NOVELS.
THE LADY ON THE DRAWING-ROOM FLOOR.* THERE is an elusive quality about the work of Miss Coleridge which hardly admits of being tested by the rough-and-ready methods of the workaday reviewer of novels. It is easy enough to point out certain obvious defects in structure— the absence of a neatly constructed plot, with, as its natural consequence, the lack of a well-rounded conclusion—and to dis- cover unreality in her handling of incident, or weakness in her • The Lady on the Dratoing-Roone Floor. By N. E. Coleridge. London ; Edward Arnold. [6e.]
endeavours to relate her characters with the hard facts of everyday life. She never descends into the cockpit of realism, and her novels are the last in the world to suggest the hideous and well-worn encomium that they "palpitate with actuality." But while there is no difficulty in cataloguing her short- comings, her rare and distinguished merits do not readily lend themselves to analysis or definition. Chivalry, at once fantastic yet tender—a sort of spiritualised Quixotry—is a leading characteristic of her books. They are illuminated by a whimsical yet gracious humour. Above all, they are steeped in an air of ethereal romance which is independent of sur- roundings, as her personages carry their atmosphere about with them. With such an equipment it is not necessary to lay the scene in the island valley of Avilion ; a lodging-house in Back Street will serve just as well when hero and heroine
are endowed by their creator with her own gift of looking at life through magic casements, and at all times offer an effective protest against the tyranny of circumstance.
Relying little upon plot or incident, Miss Coleridge's book is full of delightful passages and intimate portraiture. In form it is another Lame Dog's Diary, and deals with the growth of an unconventional friendship, ripening gradually into a closer relationship, between an unattached bachelor and a lady living in the same lodging-house. The friendship is begun through the mediation of a cat, which furnishes Miss Coleridge with the occasion for one of those engaging divagations in which she excels :—
" Now there are cats and cats. To say a cat' is as indefinite as if one said 'A man.' There is the Gray Cat, the Cat of Egypt, a goddess calm and smooth and careless of mankind, fascinating, as certain w-Dmen are, from utter indifference. She inherits the stately and gracious manners, the lofty reserve of a long line of ancestors, one of whom, no doubt, gazed with gold eyes upon the Pharaoh of the Exodus. It is a privilege to look after a cat like that. There is the Persian, redolent of Omar, catching, if ever she caught anything at all, nothing inferior to a bulbul ; fed, like the Roman gluttons, upon the tongues of nightingales. 'Is she not an angel?' I have heard my cousin cry enthusiastically, as the chosen of her hearth stood up and waved a tail as big as a Turk's head. But my cousin was wrong. The angels have nothing feline about them. Where there are birds there are angels.' That cat is a Sphinx, like her sister of Egypt. There is the White Cat, dear to fairy tale, amiable, gentle, not so fund of her claws as other cats—a perfect lady. There is the Black Cat, green-eyed, not a single spot of snow on her breast. Why she, of all cats, should be considered lucky, I have never been able to imagine. She brings with her a Faust-like sense of expeditions on a broomstick, of the revels of witches out for the night on their unsabbatical Sabbath."
The successive intrusions of a tortoise and a parrot bring on the first meeting between the narrator and "the lady on the drawing-room floor," who is described in a passage characteristic of the author's gift of dealing with a hackneyed situation in an unexpected way :— "That is a strange moment when we see for the first time one at whom we have looked hitherto with the eye of the mind alone. I remained dumb. She was not in the least what I expected. She was tall—taller than myself. She was pale—not as those are whose roses have faded, but as those who are born under an alien star. She was dark, and her hair—black hair—curved like a shell as it rose on either side above her great calm forehead. She had large dark eyes. Whether they were softer than they were deep—deeper than they were soft, I never knew ; they had not the penetrating look that makes one so uncomfortable in the presence of some women. She never seemed to be reading her interlocutor as if, feats do mieux, she were reading a book. There was distance in her eyes; they appeared to be resting on things beautiful exceedingly, but far, far away. Whether the image reflected in them were o the past or of the future, who could tell ? Of both perhaps ; for what was will be."
It is no easy task for a novelist to make a heroine live up to her label, but the first impressions of Lucilla are not belied by the sequel, and the record of her habits and modes of thought, her preferences and prejudices, reveals an time d'elite, a nature moulded of none but the rarest clay, the very defects of whose qualities have an intrinsic nobility. There are other interesting and attractive persons in the book, notably the ingenuous but elf-like Kitty, but Lucilla dominates the stage throughout. With one more quotation we may take our leave of a volume in which the delicate simplicity of the style is happily attuned to the gracious distinction of the author's thought :-- " LuciRa's custom was to go to church early in the morning— I used to watch her leaving the house with her little prayer-book —and sometimes of an evening. She did not like a crowd, she hated emotion and excitement. An empty, quiet, unpopular church was the church of her choice, and wherever she went she made interest with the sexton to get a window open. It rather annoyed her to be considered 'orthodox,' and she had little sympathy with those whom she called 'dogmatic.' I vexed her once by the assertion that orthodox only meant straight thinking and dogma an opinion. They meant, according to her, something much worse and quite different. Of course, if I did not under- stand, she said, she could not explain; people who knew Greek never did understand words. I am convinced that in her heart she thought dogma had something to do with dogs, whom she dis- liked, not personally, but because eats disliked them, and eats were weaker than dogs."
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