BOOKS.

OUT OF COURT."

THIS is a story of much power, and though written with a moral purpose, which is visible enough through the literary art by which it is hardly concealed, it is a purpose which gives force and in- tensity to the book, and of which no one can say that it is suffered to overrule the conceptions of character contained in the novel, or to make arbitrary mouth-pieces of the figures of the tale. If Mrs. Cashel Hoey's purpose modifies her story at all, it is not by straining any one of the characters in it into unmeaning subordi- nation to her view, but rather by inducing her to multiply some- what unnaturally the motives pressing on the hero to marry again after he has obtained a divorce from his unfaithful wife, in order that she may win the greater victory for her conception of the true force and sacredness of the marriage tie. Out of Court is written as a protest against the modern notion of marriage, as a contract dissoluble on such conditions as the State may choose to impose, and in favour of that more sacramental view of marriage which the Roman Catholic Church adopts, and adopts, as it believes, on the absolute authority of Christ. It is evident from a few lines in the second volume that Mrs. Cashel Hoey is herself a very earnest Roman Catholic ; but none of the characters in this story are so, at least during its course,—though in the passage we have referred to, it is intimated that the heroine became one in later life,—and the question, so far as it is argued at all, is argued without any relation to the authority of the Church which Mrs. Cashel Hoey bolds to be the true one. The only men who are held up to our admiration, including the hero himself, look upon the right of the State to authorise divorce for a sufficient reason, and a new marriage after the divorce, as unquestionable, and they practically enforce their principle. And though the heroine rejects this view with all her heart, it will, we fear, not unfrequently happen that the reader

will not be much captivated by the heroine, and not be particularly disposed to follow her view because it is hers. Whatever persuasive- ness on this subject the book has, apart from the appeal once made in

it by one of the characters to Christ's own words, it has, by the very touching description it contains of the life of the divorcee after her

marriage to her seducer, of her repentance, of her separation from him, of her incidental meeting with her first husband, and of the growth in her mind of the almost unreasoning faith that the first tie was the true and only tie by which both she and he were still bound, even though by her own sin she had rendered it impossible for her to interpose anything but a prayer to prevent his remarriage, if

• Out of Court. By Mrs. Cashel Etoey. 8 vols. London: Hurst and 13ackett.

he should think it right to use his liberty. Of course the weakness of this part of the book,—we do not mean the literary weakness, for there is no literary weakness in this part of it,—but the logical weakness of it as a moral argument, is this,—that Blanche, recognis- ing how deep had been her own sin, and how worthy her husband was of a better wife, was precisely in the position in which the sacredness of the original marriage tie would impress itself most deeply upon her, so that her feeling could be no criterion at all of the feeling of an insulted, injured, and oppressed wife ; while as regards the husband's state of mind, Mrs. Hoey is wisely reticent, and though she makes her own principle ultimately victorious over his heart, does not venture to give us any picture of the moral logic by which it gains its triumph. The subject, difficult as it is, is treated throughout with perfect delicacy. Indeed, perhaps, the one weakness of the story is that the sin of the wife is made too much the result of a villain's art and falsehood, whereas probably in nine cases out of ten of such ruin, there is a good deal of the genuine licence of passion in the seduced as well as the seducer, supposing even the man and not the woman to be the seducer ; and in that case, there would be a good deal more diffi- culty in rendering it artistically possible that the injured husband should still recognise the sacredness of the violated bond, as he is here represented as doing. A story, indeed, cannot, by the very necessity of the case, justify any moral, however high and pure, except under the peculiar individual conditions of the special cir- cumstances conceived and narrated, and hence, though this tale may be in some sense a protest against the low tone of a great part of modern literature on these subjects, it cannot establish or even tend to establish any general principle. We have no inten- tion of discussing here the moral question on which the chief interest of this tale turns, but we may just say that Protestants, who cannot of course defer to the authority of the Catholic Church on these matters, need not, however completely they may adopt the law laid down by Christ, by any means come to the conclusion that, whatever the sins committed against it, marriage is absolutely indissoluble during the life of both parties by the divine law. Interpreted strictly, Christ's words (Matthew xis. 9) appear to except the case of the wife's unfaithfulness as the one adequate ground of divorce, and apparently even of remarriage. No doubt the parallel passages point leas clearly to this interpretation, but then the parallel passages are altogether lees full. There can be no doubt that in this, as in most other cases, it is not possible to determine the matter out of hand by a text, even for those who accept most fully the authority of Christ's law. So much as to Mrs. Hoey's moral purpose. We may say that as regards the particular case dealt with in this particular story, we conceive the solution of the terrible moral problem which the tale propounds, to be a noble and Christian one, and that in this respect it is a fine protest against the loose literary morality of the day.

