VERA.*
IT is perhaps scarcely fair to speak of so pleasant a book in so homely a way, but the comparison of small things with great has always been permitted, and so we may venture to say that we feel about it the difficulty which a lady does who is anxious to recom- mend a servant whom she likes much, but is not altogether so satisfied with as to wish to keep, —a girl pretty, sweet-tempered, clean, and lady-like, but flighty and uncertain, thorough some- times in work that takes her fancy, but volatile, and preferring everything to the performance of her own proper duties. At first, with a vague feeling that our book is desultory and sketchy, we are nevertheless impressed with its simplicity and nobleness, the clearness of its style, and the purity of its feeling. Then we notice more and more its constant and rapid change of scene and subject, and we begin to feel that it is a sort of dumb show ; that the actors speak too little, and are described too much. Then come some very common-place people—Lady Anne Newbold, Countess Zotoff, some serving-women, &c.—towards the footlights, and speak too much. We discover, besides, with something akin to vexation, that we don't quite know why we have liked Vera so greatly, that we have been trusting too confidingly to our author's enthusiasm for her, and that when she does reveal herself she is often a little cross and impatient like the majority of her fellow- creatures, and, like them, stronger in the earthly affections than in the intellectual faculties or the religious sentiment. But finally, amid the scenes, partly historical and partly melodramatically fictitious, —we allude to that horrible modern invention of novelists, a railway crash,—which close the book, we recover our fondness for Vera, influenced by the pity that is akin to love, when her father engages himself to the wretched Countess Zotoff ; and feel that if she is cross like other mortals, she is much tried, and often very sweetly patient
"If he loved her, if he really had chosen her out of all the women in the world to bear his name, let him ask her, and she would be
loyal and open with him What if they were never to under- stand each other, but to drift away, having only met to part, like those shepherds of tho Russian plains, who, in the national songs, meet, tell each other a little of their history in a wild, plaintive strain, that has no closing chord, and then, as the singers part, never to see each other again, the echo of their complainte dies away over the flat steppes? There are lives like that, that end without concluding ; and was her life to be like a Scythian shepherd's song ? She trusted not— she who had such need of a home, of a friend, of love, and of warmth, end of some one to protect and cherish her. . . . . . She remained all afternoon in her room, thinking much and long: she did more than think, she prayed. This pure and noble lady gave thanks to Him who, feeding the ravens when they cry, seemed ready to feed also a hungry human heart, and to give to it, as to the year, and to the fair earth, spring, and new riches, and a new life. Oh ! fair sweet hope; oh! fair sweet day of God that saw such hope dawn on her lone- liness ; oh ! joy of the whole soul, to win the love of a noble heart, and the worship of a pure and loyal life."
The book is very short, and crowded with varying scenes in Lon- don, Moscow, Sebastopol, Rome and Nice, so that it seems rather a series of tableaux—many of them beautiful and effective—illus- trating a life, than a complete episode in that life.
