HOPE DEFERRED.* NOVEL-READERS are indebted to the lady novelists of
the day for many admirable pictures of French life, which have made the ways' of a nation, politically the most inconstant, but socially the most immovable people in the world, familiar to English men and women as travel can never make them. Miss Thackeray and Miss Kavanagh are painters of French interiors, and Mrs. Sartoris' Week in a French Country House makes us all feel as if, like Theodore Hook's friend, we had "been there." But neither those nor the other writers who have illustrated French life for us have done so in a controversial or disputative spirit. They have shown things as they are, with liveliness and accuracy ; they have not rebelled or demonstrated. The foundations of that social system which in some respects is so admirable and in others so detestable in our eyes, are so fixed that it is impossible to believe they can ever be moved. The superstructure is regarded with the unquestioning, unanimous admiration of the whole nation ; accepted as indisputably the highest and grandest evidence of civilization known to mankind, as a standard for the comparison of all nations, whose inevitable result must be their inferiority. 40f this edifice, the manage de convenance, as it used to be popularly and officially called, is the keystone. Take it away, and social life in France would undergo an integral change. To our ideas, the alteration must in certain respects be for the better, even though it should include, as it undoubtedly would, the reduction of the parental and filial relations in force and closeness to some- thing like our own not practically elevated standard, but we do not believe there is any section of opinion in France to which the notion would be tolerable. Women—to whom the French system, in which "se marier " is an abstract question, might be supposed by us to be most distasteful, against which we could easily imagine them disposed to rebel in vindication of the dearest of women's rights, that of giving herself to the man she loves and refusing to give herself to the man she does not love—regard it with com- placency, and would be quite horrified at the iaea of its abolition. Of course it ought to be, because it is,—the converse of French argument and practice in political affairs ;—if it were not, there would be old maids in France out of convents, and imprudent 'marriages, as there are in England, children unprovided for, and a general terrible breach of decorum. There is truth in this, but it is not all the truth, nor even the greater or most important part of the truth, as we see it, but as they do not, and so the question remains an open one, in which English people take a protesting controversial kind of interest, mingled with an uneasy conscious- ness that the same sort of thing is becoming the custom of society here, though it is not its proclaimed law,—an interest which French people regard with polite surprise, as a sample of the imperfect social comprehension of every country except France.
The manage de convenance is the theme of Miss Pollard's novel. She handles it very well from the sentimental point of view, and still better from the moral. She regards the custom with strong disfavour, which, as she implies that she livesin France, and writes from her own knowledge and observation, is to be respected as a conviction, not taken as a prejudice. She illustrates its worst features forcibly, she draws the contrasts which the subject pre- sents with strong and delicate feeling, and urges with earnestness an honest womanly plea for love as the only guarantee for happiness in marriage. We go with her in all this, and farther than she does, for we hold that love is the only motive which justifies marriage at all,—but we cannot fail to see that she injures her own argument by the admittance of any but French influences into the story. As she tells it, not as she intends it, the English mother of Jeanne de Lutz, by her aversion to the French system, by her interference with its action in the case of her daughter, prevents a marriage in which both parties would have found love and happiness. This is a strange oversight, and no doubt it has arisen because Miss Pollard had not the courage to go so far out of the facts of her own know- ledge as to assign the objection to a French source. The in- troduction of an English element at all is a mistake ; it only weakens the impression made by the story, by causing it to be 'contemplated from an exterior stand-point, instead of being per- mitted to appeal on the broadly human plea to the powerful action of general sympathy.
• Hope Deferred. By Eliza F. Pollard, Author of "Aviee," de. London : Hurst and Blackett. This flaw in the mechanism of the novel is the most serious fault to be found with Hope Deferred. The style is clear and pleasant, and it has an unaffected earnestness, as if the writer strove eagerly to put all that occurred to these unfortunate peo- ple before the reader without thinking about herself ; one of the rarest graces of fiction. The story is told by a young English lady, who goes to France as companion to Jeanne de Lutz. There is not much about her, but it is well said, as the following extract will show : — "Who has no mother, has no home. My sister Louisa and myself learned this lesson early. I, less quickly than she perhaps, because my nature was ever more bright and hopeful than hers, needing less to make me happy. We were brought up at school, lacking nothing out- wardly. Fed, clothed, educated, what more could we need? Trained morning, noon, and night, until I almost marvel that all nature was not trained out of us. So we grew almost to womanhood. I remember no joy, but many a bitter grief, childish perhaps, but all the more acute, all the better remembered because there was no comforter. Such a strange childhood—a romp ; a game in a large playground; no dolls ; no playthings ; no household pets ; just an every-day life of books; • lessons well or badly said ; praise charily given • a straight walk two and two through squares and crescents ; stolen pleasures few and far between ; an idle hour with some fairytale, eated on the gnarled root of an old laburnum tree. Strange that all brightness did not fade out of our hearts ; and yet perhaps there was no more laughing face, no lighter step, no more joyous voice than mine, when I stood, in all the pride of my seventeen summers, in my father's house, listen- ing seriously to the mandate that man and woman alike were born to labour. It was not different from what I had heard all my life. Work—of course, I was ready and willing to work. The mysterious future lay all before me, a silver line of glory ; my whole being expanded in the mere delight of living. Nothing could damp my ardour, nothing could make the world less good, less beautiful. I saw no evil, I knew no harm. Thus I started fearlessly on my journey."
