NO S.
TEMPTATION.*
Mn. BAGOT'S intimate knowledge of modern Italian life,. freely admitted by the Italians themselves, places this curlews,' romance in a wholly different category from those of writers whose local colour is derived from books, from a,- • rmrtaim By Richard Bigot. London Methuen and Co. [82.] hurried visit to Rome or Florence, or from their imagina- tions. This fact lends impressiveness to a picture in which, along with many agreeable features, prominence is assigned to a sinister trait,—the persistence, even amongst the educated classes, of the poisoning habit. (One of the most striking of Mr. Marion Crawford's romances—Pietro (Thisleri, if our memory serves us aright—has a similar motive.) What is more, it is not treated as an isolated aberration. The distin- guished doctor who figures in these pages observes : "In Rome, even at the present time, if a prominent cardinal dies unexpectedly, there are people always ready to shrug their. shoulders, and whisper the word—poison. It is a tradition— but unfortunately there is reason enough for its origin, not -only in Rome, but in any other of our cities." Mr. Bagot, of course, is far too much of an artist to give us a crude picture of a modern Locusta. The evil genius of the plot is not amongst the living but the dead. An ancestress of Count ITgo Vitali had poisoned her lover, her presence was believed still to haunt the scene of the story, and it is the malign influence -of her example emanating from a mysterious portrait bung on the walls of the Palazzo Vitali that suggests to the Contessa a resort to mediaeval methods as the readiest way out of her difficulties. The scene of the story is laid in Viterbo, at the house of Count lJgo Vitali, a noble of old -family but limited means who lives on his estate and is -devoted to farming. I/go is an excellent specimen of an Italian country gentleman, an honest, simple-minded, un- suspicious man, who three years previously had made a love- match with the daughter of a well-to-do dealer in agricultural produce and stock. On her father's side Cristina Frezzi was -descended, like the Obrenovitches, from a pig-dealer : her maternal grandfather was a Sicilian. Well educated, ambitious, beautiful, and childless, Cristina is thoroughly bored with her husband, and apathy had already turned to resentment on his refusal to spend a legacy on a season in Rome, when Digo invites his cousin and heir- presumptive to pay him a visit at Viterbo. Fabrizio Vitali is a typical product of the cosmopolitan society of the capital, superficially cultivated, with literary tastes, a freethinker, self-indulgent, with no profession or serious interest in life,—in short, precisely the sort of man to encourage the discontent of his cousin's wife. Fabrizio is not devoid of honourable instincts, but, spite of his philosophical reading, he is far too weak to withstand the sorcery of Cristina's beauty. They are left much together, for Ugo is out all day on his estate ; Cristina makes him her con- fidant from the very outset, and, beginning with the mutual study of Schopenhauer—a strange modern instance of Galeotto fu di /ibro--Fabrizio drifts rapidly to the verge of the rela- tions which revolt his better self. The ultimate catastrophe is implicit in the first few pages ; but this disregard for the law of suspense is largely neutralised by the lines on which the story is developed and the skill with which Christina's character is gradually revealed. She is suspect from the start ; but we are made to realise her sinister fascination, and to admit, given her immediate antecedents, how greatly environment, oppor- tunity, and the evil tradition which clings to her home would tend to impel her on the downward course.
It must not be supposed, however, that the interest of the story resides exclusively, to use the jargon of modern science, in its psycho-pathological aspect, that any undue attempt is made to enlist sympathy on behalf of a criminal, or that the other principal dramatis personae are either weak or negligible. There is a fine study in the Duchessa di San Felice of a high- born and high-minded lady, who, but for the irony of circum- stance and a lack of the diplomatic faculty, might conceivably have averted disaster. The old priest, Don Basilio, again, is at ones wise and benevolent, and, we may add, the book is free from the religious polemics which have figured so largely in some of Mr. Bagot's earlier novels. Finally, though Temptation cannot be pronounced a pleasant book, the author must be acquitted of any desire to palter with the principles of right and wrong. Cristina achieves her immediate end, but at the cost of all that makes her life worth living ; she fails to drag her unwilling accomplice over the precipice; and his emancipation from her influence lends probability to the prospect of his regeneration.
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