LADY SILVERDALE'S SWEETHEART.*
Tuns work is a typical example of a practice that has grown into great favour with authors of late years, and for which the om- nivorous hunger of the readers of fiction is perhaps mainly responsible. We allude to the practice of bookmaking by popular authors, by reprinting various scattered sketches and magazine articles, with some new element sufficient to give a title to the book, and delude the public at first into believing it to be a fresh work. Thus here, Lady Silverdale's Sweetheart, which gives the title, and which alone appears on the cover of the work, is an excessively slight story, which, though spun out to fifty pages, might have been equally well told in a dozen, even if it were worth telling at all. For indeed there is little that is new, either in the plot or the treatment of it, and were it not for a certain grace of writing which Mr. Black possesses, it would be too trivial to mention. But in some authors the very triviality and every-dayness of ordinary life afford the best material on which to exercise their powers, and when once the ability is gained of interesting a certain class of readers, it matters little that the author repeats an oft-told tale, with little variation. This power Mr. Black has undoubtedly gained, and there are good reasons for his books being popular with the female portion of his readers. They are exclusively feminine books. By this we do not mean that they are effeminate, or even that they are lacking in power and spirit, but that they look upon life, or at all events seem to so look, from an exclusively feminine point of view, making much of small matters, treating sentiment with a delectable, graceful tenderness and playfulness, and rarely bringing us into contact with any of the harder and coarser realities of life. Throughout them there breathes an atmosphere of pleasant belief iu the average right-feeling and happiness of most people, and the morality is perhaps a little too evidently proclaimed in the style of " to be good is to be happy," and the reverse. " Virginibus puerisque canto," Mr. Black might say, and certainly the maidens and youths will be none the worse for his strains, but to grown-up readers he is sometimes a little wearisome, when he repeats so often the strange colloquialisms of the Island of Lewis, which had at first only the charm of utter strangeness. Nevertheless there are two specialities in Mr. Black's writings for which we must always be grateful. The first is a strain of true chivalric feeling towards women and their relations with men, and the second is the great beauty of some of his descriptions of natural scenery. In his best works, such as the Daughter tg' hells, this tender feeling for women is very noticeable ; and the account of the refining influence of Coquette, the heroine, upon the dis- orderly household and rough children of the Scotch rector, most cleverly and even pathetically painted. Indeed, this is far the finest of Mr. Black's works, and the only one, in our opinion, which can be thoroughly praised as a whole. The majority of his works seem to be singularly lacking in concentration of in- terest, and to consist of little more than a bundle of characters, scarcely connected by a thread of narrative. As is so often the case with an author who, with great artistic feeling for nature, endeavours to interweave his descriptions of scenery with the * Lady Silverdale's Sweetheart. By Black. Loudon Sampson Low k Co. actions of his characters, the joinings of the composition are fre- quently painfully manifest, and the scenery is, in most instances, so much more vivid and life-like than the dramatis personte, that it absorbs the greater part of the reader's attention, and the interest of the story flags. Even in cases like that of Scott, whose great talents embraced almost equally the scenes of nature and the doings of man, the one is constantly getting in the other's way, and we fear that to most readers the interest of many of Scott's novels would be rather enhanced than diminished by the Emission of many pages of description. We have been led into making these general remarks upon Mr. Black's style the more readily, as there is in the volume before us really very little to criticise, the stories, almost without excep- tion, calling for little comment of any kind. Thus Lady Silver- dole's Suvc theart (which, by the way, should have been called " Lady Silverdale's Husband," as the book is concerned with him in the latter, not the former capacity) is an account of the dis- appointment a man undergoes when, after waiting many years, he at last marries his early love, who is then a widow. The first chapter introduces the couple in question, the second tells the story of their early engagement and the lady's subsequent mar- riage to Lord Silverdale, the third recounts the second marriage, and the fourth and fifth describe the husband's disappointment on his honeymoon. A somewhat unreasonable disappointment it appears to us, as it is caused by finding his wife (a woman of thirty-five) anxious to have her letters from England, and not desirous to settle down for life at Ouchy, which, from our remembrance of Ouchy, was very wise of her,
In addition, when his wife does betray some symptoms of enthusiasm, as she does at the sight of the sunshine upon a glacier, the husband's confoundedly critical appreciation takes exception to her praise, and snubs her severely. Altogether, if Frank Cheshunt was a very talented and imaginative person, we feel that he could not have been a very agreeable husband, and cannot help sympathising to a considerable extent with his pro- saic wife. Perhaps a short quotation from the final chapter of the story will convey a better idea of the irritating way he speaks to his wife :—
" It was a beautiful clear afternoon when they stood upon the small wooden pier—I really forget the name of the village—waiting for the steamer. The skies were blue, the waters wore blue, a soft sunlight lay along the smiling green shores. Frank Cheshunt was looking rather blankly out on the smooth, beautiful lake. How long do we stay at Ouehy ? ' said his wife, and somehow the voice that startled him from his reverie sounded business-like and harsh.—' I had a fancy,'said he, with a smile, 'that we might remain there a long time, if you had been loss occupied with England, Mary. I had some vague wish to take a house there.'—' Oh, I am so glad you no longer think of that,' she said, quite cheerfully. ' Ouchy, of all places in the world I We should not know a soul there, and as for amusements I Now it is quite remarkable the number of people we know who happen to he in Paris at present. Don't you think we had better got bank to Paris as soon as possible, Frank, dear?'—' Yes,' answered he, speaking with measured indifference, I think we ought to make at once for Paris. And then, as you will he with plenty of friends there, you would not mind my running over to London for a few days. The fact is, — • asked me to let him have that article by the 1st of November, and I must have an afternoon or two in the library at the Reim m.' "
So the story ends with his taking his wife to Paris, and we feel inclined to say, " much ado about nothing."
