POOR NELLIE.*
TIM novel, in spite of various faults of which we shall have something to say later on, is a very powerful and remarkable book ; and we shall best and most briefly indicate the something in it which makes it so noteworthy by saying at once, and without any reservation, that we have in its anonymous author an inheritor, not perhaps of the entire mantle of Thackeray, bat certainly of a very large portion of it. This ie an imposing claim, which in the space which can be gives here we can hardly hope to substantiate to the satisfaction of the obstinate sceptic. If, however, there be open-mindedness as well as obstinacy in those who hold that, since the death of the author of Vanity Fair, satire of a really commanding order has found no home in English literature, we commend to such persons the perusal of Poor Nellie, feeling assured that by the time they reach the end of the second volume their opinion will be substantially the same as our own.
It will be noticed that we say the second volume rather than the third, for the third volume is, in the main, an excrescence and a mistake, though it is certainly necessary for the justifica- tion of the title, as in the preceding volumes the girl whose name is given to the book is quite a subordinate character. It also contains one powerful, but much too revolting chapter, which gives the finishing touch to the relentlessly elaborate por- trait of Nellie's mother ; but a minute and terribly realistic picture of the wallowings of a gently nurtured and not ignobly natured young woman in that lowest depth which can only be reached by habitual intoxication, seems to us a violation of all the canons of wholesome art, and a violation, moreover, which has no compensating ethical effect. In the sense in which the word is ordinarily need, this volume is indeed tragic ; but its materials are not those which conduce to purification by pity and by fear, but only to heart-sickness and disgust.
It is, therefore, on the first two volumes alone, and mainly on the portrait of the central character in these volumes, that we base the claim above made. And here we may be met with an objection, even from those who have taken our advice, and read Poor Nellie with open and unprejudiced mind. Clara Neweham, it may be said, is simply Becky Sharp in new costume and novel surroundings ; and that fall of ability as the portrait undoubtedly is, it is at best very clever imitative work. From our point of view, this is altogether mistaken criticism. There are obvious surface resemblances between the two women, and, of course, the utter lack of principle common to both provides a resemblance which goes far below the surface ; but mere want of principle is not an individualising quality : it simply supplies a void in which the true individualising qualities have room to play, and it is by these that Becky Sharp and Clara Newabam are absolutely differentiated. To begin with a very broad and general distinc- tion, Clara as she appears in these pages, is an even worse woman than Becky as she appears in the pages of Vanity Fair. It is possible to exaggerate Becky's badness, and, as a matter of fact, it is frequently exaggerated. She was certainly an utterly un- scrupulous adventuress, but she differed from other people in
• Poor Nellie. By the Authorof "My Trivial Life and Idiefortnne.” Edinburgh and London William Blackwood and Bons. this numerous class less by exceptional wickedness than by ex- ceptional cleverness. Utterly friendless, and with no weapons to fight the battle of life but those forged by her own quick brain, she made up her mind to work her way to a recognised and comfortable place in society, without troubling herself con- cerning the quality of the means employed. Apparently devoid not only of the power to feel love and sympathy, but even of the capacity to appreciate them—witness her heartless and contemptuous ingratitude to the good old Mies Pinkertone, who had shown themselves true friends—it was natural for a cold and narrow nature like hers to meet all men and women as enemies, to be openly defeated or secretly circumvented. She was at war with mankind ; and in public wars, the world seems to have agreed to legitimatise actions which it would admit to be shameful in times of peace. Becky applied this opinion of the world to her own private campaign, and in her guerilla-warfare freely availed herself of the license granted to the accredited soldier ; but it would hardly be safe to say that Thackeray in- tended her to be regarded as a woman who deliberately pre- ferred crooked. ways to straight ones. When she said that it was easy to be good upon five thousand a year, she apparently implied. that the position of ease was also a position to be desired, and that freedom from the necessity of resorting to mean shifts might have been welcome to her rather than otherwise. Above all, she was not in any true sense of the word a hypocrite, unless we can so call the General who devises means to deceive the enemy concerning the number of his forces or the nature of his intentions. She played upon other people's vanity or cupidity, but she was really remarkably free from humbug, save when humbug seemed absolutely necessary in the way of business ; and, strange as it may seem at first, it would not be at all paradoxical to speak of her as a naturally straightforward person.
