HARRIET ROUTH.*
WE wonder if Mr. Yates is aware that in Harriet Routh he has made by far the highest effort, the one most worthy of an artist, which he has yet attempted. Apparently he is not, for she is, so to speak, a secondary character in a book which, without her, would be a somewhat feeble novel. A Black Sheep is a very ordinary story, its hero being the sort of young man to whom we have grown accustomed in fiction, who has done some bad things, but who wants to do better ; who becomes respectable rather than high-principled, and is, for the rest, very much like a well made lay figure. We should scarcely give a paragraph to it but for Harriet Routh, but she is really a striking figure. Mr. Yates has tried to sketch in her one of the most singular, yet not most in- frequent of mental phenomena,—the loss of moral identity, the merging, as it were, of one nature into another so absolutely that it assists in evil, without, so far as human eye can trace, itself becoming as evil as its partner. Harriet Routh, a clever governess of good emotions and no particular principles, meets her husband, a villanous black-leg, dying in an inn on the Continent. Moved by some instinct or an irresistible pity, she refuses to let him die alone, nurses him, is dismissed by her em- ployers, and on his recovery marries him. Thenceforward she becomes absorbed in him, till her own nature seems to disappear ; enters into his nefarious projects, aids him with higher courage and brighter brain than his own to swindle friends ; becomes, in fact, an accomplice, while remaining the cheerful, loving, devoted, unselfish wife. All this while, it is impossible, though she has sunk in action to the sharper's level, to hold her morally equally degraded. By a thousand touches, some of them, we suspect, unconscious, as if Mr. Yates were sketching something he had seen and only half understood, the author gives us to understand that she is not lost ; that virtues remain, though all are misdirected. She is a swindler absolutely truthful to herself and her husband, a cheat who is absolutely sincere, a loving woman who is pitiless to all but one, but has, in her mad concentration on that one, scarcely human sympathies for others—a woman full, to use the only word which will express the thought, of piety, but a piety for him, not God. It is not an ordinary passion which is described, but an absolute merging of the identity of the moral nature, such as sonic heretics have tried to believe the true relation of woman to man. You feel that, but for Routh, Harriet would be a queenly nature. At last it becomes essential to his plans to commit a murder,—very artistically suppressed as to details by Mr. Yates,—and throw the suspicion on a friend ; and Har- riet, cognizant of the former, personally arranges for the latter.
• Then comes the finest stroke Mr. Yates probably ever conceived.
• A Black Sheep. By E. Yates. London : Tinsley Brothers.
Murder differs from all other crimes in the remorse it creates, and most novelists would have made Harriet repent. He makes her break. She has lost her identity too completely to repent ; at all events, till Routh does ; but she bows down under the scathing effect of crime; begins, for the first time in her life, to think of risk, to feel fear and doubt ; her head gets hot, her veins fill, and once she urges her husband to escape, leaving her to face conse- quences alone. He, all the while, in his meanness, is beginning, as one who knows too much, to fear and hate her ; but even estrangement or treachery cannot restore her moral nature ; she protects him to the last, once using his mistress to do it, and when all is discovered, carries him poison in prison ; and then, with full means of retreat before her, drags herself to the outer gate, and thinking how he is dying within, sits till either by death, heartbreak, or by poison, she terminates her existence with his. It is the passion which Mary of Scots entertained for Bothwell described, and well described, in a sharper's wife.
This is at least a striking idea, so striking that we wish its execution were more equal and more thorough. It is too sketchily done. We do not see enough of Harriet or of Harriet's mind, and the original design is marred by two great blots. Such cases of absolutely merged identity, of one nature so absorbed in another as to leave no room for judgment on that other's acts certainly do occur, but they always demand two conditions. First, that the merged nature shall not be absolutely superior at all points to the one in which it is merged, and Harriet Routh's is. Routh has nothing in him whatever that we can see—has not his wife's courage, or brain, or unselfishness, or capacity of loving, or sovereign strength of will. There is no reason why his wife's will should in his presence cease to act except in accord with his, yet if it does not, where is the excuse for her? Does not Mr. Yates see that good remains in Harriet in spite of her criminality, because to be criminal one must will crime, and her will is, as it were, paralyzed, or rather exhausted, by excessive concentration on the single resolve to be one with her husband. That is her antiseptic, the one thing which preserves her nature from rotting as all natures rot under crime ; and to make his will so inferior to hers that hers cannot have ceased to operate, not to spend on him some of the labour he has spent on her, is defective art. Routh is not Bothwell as Bothwell was, but Bothwell as idiotic compilers of history, who do not see that to fascinate a woman like Mary a man must have had fascinations, make him out to be. Again, and this is the second blot, the moment the identity ceased the force of the antiseptic would cease too ; Maimuna, her magic ended, would recognize her age, and Harriet Routh, once convinced of her husband's treachery, would instantly have recovered her own nature, have felt her own criminality, and stopped short. We do not say she would have repented. There are natures which seem to have a physical incapacity to glance backwards enough to feel repentance. We do not say she must necessarily, in her just jealousy, have craved to punish Routh, for love has survived jealousy, as it did in Mary of Scots. But she would have become herself, that is, as we understand, incapable, if only from intellectual power and absence of selfishness, of new crime. But she goes on, carries her husband poison, i.e., connives at a new murder, and while aware in some dim way of her own exceeding wickedness, does not recover her own self, dies as it were in an absolute identity with him who has himself, as she knows, snapped the link which made that identity possible. Harriet Routh is, in fact, not worked out, but to meet an idea in a regular novel worth working out is always an unex- pected pleasure.
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