Very much the same might be said of the other stories which go to make up this volume. The longest, " The Marriage of Moira Fergus," is a perfectly uneventful little incident of village- life in the Island of Lewis, and depends for its attractiveness almost entirely on the use of the quaint dialect common in that portion of the Hebrides, a dialect of which Mr. Black is a perfect master.
Perhaps the best of the stories is a little one entitled " The Highlands of the City," which tells bow a young Scotch girl is wedded and brought to reside in London by her husband, who, from being a fisherman, gets employment as hall-porter at a bank ; and how she and her husband, being given (besides wages) free quarters at the top of the banking-house, create for themselves among the tiles a little "Highland" of their own, and give the steep ridges of roofs and stacks of chimneys the familiar names of the mountains and glens amongst which they had passed their early life
Accordingly, she set to make a home for herself, not only in the lofty little rooms themselves, but actually on the house-top ; and there she bad flower-boxes with various flowers in them ' • and on the quiet summer evenings, when Duncan had closed the heavy doors of the bank and gone up to his wife, that was a pleasant place for them to sit. especially as there was a stone coping to the front wall which insured their safety. And there it was that the aid, laughing at her own folly, began to make this a Highland home for herself ; and that ridge of the red roof, that was the giant Ben-nu-Bram ; and that other ridge, that
was her beloved Ben Lens, with the sea, invisible, behind it ; and the hollow between, with the flowers down the centre of it, what could that bo but the beautiful silent glen of Corrio Cranaoh? In the gladness of her heart she would laugh and talk to those friends of her youth, and when she read in the afternoon, it was as if she were in the still solitude of Corrie Cranaoh, until the red sun in the west went down behind the Mansion House, withdrawing the ruddy glow from the ridge of Ben Lena, and then she knew it was time to descend and prepare her husband's supper But they had grown to regard the mountains and the glen as personal friends also ; and the young wife, laughing, though there were sometimes tears in her eyes, never failed to say, And I drink to you, Ben-nu.Braren, and to you, Bon Lena, and to you, my beautiful Corsi° Cranach ; and to all that we know that are near you.'"
We need not follow Mr. Black through the details of this sad little story,—how the young wife died pining away despite of her feigned Highland on the house-top, and how, long afterwards, a grave old Scotchman came to visit the attics, and was watched while he went out upon the roof, and heard to drink the old toast that his wife had originated, in her fidelity to her early home. The story, indeed, is perhaps a little overstrained in its senti- ment, but were it not for sentiment which appears overstrained when analysed coldly, the world would hardly be so pleasant a place to live in as it is ; and the romance of City attics and business-like old men has, perhaps, quite as genuine an origin, and even a deeper meaning, than that which is heard by whispering streamlets proceeding from the most youthful lips.
With the exception of this story, there is little to commend in the book, save the sketch of the Island of Lewis with which it concludes, and in which there are several pieces of fine description, with one of which we close our notice :-
'• Who that has seen can ever forget the dying-out of the blood-red sunset over Loch Roag, and the appearance in the heavens, as the night deepened, of a strange metallic glow, fine, and pale, and luminous, in which the majestic shoulders and peaks of Suainabhal and Melasabhal grew mystic and remote ? And then, what was that even to the ap- pearance of a new and richer light behind the mountains, when out the violet night the yellow moon rose, slowly and solemnly sending its first glittering bars of gold down on the ripples of the lake ? The mountains came nearer as their shadows grew sombre under the soft light of the moon ; the white sands showed along the coast ; tho hull of the small boat on the bright water was black as jet. Those wore magical nights with the murmur of the waves all round the moonlit shores, and the scent of the sea in the cool night air. There are some who may that Lewis is a mournful and desolate island, set amidst grey seas, and hidden by rain and the cold winter mists. That may bo so, but there are others who will never' think of it but as under the inexpressible glamour of those silent summer nights, when the sea, and the sky, and the moonlit hills seemed to belong to the enchanted world, and merely to live was to breathe the air of romance."
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