THE WOMAN'S KINGDOM.* Oxx, and that the commonest, art of
the novelist the author of the Woman's Kingdom does not condescend to use. She expends, and warns us that she will expend, no skill on the construction of a plot. There are no complications, no secrets. The reader is tortured by no suspense, and roused by no sur- prise. He needs no keenness of vision to discern the whole length of the way which he has to travel. He is introduced in the first chapter to a pair of sisters and a pair of brothers. Each pair .comprises a counterpart of the industrious and of the idle appren- tice. That these will sort themselves into two couples of appro- priate lovers, that the good couple will be happy, that the couple that is not good will be wretched, he is certain from the beginning. The difficulties and troubles which threaten the one, the promise of good which briefly appears for the other, do not move him inthe least to fear or hope. He is perfectly sure that articles labelled so plainly cannot miss their destination. Nor is he even permitted to retain that placid interest which he might feel in a story which moved on with the even flow of a narrative of events, the sort of interest which few readers fail to find in Miss Yonge's charming domestic chronicles. The unity of the tale is broken by an interruption of fifteen years. This, regarded as an element in the construction of a plot, is a hazardous experiment, which even great masters of fiction have tried with `but indifferent success. This, of course, is a consideration which the author is prepared to neglect. She relies, and not without reason, on other ways of retaining the atten- tion of her readers. The interruption does something to spoil a story which would be but indifferent at the best ; but it helps to express the moral, and the moral is the book.
"Tile Woman's Kingdom, a Love Story," is the announcement of the title-page. "This will be a thorough love story. I do not pretend to make it anything else," says the author, at the beginning of the second chapter. The modesty of these announce- ments must not lead any one to suppose that the book before him is not of the very gravest order of fiction. It maintains a great thesis. " Every one who has lived at all knows that love is the -very heart of life, the pivot upon which its whole machinery turns," and what may be called a great corollary of this thesis, that men are what they are made by the women whom they love. The thesis is true enough in one sense, manifestly untrue, we think, in another, in the sense which the author seems to give it. The world could not move, as it could not endure, without love ; that may be allowed. But is it possible to look at any typical life that we know, of a great statesman, soldier, engineer, for instance, and say that love was the heart of it. Love often sets the forces in motion, suggests the ambition, or supplies the motive of action ; sometimes it is present as a powerful manifest influence 'throughout the career ; there are one or two instances in history in which the whole career in its continuity as well as in its commencement may be referred to it. But, on the whole, men live their lives, do their great works of fighting, or
• The IVoman's Kiaydom: a Lore Stone. By the Author or John Hal(for, Gentleman. l an agony of dread ; 'Did—did he tell you the name?'—' No ; only that
3 vole London: duvet and Blacken: 1865. 1 he was rich, and Mr. Stedman was poor. That was why she did it.
governing, or changing the face of the earth independently of it. There are men, the younger Pitt was one of them, who seem to stand wholly apart from it. In the Hebrew society to which we owe our religion, in the Greek to which we owe our civilization, it was almost wholly unrecognized. In four-fifths of the world in which much genuine life is lived nevertheless, it is unrecog- nized still. No man whose nature is not maimed or marred will deny that it completes life ; but who that honestly considers what his chief interest is to him, whether it be religion, or ambition, or intellectual effort, or moneymaking, can allow that love is the heart of life? Could he live his life without it? this is the practi- cal test. Doubtless he could, though it would be a great loss, sometimes almost too great to be borne ; but he could not live it without its great interests, or without something, at least, which he might put in their stead.
It is with the corollary, however, rather than with the thesis that we are most concerned. We will see what the writer makes of it. This we cannot do better than by giving a.sketch of the story.