We begin with Vera's lover—an heir to an earldom—and after a brief sketch of the life and death of his spendthrift father, we have a more interesting but slightly absurd one of his uncle, the misogy- nist old earl in his mountain home of Hurst Royal, building up some of his study windows that he might not see the servants as
• Vera. By the Author of the HOtel du Petit St. Jean." London : Smith, Elder, and Co. they passed, and avoiding church because of the illogical parson. and the old women who would bring with them posies of lads- love and other strong-smelling herbs. Then we leave England. hurriedly and are present at the consecration, by the Archbishop of Moscow, of the colours of a volunteer company ; and at the company's departure—commanded by the young boy-lover of our heroine—for the seat of war in the Crimea. It is at this ceremony that we are first introduced to Vera, but only to leave her for six- years. Next we are taken to Inkermann, and the night preceding that great battle and the dawn of that day and the attack. on the Sandbag battery are very graphically described. The: closing scene in the brief life of the Russian boy-soldier happens at the same time as the death of our hero's young. half-brother and the injuries to Colonel St. John himself, which were so serious as to obliterate the memory of the names. and messages which the dying Russian had confided to him.. After the well-remembered storm in the Black Sea, in which the wounded from Inkermann were so terribly tossed and tried, and a. page or two given to a most vivid sketch and analysis of the. feelings of a man of high aims, whose body is mutilated, and whose health, powers and memory are all shattered, we are. taken to Rome, on the way whither the hero and heroine first meet— the latter travelling with her parents for the health of her mother.. Thedescriptions of Rome are not striking, and what passes there is not important. Their next meeting is in London, at the great Exhibition of 1862, where the Princess Vera has only her father with her, her mother having died, meanwhile, at St. Petersburgh. A short season in London follows, when they are again parted and meet accidentally at Nice, where the death and funeral of the young Czarewitch Nicholas are brought vividly before us. Finally, in the' desert-like plains of Crau, in which we hope never to be deserted in the body, we are suddenly left in the spirit ; for a combination. of happy and horrible chances—so well known towards the end of a third volume—brings about the long-desired explanation between the lovers which renders them quite indifferent to their whereabouts and, under such circumstances, hapless readers know what they have to expect.
Now with all this flying about, and the descriptions of places, people and events which it necessitates, it is pretty clear that ins one short volume there is not much room for the play of character which it is so great a pleasure to listen to, in a good novel, front the mouths of the actors in the story. Indeed, the author of Vera is not a dramatist at all, except in his power of creating effective situations. He is more of a poet and artist than of a dramatist. The• external world impresses him vividly, and he reproduces it skil- fully ; not merely as it appears to the eye, but as it influences the- thoughts, and harmonizes or contrasts with the events that are- passing and the consequences which will result from them. And he shows a poet's power in recording the sorrow and loneliness and struggle and resignation of a mind superior to those around it, and compelled to live always in an uncongenial atmosphere. Bali power to conceive and describe the workings of antagonistic- qualities in the same mind—of the good and bad passions—as they reveal themselves in speech, is entirely wanting, and still more the ability to create the wide diversity of character that constitutes' society.
In the scenes which we have said are made so real to us, proba- bility is, nevertheless, sacrificed too much to effect ; as when, in• the battle of Inkermann, Colonel St. John of the Scots Fusiliers staggers wounded to the rear, and sinks down by his dead young brother of the Grenadier Guards, and, a minute after, in defend- ing himself from some brutal soldiers, accidentally kills the beautiful gallant Russian boy who rides up to save him. The touching description of the closing passage of his life, which we have already referred to, is an instance of the almost womanly tender- ness which runs through the whole book. Again, in the last scene of the story, when many days' delay in Vera's journey from Nice permits her lover, most unexpectedly, to overtake her at Marseilles,. and, still in perfect ignorance of his coming bliss, to step into the same train and be ready when the accident does happen—and which, it is pleasant to notice, injures none of our friends—it is a little too theatrical to add the further incident of their meeting ab last in the moonlight on the wide untenanted plains of Provencal Crau, where Vera, on recovering her consciousness, sits up to find' herself apparently alone, and to believe that she is dead and anticipating, in that voiceless solitude, the resurrection of the. Blessed. But if we cannot help smiling at the stage effect, we cannot help admiring, at the same time, the striking picture which imagination has drawn :— " Wrapping closely round her limbs, and fastened to her shoulders, hung her long white dust-cloak, and below it her black dress covered her feet. She fancied that the first of these was her winding-sheet—that she had died—so bewildered still was her mind,—and then that in some unexplored strange country beyond the grave she had wakened thus prematurely, and alone. Alone r elle said; after living, and dying alone, how hard it is to be alone still !' Sitting more upright, she again gazed around her, and what she saw confirmed her more and more in her hallucination. This vast level plain, with neither man, nor tree, nor boundary, was surely in another world ; this pale white light, flooding all, was the dawn of Heaven's great morning ; and these few scant stones, which with the still Bunter shrubs dotted the expanse of sand, seemed to her the grave- stones of the dead, now all sealed and silent, and casting their shadows before them, but soon to be opened, and rent. By what miserable chance had she awakened alone, anticipating with this cruel haste the resurrec- tion of the blessed ? Where were her own dead? ' Martian ! ' she called plaintively, and held out a beseeching hand. Venez done (come then), Simony ! Alexei, do not leave me alone. Henri ! at least you will come to me, for I have loved you so much and so well—Henri!'"
