SYLVIA'S LOVERS.*
MRS. GASKELL has, we fear, mislaid the pen which wrote " Cran- ford." It is difficult to imagine that charming tale, with its wealth of quiet power and restrained and therefore infectious emotion, the work of the same hand as these three volumes of unreal or exaggerated sentiment. That was written as though its author were relating a series of facts known to her from child- hood; this is composed as though every sentence involved an effort, and every scene depended for interest on a visibly manu- factured agony. The.plot is almost as old as fiction, but it has seldom been treated with more contempt for probability, or the nature of ordinary human beings. Sylvia herself is a character who never can have existed, and can only be accounted for by remembering that Mrs. Gaskell is a writer who, belonging to one breed of English people, passes her life in watching and describing another. Like all people who observe it from the outside she has been deeply struck with the dourness per- ceptible in the character of northern Englishmen, and in her in- tent watchfulness has come to believe that this, which is a mere quality produced by external circumstance, is the very basis of character. She has drawn, therefore, a girl exquisitely pretty, and intended to be very loveable, but, in every act and almost every speech, hard, selfish, and unforgiving. She is always bating somebody, curses a witness against her father, who had only told the truth, as if he were a personal foe, almost vows to * Sylvia's Lovers. By Mrs. Gaskelt (Smith and Elder.)
hate her truest friend for a remark she disapproves, bide her lover begone for suggesting that Christians forgive enemies on their death-bed, and sends her husband to exile without a sigh because he has told her, out of intense passion, a lie. She is, to our, judgment, as bad a specimen of womanhood as we were ever asked to study, and most unreal besides.
Sylvia, daughter of a little north country tenant farmer, is loved by two men, Charlie Kinraid, a Greenland whaler, of whose cha- racter the reader sees next to nothing, and Philip Hepburn, a prosperous, half Quakerish tradesman of Monkshaven, an acute- and trustworthy, but somewhat hard and self-absorbed, man.
Naturally she relies in trouble on the latter, but accepts the
whose tales and physical beauty have caught her imagina- tion. On the day she accepts him Kinraid is carried off by a pressgang, and as be is borne away, wounded, tells his rival to- bear to his betrothed assurances of unchanging affection. Philip,. who knows that Kinraid has deceived his own partner's sister, does not deliver the message, and urged on by excessive love. sanctions a report that Kinraid has been killed. Misfortune falls- on the little farmer, and Sylvia, believing her lover dead, and trembling for her future, marries Philip, and bears him a child.. Philip remains a lover in manner and kindness, when suddenly, after a three years' absence, Kinraid returns, the deception is made clear, Sylvia falls into his arms—in her husband's pre- sence—and bursts into this tragic speech:—
" ' Hark ! ' said she, starting away from Kinraid, baby is crying for one. His child—yes, it is his°child —I had forgotten that—forgotten all. I'll make my vow now, lest I lose mysel' again. I'll fiver forgive yon man, nor live with him as his wife again. All that's done and ended. He's spoilt my life,—he's spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth ;. but neither you nor him shall spoil my soul. It goes hard wi' me, Charley,. it does indeed. I'll just give you one kiss—one little kiss—and then, so. help one God ! I'll niver see nor hear till—no, not that, not that is- needed—I'll niver see—sure that's niver see yo' again on this side Heaven, so help me God ! I'm bound and tied, but I have. sworn my oath to him as well as yo': there's things I will do, and there's things I won't. Kiss me once more. God help me, he is gone !' "
Philip, heartbroken, enlists, saves Kinraid under the walls of Acre, and finally returns a dying pauper, to find that Sylvia, seeing Kinraid's marriage in the papers, thinks her husband the. faithfuller nature of the two, and is repentant of her own evil vow—a repentance which comes too late.
It is difficult to decide whether the conduct of wife or husband more violates probability. That the wrong was a bitter one may be allowed, but Philip had been the most loving of husbands, and affection can be born and is born every day of habit as well as of love. True art would have depicted the struggle between the old passion in its first revival, and the new and strong bond which bound Sylvia to Philip—the way in which a girl's fancy may be overcome by the habits and duties of her maturer life. Sylvia as a real woman might first have felt as bitterly as Mrs. Gaskell has described ; but no• woman ever loathed a husband superior to herself, whose love had never slackened, and very few are capable of the intense
selfishness which works a great wrong in order to be avenged for one done to themselves. In a very short time the decep- tion would have been pardoned as an offence prompted by an excess of love, and the wife, with her day-dream disturbed,
have turned to her home and its cares as the one chance of happiness left. As to Philip, husbands of his kind—strong,
patient, and tradesmanlike—do not enlist because wives threaten to cast them off. The first natural- emotion would have been simply one of insulted authority, followed, if the fit lasted, by a persistent devotion to business in solitude. Men of his class do not throw up all duties, and especially debts owing to a benefactor, because of an outburst of female temper. Tha passion and its effects arc alike overstrained, till, when the-
husband, driven from the house by his wife's termagant insult, after years of suffering, comes home a wounded pauper to crave her forgivenesS, the exaggeration rises to the point of absurdity.
The sense of overstrained emotion is deepened by all the episodes of the book. There is one admirable scene in which Sylvia's father, wild with passion and terror at the pressgang, heads an attack on the depot ; but it ends in his being hanged and his wife going out of her reason. All through the book,. too, stalks a spectral figure, one Hester, who has little to do with the action, but who serves in the same shop with Philip, and loving him to heartsickness, has to watch and even assist in his courtship of Sylvia. Her incessant silent pain deepens the pain of the reader, and with the never ceasing sense of exaggeration and the unfortunate termination, make the story one of the most painful and unsatisfactory lately put forth to the world.
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