THE LAST OF THE JERNINGLIAMES.*
THE last of the Jerninghames ! Yes, we heartily hope so ; for a more dolorous set (barring Brydget—and she is merged in the Lumleys) we have seldom had the melancholy misfortune to read about. ' Duke ' was the last of the Jerninghames. They were a highly aristocratic family. England was not, when they first sprang —but they never did spring—they always were. And what Eng- land has done since Duke died, Miss Bewicke declines the awful responsibility of telling us. Being so aristocratic, it is really a for- tunate thing that Marmaduke ' was his christian name, for 'Duke' was such a happy appelation—otherwise he was only a baronet. He was tall and sad—very sad always—and he stooped ; his smile—" that carious smile of his, writhing about his lips "— was so sad, it has quite depressed us to read about it. Of course he was very good, very unselfish, very learned, very absent in- deed. His tastes were unique, his opinions singular, his deeds unaccountable. He was not a success, as we may suppose, at college, nor in love ; and his end was sad, like his life, and sudden. But just before he died he stood bolt upright, for "the first time in his life," and was indignant and a little unjust and cruel to Gwynydd,—that is the heroine and autobiographer. Gwynydd is no better, but she is candid, and leads you to the prospect you have before you very early in the first volume,—" sorrow can never sleep again, not till I sleep alto- gether; but I am content to live." It is, of course, nice to know that she is content to live, but it would be nicer if we did not have so very much of the sorrow that "can never sleep again.' Indeed, we have nothing else—absolutely nothing else—so we have to be contented with the powers of introspection which enable Miss Bewicke to explain Miss Jerninghame's sorrows, and with the learning—very extensive— with which Miss Bewicke illustrates her subject. And Miss Jerniughame, also, as well as Duke, is very sad. "As a child, I was very fond of thinking of death ; delicate children mostly are, and I was never strong. Duke also liked to think of death, and one day he told me that, before he knew any better, he used to pray every night that we might all die before the morning." This is on page 3, vol. 1, and forms "the argument," as one may call it, of these cheerful volumes ; we may be thankful there are only two. Miss Jerninghame was also shy. "I always used to hate going into a room full of strangers, it frightened me ; and if I had dared, I should have liked to have said to them, 'Be kind to me, oh ! do be kind to me, and then I will do my best. Indeed, I mean well.' Duke did not like strangers any more than I did." And they were both very tall, only Miss Jerninghame did not stoop, and was very lovely. And they were both very "talented," * The Last of the Jerninghames. By A. E. N. Bewicke. London : Charles I. Skeet so that we have Greek, Latin, History, Dad, and Algebra ; Homer, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Csesar, Virgil, Dante, Shakes- peare, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the favourite sub- ject of all—the Jews—introduced to our notice in the first chapter, under the simple heading of 'Duke and Bridget and I." These are followed at intervals by all the Other classics — ancient and modern, English aid Continental — theology, philosophy, history, art, botany, poetry, &c. Fortunately for us these subjects are not gone into deeply—not even the history of the Jews—but only touched by the way, to illustrate sorrow, agony, despair, resignation, &c Considering her temperament, it is not surprising that her father, the Dean—of an unsympathetic and matter-of-fact turn of mind—sent her, with her sister Brydget, to London for a season, "to learn to enjoy herself." But he had not understood her. "Yea, everyone agreed about it, it was not only our duty to enjoy ourselves, but we should be actually going against nature if we did not ; yet all the while I never felt sadder in my life." We see at once how unwise the Dean had been, for her first drive in the Park was a horror to this young creature,— who already realised the shortness of life and the hollowness of earthly joys. "I still look back with horror to that first drive in the Park it still sometimes comes back to me as a night- mare, and there is none I dread more." When we read this, at page 47, vol. 1, of course we thought it the part of wisdom to give up hope—we said solemnly "All is over !"—and we were right ; resignation and remembrance—no, not remembrance, there was nothing bright to remember—resignation was all that was left to 418, and fortitude.
After that we read on, with hands clenched and lips compressed, to hear whatever might come without flinching. In London, Uncle Basset (Lord Basset) thinks "that the English nation is being utterly demoralised by the immensity of licentious music that is being thrown broadcast, through the land at opera-houses, music- halls, concerts, and, I regret also to add, at private parties," and 4' when first he heard a young lady sing Vilikins and his Dinah,' blushed for his country that had so degenerated, and thought with renewed admiration of the Athenians taking pleasure in Euripides." Uncle Basset therefore takes earlysteps to disgust his nieces, once for all, with operas, and sends them to see "Don Giovanni "and a ballet. They answer readily to the bit. "We did not enjoy ourselves at all." Brydget was " dogged " and fiery in her indignation ; Gwynydd did not feel so demoralised. "It must be, I feared, because I was so bad already," thought the meant-to-be modest and self-depreciatory, but what seems to us the hatefully self-con- scions Gwynydd, without even courage to be true to either herself or her lover. And so, as better moral training, shopping, Rotten Row, flower-shows, garden, dinner, and evening parties, and Angrily, that highly moral thing, a fancy ball, were freely administered by the generous and sensitively moral uncle. It is at this stage that we have the Andromeda and Perseus -episode—quite a feature in the book, as the nose was in Perseus's face, and in this story. Was it straight or hooked ? At length, the subsidiary hero—the cause of all the tragedy of the story— sits for Perseus, and decides the nose, for he is a Jew ; so Perseus's nose was booked at last. Gwynydd sits for Andro- meda. We are a little tired, we confess, of the thrilling voice and bright smile and blue eyes of Perseus. He is perfect; brave, wise, eloquent, benevolent, and very high-principled ; a con- scientious Jew, a hard-working member of Parliament, a million- aire. But is it not a little inconsistent with his utter superiority, with his godlike wisdom, that when Gwynydd dare not marry trim because of his being a Jew, he throws over his party and hie work, and rushes away to Russia, and never becomes great, and -disappoints everyone, and is most bitter and unjust to Gwynydd, when, having quite decided that she cannot marry a Jew, she fancies, some time later, that she can marry a Jerninghan3e ? But, meantime, her love for this Jew makes her very ill indeed, and Lady Brydget (Duke's mother, and a lady in her own right— sister of a real Duke), decides with great magnanimity to take her to Switzerland. Here she gets very morbid, and perhaps a little tedious, as to the exact date of beginning to think she should
"I cannot help thinking that even with all my pains I have represented myself as caring for Adrian Levison long before I really did so" (she had been very morbid and tedious about this before), "because it was so impossible for me to write of him except in the way in which I afterwards learnt to think of him. I am afraid of making the same mistake again, but I certainly think it was now that I began to think I should die of this illness.
