeant whom Stark had prosecuted and degraded before a court- -martial, who owed the Doctor no good-will, and was dead and buried in the churchyard close by, six years ago, and whom Stark had never thought about in the interval—made a kind of resurrection now, and was with him every night, figuring in these dreary visions and somehow in league with a sort of conspirator-in-chief, who never showed dis- tinctly, but talked in scoffmg menaces from outside the door, or clutched him by the throat from behind his chair, and yelled some hideous secret into his ear, which his scared and scattered wits, when he started into .consciousness, could never collect again. And this fellow, with whose sneering cavernous talk—with whose very knock at the door or thump at the partition-wall he was as familiar as with his own wife's voice, and the touch of whose cold convulsive hand he had felt so often on his cheek or throat, and the very suspicion of whose approach made him

• faint with horror, his dreams would not present to his sight. There was always something interposed, or he stole behind him, or just as he was entering and the door swinging open, Stark would awake—and he never saw him, at least in a human shape.

"But one night he thought he saw, as it were, his sign or symbol. As Sturk lay his length under the bed-clothes, with his back turned -upon his slumbering helpmate, he was, in the spirit, sitting perpen- dicularly in his great balloon-backed chair, at his writing-table, in the window of the back one-pair-of-stairs chamber which he called, his

• library, where he sometimes wrote prescriptions, and pondering over his pennyweights, his Roman numerals, his gutta) and pillulat, his ounces, his drachms, his scruples, and the other arabesque and astrological symbols of his mystery, he looked over his pen into the churchyard, which inspiring prospect he thence commanded. "Thus, as out of the body sat our recumbent Doctor in the room underneath the bed in which his snoring idolon lay, Tom Dunstan stood beside the table, with the short white threads sticking out on his blue sleeve, where the stitching of the stripes had been cut through on that twilight parade morning when the Doctor triumphed, and Tom's rank, fortune, and castles in the air, all tumbled together in the dust of the barrack pavement ; and so, with his thin features and evil eye turned sideways to Stark, says he, with a stiff salute= A gentleman, sir, that means to dine with you,' and there was the muffled knock at the door which he knew so well, and a rustling behind him. So the Doctor turned him about quickly with a sort of chill between his shoulders, and perched on the back of his chair sat a portentous old quizzical carrion-crow, the antediluvian progenitor of the whole race of carrion- crows, monstrous, with great shining eyes, and head white as snow, and a queer human look, and the crooked beak of an owl that opened with a loud grating caw' close in his ears ; and with a 'bo-o-oh!' and a bounce that shook the bed and made poor Mrs. Stark jump out of it, and spin round in the curtain, Stark's spirit popped back again into his body, which sat up wide awake that moment."

The character of Mr. Dangerfield—the villain above described— is never probed or explored ; it does not satisfy the reader even is a superficial creation ; the devilish element is tco triumphant ; and yet it bites into the memory. His cynical amusement in the presence of danger, the sardonic enjoyment with which he teases his meaner instruments, are drawn with a graphic force that, though it does not convince the reader of the truthfulness of the picture, cannot but impress him. It is only Mephistopheles in the form of an English gentleman, after all. But it is as good a Mephistopheles as we have ever seen incorporated in a novel. When to the interest of this grim, though only half-real central figure, we add that the book shows, as well as humour, a certain true, though not very deep pathetic force, an exceedingly lively power of dialogue, and great tact in developing the ingenious plot, it will be obvious that we think this no common novel.