The Story of Avis, and Other Novels

Miss PHELPS'S Story of Avis¹ is a very unusual book. It moves to strong admiration and almost equally strong regret. That would be a dull and cold reader indeed who should fail to be impressed by the emotional intensity of the tale, its mental refinement, the truth of the subordinate characters, its frequent humor, and the highly poetic quality of its diction. The diction, in fact, — to speak first of superficial things, — is often a great deal too poetic, and there are passages in the book to which the word frantic would even better apply. We have no sympathy with the vulgar captiousness which allows one idly to toss over a volume containing some of the best effort of a sensitive heart and a brilliant mind, just for the sake of a laugh at occasional absurdities of manner. But modesty and true art in the use of words are just as serious and obligatory as in the use of more palpable materials; and expressions like these, " Her lips leaned to him; ” “ against this background of the passion of carmine [of a portière!] her youth and color seemed to cut themselves like articulate words before his eyes; ” “ be paced the room with blind and bitter feet;” “she watched him with gaunt, insomniac eyes,” are as monstrous as warts and wens would be on the forehead of what Miss Phelps gravely calls the “ Melian Venus.” Whywill she call it so? Of a certainty, the expression would not be so irritating, would not remind one so obnoxiously of the irrepressible Burnaml’s treatise in Punch upon tlie Mealy Bug, if it were not a sample of a sort of conscientious pedantry which may also be noted as a surface blemish upon the book. There is the slightest possible affectation — unconscious, without doubt, as most affectations arc — of being so familiar with the arts and sciences as to have become blase about them all, so that one mentions them incessantly, but in a negligent and informal manner. It was George Eliot, whom Miss Phelps very nobly worships, who first set this ungraceful fashion of omniscience, which she alone, if even she, can wear becomingly; but it is possible for Miss Phelps to command a style of remarkable beauty which shall be quite distinctively her own. On the hither side of the line which she has too often overpassed, there is in Avis a good deal of very truly and justifiably fine writing. Take the description, in the second chapter, of the birds beating themselves to death against the Harbor Light, — a sad little “ theme,” as Miss Phelps would call it,—which is made to have a prophetic significance, and to which she recurs again and again, and always exquisitely. Or this, which the list of pigments harms but cannot spoil: “Especially she was moved by spring scents ; the breath of the earth where the overturned loam lay moistly melting shades of brown together— amber, umber, sienna, madder, bitumen, and Vandyke — with that tenderness which is so inexpressibly heightened by the gravity of the color; the aromatic odor of the early bonfires, with whose scent the languid air was blurred and blue; then by the exhalation of small buds, the elm and the grape, that borrowed the mantle of the leaf, as wild things do that of the forest, to escape detection. Every sense in her quivered to homely and unobtrusive influences.” Or the abundantly ardent, but always delicate sentiment of the scenes in the studio, when Avis was painting her lover’s portrait. She would hear the footsteps of her good old matronizing aunt die away, and, “looking gently after her, think of some odd, old words, ‘ Then she departed into her own country by another way.’ Turning to Ostrander, she would find his eyes upon her, but his lips said nothing. The robins came and peered at them with curious glance upon the window-ledge; a ground-sparrow who had built her nest just beneath the wooden door-step twittered in a tender monotone; the boughs of the budding apple-trees hit the glass with slender finger-tips, and reddened if one looked at them; the dumb sunlight crawled inch by inch, like a creeping child, across the steps and in upon the floor. ’ ’ All Miss Phelps’s allusions fo children are lovely, and the scenes in her story where children are introduced are wellnigh perfect. One is sometimes tempted to wish that she had never written prose at all, but only poetry; and that only at the bidding of some such inspiration as produced That Never was on Sea or Land, and a few of her briefest lyrics. Surely she might then have been better than an exceedingly popular writer, not only to-day but to-morrow. Possibly she never would have swerved from her highest line if she had not become the prey of a stringent set of “reformatory ” ideas, involving what we believe to be a wholly erroneous theory of womanhood. That theory seems to be based on the belief that marriage is not a woman’s best and highest destiny. It was plainly enough foreshadowed in the last of