LOVE OR MARRIAGE'?* Tars novel, painful in its subject, and

a little careless and slipshod in style, as if in parts it were written by a foreigner,—the author uses "voyage," for instance, in the foreign sense of " journey," and here and there we have a confused sentence very hard to interpret,—shows, nevertheless, considerable brilliance of intellect and a fair share of dramatic power. The plot is the weakest part.

Though it never fails in interest, it is lengthened out by a very artificial device into two parallel reaches,—a " false crisis," as physicians call it in the case of a fever, occurring at the end of the first volume, which yet anticipates the real crisis, and, in real life, could scarcely have failed to produce it. The principal figure of the story,—who is only not the heroine in the ordinary sense because the story is the history of her gradual degradation in character,—is, on the whole, conceived and painted with remarkable power;—we say ' on the whole,' because there

seem to us to be serious flaws, on which we shall have something to say. Fanny Glencairn is the daughter of a simple-minded old

Scotch botanist, whose passion for his science and for the country scenes in which he pursues it has rendered him a wretched man of business, and made him fail as an ironmonger both in Edinburgh and London. He retains, however, both the dreamy simplicity and the spiritual depth of his nature, while his wife, a worldly, selfish woman (who " took him and married him "—from real preference--in the old days when he was still suffering from the early death of one to whom he had been engaged and pro- foundly attached), does her best to make life a burden to him by her constant reproaches on his incapacity for business. Fanny's nature is, at the opening of the story, one of those quick, pretty, soft, pillowy natures which cannot endure to give pain to any one, which coaxes everybody into good humour, not without a diplomatic insincerity which is apparent to the reader, if not to the objects of her artistic coaxings ; and yet with a hard grain of selfishness derived from her mother at the bottom, which enables her to flash out a good deal of indignant energy when her vanity is deeply wounded and her self-love stirred. She is, in short, what Mrs. Linton calls a " Coozleums " in external disposition, with a great deal of intellectual acuteness and tact in reading cha- racter, and a good hard bottom of selfishness as the foundation of her character. The following passage, where she and the literary Mr. Helstone, who wins her through his intellectual fascination over her mind, and at last makes her his mistress, are first formally

introduced to each other,—it appears they have met in some unacknowledged way before,—will give the author's conception

of Fanny Glencairn's character at the outset of the tale, better than any dissertation of ours :—

" They sat down to tea, and Mr. Helstone found himself opposite this vision of girlish grace that he could have fancied stolen from some dim glade of Arthurian romance, to display the daintiest of white little wrists in handing teacups in Clapham. It was not the fine cluster of short, thick, pale yellow curls that fell down on a shapely and milk-white neck, nor the dimpled, rose-tinted cheek, nor the clear brow, nor the bright, big, beautiful blue eyes that gave an almost infantine expression to her face; but a certain fine modulation of colour, and a subtle and attractive natural grace, that drew his eyes and heart to her, and made him forget the rather theatrical character of her beauty. Besides, she wore a jacket of scarlet velvet, with a little ermine collar, which was not • Love or Marriage? A Novel. By William Black. 3 vols. Tinsley.

half so white as the chin under which it nestled ; and although this resplendent bit of dress was now sadly tarnished by ago and wear, it nevertheless completed the semi-theatrical, semi-artistic look of the graceful little figure. When, in the course of conversation, Helstone and she had to exchange words, they bore the demeanour of perfect strangers."

But Charlie Bennett, Fanny's accepted lover, soon

" Began to observe—what no one but an idiot or a lover could so long have failed to perceive—that Fanny, notwithstanding her careful avoidance of looking at either himself or Helstone, was playing her pretty wiles at the stranger. Was he so anxious now that she should appear to great advantage ? Why, the very charm of those wiles appalled him ; and how very charming they were ! Was there ever a kitten so full of comic originality ; was there ever a squirrel so demure and decorous, so sly and wicked ; was there ever a fairy with limelight quivering on her pink satin and silver spangles, so tenderly beautiful as this tantalizing sweetheart ? Her little, white, warm hand, that seemed to tingle to the finger-tips with a delicious life, was enough to have stolen a man's heart away: and then her plump, finely tinted face ; her short, thick, natural curls; and—ah ! most dangerous of all—her awful eyes, that looked out upon you as with a great childlike wonder, that drew you towards them, that made you quail before their inexpressible depth and tenderness, then burst out laughing at you for a fool, and cut the strings of your heart as with an edge of steel !"

