PAULINE.*
WE have been a good deal tantalised by this novel. It starts remarkably well, is vivaciously and clearly written, contains bright glimpses of landscape-sketching, does not drag in the narrative, and contains more than one character that would hardly be called common-place, certainly not hackneyed. And yet the general impression is unsatisfactory. Whatever is the cause, we experience as we read it none of those pleasing sensa- tions which the healthy mind receives from a good novel. On the whole, we have decided, after not a little reflection, that the source of the mischief is inefficiency in the planning and conduct- ing of the story ; and when we dare to look further, and ask what subjective condition in the author is the fons et origo mali, we find it in the slightness of affection with which the characters are regarded by their literary creator. There is, after all, no maxim in author-craft so comprehensively right as the old and simple one of Horace, which we may thus freely paraphrase :—" If you wish the reader to weep, you must yourself be in a crying mood ; if you wish reader to laugh, you must yourself enter with your whole heart into the fun." All the supremely interesting characters in fiction are felt to have been objects of corresponding interest to their * Pauline. By L. B. Walford. 2 vols. London and Edinburgh : W. Blackwood -ant:89no. 1877. imaginative parents. The interest felt by the author need not imply affection or approval, although this is frequently the case. If Scott had been writing the biography of dear relatives, he could scarcely have manifested more affectionate interest in them than he exhibits in Oldbuck or Di Vernon. Dickens is said to have been thrown into paroxysms of sympathetic anguish by the misfor- tunes of favourite characters. There was, indeed, no element of affection or approbation in Shakespeare's regard for Shylock or Iago, but we are made aware in every sentence they utter— in the exquisitely sympathetic expression given to all their wishes, fears, and schemes—that they were the objects, for Shakespeare, of intense imaginative passion. It is a high literary misdemeanour when an author first succeeds in interesting readers in a character, and then ceases to be himself deeply interested in the character in question. We have personally, for example, a vivid recollection that Hawthorne's entire novel, Transformation, one of his most elaborate works, was spoiled for us by the apathy with which he dismisses the principal character,—the mysterious creature that, though strong and tender in his human affections, touches, by strange and uncanny yet picturesque affinities, upon animal ex- istence. The Faun had committed what in any other person would have been a heinous crime, but the circumstances under which the deed was done were so peculiar, and the moral quality of the act was so obviously affected by his unique temperament, that we never lose our affection for him, and look forward, as to the climax of the novel, to the final estimate of his guilt by the author and by the legal authorities. When Hawthorne winds up, or rather cuts short, the tale by informing us curtly that the Faun is " in prison," and adds not a word as to his fate, we are not only intel- lectually disappointed, but are emotionally pained, somewhat as we should be in actual life by a display of heartlessness, and vaguely resent the author's having, in the early part of the book, awakened in us an interest which he does not satisfy.
It is, then, we take it, because of feebleness of imaginative grasp, due fundamentally to defective interest in the characters, that the novel before us, clever as it in many respects is, falls short of being a good novel. There are two pairs of lovers, an arrangement not necessarily objectionable, but requiring great skill for its successful treatment, and we cannot be sure whether it is for the one pair or the other that our interest is chiefly claimed. Probably it is about equally claimed for both, and it is thoroughly secured for neither. In the outset it seems clearly the aim of the author to interest us in Pauline, who gives name to the book, and in Blundell, who plays the part of her lover. The two are brought together in a situation and under circum- stances admirably suited to the commencement of a romantic love-affair. Pauline, with a view to abridging an unplea- santly long walk, ventures to cross the shingle and weeded rocks of a bay in the Hebrides, and finds the enterprise much more formidable than she had anticipated. She slips into a pool, and might have got into serious trouble with the returning tide, but that Blundell appears in the nick of time and sets all right. With the assistance of his arm she gets out of the water, and accepts a seat in his boat, to be rowed by his crew to a point on the shore near her destination. Blundell turns out to be an acquaintance of her brother Tom, and during the weeks of his continuance on the coast he is a constant visitor at the house where Tom and Pauline are staying. Pauline falls in love with him, and a good deal might have been made of their love-affair, by a novelist possessing the requisite power and skill. But it becomes in these volumes a tiresome, straggling business, more like a priggish friendship, resting on psychological developments and influences of a improving kind exerted by the lady, than a stirring and enjoyable tale of pas- sion. The fatal circumstance, however, is that it ends in nothing. Pauline neither improves Blundell nor marries him, and there is no tragic interest excited by his fate that at all compensates for the lack of the ordinary interest of love-making. He acts with almost incredible folly ; we can- not be sure whether it is Pauline or another woman that he is in love with, or whether he is in love with either ; and when at last, after having more or less vaguely expected that Pauline was going to make something of him, we find that he drops out of thelttory without having answered any purpose whatever, ex- cept to give Pauline the opportunity of uttering a variety of instructive and edifying remarks, we wonder whether the author could really have designed so ineffective a treat- ment, or whether it was simply blundered into, without plan or prescience. At all events, we bid Blundell farewell with. ex- treme indifference, as a senseless blockhead, who was never worth caring about, and it cannot be added that Pauline has a much stronger hold upon our affection.