Miss Phelps’s earlier stories, The Silent Partner, where it will be remembered both the heroines, one an heiress and the other a mill operative, decline to marry, on the ground that they do not “ need ” their lovers to assist them in carrying out their views. Such an objection may well appear unanswerable to any given suitor, but who but a Boston woman “ would preach it as a truth to those who eddy round and round ”? The author of Avis does preach it as a truth. One made the allowance for a certain impracticability in her earlier books that each was the expression of keen sympathies overwrought in some particular direction, of a strained and unhealthful but probably transitory mood. In Avis she returns to the charge, after a long silence, with the added power which more years and broader knowledge needs must give to one so finely endowed by nature, and reiterates the notion, now become a belief: gifted women must not be fettered by domestic ties. That woman of the future whom Miss Phelps describes in the page or two of impassioned argument added after the story of Avis is told, whose way it has taken so many generations of mistake and sacrifice to prepare, is one whom no man shall hinder and none approach save one “ whose affection becomes a burning ambition not to be outvied by hers; whose daily soul is large enough to guard her, even though it were at the cost of sharing it, from the tyranny of small, corrosive cares which gnaws and gangrenes hers; such a man alone can either comprehend or apprehend the love of such a woman.” Avis’s mother had dramatic talent, and wanted to go upon the stage; but a masterful philosopher swooped down and married her, and she died to art and was buried in a respectable home. Avis herself had an extraordinary aptitude for painting; but a handsome fellow came a-wooing, and in a moment of weakness she hearkened to his charming, and there was an end of her. But Avis’s daughter, please God, shall be an artist first and always, and take a husband only to further her ambition and to share with her the “ small, corrosive cares ” of beefsteaks and table linen. Now the story of Avis herself, cleared of its moral, is a simple, sad, and likely one enough, and even the moral hardly interferes with its absorbing interest. In one way it is sadder than the author intends it to be, for it is the memorial of a great piece of self-deception. The dreamy, motherless girl, growing up in the rarefied air of a college town, who wins her dreamy father’s reluctant consent to her adopting an artist’s career, who is so happy studying abroad, and whose first efforts seem so full of promise, is ardently loved in that complete ripeness of her handsome youth when every New England girl is most fit to win and to retain love; and strange to say, the wooer, when she marries him, does not prove perfect. He was pleasant and fond, but he had weaknesses both of constitution and character. He was not very industrious; he was vain and accessible to flattery; and when invited to a sentimental flirtation by a woman whom he had admired before he married, this unnatural man in some sort consented. On the other hand, Avis was not a model housekeeper, at least when she began, and she felt her nerves rasped and her studio wronged by the wailing of her babies. They had troubles from without. Philip, the husband, lost his professorship; the children were ill; one died; the father’s ownvhcalth failed. They dismissed their anger then about the flirtation and the subsequent recriminations, and were tenderly devoted to one another until the end. In five years the conjugal experience, which is represented by Avis’s biographer as so deplorable and devastating, was all over, and the widow returned with one child to a peaceful home in her father’s house, and the strong years after thirty lay all, or almost all, before her. If she had had a touch of the genius, a tithe of the power, which the author attributes to her, she would have laid bold of her old work, as soon as her body was rested, with a breadth of grasp and a depth of insight impossible to her day of maiden dreams; and then, and then only, would she have done things worthy to live a while. For it is perhaps the very best testimony to Miss Phelps’s own power of portraiture that we believe her tale implicitly, and take sides about her characters as if they were creatures of flesh and blood. If we were less assured of her facts, we should not care so much to dispute the false inferences which she draws from them. And so we insist that no disappointments or misfortunes happened to this married pair but such as are common to humanity. Why should they not, like others, have ‘‘ met the good days and the evil, as they went the ways of fate”? Could Avis have supposed that the presumably hasty indorsement of Couture would secure a child of earth, and especially a daughter of earth, immunity from hindrance and sorrow?

