A ROMANCE OF THE CHANNEL ISLANDS.* THE girl never goes
to Girton ; neither is she the chief person- age of the story. Nevertheless, she is a charming and an original girl ; moreover, she is a surprise to us, for Mrs. Edwardes does not excel in the delineation of good-girlhood. She is too—we will not say cynical, for the word is over-strong—but worldly- wise, and seemingly world-worn, to do so. The girls in her pre- vious novels are to the girls in most of the readable fiction of the day, what Mr. Du Afaurier's young ladies of the period are to John Leech's, and we do not expect them to be otherwise. Mrs. Edwardes is a mistress of her art, but only on certain lines, and when she depicts a Marjorie Bertrand, we are as little prepared for the picture as we should be for Sarah Bernhardt's making a success as the typical ingenue of the French stage. The proud, impetuous grand-daughter of the old Seigneur de Tintageux —a somewhat preposterous person, who reminds us in a much modified and modernised way of the savage Count in the famous Erckmann-Chatrian story, La Mason Forestiere—and her sturdy uncompromising "coach," Geoffrey Arbuthnot, are delightful people. We follow the tortuous but safe course of their true love through the meanderings of misunderstanding and money, with unflagging interest, to the foregone conclusion indicated in the first chapter by Gaston Arbuthnot, the cousin of the lucky "coach," who has just secured the privilege of pre- paring Miss Bertrand of Tintageux for a collegiate course, and in the following words :—" The foundations of Newnham and of Girton," he remarks, "may be deep ;" "the foundations of the Gogmagog Hills are deeper ! Girl wranglers may come, girl optimes may go. The heart of woman remains unchanged." Only a novelist of the calibre of Mrs. Edwardes would venture to begin and end her story, so far as any of the inspiriting doubt and sustaining suspense on which lesser artists have to rely, are concerned, in one sentence, and that the open- ing one. Mrs. Edwardes, however, does not seriously pro- pose to entertain her readers with a pretty, prolonged illus- tration of Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot's predictions, as he eats strawberries on "a dot of granite washed rciund by blue" (Guernsey in June) amid "carnation-smelling air "—a phrase graphic, but not grammatical—in the company of his cousin the "coach," and Dinah, his beautiful wife. All readers who bear in mind the author's method will be prepared to look to the already married, not to the ultimately to be married, couple for the vital interest of the story. They will also expect to find in Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot a selfish, sensuous, morally worthless person (without actual turpitude), and they will anticipate one of those drames intimes—we beg pardon for borrowing the words, but must do so, for we need their accuracy—of which she has given us a remarkable example in Ought We to Visit Her ? a tale of taboo which deserves to live as a " note " of an epoch in our social life.
No writer of modern fiction conveys to her readers the con- viction that she entertains a low opinion of men in general, and regards them with tolerably impartial contempt, so plainly as Mrs. Edwardes does ; and she marks this state of mind as em- phatically by the men of the better sort who figure in her stories as by the men of the worst. There are no men of the best sort in them. The men she portrays are, however, unexaggerated, on the level of very ordinary selfishness, levity, and godlessness, and are depicted with a curiously minute knowledge of the ways and the moods of mere irresponsible men of pleasure, minor artists, and
• A Girton Girl By Mrs. Annie Edwardes. London Bentley and Sou.
cosmopolitan loungers. They belong to a class not exactly of ad- venturers, or altogether of outlaws, but essentially worthless and contemptible. The adorable but preposterous pagans of " 0 uidar the healthy heathens for whom Miss Broughton's " revolted " young women die, have, we may hope, no existence in real life ; but -Mrs. Edwardes's Gaston Arbuthnot and his elder brethren are among us, with their sham Epicureanism and their real heartlessness and soullessness. They are fortunate who- have never known a Theobald or an Arbuthnot, who have never seen the happiness of a woman for whom they cared committed into the hands of either. Mrs. Edwardes is a true moralist, although she does not go very deep ; and her satire, which selects rather monotonous types for its objects, is keen and hard- hitting. These qualities, however, would not make her story what it is, unless it also possessed a well-constructed plot and a
pleasant style. A Girton Girl boasts both. •
The true " motive " of the story, apart from the love-troubles of Geoffrey and Marjorie, is very like that of Ought We to Visit Her ? The selfish, indolent, half-cynical worthlessness of the man in both novels, the superiority of the woman in everything, moral and intellectual (there is not a touch of the spiritual in either Mrs. Theobald or Mrs. Arbuthnot), and the at least partial cure of the careless and unprincipled husband by the imminent risk of losing the wife of whom he has been secretly ashamed, are points of close resemblance. The differentiation is in the social position, the surroundings, the details of the awakening of the women to the facts of their respective lives, and especially in the women themselves. None of Mrs. Edwardes's readers have forgotten the Mrs. Theobald whom it was decided that " we " ought not to visit; here is the Dinah Arbuthnot who has to come to that ever-to-be-regretted knowledge, to which every true woman would prefer invincible ignorance,—the know- ledge that she is far too good for the man with whom her life has to be passed. Dinah's perfect beauty, of the large, calm type, has been described in the author's felicitous way ; then comes the " note " of the story :—
" She was a blonde, amply framed Devonshire girl, in the fresh summer of her youth. 'Not a lady,' according to the traditions of small social courts, the judgment of smaller feminine tribunals. Dinah's lips could scarcely unclose before ineradicable accents of the west-country working-folk informed you that Gaston Arbuthnot, like so many artists—poor, dear, impressionable fellows !—had married beneath him. Not a lady, so far as the enunciation of certain vowels, the absence of certain petty artificialities of female manner were concerned, but with the purity of April dawn on her cheeks, the wholesome work-a-day qualities of a long line of yeoman progenitors in her heart Round Dinah's mouth might have been dis- cerned lines that should certainly not have found their way thither at two-and-twenty. And in Dinah's low country voice there was at times a lilt of unexpected sadness. Round some corner of her path Dull Care, you felt, must lurk, stealthily watchful. At some point in the outward and visible sunshine of her married life there must be a blot of shadow. A woman like Dinah could be hit through her affections only. Her affections were centred painfully—I had almost written morbidly—on one subject. That subject was her husband, Gaston Arbuthnot."
Dinah's character is worked out perfectly ; the little touches of unreasonableness, due to her entire ignorance of that kind of life in which Gaston is a blase adept, are supplied with great skill. The reader's sympathy with her is sometimes taxed a little, but it never quite gives way. And the brightness and movement of the story, sarcastic and sardonic as it is, around.
the honest, frank, honourable, loving woman's figure in the centre, are very pleasant. The married flirt, of the confidential, incomprise kind, with a facility for depreciating men's wives with a deadly skill, though she is charming to and concerning her own husband in public, is always a success in the hands of Mrs. Edwardes. She has never surpassed the typical flirt of this novel, Linda Thorne.
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