"He strained me to his desolate heart, and we kissed each other wildly, vehemently; none came between us then. Then he tried to put me away from him.

"My darling,' said he, 'you don't know what you are saying. Do you think I am such a brute as to be the ruin of the only woman I ever loved?' And his deep voice was sorely shaken as he spoke.

"If you go,' I said in my insanity, throw- pale. This distinction is one which goes ing myself into his arms, I'll go too. Oh! deeper than mere criticism. It is a point for God's sake, take me with you!' upon which social literature and society itself go much astray. When people who for each other, are obliged to meet, the scarcely know each other, and do not care. lightest of light talk naturally comes in to fill up the stray moments; and it is very handy for the novelist who has many stray corners to fill up; but now and then a point of some kind must be given to this light social froth. If not wit, which is not always at hand, why then a little license, a touch of nastiness something that will tion in the midst of us. Perhaps the indiThis is the abominashock, if not amuse. cation it would seem to give of darker evil concealed below may be false- and we not only hope but believe that it is false of itself it is the height of unloveliness.

but

After our free-spoken heroine has come to the climax of her fate, she becomes consumptive and reflective after that loftily pious kind which generally associates itself with this species of immorality; for sensual literature and the carnal mind have a kind

of piety quite to themselves, when disappointment and incapacity come upon them. The fire which burned so bright dies out into the most inconceivably grey of ashes; and the sweetest submission, the tenderest purity, take the place in a second of all those daring headstrong fancies, all that self-will and self-indulgence. The intense goodness follows the intense sensuousness as by a natural law; the same natural law, we presume, which makes the wicked witch of romance- the woman who has broken everybody's heart, and spent everybody's money, and desolated everybody's homesink at last into the most devoted of sisters of charity. The good women who follow the rule of St. Vincent de Paul would be little flattered by the suggestion.

We do not feel ourselves capable of noticing, although what we have just said recalls them to our mind, certain very fine and very nasty books, signed with the name of a certain Ouida, it is to be supposed a woman also. They are so fine as to be unreadable, and consequently we should hope could do little harm, the diction being too gorgeous for merely human faculties. We note, in glancing here and there through the luscious pages, that there is always either a mass of gloriou hair lying across a man's breast, or a lady's white and jewelled fingers are twined in the gentleman's chestnut or raven curlspreferably chestnut; for "colour" is necessary to every such picture. Our readers

"

She

will have remarked that even in the crisis mistakable, admitting of no compromise,
of her misery, the poor little heroine of no darkening by grease or confining by fix-
'Cometh up as a Flower' could not refrain ature a great mass of deep-red hair,
from throwing her hair in "splendid ruddy strange, weird, and oddly beautiful."
billows over her lover's shoulder; and the is picked up in the street by the artist-hero,
amount of use got out of the same powerful who is equally, as a matter of course, sub-
agent in Strathmore' and Idalia' seems jugated at once by this gorgeous combina-
something remarkable. Hair, indeed, in tion of colour. Margaret makes great play
general, has become one of the leading with her hair, like all the other ladies. If
properties in fiction. The facility with she does not take to sweeping it over her
which it flows over the shoulders and bos- lover's breast all at once, she lets it over
oms in its owner's vicinity is quite extraor- her own shoulders "in a rich red cloud,"
dinary. In every emergency it is ready for which comes to the same thing; and not-
use. Its quantity and colour, and the re- withstanding that she tells him with beauti-
flections in it, and even the "fuzz," which ful frankness the story of her life, into
is its modern peculiarity, take the place of which
"the usual character without
all those pretty qualities with which hero- which the drama of woman's life is incom-
ines used to be endowed. What need has plete a man!" had come at an early
a woman for a soul when she has upon her age, poor Ludlow marries her, despite all
head a mass of wavy gold? When a poor the remonstrances of his friends. Then
creature has to be represented, her hair is ensues a long and sufficiently clever des
said to be scanty, and of no particular col- scription of the failure of this red-haired
our. Power, strength, a rich nature, a no- heroine to adapt herself to the dulness of a
ble mind, are all to be found embodied in respectable life. It is very hard work for
this great attribute. Samson, being a Jew, her, as may be supposed. When she goes
had probably black locks, which would be to visit her dull mother-in-law at Brompton,
against him; but otherwise Samson would she sees in the Row, as she passes, faces
have made a great figure in these days if that remind her of her former history; peo-
indeed Delilah had not outdone him with ple pass her in mail-phaetons and on high-
amber floods of equal potency. Amber is stepping horses, while she walks, who would
the tint patronised in the works of Ouida. place both at her disposal at a word. She
It is the only idea that we have been able will not say the word; but naturally, as she
to evolve out of her gorgeous pages, if in pursues her walk, she loathes her own
deed it can be called an idea. With other bondage more than ever; and in the even-
and more orthodox writers the hue is gold ing, when she plays to her good, stupid,
or red. When the conception demands a adoring husband, dreams come upon her of
milder shade of colouring, auburn, and even the balls of other daysof" Henri so grand
chestnut (with gold reflections), are per- in the Cavalier seul," "of the" parterre
missible; but when a very high effect is in- illuminated with a thousand lamps glittering
tended, red is the hue par excellence. Red like fireflies,...and then the cosy little sup
and gold, in all its shades, are compatible per, the sparkling iced drink." Such sub-
with virtue; amber means rich luxurious lime recollections carry her far away from
vice; whereas the pale and scanty locks the solemn quiet of Elm Lodge. And she
are the embodiment of meanness and pov has a baby, and hates it; and her husband
erty of character. As for black and brown, loves her so much, and is so unspeak-
which were once favourites in fiction before ably good to her, that she grows mad with
it took to violent colouring, they are "no- disgust and misery. And, in short, an aw
where." They may be permitted now and ful crisis is visibly coming, and comes by
then in a strictly subordinate position, but the reappearance of the man, her first love,
they have nothing to do with the symbolism who, it turns out, was not her seducer, but
of modern art.
her husband. So that the wretched crea-
ture has made a victim in cold blood of the
unhappy artist marrying him, as the vil
lain used to marry an unsuspecting woman
in the old novels, because he was a quite
hopeless subject for any other treatment,
and because she wanted comfort and a
home! The scene in which she calmly in-
forms Ludlow of these facts of her utter
indifference to himself and her child, her
devotion to another man, and, finally, of

