STEVEN LA W BEN CE.*

IT is a pity, though it is a very natural mistake, that Mrs. Edwards makes up her stories with so exclusive a view to circu- lating libraries. She has a real genius for painting a particular kind of character, the thin, feeble, and yet interesting figure, which requires to be painted in water colours rather than in oils ; and she buries this talent, very rare and perfect of its kind, in the pages of an ordinary, to our minds a very ordinary, novel of un- usual size. There is a good deal of reading in 900 closely printed octavo pages, and as only some fifty of them are of any true power, reading Steven Lawrence is very like wading after a fish. We do not say that the fish is a poor one, or that it does not repay the labour ; but still one leaves it off with a strong sense of fatigue, a doubt whether that particular amusement will attract us again. It will, all the same, next day ; but still if one could get a few more fishes at once, what a glorious amusement fishing would be ! There is a little lady in this novel, one Dora or Dot Fane, who is about as perfect a sketch as it is possible for any artist of Mrs. Edwards' calibre to draw, but she is imbedded among a heap of others of the most common-place kind. They are none of them bad, Mrs. Dering, the calm woman of society, who relies on her experience, her tact, and her white shoulders for success, and who really dis- plays the experience and the tact, as well as the shoulders ; and Lord Petres, the valetudinarian peer, a selfish sybarite as long as you make no appeal to his better nature, but a cool, philosophical English gentleman, with a clear brain and good heart, when you do make it, are positively good, but none of them, except Dot, rise above the circulating library level. And Dot rises so very far above it. Mrs. Edwards had to describe a rare yet not infrequent character, quite definite, and yet watery in outline ; a girl with- out a quality to recommend her, and yet full of a kind of charm ; capable of sin, yet in a way innocent, as children are innocent when they storm or deceive ; a woman without a serious thought except for her dress, yet whose intellect in * Steven Lawrence, Yeoman. By Mrs. Edwards. London ; Bentley.

some strange way, it may be for that very peculiarity, interests the reader. There is nothing in Dora Fane, neither virtue nor vice, neither love nor enmity, no content, no ambition, no desire to live well, no desire to live evilly ; she is all colourless, and yet the keener the critic who reads these volumes, the more patiently, as we think, will he hunt Dora Fane through her adventures. Dora, or rather Dot Fane is the child of a man who does not appear, the brother-in-law of an English squire of some degree, left at her father's death in Paris without money, or friends, or guardianship, to the care of a Madame Mauprat, who lives by making cheap caps, and with whom the child, being fitted for it by nature, becomes a perfect little Parisian bourgeoise of the lower class. Her uncle, Mr. Hilliard, finds her out, and finds " a child apparently of about eleven years old ; a thin, dark-eyed child, exquisitely neat, in an old black alpaca frock, with gilt ear- rings in her ears, a ring on her hand, fair hair taken back i> la Chinoise from her face, and a little cap on the back of her head." The Squire " looked at the little creature, as she babbled on, with a pity for which I can find no name. He was not at all a philosopher. It would never have occurred to him that the life of a milliner's apprentice in one of the poorest quarters of Paris, making up caps of six sous each, and dancing among the washing- girls at the Sunday balls, might be a life out of which some human creatures could get a good deal of enjoyment. For a girl of English birth, the daughter of an English gentleman, the cousin of little Kate at home, to have spent her childhood among vile, immoral

French people (everything not English was vile and immoral

to the Squire), was desecration that made his blood boil as he thought of it. And when the patronne ' herself entered, some minutes later, nothing but the impossibility of being abusive without adjectives withheld him from giving his opinion of her, and of the rest of her countrywomen, on the spot." He carries off his niece, gives her grand restaurant dinners, at which she eats only the sweets, and fine silk clothes, in which she passes her late friends, two blanchisseuses of her own age, with the air of a duchess. She horrifies the good English gentleman, who, like most English gentlemen, has been in all sorts of places, but is all the stricter about his womankind, by talking of Mabille, and instantly comprehends that she must, on arrival in England, sink the Parisian life. She cannot, however, sink her love for clothes, and years after, when she has developed into a pretty, shallow-hearted, keen-witted, pagan little woman, looking like a marquise in porcelain, without a belief, or an idea, or a wish except that her toilette may be admired, or a capacity of love except, indeed, for Paris, she breaks out on her aunt, a silly and selfish invalid, thus :—

" 'Uncle Frank took me away from my bonnet-making in Paris, and I thank him, for his intentions at least, and you put your arms round my neck when I came, Kate, and offered me a bit of your garden, and your only half-crown the first night I was here, and I am grateful—no, I'm much more than grateful to you. Who else has been kind to me ? Arabella took away my little pink bonnet and my white parasol—the first I'd ever had, and Uncle Frank's present to me—I never forgot that ! and Aunt Arabella . . . .' Dot stopped short ; and two great tears rose sullenly in her eyes.—' Go on, if you please, Dora,' said Mrs. Hilliard. You have made me very ill—I feel my palpitations begin- ning already—but go on! Let me hear what single charge of unkind- ness you can bring against me ?'—' You took away my silk dress !' cried Dora, with a burst of genuine feeling, and had it made into one for Kate. "Poor Dora was not in a position to wear silks," I heard you say to Uncle Frank. Well, I bore no malice to the child herself—I wasn't wicked; when I saw how gentile she looked in it, I kissed her little bare neck and arms; but you, Aunt Arabella, I hated you—I hated you! and I don't think I have quite got over the feeling since. I had never had anything finer than alpaca before, and I loved my dress. I sat and looked at it when I went to bed—it came from Paris; it was like a companion to me, and you took it away Dot's voice broke.—` —I never heard such a ridiculous charge in my life !' said Mrs. Hilliard ; ' and unless you had had a most vindictive heart, you would have forgotten it years ago. Pray, how many dresses has your uncle, has Mrs. Dering given you since?'—' All I have ever possessed, I know,' answered Dot; but not one of them has made up for that. That came from Paris, and so did my little bonnet and my parasol, and I was a child then, and a stranger, and fretting—yes, fretting to be back among my friends—and you took my presents away from me ! Hard as she was, the Mere Manprat herself wouldn't have robbed a child !' "

