BOOKS.

FOR PERCIVAL.*

MISS VELEY has given us here a book of great promise and of no slight performance, belonging to a school which, without implying that she has in any way specially studied it,--and certainly she has not imitated it,—may yet fairly be called the school of Thackeray. Not that she has any of the mannerisms of the great satirist of our time. She does not diverge into attacks upon her supposed readers' reflections, as Thackeray did upon his ; she does not ridicule her hero or her heroine for the little self-deceits of which they are guilty, as Thackeray loved to do ; nor does she fix, by special preference, and with a kind of fascination, on the falser elements in human nature, and manage to give them an enormous preponderance in her picture of life, though she does not, by any means, dislike an opportunity of piquant criticism of this kind. But nevertheless that she belongs to Thackeray's school rather than to any other in modern fiction, two or three characteristics of this story prove. In the first place, she is at her beat when she is full of either pity or scorn, or a mixture between the two, and her pity is apt to be as much pity for the poverty of human nature as for its mishaps. The pathos of one or two scenes in this novel is very deep indeed, but the author seems almost to have pleasure instead of pain in making her readers see that the passion of these scenes is wasted passion,—passion spent on the wrong objects. She listens with a certain bitter pleasure to the chorus that is always in her ears, " Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" and lends her pen to verify it with something of eager zeal. And while she dwells upon this, though at a humble distance, after the manner of the great master of satire, one never quite knows which method of preaching that great truth she prefers,—the method of showing you how pitiful are the weaknesses and the illusions of the most fascinating among her characters, or the method of showing you how much there is that you cannot quite despise among the most repulsive and vulgar. The folly and even guilt of the most exquisite tenderness is kept steadily before you. And the grains of generosity and good-feeling lingering in the most vulgar and spiteful vanity are kept before you quite as steadily, —both apparently for the same purpose, that you may smile at what is best in human nature, when you see, first, how foolishly it is squandered on futile objects, and when you see, next, how closely akin to that best, is, even with all deductions, that which seems to you most contemptible. If we were asked which are the most masterly sketches in this story, we should say without hesitation, —Sissy, the exquisitely refined and delicate girl, who wastes herself on a man who never loved her, and who is made to tell a

most dishonourable and almost incredible lie for his sake ; and Lydia, the vulgar daughter of the vulgar lodging-house keeper, who makes love after the fashion of her kind, turns violently spiteful when she finds her love ignored and despised, and yet comes to herself again with a magnanimity which, though it turns the scale finally in her favour, seems rather intended to prove to us that magnanimity will not save from complete vulgarity, than that the deepest vulgarity is capable of a magnanimity of its own. The scene in which Mrs. Bryant, in her bugly cap, duns Percival for his unpaid rent, and poor Lydia intervenes to protect him from the flood of the widow's tears, bursts into a kind of rapture of triumph at the ill-success of her mother's distrust of herself, and then shows her magnanimous scorn for that same mother's distrust of her lodger, is as powerful and promising a bit of writing as we have read for many years back; and the final coup, "' Come along,' said Lydia, ' there's toasted cheese !' as she carries her mother off to sup on the promised delicacy, and disappears into that night in which the destinies of fictitious characters, when they finally leave the stage, are swallowed up, rings in our ears with true Thackerayan scorn. This scene will compare in power even with the very fine scene in which Sissy breaks off her engagement with Percival, and that other scene in which Percival repays her by acknowledging his engagement to Judith Lisle, as Sissy lies on her death-bed, caressing the little gold thimble he had given her, the one present she had not been obliged to return when their gifts to each other were sent back. Miss Veley betrays the bent of her talent in this,—that the most effective of all the touches, even in her most pathetic scenes, are the touches in which she dwells on the waste of the noblest feelings ; while the most humorous of her effects, even in the most amusing scenes, are those in which she triumphantly exhibits a certain affinity between the vulgarest nature and the noblest.

* For Percival. By Margaret Veley. In 3 vole. London: Smith, Elder, and Co What this story most wants is a certain imaginative grip of the whole plot. The side-sketches are admirable ; the centre figure, on the whole, poor and inadequate. Percival and Judith Lisle entirely fail to interest the reader, and though in this respect they only follow the example of most heroes and heroines, one of them at least,—namely, Percival,—is so completely the centre of the tale, that its interest, as a tale, is greatly diminished by the failure of his hold on the reader. That he is an olive-skinned young man, we are repeatedly assured; that he has no purpose in life except to travel and see bright pictures of foreign lands, we are also re- peatedly assured; that his clothes fit him well, we are carefully told; and that he has a certain pride and reserve, and also that strong hatred of double-dealing which goes with pride, we are well taught ; but beyond these qualities, none of which strike us as highly meritorious, there is nothing in him to interest us; and it is im- possible to forgive him for not heartily returning the love of one so very far superior to him, in every quality but one, as Sissy Langton. That one quality, of course, is integrity,—though we entirely decline to believe that Sissy ever did tell, even "for Per- cival," the most treacherous and incredible lie on which the plot of the story turns. It is unladylike ; it is unlike her in every

way ; it does not produce on her the sort of effect that such an act would have produced ; and we are unable to see why, if it did produce only the effect described on her, and no other, it should have made her tear herself apart from Percival, even when it was discovered. There is nothing so very heroic in being olive-skinned, wearing well-fitting clothes, having a deep pride and reserve and disdain for falsehood, and in re- pudiating all practical ambitions, that Sissy should have really feared Percival ; nor do we believe that the love for him which is represented in her, is in any way consistent with that sort of fear.