Red is the colour chosen by Mr. Edmund Yates to characterise the heroine of one of his many productions, the Margaret of 'Land at Last.' She has, as a matter of course," large, deep, violet eyes," and "long, thick, luxuriant hair, of a deep-red. gold colour; not the poetic auburn not the vulgar carrots' a rich metallic red, un

-

*Land at last; The Forlorn Hope."

her previous marriage has considerable | fused it." And she makes an edifying end, dramatic power, if it were not that the vile watched and counselled and cared for by audacity of one party, and the feebleness the model of womanly virtue, who all this of the other, take from it the interest which time has been saving up for poor Ludlow. should belong to a death-and-life struggle. Such is the story. It is a little departure The idea is so far original that Margaret is from the established type of the goldenat no period of her career a repentant haired sorceress, and the author does not Magdalene; and neither is she tempted by try to soften her guilt by any touches of passion into her base and treacherous crime. sentiment; but still it is clear that he feels She marries Ludlow in cold blood for a her to be a superior woman. He may home, without any delusion on the subject, praise his other personages in words, who knowing that he is a good and innocent are contented people, making the best of man, and that she is bringing him disgrace their lives; but Margaret, who makes the and ruin. The best touch in the book is worst of it, and to whom respectability is the woman's stupid ignorance and insensi- intolerable, and who dreams of cosy supbility, which leads her to imagine that she pers and iced drinks, is evidently, though can return, as she says, to her husband, af- he says he disapproves of her, fashioned after having been the wife of another man ter a much higher ideal. Mr. Yates goes a delusion out of which she is speedily driv- into her ways and thoughts in detail, while en when the wretched reprobate to whom he contents himself with weak plaudits of she goes back turns her away with a cruel-"6: Geoff, dear old Geoff," from all the paintty and insensibility equal to her own. So er's surroundings. To his taste it is evifar this is true enough, and no attempt is dent that the wickedness of the woman, her made to clothe vice in an attractive form; heartlessness and self indulgence, and utter but yet it is undeniable that the author blindness to everybody's feelings but her throughout gives to his red-haired woman a own, render her profoundly interesting; lofty superiority over all the good people and his good women are very dull shadows in his book. She-with the rich red by her side. We do not forget that years cloud over her shoulders, her silence, her ago this used to be the reproach addressed abstraction, the secret contrasts she is mak- to Mr. Thackeray, and that the cleverness ing in her own mind between the respec- of Becky and the silliness of Amelia were table suburban life and that of the illumi- very favourite objects of reprobation to nated parterres and iced drinks of her for- virtuous critics. But Thackeray did not mer state of being, and the profound dis- dwell upon Becky solely because she was gust which fills her is evidently, in Mr. wicked. She was infinitely clever, amusYates's eyes, a creature much above the ing, and full of variety. The fun in her level of those dull women whose talk is of surmounted the depravity. But at the presbabies. She sails about among them in sullen ent day this is no longer the case. There state, and he feels that she is a banished is no sort of fun, no attraction of any sort, angel -a creature of a higher sphere. about such heroines as the Margaret in Her disgraceful and abominable secret, Land at Last.' Their interest is entirely though of course he duly punishes it, still factitious, and founded solely upon their elevates her above the dull mother and wickedness. The creature is a loathsome gushing sister of her artist-husband. And cheat and impostor, and therefore she is when her real husband has disdainfully worthy of being drawn at full length, and spurned her, she becomes a heroine. When presented to us in all the convolutions of she is found, she makes a little speech of self-defence, "I acknowledge my sin, and, so far as Geoffrey Ludlow is concerned, I deeply, earnestly, repent my conduct;" she says, "Have those who condemned me -and I know naturally enough I am condemned by all his friends - have those who condemned me ever known the pangs of starvation, the grim tortures of houselessness in the streets? Have they ever known what it is to have the iron of want and penury eating into their souls, and then to be offered a comfortable home and an honest man's love? If they have, I doubt very much whether they would have re