I think it was now I began to fancy I should die of it, and to wish that it might be very soon." Why? because then Adrian Levison could turn Christian without feeling that her love
had bribed him to do so. But it does not really much matter when she first began to think about dying, because she did not die. "The man recovered from the bite, the dog it was that died." To be serious ; at this juncture we have rather too many quOtations of those parts of the Lord's Prayer and the hymn beginning "My God my Father," which refer to a surrender of her will —it is too freely handled even for a serious novel, as this certainly is, and we feel the same still more strongly about the resemblance Gwynydd finds several times be- tween Duke and our Lord. This is bad taste in our authoress, of which, however, we have little other reason to complain. But to return to Gwynydd's tour. It does not do her any good. Before she leaves London she hears accidentally from a brusque doctor that she is going to die ; so she "lies back and smiles." In this frame of mind, you know, we could expect no advantage from foreign travel, and accordingly we find that when some incautious acquaintance let fall the remark that she was getting better, she "was much worse for the next few days after hearing that ; it was a terrible idea" to her mind. At Geneva, singularly enough, she is thrown into close intimacy with Adrian Levison's old governess, who asserts enthusiastically that Adrian's lady-love should marry some one else, whether she loves him or not, so that Adrian—the bribe being removed—may find no obstacle to becoming a Christian. Thence they proceed over the Alps—Gwynydd and Lady Brydget. And at Domo d'Ossola we have a further sad confirmation of our fears that travel is doing her no good ; "certainly that day I sat and looked at the view, and I saw—Adrian Levison ; saw him as I had last seen him when he had said, Better so. I will do good deeds, God help me, and done for Him alone, they may one day win His reward." Lady Brydget consequently came to the same opinion as ourselves, that she had better go back to London. And so to London they go, and we decline to tell any more of the story.
Gwynydd is constructed on the type of Dame Darden in Bleak House; she is so very simple and 80 unbelieving in her own beauty and good qualities ; and, as in Bleak House, no type, we think, can be worse chosen for the heroine of an autobiography. Because the seeing clearly what others are thinking and feeling about her, which is necessary to the relater of a story, is so absurd in its in- consistency with the assumption of utter ignorance of her own beauty, good qualities, and influence ; it is like playing at "pie- tending," as children say, and the effect of fishing for compliments is incessantly produced.
We have so little except Gwynydd and her lovers that we are scarcely able to judge whether Miss Bewicke has skill in depicting any character but the purely introspective one, in which she would succeed if she did not overdo it and sentimentalise too much. Brydget is too merely childish to require much power ; as Gwynydd says, "though we all loved Brydget very dearly, she was not at all clever, and we often paid no attention to her re- marks." She is affectionate, and impulsive, and bright, and when she is peculiarly merry she exclaims, "Do let us all laugh at once,
or make some quite awful noise Oh, do laugh, all of you, do laugh I" and the invitation, which would put to flight most people's inclination to laugh, is good-naturedly responded to by her lover, George Lumley, who laughs "Ha! ha! ha!" Uncle Bas- set's gift of quotations and tedious determination to finish them is a novel trait, and Aunt Basset is life-like in her worldly good- nature. The Dean has the dictatorialness and want of practical wisdom said to be common to the clergy, and comes up to London, disregarding all paternal tenderness and the received opinions that cousins should not marry, to bully his daughter into an engagement with Duke ; only it is rather a defect that Miss Bewicke also represents him as a passionately fond father. Of descriptions of natural scenery we have not a vestige, although, as we have said, Switzerland and Italy were visited. Altogether, we cannot hold the book to be a success. Neverthe- less, Miss Bewicke writes like a cultivated lady, as she very evidently is, and with the particular talent of which we have spoken, of analysis of a single phase of human character. There is also, here and there, a little gentle aud lady-like, but sparkling fun and satire, as when she says it is "right to be as gracious as
possible to a-labourer's daughter Yet one ought always to be on one's guard with people nearer one's own rank." Or when Aunt Basset says, "And going to church in hot weather does not help me at all, especially when there are, such a lot of bonnets to look at as there always are in town. My beat ideas about dress used always to occur to me at church, so much so, indeed, that I had to make a resolution at last that I would never get anything which I first thought of in church, and so for one whole season I was wretchedly dressed."
Previous page