Apart from the moral of the story, the literary interest grows steadily, being slight in the first volume, strong in the second, and engrossing in the third. The characters are drawn with very different degrees of skill, quite the best, we think, and also the most important, being the unfaithful wife. The pathos of her repent- ance is powerfully given, but there is one defect in this part of the story. The weakness or smallness of moral scale which is part of Blanche's character,and is understood and declared by the author to remain, as of course it must have remained, part of the character after her repentance, no less than before it, is not brought out in fact in the latter part of the tale. We are told of it, but we are no longer made to realise it as we did in the early part. Mrs. Hoey would not have diminished, but added to the pathos, if she had left a touch of the old fretfulness and feebleness prominent in Blanche after her repentance. Marcus, Blanche's husband, is a good, though some- what slight sketch ; and the villain of the piece is decidedly better drawn than villains usually are, for the villains of novels are apt to approach the ideal characters,—are indeed in some sense ideal characters,—in their unnatural perfection, though it be perfection of villany. Mrs. Hoey has skilfully intertwined an intellectual twist —an idee fise, due to voluntarily fostered envy, but not the less pro- ducing results independent of that envy,—with her villain's evil qualities, and so she has contrived,—with the help of a very vivid and graphic description of his countenance and expression, —to make him a good deal less melodramatic than the villains of ordinary novels. Again, some of the subordinate sketches are very good ;—for instance, Lord Farney, the resident Irish peer ; and still better is the young wife he marries in his mature age, chiefly to prevent the estate from going to a worthless brother, in whose hands all his benevolent plans would have gone to ruin. Lady Franey, slightly as she is touched in, is admirable ; indeed, the very absence of strong lines in her character makes us wonder how it is she is made so living to

us as she is. Again, Mrs. MacMahon, Blanche's stepmother and evil genius,—not in any melodramatic sense, but simply in the.

sense of being a thoroughly worldly, vulgar-minded, and un- scrupulous woman, with a very spiteful feeling for any one- whom she esteems her enemy, and a natural aptitude for

thinking that every one who despises her is her enemy,— is made a telling character, so that we are almost sorry when she disappears from the scene Miss Keith the elder,.

the strong-minded worshipper of lace, is not bad in her way, though there is a touch of Dickens's mannerism in the way in which Mrs. Hoey harps on the reading-chair which she carries.

about with her everywhere, and the click with which it snaps to when she enscones herself in it. However, Miss Keith's reasons for the lace-cultus are good :—

" She [Miss Keith] had a high, square forehead, surmounted by two, rows of very stiff grey curls, held in their place by side-combs of singu- lar size, thickness, and blackness ; and she wore a cap surpassingly hideous in form, but compounded of lace of great price and rarity, and ribbons of implacable stiffness and the ugliest colours procurable for a. great deal of money. These dreadful appendages usually varied in the opposite sense to the seasons, but the form of the cap was always the same ; and the one indispensable accomplishment for an aspirant to the post of Miss Keith's maid was a knowledge of the kindred arts of washing and mending lace. Her lace was the great reality, the grand resource, association, solace, pride, and treasure of her life. She possessed a. considerable quantity of it, and she never grudged any price within her means, which were large, to increase her store. It is the only thing in which you cannot be deceived and disappointed,' she would say, except by your own fault, through your own ignorance. It is almost the only thing of which there is a fixed quantity in the world. They may find diamonds in all the out-of-the-way nooks on the face of the earth, until they are as common as dirt; but they can't dig up Venice, Brussels, Mechlin, or Alencon, worked by the fingers of "dear dead/ women" in the days of old. They can't dig up pictures by Titian and Velasquez, and Vandyck and Rembrandt—they know what lace meant —either, and then you come to an end. There's nothing else old under the sun.'"

The least successful parts of the book seem to us the somewhat romantic account of Julius Arlingham and his fortunes, which one

does not realise at all and, again, the faultless heroine, Marcia Keith, in whom, for some inscrutable reason or other, which applies to good many many heroines, the present writer at least finds it quite impos- sible to take an interest. Marcia does everything she ought to do, and nothing that she ought not to do (except, by the way, beg Blanche to stay in bed, "no matter how matinale you may feel, until I come

to you," an affectation of fine phraseology quite unworthy of that strong-minded young lady), but none the less, we rather sympathise with Marcus in preferring Blanche, with all her smallness and worldliness and sinfulness, to this paragon of wealth, intellect, and virtue. Why it is that-Marcia Keith fails utterly to interest us, except that she fails utterly to leave any distinct impression of herself upon us, we do not know. But unquestionably the fact is that her virtues do not succeed in inspiring us with any sympathy, and we are even disposed to grudge her share in helping back Blanche to peace of mind.

Taken as a whole, however, the story is one of very consider- able power and of a noble aim. There are frequent touches in it of humour, and the pathos of the latter part of it is simple, deep, and unaffected. It would be impossible by any extract of a single pa9sage to give a fair impression of its force, which grows and strengthens as the plot runs on to its close. Few novels "with &- purpose" are the better for that purpose. Unquestionably this one is. It gives fire to the story, without making the author seem to ventriloquise through the mouth of her puppets. The English style of the book is clear, flowing, and vigorous, and has but one fault, that it is not trusted to as much as it might be. Mrs.- Hoey is evidently an accomplished French scholar, and she ekes- out her descriptions so often with technical French words that the reader who has but a superficial acquaintance with that lan- guage, is compelled constantly to resort to the dictionary, if he would follow her meaning. This is a fault. It may be quite true that many of the terms used have no exact equivalent in English, but an inexact equivalent intelligible to all the world is a great deal better than an exact equivalent intelligible only to the few.

Besides, as mere literary art, English not tesselated with French, produces a much more complete and harmonious impression of style on the mind, than a mosaic such as a few of Mrs. Hoey's descriptions present to us.