And from this moment the painful interest of the story lies in the gradual growth of Mr. Helstone's influence over Fanny, till he makes her, first secretly, and afterwards openly, his mistress. Nor is Mr. Helstone made a mere malignant villain. He is brilliant, selfish, coldblooded, cynical, sceptical, a disbeliever in all absolute morality, but though from his hatred of marriage he does not marry Fanny, there is no doubt that he really loves her in his way, and that he intends from the first to the last, at the conclusion of the story no less than when he first persuades her to consent to his proposal, to give her both the name and the treatment of a wife throughout her life. Nor does he in any way blind her to what she is doing. He puts all his cynical arguments before her plainly enough, and he knows that she has both the acuteness and the knowledge requisite to understand their bearing both on her own position and on his. His guilt is even greater towards others than towards her,—towards her father, whose simple spiritual nature he knows, and from whom, of course, he carefully conceals the intellectual processes by which he is sapping and mining his daughter's rather ignoble character, — and towards her lover, Charlie Bennett, who is an acquaintance of his own, and of whose engagement to Fanny Glencairn he is aware from the first. How cleverly Mr. Helstone's thin, sardonic character is drawn,—how far he is from being one of those mere novel-villains who are said to talk brilliantly, and who never show their clever- ness within the course of the story, almost every chapter shows. We take somewhat at random a letter from Mr. Helstone to Fanny, intercepted by the worldly mother, Mrs. Glencairn, and given in the form in which she reads it to herself :- " ' Thursday Morning.

"' Mr DARLING, —You knew how little I like to wallow in the moral pigsty of sleep ; and here I am, at seven o'clock, without letters or newspapers or breakfast to pass the time. I will give myself up to you ; and tell you how that delicious little note you gave me yesterday affected me. It seemed to me as if I had anticipated death, and floated out, as the old Brahmins expected to do, into an atmosphere of delight in which all personal consciousness was drowned. Did you ever recognize the meaning of the words,—" I am not myself at all, Molly dear "—in which the man, in his great love for something beyond himself, forgets the trammels in which the Spirit of Time has bound him, and would fain restore that primeval and impersonal mingling of spirit which was once and which shall be our only existence ?'—' They didn't write love-letters in that way when I was young,' said Mrs. Glencairn, with a smile.—' But I'm afraid I shall tire you,' continued Helstone's letter. Metaphysics comes natural to a man who hasn't got his breakfast. What, then, of the future of which you speak ? I agree with everything you say about your mother; but I hold it to be our duty to think a little of ourselves. The past generation had its day ; let us have ours. The world can't be kept back because our grandmothers are alive. I see you won't listen to my theories of utilitarianism ; and indeed I cannot expect you—any more than I'd expect a woman with high cheek-bones to be able to play one of Beethoven's sonatas. But if you won't look after your own com- fort, I will ; and I don't choose to reap the prospective benefits of heaven by enduring on earth the martyrdom of a mother-in-law' It was at this point that Mrs. Glencairn's colour began to come and go. The fact is, man constructed heaven to console himself for the hardships of earth ; only he projected into the next world as much human tyranny as he ever found in this. I have said as much to you before ; but now, my pet, I must remind you that we have the ordering of this world ourselves; and the person who takes into his or her house a mother-in-law flies in the face of Providence. The noblest epitaph you could write on a woman's grave would be "Even her mother-in-law loved her ;" but where did you ever hear of its being done ? No, Fanny ; we will be as dutiful as we can ; but we must not have our small para- dise invaded by any serpent, even in the guise of an angel. You know how much I admire your mother. I do ; but then I love you. You may say, " II me plait d'dtre battue ;" but as your future husband I won't allow it, and Madame your good mother must content herself with ruling one household' She read no more. She threw down the letter on the table, as though her loathing and contempt for the writer could not be more forcibly testified,"

Nor is this letter by any means the best specimen of Mr. Helstone's intellectual power. His conversations with Fanny are often really brilliant, and likely enough to have actually produced the intellectual fascination which the story asserts, though in point of insight into motives and aims he meets quite his match in her.