It is a great defect in the book that, turning, as it does, on her devotion to Percival, we are entirely unable to enter into either the monstrous untruth which she is asserted to tell on his behalf, or even—admitting that for a moment—the kind of fear which in- duces her to break off her engagement with him, when her love for him is so true and so passionate. These turning-points of the story remain quite unintelligible to us, and the story loses greatly in

force and meaning on this account. It is not as if Percival were a merely walking hero, like Love! in The Antiquary, or like young

Waverley ; for the meaning and force of the exquisite picture of Sissy Langton depend, in a considerable degree, on our understanding of Percival, and for Percival we are wholly unable to care. Again, Judith Lisle seems to us a perfect failure, though a less important failure ; but the failure of these two figures, and therefore of the considerable part of the book which is occupied with them alone, diminishes greatly the sense of power in it, and gives an ineffec- tiveness also to the plot. Barring the truly admirable sketch of the lodging-house keeper and her daughter, the story is good whenever it approaches Sissy, and poor whenever it leaves her. But after making this very large deduction from the power of the tale,—a deduction partly due, we suspect, to Miss Veley's satiric resolve to make a hero of a man who had no purpose in life except to be purposeless,—there is little but praise to give to the slight side-sketches of her tale. The pictures of the old squire, Godfrey Thorne, with his restless love of power, and his irritation under the feeling that his power was limited even by his own pledges as to the use he would make of it ; of Mrs. Middleton, with her delicate, conventional sense, and tender heart ; of Lottie Blake, and her fierce, childish love ; of the vulgar Mrs. James Thorne, with her "big, demonstrative woman's notion of a gliding walk ;" of Horace Thorne, spoilt, generous, irritable, and suspicious ; and of almost all those figures in the story which appear just to make a single scene effective, and then vanish, are almost all vivid. Only of Godfrey Hammond we do not know quite what to make. He represents a living figure evidently to the author, but not, by any means, to the reader.

It is not possible to give our readers any adequate specimen of the power of this book, for its power is shown almost exclusively in the scenes of deep pathos,—half-bitter pathos though they be. But we may give a specimen of the dialogue, which is all lively and clever, and one which will include a fair specimen of the lighter sketches of character, the picture, namely, of the rich ironmonger's daughter,—James Thorne's widow,—generally Known in the story as " Mrs. James " :—

"Mrs. James was not a bad-looking woman. From her girlhood onward she had always been somewhat too high-coloured and strongly built for beauty ; but her features were regular and her figure good. She might have made a grand Amazon ; but her affectation of juvenility, her sentimental reminiscences and insinuating smiles, were hideously at variance with her masculine appearance. 'Hunting Harry,' as Miss Harriet Benham had been called of old, hunted now with playful glances and little sighing allusions to her youth, as if she missed it like a friend she had just lost. Percival hated her, and behaved to her with stately courtesy. ' She has such a fearful voice,' he said one day to Sissy.' It isn't pleasant,' said Sissy, stooping over him as he sat, and putting some violets in his coat. Yours is.'—'I should think hers wasn't pleasant. If they wore going to hang me, and she had to pro- nounce sentence—which she would do with great pleasure—I think I should ask to be executed at once, and let her rasp it out at her leisure when I was beyond its reach.'—' You always speak so softly and lazily when she is near,' ' said Sissy, ' I think you aggravate her.'—' Do you really ?' Percival was so pleased, that he sat up. ' Dear me! If I got some of Aunt Harriet's voice jujubes, and sucked one between every sentence, do you think it might make me more mellifluous still?' —' Well, it would make you slower,' said Sissy ; I think you would never leave off talking to her then.'—' There's something in that,' said Percival, sinking back. ' Better leave well alone perhaps.'—' After all, her voice isn't her fault,' Sissy suggested.= It's one of therm She could hold her tongue.'—' Isn't that rather hard ? Don't be an unkind boy.'—' It is hard,' he allowed. People shouldn't be judged by voices, or noses, or complexions, or such things, of course. Take hair, for instance. I should not like to be unjust to a woman because her hair was pale drab, or because it turned grey at twenty-five, or because it was such a minute wisp that one small hair-pin would restrain the whole. I don't think our coloured brothers happy in their style of hair, but I don't blame them for it. But I am not superior to all prejudices—I admit it frankly, though with sorrow. I object strongly to any one in whose hair I detect a glowing shade of purple. Just get Mrs. ,Tames between you and the light—' But we have left Mrs. Thorne seated on the sofa by Aunt Harriet. ' You don't mind my calling you Aunt Harriet, do you?' she says sweetly. Perhaps I ought to say Mrs. Middleton ; but didn't my poor dear James always call you Aunt Harriet ? And my own name, too,—I always feel so fond of my name- sakes, as if they belonged to me somehow. Don't you ?'—' I never had much to do with any namesakes of mine, except one maid,' says the old lady, reflectively, ' and she had such dreadful warts on her hands ! But I was able to give her the best of characters, thank goodness r—