her stupid and selfish nature. Such seems to be the view of fiction adopted even by such a writer (greatly above the ordinary sensational average) as Mr. Yates, to whom, by the way, artists in general are little indebted for the flippancy and coarseness of the picture he gives of them. Beer and pipes are not refined accessories certainly, but yet their presence on the scene scarcely necessitates the production of Charley Potts as the representative painter. It is not complimentary to English art.

Another book by the same authorwhose productive powers fill us with awe and wonder-is the Forlorn Hope;' in

which the story turns upon the forlorn and some extent from the traditions of her
hopeless passion of a doctor, already mar- school. Her two last books *
ried, for a fair young patient, who returns
his love. The doctor's wife, in a fit of tra-
gic but only too clear-sighted jealousy, poi-
sons herself, and leaves him free; but the
poor, pretty, consumptive Madeline, who is
the object of his love, marries somebody
else just at the moment when her physician
is beginning to permit himself to think of
approaching her, and henceforward can
only purchase a little intercourse with her
hopeless lover by falling very ill and dying
in his hands. Now it goes utterly against
all social morality to introduce lovemaking
between a doctor and his patient. There
are even hard-hearted critics who have ob-
jected to the idyll of melancholy passion as
set forth in the pure and pensive pages of
'Doctor Antonio,' notwithstanding that the
scene is Italy, and the story as spotless as
imagination could conceive. Doctors and
patients have no right to fall in love with
each other; it goes in the face of all the
proprieties and expediencies of life. A
young physician may, it is true, be permit-
ted to appreciate the beauty and excellence
of the sweet nurse in a sickroom, who min-
isters along with him to the sick mother or
father or brother; but when she herself be-
comes his patient, a wall of brass rises be-
tween them. Yet Mr. Yates's sympathies
evidently go with the physician, and it ap-
pears only natural to him that the golden-
haired patient (pale gold in this case, which
is angelic-not red gold, which is of the
demons) should quite obliterate in Dr. Wil-
mot's mind the reserved and dark-complex-
ioned wife who waits for him at home.
This poor woman does not right herself
even by suicide. The facts of the case give
her husband, when he finds them out, a
great shock; but not so great a shock as
does the marriage of the delicate Madeline,
who, angel of purity as she is, evidently
feels it quite legitimate on her part to recall
her medical lover, and enact little scenes of
despairing love on her deathbed, and die
happy in his arms, with a sweet indifference
to the fact of her husband's existence. It is
no doubt very melancholy that people
should obstinately persist in marrying the
wrong person, as indeed is visible in real
life as well as in novels; but how far it is
expedient to call in the right man, whom
you have not married, as your medical at-
tendant, may, we think, be questioned. The
suggestion is not a pleasant one.

As Miss Thomas has been mentioned in the beginning of this paper, we may say, in justice to her, that she has freed herself to

are neither immoral (to speak of), nor horsey, which is akin to immoral. They are very frothy, and deal with a world which is not the ordinary world around us a world where there is either very gorgeous upholstery or very shabby meanness, and no medium between them; but still the books are not nasty. 'Played Out.' in fact, is not a bad story. The little heroine Kate is very tiresome in her changeableness, but still she is a well-known character, whom we have met so often that we feel a certain interest in her, and indignation at the amazingly senseless way in which her prospects are thrown away. The device by which this is accomplished is one which is becoming about as general as the golden hair. It is used in both Miss Thomas's books-in Cometh up as a Flower' - in a lively and clever novel called Archie Lovell, which is a little earlier in date and no doubt in a host of others if we could but remember. It is a device not very creditable either to the invention or the good taste which suggested it. In all these books the heroines are made to spend a night accidentally in the society of a man with whom they have been known to flirt. It is done in the purest innocence, and in that curious fortuitous way with which things happen only in novels. Chance alone on both sides brings it about, but yet it becomes known, and the consequences are generally disastrous. Kate Lethbridge, for instance, in Played Out' is persuaded to step into a railway carriage in which her friend is going off to London, and which is supposed to wait ten minutes at a little country station, to enable him to spend these ten minutes pleasantly. And the moment she has entered it the train sweeps away, and the young lady's reputation is ruined for life. This expedient, it must be allowed, is a very poor one; and it is a curious sign of the absence of all real inventive power in this kind of literature, that it should be so often employed. In Called to Account,' Miss Thomas enters upon the less safe ground of married life, and displays to us, among a number of "grandly-simple" beauties, with the usual sublime attribute of golden locks, a scanty-haired pale-coloured woman, who makes mischief and destroys domestic peace, yet turns out very good at the end, and goes into the Sister of Mercy business with much applause on all hands. Here, too, an unhappy pair are condemned to rouse everybody's suspicion, and to risk