The book is pervaded, as we have said, by a strong and solemn implication that the heroine ought not to have married at all, but economized all her strength to paint pictures. But marriage is the great central fact of human relations, whereby they exist and must continue. It is not quite so involuntary as birth or so inevitable as death, but ranks so near them that we may fairly apply to it the serene and triumphant saying of Marcus Aurelius : “ That which is universal cannot be a calamity.” The powers which five years of average married life can exhaust and extinguish are not of the first or second order. If Avis had no more than enough in her, besides doing her home duties moderately well, for a time so sorrowfully brief, to paint that one picture of the Sphinx (and we never shall believe without, seeing that even that was any better than Tedder’s), then she might well have diffused her power over half a dozen water-colors, and made “ home happy ” by hanging them on her parlor wall. A woman’s gifts do certainly belong, in a peculiar and preëminent manner, to her next of kin and her immediate society, and there is room for the exercise of more talent in the enrichment of social and domestic life than your earnest reformer is apt to realize. If a woman has gifts which cannot be confined within these modest limits, there is no use in saying that they ought to go to benefit the world, for they will, and there is no power in heaven or earth to help it. Women, as a rule, are born in homes, but the most memorable of them have also ruled homes of their own. It is a rather remarkable fact that no unmarried woman has ever yet achieved the highest order of distinction. Maria Theresa, Mary Somerville, Elizabeth Browning, George Eliot — who cannot recite the brief catalogue in his sleep? — have all been married women, almost all mothers; and the first husband of Mrs. Somerville, at all events, was not one enthusiastically to claim his half of the “ small, corrosive cares,” however it may be with the “ daily souls ” of Mr. Lewes and Mr. Browning. That frequently recurring condition of a somewhat highly civilized society, which greatly increases the proportion of women who necessarily remain unmarried, does not seem specially favorable to the development of original genius in the sisterhood; however, it may cultivate a class of painful virtues. Witness the patient and ineffectual ghosts who defile in endless procession under the elms of our own country towns. On the other hand, if anybody doubts that the effort of those who are just now toiling and teasing for all manner of artificial aids and exemptions for women is really one for the assistance of mediocrity and the inflation of flatness, let him read attentively that column of the Woman’s Journal which keeps brief record, from week to week, of the specific achievements of women as women. Miss Phelps is herself so good an artist, her instinct of truth is so overmastering, that against her own word and will she has made her exigeante Avis a woman of slender abilities and short-lived inspiration.

Our author expresses somewhere in her fervid book a special aversion to the word " morbid.’" Let us not use it, then. But let us say as emphatically as we can courteously that the best of all the qualities which a book, or a system, or a life may have is sanity. Suffer us to repeat, as the key-note of our best possible aspiration, Matthew Arnold’s magnificent line on Sophocles,

and to plead for a view of human affairs and a regulation of human desires which shall leave to the natural course of things its powerful and beneficent way, and to the grand exceptions their own impressive rarity and authenticity, — a view in which the “ primal duties ” shall be clearly seen to “shine aloft like stars,” while the meteoric destinies flash few and far between, and the dazzling comet-creatures return at immense intervals along their inconceivable ways.

