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BEATRICE.* MR. RIDER HAGGARD has, for the novelist, the great gift that he can imagine passion, and passion in very different forms. This story is full of genuine passion. Sometimes he expresses it with singular power. Sometimes he over-expresses it, and we feel that a little more restraint in the language
• Beatrice; a Revel. By H. Rider Haggard.. Loudon: Longmane. 1E00.
chosen would have added to the strength of the delineation ; but even then we never feel that there is anything spurious about the passion itself, but only that Mr. Rider Haggard has made an attempt to express a true state of human emotion which has not altogether succeeded, but which aimed at truth, though it did. not quite hit its mark. He is just as powerful in painting mean passions as he is in painting noble passions. Indeed, we should say that the passion of Elizabeth Granger for Owen Davies's wealth is quite as powerfully painted as the passion of Owen Davies for Beatrice Granger's beauty and gentleness; yet the former is utterly base, and the latter, though hard names are given to it in the course of this novel, is at least as deep and disinterested in its origin, though selfish enough in its development, as the passion of Geoffrey Bingham himself. On almost all the characters touched in this story, there is the stamp of a certain intensity, which gives the story its character, though it is not often in human life that we actually find a group of characters so fixed in purpose, so imvacillating, so true to their aims, whether those aims be noble or frivolous, as the group of characters which live in this story. Even Lady Honoria's passion for the world and its pleasures, is a passion of an intense order.
And the story is not long enough to show us how these meaner passions burn themselves out at times, and show those who are possessed by them how empty they are. The chief defect of Mr. Rider Haggard as a painter of life, is that he selects by preference characters of unswerving fixity of aim, while, as a matter of fact, characters of unswerving fixity of aim are comparatively rare in human society, and certainly not the staple of which it is composed. The only powerful picture in this story of a weak character, is that of the shabby farmer-clergyman, Mr. Granger ; but he, too, is vividly sketched, meanness, shiftlessness, parsimony, and all.
We do not think that the hero and heroine are the best pictures in the book. Beatrice, no doubt, is finely painted, and a certain grandeur is given to her figure. But Geoffrey Bingham is not made impressive to us, except perhaps in his relation to his little daughter, and his supposed spring into political greatness is a picture as completely deficient in anything like strong imagination as if it occurred in the ordi- nary three-volume novel of the circulating libraries. To our minds, there is nothing so strong in the story as the picture of Owen Davies's slow, deep, intense, smouldering passion, and of the complete absence of wonder, the absolute inability to be surprised at anything which happens, which marks his sluggish, tenacious nature. Here, for instance, is a delineation of the latter characteristic which strikes us as being quite as originally conceived as it is powerfully expressed :—
"Owen Davies tramped along the cliff with a light heart. The wild lashing of the rain and the roaring of the wind did not dis- turb him in the least. They were disagreeable, but he accepted them as he accepted existence and all its vanities, without remark or mental comment. There is a class of mind of which this is the prevailing attitude. Very early in their span of life, those endowed with such a mind come to the conclusion that the world is too much for them. They cannot understand it, so they abandon the attempt, and, as a consequence, in their own torpid way are among the happiest and most contented of men. Problems, on which persons of keener intelligence and more aspiring soul fret and foam their lives away as rushing water round a rock, do not even break the placid surface of their days. Such men slip past them. They look out upon the stars and read of the mystery of the universe speeding on for ever through the limitless wastes of space, and are not astonished. In their childhood they were taught that God made the sun and the stars to give light on the earth ; that is enough for them. And so it is with everything. Poverty and suffering, war, pestilence, and the inequalities of fate, madness, life and death, and the spiritual wonders that hedge in our being, are things not to be inquired into but accepted. So they accept them as they do their dinner or a tradesman's circular."
