KILMENY.*
Mn. BLACK'S novels are always clever, and this one, at least, is, moreover, very pleasant reading ; but in spite of a touch of genuine peetry that ought always to belong to the higher novel-writers and a very good conception of character,—too often carelessly and apparently hastily worked out, —he has hardly yet written any story of a really high class. His plots arc apt to be weak, and do not seem to us to improve. Nothing can be looser in texture, and not only less dramatic, but less graphic in development, than the story,—so far, we mean, as regards the hero and heroine,—on which, this novel is threaded. The hero, we are told by Mr. Black, is a mere "lens," through which the scenes of the story are surveyed ; and let us add that he is very far indeed from an achromatic lens, and that the phenomena known as those of diffraction are exceed- ingly well marked in his case. At the opening, his sensitiveness is so exc-ssive that we expect a career of mawkish and wilful emotion, and hardly understand how he sobers down into so very
decent and practical a person long before the close. As his friend justly says of him, he has the "courage and determina- tion and self:reliance of half-a-dozen men, and the sensitive- ness and finical particular humbugging nonsense of a thousand girls," but what puzzles us is that this latter aspect of the hero's character drops away so rapidly, and even unnaturally, almost before it is well defined, and hardly exhibits itself at all where one would most expect it, in relation to the young men of better rank amongst whom he may live. All you can say of the hero is that he is an eccentricity hardly accounted for, that he faints away under very small excitements, and takes great excitements with inexplic- able calmness. The slavery of his first experience of professional life
is supposed to have produced a vast impression on his sensitive artistic nature, and to have haunted him ever after; but it is not sufficiently delineated to impress itself equally on the reader, so that his frequent references to it afterwards are felt to be a littleob tru- sive. On the whole, but that he is made the 'lens' for some passages
of beautiful and thoroughly poetical description, we cannot say we like the object-glass through which the image of the story is focussed for us at all ; and as for the principal figure, or at least what should be the principal figure so focussed, the young lady who inspires the heroic artist's highest efforts, we learn hardly anything at all about her, except that she has a way of looking dreamy and far away,— withdrawn from real life,—that she is small, rides well, walks well, and has eyes "with large dark pupils set in tender blue-grey, and shaded by long eyelashes,—eyes full of strange intense life that was just tempered by the calm, wise, kind expression of them." We submit that this is barely enough to justify the raptures to which we are so often treated.
When we leave 'the lens' and the principal figures which it focuses, the improvement is great, and as is so often the case with novelists of any power, we at once feel that the figures intended to excite least interest are far more worthy of it than those on which the plot chiefly depends. Heatherleigh, the clever, generous, masculine artist without genius, of clear, sharp, sceptical intellect, who understands the business side of his art so well, is exceedingly -well drawn if Mr. Black were not at times so very careless, and slightly contemptuous, as it seems to us, towards his readers, in finishing off this gentleman's conversation. Nothing in the world can be better than this explanation,—whether regarded as illus- trative of his character, or as realistic lively dialogue —which he gives of his averseness to save money against a rainy day : —
"4 Yon meanthat I ought to lay up for a rainy day? Yes.'—' I daren't
begin, Ted; for I know the consequences. A man who has just what money he wants, with the chance of getting a little more by a little extra work, is in a happy position ; but the man who saves ever so little pledges himself to a draining system. He is never satisfied with what he has saved. Its ignominious smallness haunts him, and drives him to unnecessary work and unnecessary economies. God forbid that I should become avaricious, with my eyes open, Ted ! You talk nonsense,' I said. There is no reason why you should become avaricious. But when you have an extra ten-pound or twenty-pound note, why not put it into a drawer, or into a bank, rather than invent some useless extra- vagance, as you do now, simply to get rid of it ? The ten-pound note would look shabby. I should say to myself, "I must get a hundred pounds, instead of eighty, for this picture from Solomons." Solomons comes up. We have talked about eighty pounds ; I demand a hundred. Solonsons is disgusted, begins to worry, and bargain, and deprecate, and beseech. Inwardly I cry to myself, "Good God ! am I become a cheese- monger, that I must make my living thus ?' Ultimately Solomons gives me ninety pounds ; and I never see him afterwards without grudging him the ten pounds, and I never see my small savings without thinking, with a pang, that they ought to be ten pounds more. My dear boy, I don't see why a man should wilfully make his life a burden to him. When the rainy day does come, I shall know at least that I have enjoyed the sunshine. I don't envy the men who sit indoors all their life, dis- consolately patching an umbrella."
