A LOST LOVE.*
To the historical student who pursues his subject far there soon comes a strong sense of the similarity of all epochs. It is so fatally easy to put a finger through those subtle differences —dress, taste, amusements, ambitions—which make the piquancy of history, and to feel underneath the throbs of a common humanity, a common humanity of whose intimate manifestations in our own epoch we are perhaps a little tired. From whom are we to get historical flavour ?
We shall learn little of contemporary dress by studying Raphael. Lyly will tell us more of Elizabethan manners than Shakespeare. Fanny Burney is more revealing than Swift. If the author or the painter be young and, unsophisticated we shall learn most. It is not so much in the achievements of the several generations as in their aims that we shall find diversity. The desire of the eighteenth century for correctness and mag- nificence, for instance, is more striking than its achievement in either direction. The young writer will take his generation at its own valuation in a way that will be a revelation in later ages.
If, therefore, the reader would understand 1850 let him read a very charming little story, which has just been reprinted, called A Lost Love, written by a girl of twenty- two, Miss Anne Charlotte Ogle, who signs herself " Ashford Owen." It is the drawing-room, the world of women, which is painted, a pathetic if charming world in which the educated, highly civilized woman has no outlet for her activities but marriage and motherhood. Let these two go astray and the woman's life is in ruins. In A Lost Love we do not hear of the husband-heisting which Thackeray displays, that most horrible development of ultra-feminism. " Ashford Owen's " women are far too charming and far too sensitive for anything of the sort. All the characters are pleasant, and yet the book is not only melancholy but tragic. The busy, clever man to whom an affair of the heart is not of prime importance, and who, there- fore, makes a blunder in it quite unconsciously, perfectly honourably, completely spoils the life of the heroine. There may be evils in the present habit of working outside their homes which women have developed, but surely almost anything is better than the almost blasphemous mockery of domestic hap- piness which the necessity of early Victorian marriage made possible.
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