THE WIFE'S EVIDENCE.*
IN Mr. Wills's novels,—at all events in this, the last and much the ablest of the number,—masculine power and strength of con- ception rise to the very verge of genius, which they never seem to us, however, quite to pass. The impression of ability left is ex- ceedingly high, and yet there is with it a faint indication that fiction is scarcely the special field in which that ability would most naturally express itself. Nor does this impression arise from faults in the book, which it would not be very easy to find and substantiate; but rather from a certain grimness of effect, not only calculated for a specific purpose, but apparently natural to the writer—a seeming deficiency of pleasure in his art, which makes one imagine that these strong, rapid delineations of his must interest the reader very much more powerfully than they do the author. Vivid as his sketches of character are, it is difficult to think of them as peopling his imagination, and as insisting on careful and affectionate literary portraiture, like the creatures of a genuinely creative imagination. We have all read how Miss Bronte used to live in fancy with her conceptions until they forced upon her the true solution of any difficulty into which her imagination had plunged them,--till it "came to her' how it all turned out. Perhaps this may be just as true of Mr. Wills. But his pictured images, clearly drawn and painted as they are, give us no such impression. It always seems to us that his imagination dwells far more eagerly on his story than on his dramatis personle, and that cleverly, very cleverly, as they are delineated, they are delineated rather by the way, and for a secondary purpose. He does not handle his characters as if they were so living to his own mind that it were always a plea- sure to him to bring them on the stage. Whether it really is so or not we cannot say. But certainly his art would gain greatly by rather more tender diffuseness in touching off their personal traits. They are so much on the stretch, so deeply shadowed, so brusquely dealt with, and exist so exclusively for the plot, that we scarcely feel at the end that they existed at all, apart from the particular situations in which we have known them. There is no adequate perspective of incident to help us to their acquaint- ance fully, and gradually, and in relation to small things. They seem throughout the book almost too near to you, and to have all the unreality which belongs to faces that we have only watched under very peculiar circumstances and with very eager attention. It is facility and skill in casting the minor lights and shadows which most gives the reader the impression of the author's taking a happy interest in his own art. Hence, in the retrospect, Mr. Wills's lighter creations, which are not so carefully finished nor so deeply involved in the story, strike us almost more than the stronger and more deeply graven features of the prin- cipal characters.
But we have been trying to explain why, being so powerful and effective as he is, Mr. Wills does not leave on his readers the full impression of genius, instead of pointing out what the pecu- liar force of his picture is. The Wife's Evidence is a tale inge- niously intended to prove that a wife's evidence ought at least to be received for what it is worth, if offered, if not, to be com- pellable, in criminal no less than in civil cases. The earlier part of the book shows the advantage to justice of receiving the wife as evidence in the case of a bankruptcy. The latter is intended to show the gross injustice of refusing her evidence entirely in a case of murder. But this is the mere excuse for an exceed- ingly ingenious and dramatic plot, that is worked out with very great power. The wife in question is the vaguest, and yet, perhaps, the best delineated character in the tale. A true woman has no edges to her character, and Mr. Wills has given us, in this case completely, his conception of his favourite heroine. The power with which the soft yielding fibre of her character is condensed, under the high pressure of a great peril, into a sort of gleaming thread of flame, striking vainly and desperately at every point where there is the faintest hope of dis- solving the cruel net-work of circumstances in which her husband seems so securely caught, is of a very high order. But the most original character in the book, and yet the one, as to the suc- cessful delineation of which we entertain still the greatest doubt, is that of the old mother, who really commits the murder of which * The Wife's Evidence, By W. G. Wills, author of "Life's Foreshadowing'," "Notice to Quit," Sc. Three yob. London : Hurst and Blacken. her son is accused. The character is one difficult to execute per- fectly, and yet of sufficiently strong outline,—so strong that the temptation is to make the outlines even harsher than they ought to be. She is a vigorous, upright, square-minded, rather coarse woman, who farms her own land, and delights to look after all the detail of the farming herself, stumping about in thick shoes in all weathers and at all hours to superintend. She has been long a widow when the tale commences, and not a very sorrowful widow. She is revengeful, and a little inconsequent, and has never for- given the parson of her parish for selling her a cow a bad bargain, in, perhaps, a somewhat deceitful manner ; and she revenges the injury on the whole Church, which she invests with this one sin as with a garment; for she never entered a church again, we are told, afterwards. She prides herself on never having "hid behind a trick" in her life. There is much tenderness in the old lady, of a rough motherly sort, especially to her son ,whom she calls "Bonnie," and her grandchild. She is far from exigeant, but very jealous, and there are one or two sorts of slights she cannot either forget or forgive. At the age of sixty-three she is taken in to *marry her agent, a coarse, vulgar farmer, good-tempered, with what the author cleverly calls the "tavern temperament—the good-nature which sends the brimmers round and pays the lordly score,— which wrings your hand with a benediction, and giddily blows a slander on you about the country, yet shrewd enough to guard itself." To her son, remonstrating and reminding her of his own father, with whom, as lie thought, she had always lived happily, the old lady replies :— " 'Eh, dear ! happily !—that is the happiness. I never talk of injustice or wrongs, but I don't think of 'em the less. Not much happened since then in this quiet house to put 'em out of my mind.' Then, to the cold astonishment of her son, who scarcely trusted to his ears, she gave him the history, with feminine bitterness and detail, of a certain velvet mantle which her husband had long promised her, and made a deal of fuss about. She could have bought a whole wardrobe for herself had she cared ; but when he made such a fuss about this present she took a whim for it. When it arrived she could have put a pie-dish under either shoulder, it was such an ill fity and she wished to have it sent back and altered.
