NOVELS.
LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER.*
EiRS. HIIMPHRY WARD'S new novel is differentiated from its predecessors in two particulars. In the first place, it is not a romance of strictly contemporary life, or one that relates itself to the political or social currents of the hour. It is a novel of the last generation, before society had grown so unwieldy and cosmopolitan as to render the keeping of a salon impossible, for this is not merely a novel of society but of a coterie. Secondly, this is, if we mistake not, the first time that Mrs. Humphry Ward has clearly and unmistakably borrowed for the skeleton of her plot an historical episode of which the record is available. For Julie Le Breton, the heroine of Lady Rose's Daughter, does not resemble Julie L'Espinasse in name alone. Like her, she is a belle laide ; like her, the illegitimate daughter of a noble mother; like her, she owes her notoriety to her rup- ture with the patroness whose friends she contrived to detach. The resemblance deserves to be noted, not to be insisted on, since, in truth, it only relates to the bare outlines of the plot, the treatment and setting of which are entirely fresh and inde- pendent. The method adopted, in short, has a pretty close parallel in the procedure of composers who take an old theme —by Haydn or Handel, for example—and make it the basis of a set of elaborate symphonic variations in which there is ample room for inventiveness and originality. Mrs. Humphry Ward has similarly given us in Lady Rose's Daughter an elaborate and impressive set of modern variations on the L'Espinasse theme.
Julie Le Breton, in whom Mlle. L'Espinasse is reincarnated, is the only child of Lady Rose Delaney, daughter of Lord Iiackington, who had the misfortune to find her affinity in a brilliant but ineffectual genius after several years of marriage to an unsympathetic soldier. Refused the opportunity of re- marriage by her unforgiving husband, shunned by her father, and forgotten by her friends, Lady Rose expiates her error in poverty and loneliness on the Continent, dying young, like her lover. Their child, the heroine of the story, inherits the charm and intellectual keenness of her parents, to which is added a vivacity due to her environment, and so it comes about that when, on a visit to some school friends in England, she meets old Lady Henry Delafield, she is immediately engaged as her companion and secretary under an assumed name. In the in- evitable conflict that ensues the victory of youth, when rein- forced by personal magnetism, intelligence, and wit, is a fore- gone conclusion. But Lady Henry is a very formidable antagonist. To begin with, she is one of the half-dozen people who know Julie's history. She is also more strong- willed, more upright, more fearless. Julie's triumph, in a word, is of the nature of a Pyrrhic victory. As a mere adventuress she could have secured her position; but it is at once her merit and her weakness that in matters of the heart she is purely disinterested. She refuses the heir to a dukedom, and encourages the suit of a brilliant penniless egoist, Captain Warkworth. It is the old story : in friendship there is free choice, but on subit Thus, while there is enough in her of the adventuress to render Julie interesting and picturesque, her intrigues are in the main entirely harmless, and the punishment recoils entirely on her own head. She moves heaven and earth—in the persons of Cabinet Ministers and financiers' wives—to secure
• Lady Roses Daughtwr. By Mrs. Humphry Ward. London : Smith, Elder. and Co. [6a] the professional and pecuniary advancement of Captain Warkworth, and achieves her end only to find that he is
calmly prepared to many her own mother's niece,—not
because he has disturbed Aileen Moffatt's peace of mind-by his attentions at Simla, but simply because she is well-born,
socially eligible, and, above all, a great heiress. Yet Julie not only acquiesces in his decision, but when Captain Warkworth proposes that she should join him in Paris—he is ordered to Africa on a perilous mission—she agrees to give him this final proof of her humiliating infatuation. Warkworth's action throughout is so contemptible as to be difficult to reconcile
with his record. But in the case of Julie, Mrs. Humphry Ward has traced the operation of heredity and environment on her mixed character with such elaboration and skill as to render her defiance of convention more than plausible. From this act of social suicide Julie is saved by the intervention of Jacob Delafield, her faithful lover. Lord Lackington, her grandfather, is stricken down by danger- ous illness, and Delafield, hurrying off to fetch Julie to the old man's bedside, contrives to intercept her on her journey and bring her back. It is not in human nature to feel grateful to a rescuer whose intervention impresses on the rescued so crushing a sense of humiliation. But at least Julie knows that her secret is safe with Delafield, who still wishes to marry her as the best means of saving her from herself. Touched by his chivalry and his persistence, anxious to rehabilitate her self-respect, and influenced by a letter from Warkworth in which he not only acquiesces in but applauds her desertion, Julie consents to become Delafield's wife, and the concluding chapters describe the gradual con- version of her respect into love.
Of the delicacy and sympathy, as well as the impartiality, with which Mrs. Humphry Ward has handled her difficult theme we cannot speak too highly. The figure of Julie, commanding yet helpless, endowed with great intelligence but hampered by ill regulated emotion, dominates the story; but the per. traits of old Lady Henry and the butterfly Duchess of Crow. borough are excellent in their different ways. As for the two principal male characters, Jacob Delafield and Captain Warkworth, they are better chosen to illustrate the workings of the heroine's character than to inspire admiration or interest. The former comes perilously near being a prig; the latter is a soldier of fortune in his energetic moments, a pro- fessional philanderer in his leisure, and the note of insincerity is so acutely emphasised in his letters to Julie as to make the reader wonder how so clever a woman could be imposed on. The last hundred pages partake inevitably of the nature of an anticlimax ; indeed, there is nothing in the book to equal in dramatic intensity the scene of Julie's discomfiture on the last evening of her stay under Lady Henry's roof. But with all deductions, Lady Rose's Daughter, in virtue of its finished characterisation, its restrained eloquence, and its dispassionate outlook, is calculated to maintain the author's deservedly high repute as one of the most intellectual and suggestive representatives of English fiction.
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