Green Pastures and Piccadilly² — it should, by the way, be Piccadilly and Green Pastures—begins very pleasantly. Has not Mr. Black always a simple and peculiar grace of literary entrance ? On the present occasion it seems charmindy proper that we should owe to an old and much-admired acquaintance, Queen Tita of the Phaeton, our introduction to a new heroine, and one of the loveliest and most clearly individualized of them all, Lady Sylvia Blythe. We like her Scotch lover too, and entirely believe in him: Balfour, whose name is historic if he is in trade (so aristocratic do we all become in the charmed “liberties” of English fiction!) —Hugh Balfour, of the high mind, the hard head, the true heart; of enlightened and wary but ungrudging benevolence; of strict hut unsentimental sense of honor, scornful integrity, and haughty, quarrelsome temper. For his sake we fling ourselves into the familiar arena of English politics with an ardor almost as innocent as Lady Sylvia’s own. We enjoy his contemptuous fight with the deputation of electors from his borough of Balinascroon with as much zest as if an English election were a novelty, and we had not regularly weathered a score of them, every year of our adult lives, under the guidance of Bulwer, Lever, Trollope, or Reade. It is a pity that the scene in question is too long to quote, for it is the best in all the book, and strikingly illustrates Mr. Black’s aptitude for a more terse, keen, and manly style of writing than that which he ordinarily affects. Almost equally admirable are the scene at Balfour’s former college in Oxford, where he makes shamefaced and would-be indifferent confession of his love to the sym-* pathizing and romantic old don; the experiences of this thorough-going philanthropist in Happiness - Alley, where he sojourns for a while, — to the intense admiration of his high-souled young mistress, — that he may study from within the life of the lowest orders of society; the piquant love scenes between these two, where politics and nightingales play about equal parts, where the secrets which the lover tells the lady under the moon-silvered, whispering foliage of a Surrey June concern gas bills and water bills, and the girl is continually confounding the reformer by religiously adopting his extremest views and giving them back to him in a shape so exaggerated as to be suicidal. Then come the facile marriage the hurried honeymoon, and, fast and fateful, the wholly natural and inevitable misunderstandings and miseries of this high-spirited but undisciplined pair. It is all spontaneous, earnest, and fascinating; there is not a false note anywhere until we are suddenly jerked off the track of our highly-wrought interest and landed in the most prosaic wilds of our own country. The names of some of our dramatis persona: accompany us still, but their selves, their souls, are fled. A most engaging romance has been snatched away from us unfinished, and we have been given, in its stead, a commonplace kind of guide-book to scenes which we know quite well enough already. This last may not seem quite so great an injury to transatlantic readers as to ourselves, but they must equally object to seeing a work of art ruthlessly spoiled for purposes of literary trade, and a book of travels over the least storied of earth’s lands sprung on them from behind a front of sweetest fiction. It is inconceivable that a clever man like Mr. Black should have cared to do so flat a thing as to write the history of his travels at all, and very much indeed to be regretted that he seems to have contracted the rather vulgar habit of producing a book a year at any hazard. In no well-administered realm of letters will more than one book in two or three years be allowed to any author. George Eliot gives us about one in five. When the Preacher uttered his impatient protest against the “ making of many books,” he little dreamed — good, easy man — that the world would one day see something much worse than all making of books, namely, their manufacture.

No clue is given to the identity of the American author who figures on the title - page of Green Pastures as Mr. Black’s assistant. It is quite easy to see, however, what he must have supplied: an exposition of the manners and customs of the commercial “runner;” a careful explanation of the local jealousies of the north and south “ sides” in Chicago; a treatise on the much-disputed dialect of the Western plains. But the truer the “local color” of the latter part of the book, the less it suits those ideal beings whom we find it so difficult to associate with the scenes portrayed; and as for Balfour having remained in Idaho as Von Rosen’s agent, we simply know that the rumor is false. As the prince consort of Queen Titania cynically remarks, “ People who fail for half a million are sure to be pretty well off afterwards; ” and Hugh Balfour was never the man to have turned his back on the native land whose interests he had made so peculiarly his own, and plunged into the stupid life of a mighty hunter, just because he was no longer a millionaire. The feelings with which we close this mutilated romance may be summed up in one word,—defrauded. Our author has failed for more than Balfour himself, and we will have no compromise. The title of his last chapter, Auf Wiedersehen, would seem to indicate that he means, at some future time, to tell us more of these nice people, but we give him fair warning that we will not read the sequel to Green Pastures unless its opening sentence be, " And so they awoke and found it all a dream.”