"'What think you he did, Will ? He tumbled the mantle into its box, and sent it off a present to your Aunt Dora, the woman in all the world I hate the most, and he told me to my face a few days after he had heard from her to say it was a good fit for her. I've done him many a kind turn since that, Will, and I sat up for six nights with him when he was dying without ever taking off my clothes ; but I tell 'ee I was thinking of that dress when I looked from my window and saw the velvet on his hearse."
The farm agent, of course, no sooner marries the old lady than he begins to insult her—excites her virulent jealousy by acknow- ledging his connection with a young and pretty woman, who is one of his wife's own servants, and breaks down the strong framework of her sturdy, thickset nature into abject misery and revengefulness. It is in this frame of mind that she commits the murder from the penalty of which her son endeavours to screen her at his own peril, his wife being the only witness of his innocence. But at this point the delineation of the old lady, if it does not break down, is partly evaded, by assuming that she sinks into a stolid, obstinate state of moral coma, in which she is scarcely sensible of the drift of anything which happens. She not only, in spite of her proud straightforwardness before, assents to her son's lie for protecting her, but sticks to it with strong pertinacity, and takes little notice even of his condemnation to death. We doubt whether this is really in keeping with the first impression given of the character, and the whole figure is dashed off in so few strokes that we can scarcely judge. The outline is bold and impressive, but it is rather a design than a finished picture.
The minor sketches are unusually good. One, of a shrewd Irish bailiff, Michael Bryan, is so true and humorous a picture that the greatest novelist might be proud of it. When his young mistress is at the climax of her mad efforts to secure the proof of her husband's innocence, Michael himself, who is firmly con- vinced at heart of the young master's guilt, but none the less determined to work for his acquittal, remonstrates with her thus :—
" 'Why are you silent, Michael ?' she said, turning on him waywardly. 'Do you see any reason why I should not demand my husband's re- lease?' ' 1 wonst had a little maol* cow—" Michael, what do you mean? Did you hear my question?' ' I wonst had a little maol cow, and she would never go straight home, but gave up her whole mind to dartin' down every lane and corner. It twasn't for devilment, I know for sartin, by the anxious way she kept lowin' ; but she was athrivin' to find a short cut, I suppose, or more like a lookin' for her lost caX She had some raisonable notion in her head, I'll swear, but her acts had no raison in them. One day I made it my convenience to go out larkin' wid her, and let her have just her own way, if she were to lep into a quarry or scamper into the public pound. She pissed herself,
• Hornless; literally, bald.
and I followed her quite hearty the betther part of a day down every hereon and around every old wall and through every green gutter till she was fairly tired out, and gave up all hope, and let me lead her back to her field widont a prank or start. Now, you're the very moral of that little maol cow.'"
But no extract we can give here would convey an adequate idea of the power and gloom of the whole story,—of the helpless set of the wayward destinies which we feel streaming dead against the principal characters, and the anguish of the trial to.
the poor wife, compelled to see her own little Bon give true evidence, of which the impression and drift is altogether false,
against his father. The absorbing interest of the story, and the force with which every separate piece of carving is effected, will make the tale deservedly popular. But while proving its writer's abilities to be of the highest order of general ability, it falls short of the effect of perfect art, mainly because there is no indication that the author lives in the imaginative life
he describes,—because it reads like a work dashed off by a man of great power for a purpose, and not executed for the love or
the thing as an artistic enjoyment.
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