WITHIN SOUND OF THE SEA.*
MANY readers will like this Scotch story because of its wit and wisdom, others will enjoy its admirable sketches of scenery, and some will ask for it at their libraries because it is the successor to Blue Roses, to which it is indeed superior in power and in- terest. But it will be best appreciated by those who have them- selves felt something of that stirring of the sap which has lately -expanded northern Calvinism, not less than other Christian com- munities. It would be mistaken pains to attempt an analysis of the four love-stories which, intermingled, make a fuller chord of the Love that has its echoes " beyond these voices." And it would be an ungrateful task to dwell on some faults of artistic composition which may be found in this delightful book. They are those which a painter might commit who tried to express more than brush and colours can of a complex subject, and who endangered the main impression of his picture by too conscien- tious detail.
Mr. Esslemont, the minister of Lumgair, is the central figure of the book ; and more or less reflecting the light that shines on him, the other persons come and go, and suffer such loss as mostly proves to be gain, for there is little blackness of shadow in the story. Both the minister and Marion Ford, the heroine, are of mixed Lowland and Celtic parentage, and the education of their more perfect selves is wrought, now by the passionate, now by the self-controlling, powers with which both are en- dowed, but without the balance of which the flower of their love would not have blossomed as it did. Both are tried by the weaknesses of their Highland kinsfolk, even more than by the dissympathy of the hard-headed people of the Kirkton and the paganism of the Fisherton. Mr. Esslemont suffers with infinite patience the egotistic hysteria of his sister, who is crazed by regret ; and Marion gains strength and sweetness in her devotion to a weakly repining mother, and to a selfish, esthetic brother. Aiming at a representation of a Scotch parish, as it is affected by the radical change in religious feeling -which is transfiguring historical Presbyterianism, the author groups the elements of the Lumgair life with frequent reference to wider thought. She preserves the individuality characteristic of Scotch people, and yet every figure in her book is influenced one way or another by the gospel of universal brotherhood, which would seem as new in Forfarshire as it was eighteen centuries ago to the Jews. The crass conceit, the commercial uncleanness, the sceptical flippancy of her Fairlies and Fyfes, and the dull pre- judices of Kenneth Ford, make cross-shadows ; yet even they are turned, as clouds in slimmer sunsets are turned, to glowing perspectives of light. There is a clever young doctor, brought up at " a university which could boast of Syme, the guide to conservative surgery ; Sir W. Hamilton, with his stag-like eyes ; James Miller, so tall and upright, with his pale, clean- cut face, the apostle of temperance ; Wilson, with his long • Within Sound of the Sea. By the Author or "Vera," "Blue Roses," doe. London: C. Began Paul sad Co. 1879. locks, last of the school of the Nodes ;' Aytoun, lecturing on belles-lettres, and writing verses in which the spirit of the ballad
is incarnate ; and Simpson, carrying about on the torso of an over-grown child the head of a demi-god." And Dr. Fairlie is of very advanced thought, and he draws from Marion Ford a love so intense, and leaves her so desolate, that his is perhaps the darkest figure in the story. Yet even he is partly redeemed by his loyalty to the honour of his family, while Marion's education of suffering fits her for the higher love of Mr. Esslemont. All the skill of the author is given to the description of that nobler emotion which, indeed, has its birth in passion, but its outcome in sacrifice. The frank expression of an undoubting optimism reconciles her readers to the purging fire in which she plunges almost all her characters.. The minister never rouses our ad- miration more than when, in the worst moment of his weary pain, he prays that he may be kept pitiful towards his sister, the instrument of it. Dr. Fairlie's two hours of intense grief almost condone his cruelty to Marion. Clementine's drunken lover, in extremest physical misery and degradation, is restored by the alchemy of love, and its terrors to his scared conscience prove more powerful than the terrors of Law, human or divine. The key-note of the book is struck in the description of the minister's book-case. " To its top shelves the works of Owen, Scott, Edwardes, and Calvin had all been relegated. Then came a middle-distance of lexicons, and of college prizes, princi-
pally in Greek ; then some rows of historical works, and piles of Clark's edition of the German theologians ; while the fore- ground was littered with Chalmers, Trench, Hengstenberg, and McLeod Campbell." On the table was a volume of Augustini Opera. The pictures of Forfarshire farm lands, Highland coolie, or Sydenham glare, are vividly true ; yet they are not untouched by the mysticism that colours all the story. Some-
what of Wordsworthian " passion " throbs in the west-coast storm ; in the " snow-drifts that flew like flames before the icy wind," in the whaling regions where Hugh Ford is shipwrecked ; and in the sea, which, round the craiglands of Lumgair, " laid a salt and wailing fringe of surf." When by other means Mr. Esslemont failed to cheer his witless sister, " often he trusted to clouds and birds and flowers, as to so many interpreters of his pity who heals all our diseases." There is the true humour of a wide sympathy in the author's excellent sketches of the Lowland servants and villagers. Their worldliness, which shapes itself on Bible models, and which uses the poetry of the Psalms to express the narrowest and most sordid feelings, is drawn with so kindly a touch as to be even delightful ; and in no modern novel are there better speci- mens of the caustic wit which is the product of an intense personal conceit, joined to that perception of the abstract rela- tions of things which appears to be inherited by the modern representatives of Davie Deans and Andrew Fairservice.