That journey was to take her into the heart of a system in which sending a girl of seventeen out of her father's house to work for her bread among strangers has no place, but giving her in marriage to a man whom she has never seen is a matter of course. Which is the worse alternative, the harder ordinance of society? We shall never agree on that question, but, at least, for the first there is the plea of necessity, though it is an elastic one, and many times it has occurred to the present writer, seeing the homes from whence the daughters have gone forth to earn their bread, to wonder exceedingly. The reader would like to see a little more of this girl, whose sketch of the privations of school life is so admirable,—that "no dolls, no household pets," reveals a great truth too much ignored by parents ;—but she becomes vague, being kept in the background, while Jeanne de Lutz, a charming French girl, with all the good and none of the unpleasing charac- teristics of her nation, fills the scene. The family circle at Amonville is delightfully described, and one likes all the people, especially Count Louis, the hero of a story which unexpectedly takes a melancholy and ultimately a tragic tone. The English mother of Jeanne de Lutz speedily becomes confidential with Miss Ivor, and tells her country- woman why it is that she shrinks from carrying out the family arrangement by which Jeanne and Count Louis are to combine the family estates by their marriage. Her discourse is on the manage de convenance, and though there is nothing new in it, all the reasons with which we are familar are well put, in a simple, womanly, convincing way. Then, later in the story, we have the
illustration in the persons of the Marquis de la Croix and his wife. The handsome, unscrupulous Marquise plays an important part in the story, a part which is dexterously managed, for she is never inconsistent with her real heartlessness and frivolity, and when she is guilty of a great crime, does it cleverly by the hands of another,—a much less wicked woman, in whom passion is fierce and absorbing, not an affair of coquetry and minauderie, as it is in the Marquise. Here is the sketch :—
" The Marquis was a dark man, at least as far as his hair and moustache went; his face was of a sallow indescribable complexion, well shaven, defining to perfection the thick moustaches ' and long pointed imperial ; the eyes were cold and careless, generally expressive of no particular feeling, save when they lighted upon a woman, and then, from mere habit they assumed that criticizing look as when a man examines the points of a horse. He was, in fact, a perfect type of a certain class of Parisian gentlemen, such as one may meet any day lounging on the Boulevards or in the clubs,—a man who bad passed through every form of dissipation and pleasure, and to whom no vice is unfamiliar. Had he been asked, he would probably have said he had never been a child, and he would have spoken the truth ; while yet in age a boy, life had no secrets for him. The card-table, billiards, the racecourse, miatreases,—each in their turn had claimed him for their votary ; to be tossed on one side to-day, picked up to-morrow, dropped again next day, and so on, in one eternal round, until at five- and-twenty half lli8 fortune was spent, and he himself was blase' and wearied, believing neither in God, man, nor womankind. Then it was that his dear friends had gathered round him, and preached matrimony —that was something new—a change, at least, so he agreed to try it ; and Louisa had been hunted up out of her distant provinee, proposed for, and readily bestowed. A Marquis with half a fortune was good ; the title made up for deficiencies, and her own fortune filled up the gap. For ten days after marriage there was a sort of pause in the Marquis's existence, then he resumed his old life. Husband and wife met at their late breakfast to go their own way afterwards,—she to her visiting and shopping, he to his club or lounge on the Boulevard. The dinner-hour would again unite them, unless they had some previous engagement ; but even then they rarely dined alone. Tete-h-tetes are unpleasant unless love and sympathy preside. Then to ball or opera, theatre or concert, until morning dawned. And so they lived on from day to day. Of any inner life, any union of soul with soul, they never dreamt."
The picture might find many pendants on this side of that strip of silver sea which does not make quite so much difference as we fondly imagine, but the author's point is the sanction of such a state of things by the laws of society, and its habitual recognition
by custom, its not being considered detestable on the part of the men and degrading on that of the women.
We must not tell the story of the long-deferred hope, and how it was ultimately realized, through what trial, and what training, —with one terrific incident, brought about with a skill which, if it had no other merit, would mark out this book from the rank and file of the crowded array of novels ; we can only direct attention to it as a true and beautiful delineation of a woman's heart at war with circumstances and with fate.
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