Is there, then, no true element of romance in the large, inchoate living of the far West, its primitive manners, and the strange, titanic splendors of its scenery ? Is it quite out of the question for a novelist to try to enrich his work by the picturesque contrast between life in the most settled and sophisticated spot on earth and the life of the same race in one of the newest and most lawless? Henry Kingsley did this for English and Australian life; and who has forgotten the fresh and powerful enchantment of Geoffrey Hamlyn? And let nobody decide hastily, on the strength of Green Pastures and Piccadilly, that the British Channel cannot be made to flow freely into the Pacific Ocean. Let him not decide, at least, before he has read Erema; or, My Father’s Sin (Harper & Bros., New York). It is a very bad title for a book, — a trumpery, catchpenny title, of the sort which seems to “connote” coarse wood-cuts and incessant melodrama; nevertheless, the book is great. Mr. Blackmore, the author of Alice Lorraine and the Maid of Sker, has none of Mr. Black’s quaint literary courtesy and gentle graces of manner. He seems, in fact, rather to disdain to please. But he arrests our attention, and presently constrains us to follow him. He gives us with a few bold strokes a new, but ever memorable landscape; with a few firm lines, an entirely unheard-of, but intensely vivified type of character. We have no notion whereabouts on either continent people talk the queer, strong English dialect, freely besprinkled with obsolete and, we half suspect, invented words, which this author puts into the mouths of so many of his characters; but we do know that it seems equally suitable to the Californian herdsman and mill owner whose ancestors have been for several generations in America, the sexton who has never been beyond the confines of the sleepiest hamlet in England, and the old family servant , once a nurse, long a lodging-house keeper in the cockneyest part of London. Even the gentler-bred people in the book, the gallant major and the invalid earl, occasionally avail themselves of the same pure and pungent mode of speech, and we do not mind the oddity. We are too intent on what they have to say. Considered with reference to the actual world, the story of Erema is violently, one might almost say impertinently, improbable. Considered with reference to the relation of its parts, the interdependence of its peculiar and often thrilling incidents, it is admirably consistent and symmetrical. The daughter and heiress of an English earl and graduate of a French convent, after the death by starvation of her father in the great Californian desert, sojourns for a while most gratefully, and, as it would seem, congenially, in the household of the aforesaid herdsman,— and a rough but precious old hero he is. She is a princess of refinement and high spirit always, but enters with zest into the customs of the place, and distinguishes herself much in athletic sports and stormy, often sanguinary adventures. At this time, being fifteen years old and finely grown, she wins the affections of Ephraim Gundry, the old ranch-man’s grandson, but rejects his suit because she has her father’s name to clear of the cloud which blighted his existence. Animated by this filial purpose, and arrived at the mature age of seventeen, she returns to England under the formal guardianship of Major Hockin, of the British army, one of the most entertaining characters in the book and not the least lovable. Here she assumes the office of detective, grandly scorning any assistance from the police force of her mother country, and relying solely on the sufficiently remarkable aptitude for both fight and finesse which she had herself developed on the Pacific shore. After long struggles and many disappointments she is completely victorious. The real author of the crime of which her father had been accused is hunted down in person by this intrepid young woman, and makes voluntary confession to her. She declines to bring him to justice, but a timely flood removes him from the scene; the sickly, but truly saintly incumbent of the Castlewood estates dies almost simultaneously, and Erema enters into her long - alienated kingdom, only to turn her back upon it forever. American ties are stronger than those of birthplace and lineage. She comes back to the States in the midst of the civil war; finds Samuel Gundry in the Union army, and the rejected Ephraim in the Confederate; restores the latter to life, though stricken by an abundantly mortal wound; reunites and reconciles the two; and returns to California to spend the remainder of her days as the mother of Ephraim’s children and the mistress of Gundry’s mill. Could anything be more frantically absurd? But where now are the indignation and incredulity with which we received the suggestion that the Balfours might remain in Idaho? We are conscious of no such feeling. In the skillful hands of the author of Erema the impossible becomes indisputable, and the preposterous natural and plain ; because this author has true creative imagination, and “ when found,” as Captain Cuttle used so devoutly to say, “ make a note of.”