How droll you are !' Mrs. James replies, with her head on one side. She holds a small portrait a long way off, and lifts a gold-rimmed glass to examine it.—' What have you got there ? ' Aunt Harriet inquires. Mrs. James sighs, and turns the picture a little towards her companion, who puts on her spectacles, and peers curiously at it. It is a painting on ivory of Maurice Thorne, the Squire's favourite son, who was drowned so many years ago. Good gracious ! Maurice's miniature out of the library ! My dear Mrs. James, excuse me, but Godfrey never allows that to be touched.'—' Oh, he wouldn't mind mind My having it for a few moments, just to recall old days. He would understand My feelings, I am sure. Don't be afraid, dear Aunt Harriet ; if ho should come in, I will take all the blame. I will say, " The fault is mine, papa, entirely Mine—you'll forgive me, won't you? " I assure you, Aunt Harriet, ho shan't scold you—I will toll him you warned me, but that I was so wilful—and felt so sure he would understand my interest in poor dear Maurice.'—' Godfrey will not scold me—I am not afraid,' says the old lady, with quivering emphasis. She is almost boiling over with suppressed indignation at the idea of Mrs. James defending her from her brother. Her knitting progresses in a jerky manner, and she

has not discovered that she has dropped a stitch in the last row. It would be odd if Godfrey and I didn't understand each other. And you must pardon me, but I don't quite see your particular interest in Maurice.'—' In poor dear Maurice ? ' Mrs. James repeats, as if Mrs. Middleton had forgotten the proper adjectives for any one who hap- pened to be dead, and she would delicately suggest them. ' You don't see my interest in him ? How strange ! I always thought it so true, what some one says, somewhere, you know, that a woman never feels quite the same towards a man who even if Rho Oh, I can't remember exactly how it goes, but it isn't out of my own head. I saw it somewhere, and I said, " How very true !" One must feel a little different towards him, I think, though one cannot feel quite as he would wish.' Mrs. Middleton stares blankly at her visitor. Astonish- ment and disgust have risen to such a height within her, that, unable to find fitting expression in her face, they find none at all. What does this woman mean ? That Maurice—Maurice—Oh, it is too much (' My dear,' she said afterwards if I had spoken I must have screamed at her!') Mrs. James, still with the portrait in her hand, sighs, half-smiles, and puts up her eyeglass for another survey. ' So like l' she murmurs. Handsome Maurice, trim and neat in the fashion of thirty years ago, looks oat of the miniature frame with wide, clear oyes, and proudly- curved mouth. One might fancy an expression of scornful appeal on the delicately painted features, as if ho saw the coarsely-complexioned, middle-aged face leaning over him, and exclaimed, ' Mate me with her 1 She turns the bright young fellow a little more to the light, and dusts him pensively with her lace-edged handkerchief. Cunene she says. 'Of course poor dear Maurice was handsomer—there could be no doubt of that:'—'Handsomer than whom ?' Aunt Harriet is growing desper- ate.—' Handsomer than poor dear James. I've got him in a brooch. It must have been done when ho was about the same age, I should think.'—' I dare say I am a stupid old woman,' says Aunt Harriet, who has compressed a multitude of mistakes into a row or two of her work, and is going fiercely on, but I don't quite see what was curious. One of them was pretty sure to be handsomer than the other, unless they were twins, and you couldn't tell which was which.'—' Dear Aunt Harriet—how practical she is I' Mrs. James murmurs, in a fondly patronising voice. No, I was thinking how curious it is that Love will still be lord of all,

as they say. Poor dear Maurice—handsomer—older (and that is always a charm when one is very young, isn't it?), and the heir, too. And yet it was poor dear James who was to be my fate Ah, I suppose it was obliged to be James,' says Mrs. Middleton vaguely. Her companion darts a keen glance at her, as if suspecting a hidden sarcasm, but the

old lady is examining her knitting with newly-aroused curiosity, and seems startled and innocent."

With plenty of sketches as good as this, and one or two of much greater force, with very high powers of pathos, and a keen

insight into superficial elements of character, Miss Veley only wants leisure and care, a stronger grip of her story, and less perverse desire to make a hero of a man with hardly anything great in him, and (we suspect) almost because there is nothing great in him, to write something which will enrol her name among that higher class of English novelists who write not for one generation only, but for Englishmen of every age.