In all these respects Becky Sharp and Clara have absolutely nothing in common, and their surroundings are as diverse as their characters. Clara has, to begin with, the social position and the creature-comforts the want of which called into action Becky's wonderful powers of dramatic dissimulation. The daughter of a Bishop, and the wife of a rich and exceedingly pliant husband, whose standing in his county is such that he is eventually made a Peer, she possesses, in addition to these advantages, a personal popularity which would have enabled her to compass all reasonable ends by perfectly direct and transparent' means. Unlike Becky, therefore, Clara is not subjected to the stress of external temptation ; her temptations, such as they are, are self-made, and have no palliating quality. Becky, the adventuress of -whom nobody knows any- thing, meets everywhere with a suspicions greeting, and her first task is always to loll suspicion to sleep; Clara, by her antecedents and externals—her angelic face is frequently referred to—receives universal confidence, and only in the minds of one or two persons does she inspire even a vague distrust. She is absolutely without a single excuse for choosing " ways that are dark" or attempting "tricks that are vain," but she is an in- stinctive hypocrite and a deliberate schemer, with such an ungovernable passion for walking in tortuous paths that, like Pope, she would, if possible, "drink tea by stratagem." The special art to which she devotes her talent for finesse is the art of match-making—in which is included. the companion art of match-breaking—and her principal victims are her two daughters, Adela and Nellie, and the brothers George and Charles Crofton, of whom the former is deemed an " eligible," the latter a " detrimental." We have used the word "victims " not carelessly, but with intention. Most match-makers are partly inspired by a mere love of managing other people's affairs for them ; but, as a rale, the match-maker is a really kindly disposed person whose first object—and, as she honestly believes, her only object—is to make young people happy by helping " suitable " youths and maidens to find out each other's suitability, and then to do what in them lies to secure the smooth running of the course of true love. There is none of this sentimental nonsense about Clara Newsham. She knows nothing of love or of young people's "feelings " for each other ; all she knows is that she has certain " views," and if the feelings and the views clash, so mach the worse for the former. In contemplating the cold, calculating cruelty which characterises Clara's method of carrying out her plans, our blood boils in a way which compels as to realise that the aboriginal savage is stirring within us. To divert suspicion from her schemes, she adopts a course of action by means of which she inspires Adele and George with a feeling for each other which is a compound of fear and dislike; but when the auspicious moment for direct action arrives, the two puppets, mutually repellent though they be, must come together. Gradually but surely, the two helpless young creatures are involved in a web from which there seems no escape; and though George's life is made as miserable as the life of a healthy young man with a clear conscience well can be, and Adele is tortured till her poor brain is on the point of giving way, Clara knows no pity and no relenting. And here it may be well to take note of one important difference between the portraiture of the author of Vanity Fair and that of the author of Poor Nellie. The limner of Becky Sharp is not merely devoid of a positive dislike for his creation ; he has a measure of sympathy with her—indeed, one feels sometimes that he really admires her cleverness and courage—and his sympathetic appreciation infects the reader, and enables him to feel that Becky, in spite of all that is repellent in her, is a human being of ordinary flesh and blood. On the other hand, it is clear that the portraiture of the later writer is much less passionless,— that she hates Clara, and determines that we shall bate her, with a fierce hatred ; and though this hatred does much to increase the impressiveness of the picture, it also does something to weaken its verisimilitude, for Clara is less a woman than—to quote the sub-title of Webster's play—a " white devil." Before the author has well warmed to her work, and while her emotions are well in hand, she remarks of her heroine that, "at the beginning of her career, before her great talents were fully developed, Mrs. Newsham was at times undoubtedly too astute ;" bat, as a matter of fact, she is too astute from first to last, for the simple reason that her creator mercilessly debits her with gratuitous hypocrisies and dissimulatious of which a clever woman like Clara Newsham could never have been guilty, because she would have seen clearly the probability of their being found out. Once or twice, when she makes a mistake of this kind, she is befriended by the chapter of accidents, and her temerity is therefore apparently justified; but then, cold, nnim- pnlsive women of Mrs. Neweham's type are not in the habit of trusting to accident, and the author would not have made her so foolish bad she not been determined to realise to the utmost extent her possibilities of mean cruelty. Then, too, when Clara deliberately entraps poor, frightened Nellie into a lie, in order that the consciousness of the sin may make the girl still more powerless to resist, she achieves a refinement of inventive wickedness to which Becky was quite a stranger. A portrait painted with such strokes as these cannot fail, and does not fail, to bite itself into the imagination and the memory, but we cannot help feeling that a lighter and more discriminating touch would have given it a satisfying quality which at present it lacks.
Though Poor Nellie has evidently been written for the sake of this one character, the subordinate personages are delineated, not, indeed, with the same inventive genius, but with equal care and skill. Indeed, in some respects they are more successful than Clara, because drawn with a cooler, calmer hand. In such creations as the absent-minded Thomas Newsham, who never realises that he is but a tool—a rather dangerous one at times —in the hand of his clever wife ; the loyal, simple-hearted, trustful Admiral; and the phlegmatic and puzzle-headed Adele, whose inertia of nature makes such severe demands upon her mother's powers of management, it is difficult to find a flaw. The literary style of the book ie perfectly simple, but it has a fine hard polish which is wonderfully appropriate. Poor Nellie is, in short, a very remarkable novel ; and the longer we consider it, the less reason we see to modify the verdict pronounced in our opening sentences.
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