Erema, then, is a book worth study. Let us consider it a little longer. Minor peculiarities, or rather originalities, of this author’s method are a great concentration of purpose and seriousness of spirit. You cannot conceive of him as conscious of his own humor, although he betrays plenty, as very earnest people often do in conversation. He tells his wildest tale with a simple assurance which fairly cows the reader’s skepticism. He explains little, and apologizes never. He plunges his people without warning into the midst of the most extraordinary situations, and disdains even to tell how they got there; his business and the reader’s being to see them through. Another marked feature is the preponderance of noble types of character, — the very sparing employment, even in a tale of mystery and crime, of thorough baseness. Everywhere in the course of her quixotic quest Erema encounters kindness, help, loyalty. Even the arch villain of the piece half wins our pardon in the end, and in no maudlin fashion either, but only because we are made clearly to see the cruelty of his wrongs and the terrific strength of his temptation.

Erema is unconventional to the last degree, and readers who dislike this quality, and prefer something simple, safe, and realistic, had better turn at once to Marjorie Bruce’s Lovers. (Harper & Bros.) Marjorie had a great many of them in all orders of society, for she belonged to the class of heroines most frequently described as “ little witches,” and twinkled fatefully at every man she saw, and called her father “ darling daddy.” Since, however, that father was only a superior kind of yeoman, it became Marjorie to steel her small heart against the very genteelest of her admirers, and, in effect, to adopt the highminded resolution of the heroine in the Bab Ballads: —

This, after some ineffectual efforts and lapses into naughty coquetry, she is divinely enabled to do: the lord of the county, who had distinguished her by his smiles, marries the heiress cousin to whom he is properly betrothed, and Marjorie becomes the mistress merely of “ an ancient three-storied manor-house, with small casements looking out of masses of ivy, a couple of straggling modern wings, a quaint pillared stone porch gay with old-fashioned vases,” etc.

Marjorie Bruce’s Lovers may be described as passively and rather pleasantly harmless. Winstowe (Harper & Bros.), by Mrs. Leith Adams, is most aggressively and annoyingly so. It is saturated with false sentiment, and suffused with maudlin piety. If Dickens had once lost his mind, and embraced Methodism when he had only partially recovered it, he might have perpetrated much such a story. It begins with a tiresome old gentleman, so bowed and beaming with goodness that we strongly suspect him of having robbed a bank, who discovers in a church porch, one Christmas Eve, a vagrant boy, with aristocratic features and golden hair, listening to the carols, and starving. The matter-of-fact old man rashly proposes to remedy the starvation, but is respectfully requested by the æsthetic waif to wait until the music is over. This point he yields, but will not be let from adopting the young beggar and sumptuously providing for all his low connections. The highly-organized little wanderer’s name is Willie, and he grows to be a great comfort to the bland old gentleman, and saves children’s lives when the houses take fire where they are staying, and carries all before him at the university. He also clears at one sprightly bound the preliminary steps of legal advancement, popularly supposed to be slow and difficult in England, and is a blooming barrister at twenty-five, and the favorite guest of Q. C.’s and the like. His appalling astuteness never failed him but once, and that was when he fell in love with old David Earle’s other ward, also golden-haired, but highborn and richly dowered. She looked upon Willie as a brother, and engaged herself to Guy Tremlelt, whose record was by no means as clear as Willie’s, and whom the latter darkly suspected of being occasionally inebriate. Obeying his lawyer’s instinct, he even looks about for some proof of his rival’s guilt, but is presently shocked at his own lack of generosity, and permits himself to use the violent past participle “confounded” in making confession of his baseness. Thenceforward, he devotes himself simply to Tremlett’s reformation; succeeds, however, but indifferently, yet so far as to receive a recommendation to Lilian’s mercy, while watching at the bed where Guy is rather ruthlessly dispatched by delirium tremens. It is needless to add that Lilian, after a suitable delay, accepts him as a legacy; and that Willie is conclusively shown by his friend the Q. C. to be the descendant of a long line of nobles and heir to a handsome estate.