But then, again, nothing can be more silly than this bon mot attri- buted to the same talker, and apparently so much prized by the great diner-out and conversationalist of the book, that he at least pretends to take a note of it :— "Do you fish, Heatherleigh ? '—'No,' said Heatherleigh, who was cutting the wire of one of the bottles, while I was busy with the lamp. You never spent a wet day chub-fishing in a sluggish Essex stream ? No.'—' Then you never contemplated suicide. Oh, what a charming county is Essex, on a wet day, with never a public within six miles of you! I'll tell you what it is,' said Heatherleigh, pouring out half a tumbler full of pale, hissing, straw-coloured wine, when Noah looked out of the Ark and fancied that the waters of the Deluge were assuaged, it is clear he was not in the neighbourhood of Essex.'—' Oh, damme, that is too good to be lost,' said Morell, taking out a note-book and jotting down, or pretending to jot down, some memorandum."
A man of Heatherleigh's clear, strong, smart nature would never have made so silly a joke as that, and it is not the only blot of the kind which we have noticed in reading the usually crisp and telling dialogue put into his mouth. Still Heatherleigh is, on the whole, a strong and admirably drawn figure. With "Bonnie Lesley," the yellow-haired, innocent, large-eyed, superficial-minded beauty, who appeared in a somewhat different shape in Mr. Black's tale of Love or Marriage we are again well satisfied. Throughout the tale she keeps up her character of shallow kindliness and not unamiable coquetry, but we are not sure that she is not betrayed into rather too keen, and earnest, and, so to say, positive criticism in the conversation which she has with the hero during the drive back from Richmond. The discussion turns on the possible success of an unconventional love marriage, if a rich girl were to marry a poor lover, and go abroad to get rid of the atmosphere of false relations which in conventional England such a marriage would cause,—and we cannot help thinking that Bonnie Lesley too much loses her child-like, inquisitive, wondering tone in this conversation, and talks too like a wise, clear-headed woman, who had cast off that sense of self-distrust and of mute appeal for approval, which is elsewhere of her essence. Take this, for example :-
"'Let us take one ease. The lady is well-born, tender-hearted, tolerably rich, and has a pretty considerable pride in her ancestry. The lover has no family-tree, and little money ; but he has all manner of manly and lovable qualities that win the lady's liking and admiration. Now, ought they to marry ?'—' Not in England ; particularly if she has a lot of friends and relatives.'—' A. decisive judgment,' she said, smiling ; still you leave me a loophole of escape. They may marry out of Eng- land. Then you don't see any real obstacle to their union, so far as they themselves are concerned?'—' How can there be ?'—' Forgive me for saying it, but you stare at such a notion as if there were something ghastly in it. Yet it is natural that, wherever she goes, the girl will retain much of the opinions she has caught in our English atmosphere, and may even at times show the awkwardness of over-striving to convince the man that he is her equal.'"
There we have, if we do not much mistake, Bonnie Lesley speaking with authority, and not in the tone of appeal which is so character- istic of her. We seem to miss her natural voice in this dialogue, and to hear that of a more sagacious and thoughtful woman. But with this exception the picture of her is admirable, and the denouement of her story is admirable too. But perhaps Polly, the model, is the freshest and best of Mr. Black's woman pictures, though here again there is a great carelessness in the plot, rather than in the character. How should Polly, who has avoided Heatherleigh's rooms so carefully, who had anxiously avoided meeting him even, for months, and who had so strong a reason for not seeking him, especially for not seeking hi m when alone, happen to be going to his rooms, where she expected to find him alone, on the very occasion when it chanced that his father was present, and the conversation about her, which it was so undesirable for her to overhear, passed between them ? This seems to us one of the many little notes of a hastily written book. But Polly herself, with her shrewdness, and gaiety, and sharpness, and her frank, unbashful nature, and the great tenderness and depth of modesty which lie beneath it, is a delightful sketch, on which we should have been glad if the author had lingered longer.
Mr. Black's rapidest sketches are among his best things. The sketch of old Job Ives, of Bonnie Leslie's impudent little niece who dines with her at the Star and Garter, and of Lena, the Munich professor's daughter, are all in their way very happy, though very slight. Still, looking at the book as a whole, though it is very pleasant reading, with touches of genius here and there, we are persuaded that it is somewhat hasty and careless, that it is beneath Mr. Black's own artistic ideal, and that it will impress his most attentive and sympathetic readers rather as once more indi- cating how much he could do, than as raising their estimate of his execution. The type of tale in which, if our impression of his powers be worth anything, he might rise highest, is the idyllic, semi-poetical story, not, of course, without a hard side to it by way of background, of which Miss M. B. Edwards has given us one or two clever specimens in Dr. Jacob and John and .1, but which reaches the point of really perfect art without involving too much of close, minute, realistic painting, in such an inimitable work as the Liza of the great Russian artist Tourgue- neff. Only if he should ever attempt a great effort in that type, he must not overdo the sentiment ; he must not revel in subjective- ness, as he does in some parts of the tale before us.
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