AURORA FLOYD.*

AURORA FLOYD is a clever melodrama; by no means what is ordinarily called a sensation novel. If a sensation novel means a kind of literary centipede of a hundred different joints, each separately alive, and each popping out of the one that preceded it, such as Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Crowe have accustomed us to expect by that title, Aurora Floyd is by no means of that class, though the authoress sometimes appears to confuse herself with a momentary vision of excelling in that school. From this false model, perhaps, it comes that a book, properly of the melo- dramatic order, gets its crisis split into two or three minor ens' es, instead of being concentrated into one ; that the de'nouement, instead of coming with the full melodramatic force of a single cataract, divides its descent between three little shelving ledges of explanation which break its force and its effect. Aurora Floyd's mystery is broken into two, and its influence on her destiny into three distinct centres of interest. The unplea- sant passage in her early history is revealed to her husband and the storm has all cleared away, before the suspicion as to her share in the murder again divides them; and even when that is dissipated, her fate still hangs in the balance. We think this elongated system of joints quite inappropriate to a genuine melo- drama such as Aurora Floyd, and probably the result of Miss Braddou's not clearly seeing the type of book for which her con- ception was fitted.

Aurora Floyd is a story leading up to a single effective situation of melodramatic interest, which should have determined the whole form of her tale, and been the focus—the point of sight, of the whole. The characters are of no intrinsic interest; but their attitudes are well calculated for the main catastrophe,and towards this they should always and, in fact, do generally, lean. They are wheels in the machinery of the story,—at their best, are instruments for working out the principal situation,--sin- stead of characters to the full development of which the prin- cipal situation is subservient. This is, indeed, the proper charac- teristic of melodrama, as distinguished from drama. In melo- drama you perceive a position of highly strung suspense, sad 4' Aurora Floyd. By DI. L. Brucidon. Three Volumes. Tinsley.

suit your figures to it, so as to give it its full effect upon the nerves ; in drama, if the conception of the characters and that of the framework of events are not actually simultaneous, the latter is rather subordinated to the former, no stroke being put in without, at least, some definite bearing on the delineation of character as well as on the evolution of the plot.

Miss Braddon's powers for melodrama being really consider- able, we can only criticize her performance from this point of view. It would be unfair to her to deal with it from any other. All we have to ask is, has she succeeded in leading up to her central situation, so as to produce the greatest possible effect, so as to catch the reader gradually within the eddy of the plot, and then engulph him in its vortex, till at last, when hope seems vanished, a saving breath of wind catches the sail and the whirlpool is escaped? To a certain very considerable extent no doubt she succeeds in this; but, besides the main defect to which we have alluded—the frittering away of the catastrophe,—there are other smaller deficiencies which we are bound as critics to point out.

The characters concerned in the main catastrophe of ilurong Floyd are not very numerous. There is Aurora herself, a grandoise creature of overflowing life, majestic, impetuous, radiant, " fling- ing sentences" at her audience, when at all hard pressed, " as if they had been a challenge," who is the heroine of the final tragical situation, from which she emerges more majestic and magnificent than ever. There is her husband, Mr. John Mellish, a sort of higher-class " John Brodie,"—a Yorkshireman of great stature, and of a loving, joyous, and trustful nature, " stout, strongly built, with a fine broad chest, and unromantically robust health," of whom we are frequently reminded that " Heaven knows, I have never called John Mellish a hero." He is, in fact, that jolly and solid sort of squire whose emotions give the last touch to melodrama, and whose rollicking joy when the Iclaircissentent comes restores the audience again to brilliant smiles. Of some such use is John Mellish in this narrative : in one passage Miss Braddon has caught the very tone of Mr. Dickens's most melodramatic joy :—

"Butthis stalwart, devoted, impressionable Yorkshireman ate amost extraordinary repast in honour of this reunion. He spread mustard on his muffins. He poured Worcester sauce into his coffee, and cream over his devilled cutlets. He showed his gratitude to Lucy by loading her plate with comestibles she didn't want. He talked perpetually, and devoured incongruous viands in utter absence of inind. He shook hands with Talbot so many times across the breakfast-table, that he exposed the lives or limbs of the whole party to imminent peril from the boiling water in the urn. He threw himself into a paroxysm of coughing, and made himself scarlet in the face by an injudicious use of cayenne pepper ; and he exhibited himself altogether in such an imbecile light that Talbot Bulstrode was compelled to have recourse to all sorts of expedients to keep the servants out of the room during the progress of that rather noisy and bewildering repast."

But Mr. John Mellish can be tragic at times. In one place ire bites his lip "till the strong teeth met upon the quivering flesh, in the agony of that thought." Is it meant that the teeth meet through or only upon the quivering flesh ? If the former, we feel a little doubt ; if the latter, we are not sure about its value as a barometer of agony.

