The Sun.
London, England, 1868-01-21 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The White Rose. By G. J. Whyte Melville. Three
Vols. Chapman and Hall.

" The White Rose" we take to be the supreme
flower of its author's imagination. It is, to our
thinking, among all his fictions, his very happiest
achievement. Like Lever's, his style has improved
by practice instead of having, as happens with re-
gard to so many other writers, deteriorated through
carelessness. The easy swing of his manner, the
dash, verve, vivacity, sparkle, and gay animal
spirits with which he has always hitherto written,
have in no way " gone off "—will be found here
just as exhilarating, as animated, and as effer-
vescent in this the latest outpouring of his
fancy as in " Cerise," or in "Digby Grand,"
as in the " Gladiator," or as in " Brookes"—not
Brocks of Sheffield," but—" Brookes of Bridle-
mere." To the readers of The Fortnightly, since that
able monthly passed under the editorship of Mr.
John Morley, on the retirement from the edito-
ial chair of its original projector, Mr. George
Henry Lewes—" The White Rose" has long been
familiar, and that, too, we can certainly say,
from our own experience, very delightfully. The
luctuating fortunes of its principal characters we
have followed with an eager interest, such as we
might rather have accorded to actual living and
breathing contemporaries. For, the characters—
Ispecially the principal characters—here grouped
together in this imaginary narrative of " The
White Rose," are no mere puppets, tricked out in
io many fancy dresses, rouged, and powdered, and
Fitted up with wires, and pulleys, and movable
joints, and an ingenious complication of internal
clockwork machinery. They are to us as
io many people of " our own flesh and
blood"—to use the phrase adopted by Mr. Glad-
stone—people in whose existence we fully believe,
old whom we seem to have often met face to face,
and with whom, in society, we are at any moment
liable to renew our personal acquaintance. There
are, to begin with, the hero and heroine of the tale
—the " White Rose" and her most faithful but (for
long) most unfortunate lover. Norah Welby--
Lfterwards Norah Vandeleur—afterwards Norah
Ainslie. The hero of the book being Gerard
Ainslie student, soldier, gambler, gold-digger,
Iramatist, and, to crown all, towards the close of
the work, a handsome, clever, wealthy man of
fashion, homme and accomplished gentle-
man. Together with these two—Norah and Gerard
—Major Whyte Melville brings us into intimate
personal acquaintance, as it were, with—how many
Aber admirably well delineated characters ! Fore-
most among these as a creation drawn from the expe-
riences of life--Mr. Vandeleur of Oakover. A
thoroughly heartless man, we should say—a man
of a hideously pitiless selfishness—a blase, case-har-
lened, worn, sated, sin-grained, cynical, fasti-
dious ;voluptuary. The only inconsistency in his
lelineation, as it appears to us, is that observable
in the incongruous manner of his revolting and
inelo-dramatic death. If he had expired to slow
music, and in a glare of blue-fire, he could hardly
have breathed his last under (for him) unlikelier
circumstances. Barring this, however, the whole
portraiture is inimitable : Mr. Vandeleur being
on the whole sui generis—having no double
that we can recal to mind in the whole
range of imaginative literature. Not by any
means, in the same way, can we speak, as of a perfect
original, of Dolly Egremont—the root idea of the
fun of whose ridiculously distorted poetical quota-
tions one can't help tracing back to perhaps the de-
lightfullest comic character ever drawn by Dickens
—that incomparable droll Dick S wiveller. Ludicrous
though many of the misapplied verses of Dolly
Egremont undoubtedly are—not one amongst
them approaches such a preposterous echo from
one of the poets as Dick Swiveller's—" I never
nursed a dear gazelle to glad M 3 with its fond
black eye, but when it came to know me
well and love me, it was sure to marry a market
gardener !" Dolly is droll nevertheless, and always
good humoured. It is a satisfaction to know of a
good fellow like Egremont that he is married before
.ve have done with him, to so congenial a mate for the
:nanager of the Accordion as Fanny Tregunter,
whom, however, we regret to have the last sight of
when she i. arrayed, not in pink—even though her
tress be bridal white. As for " the Dandy," or
Dandy Barton"—Granville Burton, so called
because of his being a bit of a swell—only a bit of
one, not the entire animal, bat in3rely a Dandy—
ire never take kindly to him from the beginning o f
the story down to the very end of it. On the con-
trary, he is distasteful to the reader—being, as he
is, an insufferable coxcomb—empty-healel and
hollow-hearted, and be hanged to him ! Two other
iotable characters in the tale have yet to be par-
ticularised—both admirably well drawn—Fanny
Draper, daughter of Old Grits, the miller, and her
evil genius for a time, the Count Tourbillon. The
latter is a masterly delineation of a certain well-
known genus of comely, conscience-less, life-enjoy-
ing Frenchmen. Altogether the story, as it is here
told in these three volumes of " The White Rose,"
which has been unfolding, leaf by leaf, as a
serial or monthly while in the pages of The Fort-
nightly, breathes fragrantly and refreshingly enough
of the mother-wit of one of the raciest, and one of
the most vivacious of the story-tellers of our time—
Whyte Melville—author, already, of a whole library
of bold and vigorous and thoroughly original contri-
butions to the imaginative literature of nowadays.