The old theology and manners of the Lumgair natives meet the streams of Universalism and material progress, with piquant contrasts. Christy Blake and Robbie Tosh, servants respectively of Mr. Esslemont and the Fords, are admirable mouth-pieces for the privileged pride of their race. As Christy talks of her pastor over a cup of tea at the grocer's, she declares that,—
" Doots were very unbecoming in a minister, and that she feared Mr. Esslemont had no an extraordinar' grip o' the truth.'—' I was a League and Covenant wumman mysel',' replied Mrs. Butchart, yet I'm thinking that, doots or nae doots, he is one o' the kingdom, Erastian or no Erastian, I ken them when I see them.'—' I'm no speaking of his morality, but o' his divairgences,' retorted Christy, with severity.—' I have heard speak of them, and I pairtly believe it may be the case, but I like weel his evidences o' Christian goodness. He was just maist extraordinar' affecktin' when our Tibbie was taken.'—' It's weel kent,' said Christy, ' that when the shepherd is angered wi' the-sheep he gies them a blind bell-wether, and I am feered that may be the case here, for I cannot see that the minister deals honestly wi' the terrors of the Law.'—' Ah ! weel I wot, wumman, at the eerie turn o' the nicht, and in the dead-mirk dale, it's no' the terrors of the Law that'll servo your turn. He's maybe no' just as soond as we could wish, but he has baith sang-gear and book-gear, and he was just wonderful wi' Tibbie.' " We can conceive how revolutionising is the minister's teaching when, in a vigorous discussion between the agnostic doctor, a soldier from India puzzled by the claims of many creeds, and an easy-going Presbyterian of the past, Mr. Esslemont, pale with intense feeling, says of his faith :— "I see in men the glorious possibilities of their present and of their future lives; I see in every man a king and priest unto God; I see every man risen with Christ. I am a minister of the Word, and it is my duty and my pleasure, seeing that every man contains a latent force for good,—it is my duty, I say, to touch the springs of feeling in them, to waken the force that is in them, and having set it free, to turn it on to the wheels of society : to prove that the Word, being made flesh, dwells among us.' When men are ener- gised to goodness here, they will more readily believe in the kingdom prepared for them before the foundation of the world; and they will be content with nothing less."
We are bound to say that the author, without a word of moral- ising, has succeeded in showing the action in Lumgair of this enthusiasm. Perhaps even more than she intended, her dramatic instinct takes her beyond Mr. Esslemont's doctrine to the yet more universal optimism which can even love pain and loss, because by them there can be for man a more intimate union with the eternal sacrifice of Gethsemane than by any felicities of temporal joy. " There is no living in love without some sorrow," said Thomas a Kempis ; and there is much of the true and necessary " imitation " in Mr. Esslemont's life, but still more in Marion's, when the intensity of the first passion she conquers, is her title to the second and fuller draught of love.
The " dusky strand of death " could not be left out of a story such as this ; but it is death as sacrificial, not as penal, any more than the daily miseries of life are penal ; and the author well expresses, as in the deaths of Clementina and her long-lost lover, the,—
" Present joy Of seeing the life's corruption, stain by stain, Vanish in the clear heat of love irate.'
Delight is, indeed, throughout the book so edged with pain, that but for the underlying sense of victorious sacrifice, we might complain of its sadness.
The author freely uses what has been called the pathetic fallacy, and she subordinates natural phenomena to the moods of her personages ; but it is evident that to her all material forms are in truth sacramental, and things unseen exist behind the veils of things seen, for her, as for her hero and heroine. " The divine beauty of created things " waxed and waned for Marion and for Mr. Esslemont, as they loved and lost and loved again :-
" Of the vagrant melodies of Netherbyres, Marion knew them every one, from the great diapason of the deep, to the bleat of the early lamb before the winds of March. She was right to love them. They tell us that we belong to the world, and the world to us. They reassure us. We hear them, and we feel that we love and are beloved ; that we ask, and that we receive ; that we demand, and that in our turn we can also give."
Admiring as we do this picture of Scotch life, leavened by the teaching of Dr. McLeod Campbell, and Erskine of Linlathen, we are not inclined to lay stress on such faults as its unneces- sary episodes, and its over-scrupulous accuracy in details unim- portant to the general effect. We would willingly have heard more of the fisher and farmer folk of Lumgair, instead of Hugh Ford's Arctic misadventures. The scenes in Sutherlandshire might well have been used in another sketch of northern manners and thought, which we hope the author may give us. Meantime, there have been few,:if any, more charming additions than is this story to that literature which describes the bene- ficent ferment of love, and the importance to society of noble emotion ; and which warns us that the only death and decay that need be feared by man, is the spiritual death of egotism and hate.
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