BOOKS.
LENA'S PICTURE.*
MRS. RUSSELL BARRINGTON has written a story of a very
original kind, of which the effective execution must have been even more difficult than the original conception. And yet, after the first projection of her leading idea, the very best part of the book is the vivid imagination with which she has worked out her conception. There is contained, no doubt, in this story what the great German critics used to call the "retarding element" in tragedy, an element which occupies about one-third,—the middle third,—of the first volume, before Mrs. Barrington can get her heroine well started in love. We confess that we do not care very much for "retarding elements," and that this particular "retarding element," which consists of rather abstract discussion on the theory of Art, is, though sufficiently readable, not supremely interesting. But in this story,—not a very long one in itself,—the "retarding element" does not occupy more than about a sixth of the whole, perhaps not quite so much ; and though we should have been well pleased had it not taken quite so much analysis of the genius of painting and music to carry Lena into the full tide of her love for the German artist, we cannot say that the "retarding element" in this story seriously mars either its power or its beauty. And both its power and its beauty are very considerable. For the intention of the story is to disclose the potent influence which may be exerted over our actual life by "a light at once clear, transparent, yet mysterious," which comes from beyond it; not, of course, a light of any preternatural origin, not the light thrown,—if any light ever is thrown,—by hypothetical answers to any psychical enigma, not the light thrown by any eccle- siastical principle or any theological doctrine,—but simply a spiritual light which reveals a real source of power "beyond the veil." The opening chapter of the book introduces us to the otherwise poor and heavy little picture which is trans- figured by its sunset sky,—a shaft of light streaming up from a sun already below the horizon,—into a symbol of Lena's yearning for light upon some of the most insoluble of the mysteries of life,—the problems arising out of those alienations of reason which seem, while they last, absolutely to extinguish the very possibility of either moral discipline or moral responsibility :—
" On the wall of a little bed-room in a far-off west-country home in Somerset hung the portrait of an old Romanesque church. Who had painted it, how it had come there, no one knew; and for many years no one ever had the curiosity to wish to know. Hung up as something to fill the space on the wall above the mantel-shelf, it was recognised and dusted only as part of the other furniture of the room, and most of the picture was undoubtedly very dull, not worthy of much attention or aclmowlegment as a work of art. The old church was painted carefully and solidly. It was a very correct, laboured, conscientious, and thoroughly inartistic piece of work—heavy and tight '—oily and black ; but every detail of the old church was depicted, and each paving-stone of the Raiz from which it was drawn. Some figures less elaborately painted, and switches of green paint meant for trees, decorated the fore- ground and filled in the lower corners. The figures, however, were so thinly and inadequately put in that the lines of the ground showed through the skirts of the women and through the legs of the men. Evidently the artist was a painter of architecture ; and into the painting of the architecture he had put his conscience. But, in all probability quite unconsciously, he had put something much better into the rendering of the sky behind the building. All the rules and theories he had been taught, evidently in a German school of art, had not been able entirely to eradicate the power of putting something of the meaning of nature on to his canvas when he worked from his sense of her meaning and not from taught theories ; and at one happy moment he had forgotten the laws of picture-making and had thrown his own native power into the painting of a sky. One evening his eye must have been caught by the beauty of a luminous light which hung in the horizon after the sun had dipped below it—a light at once clear, transparent, yet mysterious ; a light that seemed to hold a secret from a world where the sun had travelled to after he had said good-night to the town and its inhabitants. The painter of archi- tecture had somehow got his pigments to record this clear, trans- parent, mysterious light, and the little picture got finished in two utterly discordant parts put upon one canvas-24 inches by 20. The little bedroom where it hung was lived in by Lena Prevost, a young lady who knew nothing about pictures. She did not know that the painting of this sky was in the truest sense an artistic achievement—nor did she consciously recognise that the church was a dull useless piece of work—as far as an artistic result went an utter waste of the many hours that had been spent on its pro- duction. A photograph would have given all it gave, and better.
* Lena's Picture. A Story of Love. By Mrs. Russell Barrington 2 vols. Edinburgh: David Douglas.
Nevertheless, from other than artistic reasons the sky had become much to her. She saw in it a hint of the world which was beyond the veil—a world Lena's thoughts and hopes made for as the natural goal of her everyday life. In painting the picture the artist probably had linked it on to no definite spiritual experience of his own, but he had been able nevertheless to give it a very dis- tinct power of suggesting a comfort to Lena's spirit."