And the description of his mode of accepting his sudden access of fortune is singularly vivid :—
" On board of one of these [ships], Owen Davies worked in various capacities for thirteen long years. He did his drudgery well ; but he made no friends, and always remained the same shy, silent, and pious man. Then suddenly a relation died without a will, and he found himself heir-at-law to Bryngelly Castle and all its revenues. Owen expressed no surprise, and to all appearance felt none. He had never seen his relation, and never dreamed of this romantic devolution of great estates upon himself. But he accepted the good fortune as he had accepted the ill, and said nothing. The only people who knew him were his shipmates, and they could scarcely be held to know him. They were acquainted with his appearance xind the sound of his voice, and his method -of doing his duty. Also, they were aware, although he never spoke of religion, that he read a chapter of the Bible every evening, and went to church whenever they touched at a port. But of his internal self they were in total ignorance. This did not, however, prevent them from prophesying that Davies was a deep one,' who, now that he had got the cash, would 'blue it' in a way which would astonish them. But Davies did not excel in azure feats.' The news of his good fortune reached him just as the brig, on which he was going to sail as first-mate, was taking in her cargo for the West Indies. lie had signed his contract for the voyage, and, to the utter astonishment of the lawyer who managed the estates, he announced that be should carry it out. In vain did the man of affairs point out to his client that with the help of a cheque of £100 he could arrange the matter for him in ten minutes. Mr. Davies merely replied that the property could wait, he should go the voyage and then retire. The lawyer held up his bands, and then suddenly remembered that there are women in the West Indies as in other parts of the world. Doubt- less his queer client had an object in his voyage. As a matter of fact, he was totally wrong. Owen Davies had never interchanged a tender word with a woman in his life ; he was a creature of routine, and it was part of his routine to carry out his agreements to the letter. That was all. As a last resource, the lawyer suggested that Mr. Davies should make a will. I do not think it necessary,' was the slow and measured answer. The property has come to me by chance. If I die, it may as well go to somebody else in the same way.'—The lawyer stared. Very well,' he said ; it is against my advice, but you must please yourself. Do you want any money ? '—Owen thought for a moment. Yes,' he said, I think I should like to have ten pounds. They are building a cathedral out there, and I want to subscribe to it.'—The lawyer gave him the ten pounds without a word ; he was struck speech- less, and in this condition he remained for some minutes after the door had closed behind his client. Then he sprung up with a single ejaculation, Mad, mad ! like his great-uncle !' But Owen Davies was not in the least mad, at any rate not then ; he was only a creature of habit. In due course, his agreement fulfilled, he sailed his brig home from the West Indies (for the captain was drowned in a gale). Then he took a second-class ticket to Bryngelly, where he had never been in his life before, and asked his way to the Castle. He was told to go to the sea-shore and he would see it. He did so, leaving his sea-chest behind him, and there, about two hundred paces from the land, and built upon a solitary mountain of rock, measuring half-a-mile or so round the base, he perceived a vast mediceval pile of fortified buildings, with turrets towering 300 ft. into the air, and edged with fire by the setting sun. He gazed on it with perplexity. Could it be that this enormous island fortress belonged to him, and if so, how on earth did one get to it ?"
Nothing in recent fiction seems to us more remarkable than the picture, which succeeds, of the rise and growth of his dumb passion for Beatrice Granger, or of the sort of voice which it ultimately finds for itself, when it finds a voice at all. Then, again, as we have said before, the sketch of Elizabeth Granger's cold and wintry passion for him and his wealth is singularly impressive,—quite the second great success of the book. The heroine, Beatrice, must come third. Her figure is more of a mere ideal than the others ; but it is a vivid ideal, and it is impossible not to take a deep interest in her. Mr. Rider Haggard, as we have hinted, somewhat overdoes his attempts to express the visionary side of human life at times, and especially when be gives us her mystical dreams. We hardly think, for instance, that the dream which Beatrice relates to Geoffrey Bingham after their recovery from being drowned together, is coherent enough to answer his purpose of painting impressively the sense of predestined misfortune which he wishes to connect with Beatrice's feeling for Geoffrey Bingham.
Nothing is more curious than Mr. Rider Haggard's use of fatalism as a sort of imaginative medium for expressing passion. We do not think that it means in him either a philosophical or a religious belief, but he seems unable to conceive of any great tragedy without connecting with it a flavour of fatalism. It is only his way of marking that greater powers than any which we perceive, concern themselves in determining human lots, of indicating that all who eagerly desire and pursue, are puppets shifted about in the loom of some mighty power which he really conceives as personal, though he shrinks from avowing his belief in its personality :—
"Thus, then, did these human atoms work out their destinies, these little grains of animated dust, blown hither and thither by a breath which came they knew not whence. If there be any malicious Principle among the Powers around us that deigns to find amusement in the futile vagaries of man, well might it laugh, and laugh again, at the great results of all this scheming, of all these desires, loves, and hates ; and if there be any pitiful Principle, well might it sigh over the infinite pathos of human helplessness. Owen Davies lost in his own passion ; Geoffrey crowned with prosperity and haunted by undying sorrow; Honoria perishing wretchedly in her hour of satisfied ambition ; Elizabeth gaining her end to lose it in the grave ; Beatrice sacrificing her- self in love and blindness, and thereby casting out her joy."
That is Mr. Rider Haggard's epilogue. It is obvious that he uses predestination only as a sort of tragic music wherewith to shadow forth the deep pathos and irony of human passion. He hardly knows how to give voice to his pity and his pain without suggesting that higher powers intervene to baulk us of our ends, or else to grant them in some sense which "keeps the word of promise to the ear, but breaks it to the hope." Doubtless this is true, but is there not even in his own story, so far as that is a true transcript of human life, a far better explanation of this irony than preternatural malice or helpless pity?
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