Two sisters, schoolmistresses by occupation, have taken up their abode in a sea-side lodging. They are twins, but wholly unlike in appearance, Edna being small and insignificant, Letty a queen-like beauty, whose " unfortunate appearance," as she humorously calls it, deals death to the hearts of all male beholders. It is with a certain pride of sex that the author describes and dwells upon this wonderful subjugating power ; she is evidently not ill pleased to believe that there is an influence which the wisest of the stronger sex fail to resist; her feeling presenting a curious contrast to the mixture of incredulity, contempt, and hatred with which men regard one of their fellows who has the reputation of a conqueror. To this same lodging-house come down two brothers, the elder a doctor,—grave, hard-working, with large heart and brain ; alto- gether as good a specimen of a man as we have often seen drawn by a woman's pen ; the other an artist, wanting in moral strength and fixity of purpose, with the fervid, passionate temperament which it is one of the conventions of fiction to attribute to artists, but which, if it is characteristic of artists at all, is characteristic of the musician rather than of the painter. First comes acquaintanceship, then companionship, then some- thing like love-making. We suppose that it is by way of a conces- sion to the taste for incident that we are treated to a scene, which seems to us to occur in every third novel that we read, of an escape from the tide. But the party at the lodging-house separate. Will they meet again? As they all live in Kensington of course they meet. The doctor's suit to Edna prospers, and they are married ; the artist is rejected by the beauty, who has a very practical dislike to poverty, but being very passionately in earnest, and getting at the same time a good partnership in an Indian mercantile house, is finally accepted. He goes to India ; Miss Letty is to follow, and we see her safely on board the Iudiaman. Then the curtain drops for fifteen years. When it is drawn up, " a funny Dutch voice," which we have heard on the Indianian offering to take charge of Miss Letty, has developed into the substantial form of Mr. Vauderdecken, her husband. The young lady, in fact, had preferred the certain wealth which he offered to the vaguer prospects of her betrothed, and had terminated her voyage at the Cape, whence we now find her returning. The second portion of the story is chiefly occupied by the tale of the wrongs and vengeance of the jilted man, who had abandoned home and fortune and friends on hearing the news of his loss. Regarded as a story, this is the best part of the book. There is much dramatic force in the situation when Letty's daughter, who has heard the story of her mother's wrong-doing without knowing of whom it was told, repeats it :—
"And then she repeated, almost literally, what she had board. Her mother listened, too much startled, nay, terrified, to interrupt her by a word. The whole history was accurate, down to the remotest particulars, facts so trifling that it seemed impossible for any stranger to have heard them, nay, they had escaped her own memory, till revived like invisible writing by being thus brought to light in such an unforeseen and over- whelming manner. It seemed as if an accusing angel spoke to her from the lips of her own child ; as if, after all this lapse of years and change of circumstances, the sins of her youth, which she had glossed over and palliated, and almost believed to be no sins at all, because no punishment had ever followed them, rose up and confronted her. Also her con- demnation came from the one creature in the world whom she loved
dearly, purely, and unselfishly, her own child. Was she not a wicked woman, mamma ?' said Gertrude, lifting up her glowing face and looking right into her mother's. ' After she had made him miserable so long, first pretending she liked him, then to change her mind and refuse him ? When she had at last faithfully promised to marry him, and he was expecting her and was so happy, to break her word, and go and marry another man Who was the man ?' asked the mother, in
• The IVoman's Kiaydom: a Lore Stone. By the Author or John Hal(for, Gentleman. l an agony of dread ; 'Did—did he tell you the name?'—' No ; only that
Wasn't it a wicked, cruel thing ? Oh, mamma,' cried Gertrude, in a burst of indignation, 'if ever, when I grow up, I were to meet that lady, I should hate her ! I know I should. I couldnt' help it.' " Meanwhile, the doctor and Edna, though not without sorrows and trials, have prospered and are happy.
Now, did these women make the men who loved them what they were? Were they,-in Mr. Ruskin's phrase, " queens " to husband or lover ? With the good couple the theory breaks down at once. The doctor's character was made before he saw Edna. She adorned it, doubtless even, we may say, completed it ; possibly straightened it, kept it from eccentricity and excess ; but he was a true, duty-doing man before he loved her, and would, we may venture to believe, have been the same had his love been a failure ; only, very possibly, as often happens in such a case, somewhat hardened or soured. The author seems to feel that she must do something to make out her case. So she gives us a scene in which the doctor proposes to set up a carriage to make a show of practice which he has not got, but is persuaded by his wife's vehement protests to abandon the notion. Very honest and wise advice Edna seems to have given, and her husband was all the better for taking it. There is nothing more to be said, except, indeed, that we believe the real man, such as he is here represented, would never have needed to be advised against such folly.
With regard to the other couple, the case seems to be stronger. Beyond all doubt Letty ruined her lover. That is an event pro- bable enough. But it very seldom happens that women ruin men who are good for anything. The wild, unstable, pleasure-loving creature, such as Julius Stedman is described, must have come to the same end. Such men are not saved by women, however good. They break good women's hearts. And what about Mr. Vander- decken ? It is true that he was a Dutchman, elderly, and fat, and rather deaf. But this is no reason why the theory should not hold good for him. Of course it is not pretended that it does. Letty does not make him good or bad, does nothing, in fact, but make him more suspicious and cross than he naturally was. And yet he is the type of ordinary men, who are not indeed all elderly or fat, but are what is called common-place; not clear-headed, great- hearted doctors, nor passionate, self-willed artists,—but ordinary men, who do ordinary work ; and theories which will not hold good for them must be judged to have broken down.
We are not carping at a high morality, nor objecting to a high standard of woman's duty. But we cannot think it wise to create illusions which life is sure to dissipate. The woman who marries with the notion that she can make her husband's character will meet with a disappointment that will either break her heart, or tempt her to forego even the good she can do. She will find that her husband is made already, just as David Copperfield found that Dora's mind was formed. Aud she may easily over- estimate even the stronger influence which she will have upon her children. The truth is that the influence which one human being exercises over another is a power that defies calculation. No knowledge of circumstances enables us to predict or even to guess at its results. There are cases, some of them the most heartrend- ing of human experiences, in which, under the most favourable conditions, it seems to fail altogether. Such facts do not alter the obligation of duty ; but it is idle to ignore them. It is worse than idle to fill inexperienced minds with inflated notions that will collapse at the first touch of reality, to flatter them with the promises of a kingdom which neither they nor men ever can or ever ought to exercise.
"We differ widely, it will have been seen, from some of our author's views. This difference does not blind us to the many merits of her writings. We do not think The Woman's Kingdom quite equal to her best ; of recent works we should prefer A Noble Lift; but we need hardly say that it is well worth reading.
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