Where the author seems to us to fail in the history of this painful development of Fanny's character, is that while he ascribes to her both coldness enough, selfishness enough, and shrewdness enough to play with two lovers at once,—indeed, she hardly knows at first which she prefers, the youthful, impulsive lover, or the older cynical, intellectual lover,—while she is clever and self-pos- sessed enough to keep Mr. Helstone at a distance even when she has compromised herself by stealing away with him to reside for a short time in lodgings at the sea-side as his sister,—and clever and self-possessed enough also to win back Charlie Bennett and per- suade him of her innocence when he discovers her in this false position,—yet the author never does practically explain to us why this clever girl, evidently one neither of strong passions nor of impulsive affections, does become Mr. Helstone's mistress when she might certainly have become his wife if she would. She is not by any means indifferent to worldly consideration. She is full of love of the world, and the things of the world, and the pride of life. She is so anxious about being " respectable " that even when she has compromised herself by leaving her father's house and going to reside alone with Mr. Helstone at the sea-side, he does not dare at that time to propose making her his mistress. She makes him respect her own savoir-faire, while thoroughly enjoying his admira- tion and his thin intellectual brilliance. She is perfectly aware that he is quite willing to marry her, if he may not have her for his mis- tress without marrying her. She is represented as utterly without theoretic enthusiasms for his social heresies. She understands and any enjoys his sceptical criticism, but she never believes, much less embraces, his theories, if, indeed, he believes them himself. In short, Mr. Black never gives us the least notion what Fanny Glencairn's motive is for becoming Mr. Helstone's mistress, and yet he paints a girl who must have had a motive, who ought to have had a distinct motive,—since she is carefully portrayed as neither so innocent, nor so much in love, nor of so passionate a nature as to fall a victim to Mr. Helstone's teaching or his arts. There is evidently some great defect here in the picture of this otherwise powerfully delineated figure. Fanny Glencairn's rapid growth into the likeness of her bad, worldly mother is powerfully painted; but Mrs. Glencairn herself would have been the last to fall into this sin against the world ; nor can we quite understand even her concurrence and conspiracy in her daughter's shame, except that it was beyond remedy before she knew it, and that Mr. Helstone's money was her only means of living after the gay and worldly fashion which she best loves. Even so we have some doubt whether her character, as painted, would not have been more consistent, if she had, in the pride of her worldly dignity, cast off her daughter and fretted her husband to death, 'rather than sanction the sacri- fice of all the notions of worldly respectability in which she had grown up. We do not say she would have been less offensive or less degraded than she actually is painted, had this been the turn given to her conduct, for the motive in either case would probably be irredeemably selfish,—but she would certainly be a more ordinary, and we think a more natural character. There are few women who have worshipped the world and its estimates of things all their lives who would not prefer its canons of respectability, even to its pleasures and enjoyments, in their maturity. Moreover, there is something really unnatural in Mr. Helstone, with his expressed views upon " mothers-in-law," burdening himself with the mother not of his wife, but of his mistress,—and such a mother as this, moreover,—without apparently any reason but complais- ance to the woman herself.

But perhaps the greatest blot in the story is the utterly unnatural conduct of Fanny's father, — the old naturalist and spiritual dreamer, Mr. Glencairn,—both when his daughter is first charged with a lapse from virtue, and still more when he first learns for himself that this lapse is true. He is painted as a man, of weak will, . certainly, but of devout nature and intense affections, who loves God deeply and his daughter fondly, and who has failed to teach her his own faith and tone of spirit only from an absence of mind characteristic of a dreamer with an absorbing scientific passion. Yet when Mr. Glencairn first hears how a man he loves and trusts (Charlie Bennett) has broken his engagement with Fanny because he has discovered her intrigue with Mr. Helstone, he presses no inquiry, he does nothing beyond languidly showing the letter of the outraged lover to his wife, and this though he well knows that

his daughter and wife are receiving all kinds of valuable presents from Mr. Helstone, and indeed almost living upon his bounty. Still worse, when Mr. Glencairn at last knows the truth, and finds his daughter and wife really depending on this cold bad man both for their subsistence and their pleasures, he makes not the least attempt to reclaim either, makes no appeal to his daughter's love for him- self, which is real and deep in its way, makes no effort in any way to withdraw her from the heartless, shallow, frivolous life of hectic gaiety and sneering doubt into which Mr. Helstone is dragging her, but goes coolly off to Prussia, to hunt up her former lover, Charlie Bennett, who has volunteered into the Prussian Army, and been wounded in one of the preliminary actions before the great battle of Koniggriitz. No doubt this extraordinary expedition is partly devised to bring in the minute knowledge which Mr. Black possesses of the Prussian campaign. Still he should not sacrifice the one central light, the one noble conception, of his story to that exigency. Nor indeed would it have been at all necessary. His sketch of Major Kirschenfeld, the father of the rather pale and lifeless " good" heroine, is very graphic and powerful. Had Mr. Black but delayed a little the death of that admirably sketched Prussian officer, he would have had plenty of means of introducing his Prussian scenery without sacrificing the one spiritual light of this rather oppressive and painful story. As it is, Mr. Glencairn acts not as a man who really loves his child and puts his trust in God, but as one who ceases to love his child directly she sins, and has no faith in God's love for her at all. Again, though Charlie Bennett's is too colourless and empty a character to deserve much criticism, his silly and incredible weakness with respect to his betrothed are quite beyond belief.

With all these faults, the novel is one of great power,—its chief defect being that the bad characters are so much more vividly painted than the good. Major Kirschenfeld, indeed, is a capital sketch ; but then he is only slightly outlined, and Mr. Glencairn, who promises more, is spoiled. Allowing for all these faults, however, Love or Marriage is more striking, and its somewhat lurid moral colouring more true to life, than is at all usual in modern fiction. Vigorous as it is, it is not a story to live ; but it is certainly the production of an imagination,—we may almost say of a genius,—which we should conceive fully capable of works of art that might live.