Understanding that the shadow in Lena's life is the inherited insanity of her mother and sister, and the conviction which her brother and herself had come to, that for them marriage would be wrong, we see clearly in this passage the kind of task which Mrs. Barrington has set herself, and we should certainly have thought it a most difficult one to work successfully into the substance of "a story of love." But she succeeds completely in creating out of the situation a very moving, pathetic, elevating, and spiritual tragedy of unhappy but by no means " miserable " love. Nor does she dwell at all on the morbid aspect, nor indeed on any aspect of the special mystery which provides her story with its raison d'etre. What she occupies herself with is the picture of the kind of strength by which the straight line of duty is maintained, and of the after-glow by which the shalows of her tragedy are so much softened and relieved. It is impossible to call the story one of pure melancholy. On the contrary, it is full of that bright transfiguration which sadness undergoes when there is even more in it of serenity than of sadness, and more of strength than either. We had no conception, when we had mastered the main lines of the story, that it could grow in interest with every page of the second volume, and leave so simple and natural and yet so vivid an impression of the influx of power from "beyond the veil."
The whole interest, or almost the whole interest, of the story is concentrated in the figure of Lena herself. Mrs. Barring- ton has given us one or two graceful sketches besides that of her heroine, especially that of Lady Lovat and Mr. St. John, —the latter resembling to some extent George Eliot's undog- matic clergymen, as for instance, Mr. Irwine in Adam Bede, or the good clergyman in Janet's Repentance. But Lena is so com- pletely the centre of all interest, that next to the depicting of the light from "beyond the veil" which gives its whole motive to the book, the story might be regarded as "Lena's picture" in quite another sense,—a picture, that is, not belonging to her, but of her. Her pensive and yet intense simplicity of nature, her subdued and yet even passionate pity for her sister, her sense of something like dread at the mere idea of plunging into the warmth and blessedness of a happy love while her sister is suffering the loneliest of lonely fates, her sudden trance of happiness so soon extinguished, her uncom- plaining misery, and her overflowing gratitude for the power which floods her nature in answer to her prayer for help from "beyond the veil," are painted with a clearness which makes us think of Wordsworth's lovely sonnet on the expression of of Lady Fitzgerald's countenance Thee with the welcome snowdrop I compare, That child of winter prompting thoughts that climb From Desolation toward the genial prime ; Or the moon conquering earth's misty air, And filling more and more with crystal light As pensive evening deepens into night."
Lena's is a twilight character which flashes into sudden happiness, and then pales again to spiritual resignation ; but it fascinates us with something more than the fascination of brighter and more radiant heroines.
Mrs. Barrington seems to take pleasure in making Lena insist that though the divine mind had filled her with the sense of peace and of a divine sympathy with her personal grief, the strength which came to her had no connection with any special Church or doctrine :— "I do not recognise in this sense of peace and happiness any connection with Church or so-called religion. Of course, that is my own fault ; but these do seem outside it. I feel it has to do with the sorrows and joys of my own intimate life, not with Church creeds and services. All those phrasas one has heard in church since one was a child seem rather to deaden instead of to quicken the reality of their meaning. Repeating them so often without full sensibility to the emotion that they ought to stir seems to cheapen them."
Lena supposes it is her own " fault " that she connects her new sense of power and help with no special Church and no special doctrine ; but is it not rather treated as her own special merit ? We cannot conceive why an individual expression of the pity and love of God, felt in the depth of a great anguish, should be connected with any doctrine at all, except the doctrine that those who ask for help earnestly, will
receive what they need. But though it is directly bound up with no other doctrine, surely it should lead to much wider re- flections than Lena seems at all inclined to indulge. These individual experiences cannot be isolated. If the humblest make acquaintance with them, they must feel assured that the highest natures have had the same experiences in much higher and intenser forms ; and they may fairly expect to find in the records of those higher and intenser experiences, a ohm to a much wider and more impressive and luminous revelation than any of which they themselves can boast. In the present day, some of our writers seem to take as much pains to keep their religious experience in the vague, and to protest against any attempt to generalise and enlarge it, as they do to insist that there is a vague spiritual world "beyond the veil." So long as we get only a glimpse of it, they regard it as a pure blessing ; but they are almost as much afraid of hearing anything coherent and exact about it, as they are of losing sight of it altogether. The idea of Revelation as taught in the Scriptures and the Churches seems to them to narrow, instead of widening, the teaching of individual experience ; and we suspect that this is what both Lena and Mr. St. John are meant, not perhaps to teach us, but at least, with a good deal of emphasis, to suggest. We should ourselves draw a very opposite inference, —the inference, namely, that if the least among us may verify for himself some of these mysteries of peace, the Past must contain the records of something much larger than such isolated glimpses of the world "beyond the veil."
However, we will not quarrel with a story so beautiful and so spiritual as Mrs. Barrington's, only because it seems to. throw some discredit on doctrines and Churches. The story is a real story of love and not a religious dissertation, and there is absolutely no " edification " in the book. There is one passage of description so fine that Ruskin himself in his best time might have written it ; but it is too long and too closely connected with the context to be dragged from its place into an extract.
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