NOVELS.
THE DREAM AND THE BUSINESS.*
THE publication of a posthumous book by a distinguished writer must always be awaited with keen expectation. Some- times it is an inferior production which had been better left alone; sometimes, like Weir of Hermiston, it opens up vistas of such supreme achievement that our sense of loss is doubly increased ; sometimes, again, as in the present case, it is a typical specimen of the writer's work, enabling us to estimate its merits and limitations. The Bream and the Business will not, we think, add to the reputation of Mrs. Craigie ; but it will not detract from it. It is a fair example of her strength and her weakness. The subject is the old conflict between temperament and inherited convictions, between human • The Dream and the Business. By John Oliver Ilothes. London; T. Fisher Hun [63.1
passion and ingrained belief. There are six main figures in the book,—Firmalden, the Nonconformist minister, and his sister ; the Roman Catholic Lord Marlesford and his
wife ; Lessard, the musician, and Miss Nannie Cloots, the actress. Among these six the game of love is played with
immense confusion. Firmaldeu as a boy is engaged to Miss Cloots ; she breaks with him, and later he comes under the influence of Lady Marlesford, who sees in him a possible convert to her faith. Sophy. his sister, falls in love with Lessard, breaks with him, marries and is left a young widow, and in the end marries the widowed Lord Marlesford and becomes a Roman Catholic; the Marlesford couple, after various sentimental adventures, are united again and live happily till the wife's death. Lessard plays the familiar part of a disturber of domestic peace; Miss Cloots in her later
phases is a disreputable little dea ex machina who is used to make Firmalden's character clear to his friends. The book
might have been aptly called "Love's Cross-Currents," for there is the same bewildering complexity in the attachments as in Mr. Swinburne's romance. Of story in the ordinary sense there is none. The book is a study of Firmalden's development, his opinions, his loves, his doubts,—not his doings. Drama is almost wholly absent, and the narrative
rambles along with the aid of many coincidences. Great as Mrs. Craigie's merits are, she shows in this work the same carelessness of construction which made so good a novel as The School for Saints an object-lesson in faulty technique.
But one of her most striking merits is a technical one. She had an extraordinary power of reproducing an atmosphere by a few significant details. The home in Bayswater in the early chapters, Miss Cloota's establishment at High Barnet, the house- holds of Sophy's several aunts, are all reproduced with extreme clearness, and .with the most modest expenditure of language. Mrs. Craigie excelled in all varieties of needle-point work. It is apparent in her lighter dialogue. No one has better re- produced the conversation of cultivated people as it ought to be. Wit and logic are mingled so harmoniously that, in spite of the brilliance, there is little artificiality to offend. But this gift is seen at its best in her analysis of her characters, for she belongs to the school which does not leave the reader to grope in the dark for a clue. Such analysis, made up of neat antitheses, wittily phrased, and lit often with real tenderness and poetry, is so delightful to read that one may be pardoned for forgetting that it is not necessarily good fiction. Mrs, Craigie was a past-mistress of the psychological portrait. She can sum up the foibles of a character in an aphorism which seems to exhaust them, and on the next page set out the other side with equal candour and sympathy. One feels in every turn the skilled band of the serious student of life, who can be cruel but never inhuman, and delicate without sinking into triviality. As a gallery of portraits of men and women in the abstract the book, like her others, has few rivals in contemporary literature.
When all is said, however, this is not fiction. Her people seem to us to remain in the abstract. She is too metaphysical, too preoccupied with the nuances of thought and feeling, to clothe these abstractions in flesh and blood. Firmalden talks not because what he says has any bearing upon the story, but because it is illustrative of a side of human nature which he is there to typify. They are all creatures in the void, desperately self-conscious, but uttering the thoughts, not of living souls, but of some external argument. Sophy, who begins admirably, fades away into just such a phonograph ; Firmalden is never, to our mind, alive at all; and the Marlesfords, husband and wife, are even more shadowy. Logically they are fully realised and wholly conceivable, but in fiction, as in philosophy, conception without perception is empty. To this criticism there are two exceptions. One is Miss Clods, who is por- trayed with the realism of an unhesitating dislike. The other is Lessard, the musical Don Juan, an incarnate sentimentalist, who is real because his character, such as it is, happens to be of that evasive, sentimental type which is characteristic of the book. Abstractions, nuances of feeling, these are his life, and therefore he is alive in the story because of his very flimsi- ness. And this brings us to what has always seemed to be the great blemish in Mrs. Craigie's work, a blemish which must prevent her, for all her brilliant cleverness, from taking the highest rank in fiction. It used to be a commonplace to say of her books that they were cynical, a reproach scarcely deserved; but they had that quality which commonly goes
hand in hand with cynicism, sentimentality. The latest novel shows it in abundance. It is nominally a story of high passion, of the greatest conflict which the world can show, that between love and duty, as typified by religion. But neither the one side nor the other seems to us fully realised: The delicate philandering, the emotional adventures, have not the mark of the "God unconquered in battle." The religion, also, on both sides is little more than a sentiment as here portrayed. We cannot believe in the reality of either the Calvinism or the Roman Catholicism. Both have an air of attitudes taken up from some aesthetic preference, some passing discontent, or some old fragment of pride. We might accept the elder Firmalden, but we cannot credit his son.
If proof were needed of this characteristic of Mrs. Craigie's work, it would be found in the topical element which she thought fit to introduce. Firmalden meets Gladstone at a dinner-party, and they talk of Home-rule ; Firmalden delivers a great address in the City Temple on the position of modern Nonconformity; and elsewhere throughout the book there are other little links with the modern world. Novelists who are conscious of a thin vitality in their characters often fly to topical allusions to give their work the actuality which they feel it lacks. Mrs. Craigio was far above the common roman clef ; but that so conscientious an artist should have had recourse to the topical seems to indicate that she was aware of this defect. Her books, as we look back upon them with gratitude for the pleasure they have given us and regret for the nntimely death of so brilliant a writer, appear, in our judgment, to fall short of great fiction. They have the, supreme merit of style ; they are full of subtle and suggestive thought and acute observation ; and they have both wit and that rare emotional quality, without which wit declines into cynicism. But we cannot help feeling that it is the essayist rather than the novelist whose loss we deplore.
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