*Played Out ;' 'Called to Account.'

"On either side of these glasses were niches (oval-shaped at the top in the wall, which was coloured a faint warm cream-colour) containing marble statuettes about two feet high. Venus and Hercules, Apollo and Diana, were chosen as the respective types of beauty and strength.

their character by being shut up together in "immense sheets of plate-glass," but go in a cave for some twenty-four hours or so, on to its more purely artistic features: though happily, as they are all but killed by the experience, scandal is silenced. Certain curious symptoms of the kind of culture prevalent in the region to which this class of literature belongs, are, however, to be gleaned out of these books-a real contribution to our knowledge of our species. The first of these gives us a sketch of the favourite literature of the hero, who is, like so many heroes, a man of letters publishing novels in magazines, and otherwise contrib uting to the instruction of the public. He is, besides, a clerk in a government office, a university man, and has suddenly and unexpectedly become heir to a fine estate. We are told to glance round his sitting-room in his absence, with the view of throwing light upon his tastes and pursuits and this is what we find:

"The recesses on either side of the fire place were occupied with broad shelves, and these were filled with books- original editions, most of them, of the standard modern novelists. An independent oak book-stand, placed within reach of the one arm-chair in the room, might be supposed to contain the more special favourites of that room's occupant, and there Fielding and Smollett, Wycherly and Ben Jonson, Spenser and Sidney, Bon Gaultier, Bacon, Addison, Ingoldsby, and a host of other wits, po ets, essayists, dramatists, humorists, and scholars, stood in amicable array."

Our readers will admire the admirable conjunction of names herein assembled, and the charming way in which they relieve and heighten each the effect of the other. Bacon and Addison leashed together, and marching between Bon Gaultier and Ingoldsby, is a true stroke of genius; and there can be no doubt that a very peculiar light is thrown upon the "tastes and pursuits, if not on the character of my hero," by the fact that his shelves are filled with the standard modern novelists in the "original editions." It is intelligible that people who read nothing but standard modern novelists should produce such books as those which are now under review. The second passage we shall quote is also a description of a room a room which the hero again a literary man- of Called to Account,' thinks so perfect, that he never tires of raving about the exquisite taste which has arranged it. It must have been done by "a woman of genius essentially human," he says. We do not go into the paraphernalia of silver lamps, "shallow silver urns, ciassical in design and execution," and reflected

In the

In one recess by the side of the fireplace, a small semi oblique piano stood, with a pile of loosely arranged music on it. corresponding recess there was a ruby velvet shrine, composed of a pedestal and curtains for the glorious goddess, who is grander and more perfect in her mutilated beauty than anything else the world has seen in marble, a nearly lifesize copy of Our Lady of Milo.' And pictured suggestions of the past and the future were not wanting; for Raphael and the Fornarina, Dante and his Beatrice, and a Madonna with the warm soft beauty of a moonbeam, all looked upon one from the walls."

This amazing combination strikes the poet-hero as half divine. Very likely Miss Thomas imagines that the relation of the Fornarina to Raphael, and that of Beatrice to Dante, were identical; and that it is very fine and classical to talk of the Venus as Our Lady of Milo. Such wonderful exhihas caught up a name here and there, and bitions of the uneducated intelligence which is bold enough to think it knows what they mean, are very astonishing. Truly, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

We have gone as far as human patience can go in our survey, and leave off with the certainty that we have left a great deal that is more objectionable still untouched. In one novel, which we do not attempt to notice here, but which lately passed through our hands, we remember that the chief interest turns on the heroine's discussion with herself as to whether or not she will become the mistress of a very fascinating man she happens to be brought in contact with. Her decision eventually is on the side of virtue, but she takes the whole question into consideration with the most frank impartiality. In another † the central point is a certain secret passage leading from the chamber of the profligate master of a house into a room occupied by an old general and his charming young wifea passage which the villain uses once too often, finding himself at last in presence of the insulted husband. But it is needless to multiply instances. It would be a task beyond our

* Which shall it be?'t Guy Deverell.'