As for the Modern Minister (Harper & Bros.), the last of our English visitants, with its list of one hundred and twenty-one dramatis personæ, its rank abundance of truly vile illustrations, and the dense confusion of its numerous plots, we have but the first part of the story as yet, so perhaps there is no need to say anything about it. It has a certain exuberance of incident and scenery, but differs, unfortunately, from all the others by being positively coarse and objectionable in parts; and if it be not the work of a very young writer, it surely is that of a moderately vicious one. All these English books teem with Americanisms of expression, technically so-called. In all of them, and in books, by the way, of more literary pretension than any of them, we find “reliable” and “those sort of things,” and a fine confusion in the cases of the personal pronouns. But they have other qualities in common which distinguish them decidedly, and, it must be owned, favorably, from the two lively American tales which stand at the foot of our list. Trite and poor though several of these reprints be, they are all fairly well constructed, —• all, at least, except Green Pastures and Piccadilly, which, as we have seen, is dissevered and pieced, deliberately and of malice aforethought. The rest have each its significant chain of events and sequence of situation, a cumulative if not very intense interest, a slight but sufficient maintenance of suspense, and a proper resolution and end. That is to say, these English writers, even Mrs. Leith Adams, with her mincing moralities, appear all to have learned their trade, while the evidently clever and agreeable authors of the Wolf at the Door (Roberts Bros., Boston) and One Summer (Houghton, Osgood & Co., Boston) seem ignorant of those very first principles of fiction exemplified in any one of the familiar fairy-tales recited to us all in infancy. A story, properly speaking, is a thing of shape and boundaries and motive, not a portfolio of loose sketches, however charming, nor a rehearsal of long conversations, however natural and gay. The Wolf at the Door is one of the No Name novels, — number ten, we believe, — and it is less than the least and lighter than the most volatile of that amusing, but on the whole rather futile series. It is a speaking and very piquant likeness, in outline, of town life and fashionable charity, just as many of us know them. It is full of the bright talk of slightly commonplace and conventional, but refined and animated people; the temper of it is sweet, the style purer than we are apt to get from over the water; there is enough of diffused and careless cleverness about it to brighten and redeem six Marjories and a dozen Winstowes, but in no true sense of the word is it a romance, or even a tale. It strikes one as the quick work of an incorrigibly idle amateur, whose wit and talent will never submit to the discipline which they need in order to make them permanently effective.

It may be urged that the very immaturity of One Summer, which appears in a new edition with graceful illustrations by Hoppin, implies a greater chance of future excellence than the lady-like aplomb of the author of the Wolf at the Door, and we are always inclined to hope for the best; but there can be no harm in reminding one who would write novels exactly what a novel is and is not. It is either a study of picturesque types of character, — and not all types are picturesque, any more than all objects are suitable for representation in art, —or it contains a closely connected series of interesting events, commonly called a plot. Mr. William Black has proved himself so true and dainty an artist in character that we are not strenuous about his plots. Mr. Blackmore resembles the greatest novelists of all in combining these two characteristics, and he does so in a higher degree than has yet, we think, been generally acknowledged. The Marjorie Bruce and Winstowe makers irritate us by their fatuity, but they show clearly that they understand the mechanical principles of storytelling; while our own apt and sparkling countrywomen seem laboring under the delusion that any mere aimless “ once there was,” told spiritedly against time as one tells a story to an importunate child, is worthy to be called a work of fiction.