She marries Steven Lawrence, a sullen, hard, high-principled yeoman, who has lived the wild life of California, without loving him ; carries him against his will to Paris, plunges into half reputable society, disgusts him by going to a masquerade clad in a page's costume, which he had forbidden her to wear ; finally, goes off with a man she only admires in her shallow-hearted way, to be rescued by her cousin Katharine, the conventional heroine of the book. How is Mrs. Edwards to make such a character, so utterly opposed to all English notions of propriety and—no, not morality, the thin little soul is not immoral in intention—attrac- Live? Well, it is done, done without overmuch labour, by little touches, and gentle suggestions, and faint strokes, all of which end in creating a living and in our judgment very artistic picture. This little creature, who for years remembers a lost dress, who deliberately hooks a man she does not love, or think she loves, who cannot keep herself modest, as we English understand modesty, because she does so love admiration, has at least one virtue of her own. She is abso- lutely true, true from shallowness, not virtue, makes no pretences,

laughs at lies, starts from the assumption that she is shallow, that she is pagan, that heaven itself is not comparable to amusement as she understands amusement, that is, an opportunity of admira- tion, which she had rather were bestowed upon her toilette than upon herself, and has but one genuine feeling, an almost savage fondness for and devotion to Paris, a feeling which makes her say,

and say with truth, that she would rather be a bourgeoise making up caps for six sous in a back street on the Seine, than live else- where ; above all, in respectable, heavy England, where " servants have suet puddings, and master and mistress no amusement." She is not good, any more than a porcelain figure is good ; but then she is not bad, any more than a porcelain figure is bad. She is too shal- low, too little reflective, too devoted to herself and the admiration she craves to be bad, while her keen Parisian realism defends her from every form of pretentiousness or affectation. She loves luxury, but we feel she is true when she says that in Paris she can live on a shilling a day. When found out in her madcap expedition to the ball she confesses herself frankly, promises repentance with an air which, were her mind not so " fleet," as the Suffolk people say of the water, one would almost believe, defends her immodest

dress, quite honestly as far as she is concerned, by pleading its artistic perfection, tells her husband what she sees and hates as her own fate if he throws her off, and detects in the very

storm and passion of her grief with true Parisian instinct the point in his otherwise high character which will des- troy her. Pagan because her mind will not hold Christianity, immoral because her soul is too thin to retain morality, truthful because no fact shocks her, of perfect temper and consummate vanity, able even to pardon her cold aunt because she sees she should herself have treated a dependent relative in the same way, pretty in every act and movement and word, but never for an instant unconsciously pretty, warning her husband as he kisses her for the first time that he is crushing her bonnet, yet, as she says herself, capable of any sacrifice for him if he will live her life, she is a wonderful little figure, reminding us distantly, perhaps,

but still reminding us, of Blanche Amory in Pendennis. There is badness latent in Blanche, which makes her seem fuller- blooded than Dot ; but there is a likeness too, and Thackeray would not have denied the extra difficulty of Mrs. Edwards' task, that of describing a being really of porcelain, as she so often says,

and yet unmistakably alive. Her success in her task makes the reader quite angry that to follow Dot he should have to wade

through three volumes of such common-place stuff as pads out Steven Lawrence. It is awfully wearisome stuff ! There is nothing bad in it, nothing stupid, nothing egregiously improbable ; but

then also there is nothing, or very little, which was worth writing. The sketch of Lord Petres is original in its way, but he is .so handled as to become almost a caricature, and there is some malicious reality in Mr. Clarendon Whyte, the social impostor ; but Steven Lawrence himself is a woman's man, and about as unlike anything his bringing up would have produced as the regular lady novelist's curate is unlike the real being under all all that choker and cassock. His treatment of his wife on her return from the ball for which she has sacrificed so nauch is the treatment a justly offended and similarly offended wife would mete out, not what a man would ; and his act in marrying Dora at all is one such a. man as he is represented would never have committed. A woman might, but men rarely fall into crime from the passion either for self-sacrifice or self-suppression, and least of all harsh, dominant, rigidly upright men like Steven. His love for Kate would have taught him the wrong he was inflicting on Dot, and if he had inflicted it there would have been no end to his forbearance with her. The strong runaway who has lived the Californian life would not have expressed himself in this way because his wife had adopted an unfitting dress for a masquerade. He might have been infinitely sterner, but the form of his repugnance is feminine, not mannish, certainly not Californian :—

"She looked jaded and worn; her paint most like paint, most unlike life ; her eyes unnaturally large, and with the bluish shade of art horribly visible upon their lower lids. As she approached him the fumes of wine, of punch, mingling with the stale perfumes of patchouli and millefieurs, overcame him with a sense of bodily sickening repug- nance. I couldn't withstand the temptation. I'll give my whole life to make amends.' And she held out her trembling little hands, in their soiled torn gloves, towards him. 'Don't touch me,' he said, draw- ing back, but not taking his eyes a second from her figure. And in the tone of voice in which he spoke those three words Dora knew her fate : fathomed not his agony of self-abasement : that she could never know : but his scorn, his abhorrence of herself."

However, hypercriticism on Steven Lawrence would be unfair. It is much to get in a novel of the kind one figure artistically perfect, and such Dot's seems to us, however inferior may be the impression made by our account of the picture. Only if an artist thus gifted would but give us a novel full of Dots !