Henry, of course, is only too glad.
Besides the power which with a few slight touches makes us— we scarcely know why—fall a victim to the charm of V6ra's beauty and bright pure nature, and sad and solitary life, the author ex- hibits that of portraying the doubts and fears of poor Colonel St. John, and making us feel—provoking as it is to us who are behind the scenes—that he could not have done otherwise than leave Vdra in Rome, in London and then in Nice, always longing for and yet in ignorance of his love for her. Of still more interest and beauty are, perhaps, the thoughtful reflections on things in general which we meet with frequently, and with one or two instances of which we will conclude. Take this, about memory :-
" Of all artists, ancient or modern, commend me to Memory. It is there that we find the most careful eclecticism, the most genuine romance. We call Memory faithful, but that is the very thing that it is not, and that perhaps we would not wish it to be. How does it not with golden pencil touch and retouch the picture of our past lives ! it now draws out this detail and now suppresses that, now throws one fact into the background, and now magnifies another. Out of the harsh daguerreo- type of a past reality it can not only make a lovely and picturesque sketch, but the sketch becomes an alto-relieve, and at last the figure in relief develops into the perfect statue. And for this statue, affection having prepared a golden niche, the image remains in it for evermore, -the object of our perennial, and as we fancy, faithful worship. Pecu- liarly true is this if the life has been voluntarily, or involuntarily, de- prived of movement, novelty, and change. There is then no standard of reality by which to try our impressions, and gradually those which we ascribe to Memory become in reality the new and over new creations by which the 'hollow heart' has tried to fill its vacant places."
And this about ennui, when the poor maimed colonel returns from the Crimea :-
" The great poet who saw, as in a vision, the star-floors of paradise, and the nether circles of hell, is not the only man who, between the ages of thirty and forty, has found himself among the shadows of a ' wild, rough, and stubborn wood.' Nor yet is Dante the only ono who, on emerging from that mental crisis, has looked back upon it almost with fear. It is felt to have been such a bitter experience that a little more of it would have been death, and then such a gloom!—death itself can hardly be more painful. The cause of this suffering is ennui ; and it is a mistake to suppose that only the idle or the trivial can fall a prey to it. For if by ennui we mean want of interest, and not only a want of present stimulus to exertion, but also that profound discouragement, and that sickliness of all the mental powers which makes us look on the past with disappointment, and on the future with dread, while the present cannot rouse us out of indifference,—if this be ennui in its worst shape, then minds of a high order have suffered from it, and, like the great Floren- tine, have shivered in its shadow. Only ho and they have not succumbed to it. They have confessed its horrors, but they have forced their way out of it, and struggled against the darkness, until the darkness broke. .
Nothing could exceed Lord Kendal's tenderness, or the pleasure which he felt in his nephew's society ; therefore Colonel St. John spent the greater part of the year with him, yet the silence and the unevent- fulness of such a life were terrible, as terrible as every reaction must bo ; for every great effort, every excitement, and every happiness, has a strange way in this world of seeming to dig its own grave. The days were long, and he was 'a-weary ;' weary because, though he would not own to it, the body was still sick ; because the nerves were jarred; be- cause neuralgia gnawed in the stump of his left arm; because the head was too weak for study ; because he had not found the secret of the power of player over the darkest moods of the mind ; because the spirit suffered from want of occupation, want of duties, and want of strength for a holy effort after a courageous, sustained, and patient recovery."
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