Elsie and Tom are the other pair of lovers, and this love-affair has at least the advantage of coming to the usual satisfactory -conclusion. Elsie is not so didactic as Pauline, and with a little change in the handling, the author might, we think, have made her a favourite. All she wants is constancy—heart enough to feel seriously and steadily—and we can conceive no reason why she should not have possessed this redeeming quality, except that the author bad from the first no distinct and firm idea of her personality, and trusted for the development of her character, to some considerable extent at least, to the chapter of accidents. The result is that Elsie is neither interesting to the reader, nor correctly delineated as a study in character. She is uninteresting, because she is a flirt ; and a flirt, unless as clever as Becky Sharpe, which Elsie emphatically is not, cannot be interesting. Her character as a whole is impossible, because we are required to believe that " she will grow up into a good, true, loving woman." This, we maintain, is impossible, not from any positive and vigorous malignity in Elsie, but because she has no character, good or bad, and is merely frivolous and heartless. Ex nihilo nihil fit; there is more hope for a castaway capable of passion than for a flirt. And there can be no doubt that this is the word rightly descriptive of Elsie. 4' She had subjugated Hugh, Tom, and such as those, by the score ;" she had flirted with Blundell, apparently incited thereto by an un- worthy desire to cut out Pauline. Her trifling with Hugh is par- ticularly heartless. If Tom had been a manly and sagacious fellow, he would have not have condescended to be one of the many strings to her bow. But Tom is nothing,--a mere over- grown school-boy. Elsie will never grow into " a good, true, loving woman." She will grow into a conventionally irreproach- able matron, safe as a fly from all strong feeling, never committing any great mistake, but never rising by a hand-breadth above the standard of reputable worldliness. If she has a daughter who happens to fall really in love, she will not understand it, and will think the girl is ill, or becoming insane. She will probably have her " little hoard of maxims " for use in " preaching down a daughter's heart," but she can never allege truly that "she her- self has suffered,"—she is incapable of that.
The principal characters having thus failed, one and all, either to secure our interest or to engage our affection, we seem shut up to the conclusion that the novel is not a success. The author will perhaps expect us to dwell upon the high moral purpose which may have been entertained in its composition, but from this point of view also the treatment is, to use no severer term, inadequate. Pauline, who on the whole is the best of the characters, has just and elevated ideas, and favours the preposterous Blundell with much excellent advice ; but then, it all comes to nothing. In actual life, we admit, the uselessness of good advice is a frequent experience, the failure of noble purpose a common fact. Many an arrow misses its mark, many a river loses itself in the sand. But it is perhaps the subtlest of the distinctions between nature and art that the latter cannot, except within narrow limits and under conditions very hard to fulfil, indulge in what to human eyes appear the aimlessness, the failure, of nature. Art must bring her seeds to bear,—cannot, like nature, cast all but one in a thousand away. Nature is indifferent to the effect upon the human spectator, art cannot be indifferent to effect. If, therefore, art will deal with the element, of failure, disorder, and purposelessness in life, the artist is bound to make it the producing cause of intense human feeling. This is the mystery of tragic art. The heir of Ravenswood disappears in the quicksand ; according to all tests applicable by human judg- ment, that is a life lost, flung aimlessly " to the void ;" but Scott makes the death of Ravenswood the occasion of profound feeling in his readers. The unpardonable fault in the novel before us is that we are never made to feel profoundly. When we learn, as we do in the most off-band manner, that Blundell has broken his neck at a steeple-chase, we are not more moved than we should be by learning, from a para- graph in a morning newspaper, that an absurd person whom we sometimes heard of had accidently lost his life. The river loses itself in sand, and we turn away listlessly disappointed, without a trace of the imaginative anguish appropriate to tragedy. In the scenery on the brink, however, before the river lost itself, there were features not without interest. In other words, the delineation of some of the secondary characters is more successful than that of the principal, and there are in the book a good many eloquent descriptive and reflective passages.
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