Then there is Mrs. Walter Powell, the "spidery" and spiteful lady companion, who is, more than any other person, intended to be hated by the audience; but whose share in the fateful conspiracy is not sufficiently strongly marked. We have the feeling throughout the tale that Mrs. Walter Powell is so much hated by the authoress that she is so hated for reasons extraneous to the tale itself, and rather rebel, therefore, against the frequent epithets of disgust which precede overt action in any way culpable. She was meant to do more towards the result than she actually does, and therefore misses something of the proper effect. Again, there is Mr. James Conyers, the groom or trainer, Aurora's first husband, who dies, and then comes to life again so awkwardly, but who is little more than a lay figure. And there is last and most effective of all for the purposes of the tale, Steven Hargraves, the " softy," the white-faced, humpbacked, crafty, whispering drudge, whom Aurora whips for his cruelty to her mastiff, and who never forgives it. All these people are con- ceived in more or less distinct attitudes towards the central situation of the piece ;--the half-witted, white-faced drudge fero- ciously but cunningly plotting ; Mrs. Walter Powell viciously spying ; Mr. James Conyera insolently craving bribes ; Aurora in glorious disdain for the mean creature beneath her, in limit- less love for the loving husband beside her, buying off, and dictating terms to this resurgent husband ; and Mr. John Mellish, a hearty and genial victim, with whom the audience is to suffer. And to these associates himself rather arbitrarily, but not entirely withontmelodramatie effect, the favourite sea captain of melo- drama—Captain Prodder, who, for forty years having meditated in silent tropical nights at sea on his " little sister Eliza," but never having found time to ask after her at Liverpool, turns up at a critical moment to shed an old tar's hearty tears over the danger of his sister's child, and to catch the murderer when just on the point of escape. This is an admirable melodramatic touch. Why does an "old salt's" emotion always add so much seasoning to a great scene of this kind ? It would bs foolish to deny that Captain Prodder's grotesque activity and love are a kind of safety-valve to an audience over-excited with Aurora Floyd.

All these figures are generally well calculated throughout for their grand attitudes in the crisis ; but the authoress has con- fused herself in the case of Aurora by trying to create a char- acter, when she had only conceived the heroine of a scene. The effort in the earlier part of the story to mix tip with the queenly romantic attitude of Aurora, the fast and rather horsy slang of the Honourable Ltetitia Salisbury in Mr. Sala's " Seven Sons of Mammon," is decidedly a failure. The intention no doubt is to justify in some way the early school-girl alliance of Aurora with a groom, by showing the active bent of the young lady's tastes. We should be sorry to say of any one of whom, to the last, we know so near nothing as we do of Aurora Floyd, that the grandiose

and the rather slangy elements in her character are incapable of being reconciled. But we do say that the escapade of her youth could have easily been conceded by the reader without this attempt to explain its origin, while the effect of the " horsy " conversation in the first volume is simply to diminish the telling character of the melodramatic crisis when at last it comes. The injured, haughty, loving, magnificent, splendid being, whose lofty attitude in peril we are asked to admire, is not a bit the more real, and is-

much the less interesting, for the conversations about Thun- derbolt and Cheops with which her conversation at first is rather awkwardly interlarded. Instead of giving a motive to her actions, these bursts of conversation from one who had suffered so much from horsy swindlers are grossly unnatural, and only convey an impression of an empty mind. Then the subor- dinate characters are a little too numerous for the purpose of the melodrama, and sadly delay the only legitimate action of the

Talbot Bulstrode is much too prominent, and Lucy only useful as a foil to ber cousin.

One more defect we must notice. The tale, which has a vigorous melodramatic action of its own, is sadly diluted by that species of Thackerayish reflection which, suitable enouglrin its inventor, is wholly and absolutely artificial in many of its imita- tors, and utterly out of place in Miss Braddon. Take for in- stance, the following :—

" What Lucy meant, perhaps, was this :—How could Aurora be other- wise than wretched in the companionship of a gentleman who had neither a straight nose nor dark hair. Some women never outlive that school-girl infatuation for straight noses and dark hair. Some girls would have rejected Napoleon the Great because he wasn't tall,' or would. have turned up their noses at the author of Childe Harold' if they had happened to see him in a stand-up collar. If Lord Byron had never turned down his collars, would his poetry have been as popular as it was? If Mr. Alfred Tennyson were to cut his hair, would that opera- tion modify our opinion of The Queen of the May ?' Where does that marvellous power of association begin and end ? "

What can be waterier verbiage poured into Mr. Thaekemy's favourite moulds than this? It is like getting that stuff called semola or semolina we believe, in the place of in good jelly, to find Mr. Thackeray's forms of thought filled with stuff of this kind. And with this we have at least some twenty-five per cent. of the three volumes filled. Here is another specimen

"'That old Frenchman was right,' muttered Captain Bulstrode there is a great satisfaction in the misfortune of others. If I go to my dentist I like to find another wretch in the waiting-room ; and I like to have my tooth extracted first, and to see him glare enviously at me as I come out of the torture-chamber, knowing that my troubles are over, while his are to come.'" Miss Braddon shows considerable power-for melodrama, and

it is a pity she should not concentrate her strength more upon it, and evaporate the thin reflective fluid with which this book is

distended. All her pictorialness tends towards the showy. " Purple sea," " those red July sunsets," that " sultry August weather," that" sunny September day," are phrases which recur at d

recur till we are weary of them, arising apparently from the habit of trying to give an external spot of colour to every convenient place in her story. This, though too often repeated, is a part of the proper style of her tale ; and there is, which is by no means the case in all melodrama, a real vigour in the melodramatic parts which justly deserves some of the success it attains. If Miss Braddon would purge away the spurious reflectiveness and concentrate her pictures close about her central situation, she might be one of the best of our melodramatic writers.