THE SISTERS LAWLESS.*
IT is not easy to make up one's mind as to what is the charm of The Sisters Lawless. Compared with the author's first story, Rosa Noel, a novel which stood out from the dead-level of the dreary fictions of last year, her second is not an advance in point of construction. She has not the faculty, apparently, of working out a plot on any but its simple, straight lines ; she lets all sorts of stitches drop, and is supremely indifferent to the hanging loose of threads. She misleads the reader, not with the artfulness which conceals a purpose in order to render its revelation additionally effective, and delights in supplying delusive clues, but from sheer wilfuhaess, impatience of order, and disdain of proportion. When she brings the Sisters Lawless home to Creyke Park from Canada, she persuades us that a hapless love on the part of an invalid cousin for the handsome demon, whom she whimsically calls Angela, is a portion of her plot, so minutely does she describe Fox Lawless and his crippled state ; but she does not mean it, or if she did mean it in the beginning, she changes her mind ; and there comes of the interesting young man, with the brown eyes and the per- plexed and troubled gravity of expression, just nothing at all. Realism is not her forte ; the few incidents which form the story are highly improbable, and the minor characters who play their parts in it are inconsistent. Nevertheless, the book is very attractive, and the reader readily pardons its faults on account of the odd, original, taking sort of way in which they are com- mitted, being content to follow the author's rambling lead, and to put up with her whims, long after he would have shut up many a more positively commendable writer's pages in annoyed weariness.
The spontaneity and ' go ' of the story—the impression which it makes that the author could not help writing it, and that _it is all thoroughly real to her, its incongruities matters-of- course, and its oddities every-day things—make it captivating, and there is in it one really fine conception. Beyond these, it is impossible to define any considerable merit in the inconsequent, patchy, painful story of the sisters, who are violently contrasted according to the good old black-and-white, light-and-darkness, angel-and-fiend system of a school of fiction for grown-up people, which was perhaps evolution as applied to the Tommy-and-Harry romances of the nursery. Never, for the apace of a page, does Angela Lawless fail to interest. She is odious,—a selfish, vain, unscrupulous, unbelieving, ungrateful, capricious, tyrannical, exacting, cowardly, even foolish girl ; but she catches one's attention, and she holds it, and throughout one feels the sweep of the wing of the avenging angel in the air, drawing nearer and nearer to her golden head. She is always vexatious, natural, pitiable ; and when Clernence, who is as angelic as Angela is the reverse, is winning the prize on which her sister's heart is set, we cannot help pitying the wilful creature, who does not deserve anything but ill-luck, and positively shrinking from the thought of the punishment that is coming upon her. It sounds very shocking, because after all Angela is simply a wretch ; but therein lies the author's power and all her cunning. The men in the book are unreal, and more or less uninteresting, so that when the catastrophe occurs which lays waste the lives of both sisters at one blow, one does not care at all about Bertie Lawless, who is the first victim. The rivalry of two sisters----a well-worn theme for the novelist becomes fresh and vivid in this writer's hands, who gives it a form with which it has certainly not before been invested within our knowledge,—a form so tragic and so unspeakably sad, that it haunts one with a constancy very much out of proportion to the literary merit of the story.
When the fate of Angela Lawless has come upon her, the achievement of the book is reached. The effect of remorse upon the mind and the life of Angela is depicted with real power, and with complete consistency with the girl's unscru- pulous, self-absorbed character. The author has caught a thorough grip of Angela's nature, and her handling of it is admirable ; whereas the rival sister is a mere pale sketch, in which sympathy and force are alike wanting. It is difficult to quote from any of the best passages in the book without spoiling the reader's interest by revealing the main incident of the story, but here is one characteristic bit which shows Angela as the odd,
* The Sisters Lawless : a -Voce!. By the Author of "Rosa Noel." London: Bentley.
un-commonplace creature she is. It is after the death of cousin whom both the sisters loved, and when Angela, burthened with the secret of her sin, has been taken to Paris, for the cure of her hopeless melancholy, everybody's interests and conveni- ence being, as usual, sacrificed to her. Adrian Lawless, the dead man's brother, applies himself to the task of remonstrating with the moping invalid :—
" Angela,* he said, "dear child, rouse yourself. Deal again with the realities of life; don't sit here all these long hours in an apathy that it goes to my heart to see. Submit to the irrevocable, and take up some- thing worthier the name of life than is this supine existence."—" You cannot possibly know how to talk to me," she broke in with a weary fretfulness, "you cannot understand how my very soul is cowed by a nameless terror that never leaves me. I am afraid of myself. My own capabilities appal me—my capabilities for suffering, I mean, she added hastily ; "suffering, regretting, not acting, Adrian. I do not want to live, and I am afraid to die. No one can soothe me. I am like a weary swimmer who throws himself back and floats, because he is too much exhausted to swim longer, yet will not sink and let the cold and merciless water close over his head. You look sorry for me," she went on, "you and everybody are much sorrier for me than for Clemence; is it not so ?" He bent his head in token of acquiescence. "You and they are right to be. I am infinitely more to be pitied. . I wish you would not be so kind to me ! It is like trying to feed a mummy on the fat of the land and giving it a landscape to look at."— " Come," said Adrian, smiling, "that is more like your old self."— " Here come Cldmence and Aunt Maria, and Chimence is laughing."— " Why not? You did not expect her to go through life and never laugh again ? For the sake of other people, you may be sure, Angela, that she is right in her method of taking irreparable trouble, and that you are wrong."—" Method !" repeated Angela with languid contempt. "The idea of there being any 'method' in taking trouble. Trouble takes you, and its 'method' is to take you by the throat and knock you down and trample on you.''—" You are wrong ; it would only be a coward who would not bear suffering with some degree of fortitude."— " Then I am a coward," she said, without the smallest approach to vexation.—"I am sorry to say you are."—" Well, as I am not a man it is no stigma. There gothe people flocking out of the cirque, the child- ren in raptures, the grown-up French children in semi-raptures. I hope that not many will come past here ; it makes my left arm numb to hear those crisp, gay voices, that can only come from an unburthened heart."
The story is a very melancholy one, and the end is so vague, so inartistic, it is allowed to tail-off into such utter lack of interest, that the comparative cheerfulness of its termination does not take the weight off the reader's spirits. The author evidently gets tired of Angela when her mental strife is over ; plainly wearies of her when, for the first time in her recorded life, she does a right thing (and even then is so forced and hemmed-in by circumstances that she cannot help it) ; and finishes up the story by an absurdity. The least practical of lovers, returning from a period of probation, would hardly peruse the inscriptions on the tombstones in the 'churchyard in order to ascertain whether the beloved one was living or dead, while the simple expedient of inquiring within at her residence close by was open to him.
All is not lugubrious, however, in _this attractive, incongruous, unequal book. It is brightened up by some very pleasant social sketches, and however oddly it may sound, by two quite charming ghost-stories. An American family, " reglarly rich," as Toots said of Dombey and Son, is also a delightful accession to our acquaintances in fiction. Miss Pussie Smith, who rules her papa and mamma with a charming despotic sway, puts her pretty hands in Keepsake attitudes, and fills her drawing- room with orchids, because mere flowers are so common, but is a true and kind-hearted little being withal ; her despotically-ruled papa and mamma, and their rather dreadful, but very amusing male friends, are capitally drawn. There is point, perception, sly, dry humour in all the sketches of American society in Paris ; and the rich young Yankee who is so inventive in the arrangement of his "Germans," is the one living, moving, real man in the book.
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