MISS AMELIE RIVES'S NOVELS.* IT is always a trying matter,
on taking up a novel, to dis- cover in it a sequel to a predecessor of which one happens to be ignorant. It argues oneself insufficiently informed as far as the author is concerned ; but, at the same time, creates a sense of irritation. Even with Thackeray or Trollope, the assumption that every reader is familiar with what has gone before in the way of story and character, was sometimes trying. Here, when we began Barbara Dering, we were igno- rant altogether that she had married Val Pomfret, and been left by him a widow, before a previous novel (The Quick and the Dead) so much as began; and that she had likewise, also in the first novel, fallen wildly in love with her first husband's cousin, Jack Dering, and dismissed him and recalled him two or three times before it ended, in a conflict between her passion for him and her love for the first husband. When the second novel begins, she recalls him again after two years, loves him again, dismisses him, recalls him, flirts with him in a very pronounced form indeed, dismisses him, recalls him, marries him, dismisses him once more, finally recalls him for positively the last time, and settles down with him in a really humdrum way. "With hands clasped and cheeks together, they watched the rising moon, with the deep stillness in their hearts of the hope that has outlived despair." When one has conscientiously studied The Quick and the Dead, as well as its successor, one sits and watches the outside of the books with some reflective wonder what they had despaired about before, and what they were hoping for now. Even when a young woman's first husband has died before one novel begins, it is difficult to see why she shouldn't fall in love with his cousin and marry him before a second is ended. Yet her ups and downs over this solitary business make the plot of the two whole novels. If there is any moral at all, it is that, having been sentimentally in love with number one, Barbara feels dreadfully shocked at finding herself materially in love with number two, and wonders whether she ought. Anyhow, the lover of that kind of thing will find enough of tangled hair, white, strong shoulders (for the young woman is robust), and mysterious physical affinities, to supply even three tales of the pattern. This lover divides the heavy masses of her hair and ties them round his throat ; he kisses her dress and waist, while she feels the great throbs of his heart against her face ; she asks him nine round times to kiss her, and he won't; and so forth, till one is fairly bewildered as to what it is about, there being nothing on earth to forbid the banns. No wonder the hero is occasionally spoken of as "poor Dering," for be is courted and dismissed, written to and telegraphed for, and generally mystified about nothing in a way which might well madden a less vigorous and straightforward mortal. But the lady-heroine's morbidness of mind is, we suppose, intended to be the reader's study, as it is entirely her own. She studies Thomas a Kemple, and imposes violent penances upon herself, for no clear reason, when Dering is away, and carries on with him in especially mundane fashion when he is not. And in these violent alternations lies the plot of two whole novels. She is a perplexing heroine, even for these analytic days. With an unwelcome suitor of another kind, the husband of a meek friend, who provides a sort of underplot in the form of another conjugal lesson of the same speculative sort, she proceeds in this fashion. She has been discussing with him the theories of Tolstoi, which, combined with Ibsen's, underlie apparently half the marriages of the day, and he wants to kiss her in the corn-house or barn, where the scene takes place. But, "with one swift movement of her strong body she flung him from her so violently that, losing his balance, he fell sidewise upon the heap of corn, and slid noisily and
• Barbara Dering. By Amelie Rives, Author of "The Quick and the Dead London : Chatto and Windius. 12.
ungracefully to the floor beneath, heralded by the delighted shouts and caperings of the two children, who had rushed in from the other room on hearing something fall. Barbara, one blaze of furious indignation, stood to her fall height on the ledge above, Eunice (the meek friend), meantime surveying the scene from the doorway." The children are the man's own, and the position certainly not dignified.
Of course, these stories, written by a clever American, have plenty in them that is American and clever. The best parts in them are the American descriptions, while Lois and Win, the two Bransby children, provide us with a quota of amuse- ment which American children seem especially invented for. They are so preternaturally forward that our admiration is untinged with envy, which makes it all the more welcome. " 'Barbara, what ith the doing P' asks Lois, watching a pretty Alderney heifer under a horse-chestnut tree. 'Ruminating, my dear,' answered Bransby (the prig-father), who had become anxious of late to appear more interested in his children. Woominating ? ' said Lois, her small brow perplexed. She lookth ath if the were eating herthelf.' " The attitude of the two imps towards the malignant aunt of the fiction is refreshingly uncompromising. And we cannot be surprised at Barbara being "nearly startled into one of her ringing laughs," when, on hearing of her aunt's approach, Win simply groans "Oh, dem !" and, upon being admonished, explains it as being only "what that Mantalini man" says, as she thought everybody knew. The smiling little negress Martha Ellen, whom Barbara knows as Rameses, with her primitive but earnest religious notions ; the suave and worldly Bishop, who utterly declines, from prudential motives, to give the heroine any advice about her conduct to her husband, and defends himself on the highest apostolic grounds ; the hypocritical prig Bransby and, his submissive wife, who forms Barbara's foil, as well as her counsellor, are all well sketched and well pro- vided with the local colouring which is the conventional value of sketches of the sort. We like to realise that we are reading in our own language of types and characters so diverse from our own,—though we unfeignedly dislike the religious discus- sions, not from the Pharisaic side, on which Bransby and his sister regard them as blasphemous, but for the "astral" current which seems to run all through them, inevitably con- necting these painful and distracting speculations with the Ibsenic development of idea. It is our own fault, we doubt not, but we seem to want Kingsley back again to give us a draught of fresh air, all the more if it should come from his favourite east.
We feel all the more loath to say anything in disparagement of Miss Rives's work when we look at her face as shown on the frontispiece after another modern fashion. Certainly we make acquaintance there with a very handsome and attractive specimen of southern personality. We believe that the young lady is from Louisiana—with an earnest and genuine look in the face and eyes which make her appear more real than, with respect, be it said, that supreme young humbug Marie Basch- kirtseff, whose name somehow occurs to us likewise in this modern astral and introspective connection. No one can help liking the face very much indeed, or believing that she must be very much better than her heroes and heroines. But we cannot think that she has advanced upon her first book, Virginia of Virginia. That seems to us almost all delightful —racy of the soil, fresh and real in study and contrast of character, with little or no suggestion of the morbidness of the later development. The same love and observation of nature and of animals, with whose ways Miss Rives is evidently well acquainted, reappears in the history of Barbara Pomfret, but there is little or nothing in her sweet Virginia, except her physical strength, to prepare the way for her successor. And in faith, we do not quite understand with which sex Miss Rives's sympathies lie in her view of the painful struggle which appears to be taking the place of the alliance which was once supposed to represent marriage. She quotes with enthusiasm from Mrs. Beecher Stowe to prove that woman is provided with all her hair-shirts and mortifica- tions at home; while in her preface (after criticism) she is all for Jock as the victim of "a creature morbid, hysterical, sensitive, introspective; an egotist to her finger-ends, although an unconscious one : a sophist and a self-deceiver." No wonder she is angry with the critics who thought she was describing herself in Barbara ; but we still feebly wonder what or whom she quite is describing. We are dreadfully
humiliated at thinking there can be any impropriety in the book, when we are serenely told by way of rebuke, once and for all, that Frederick Robertson has said that all situations are pure to the pure. Somebody else said something very like it long before Robertson, by-the-by ; but we doubt if it was meant to cover everything for ever. By that light nothing can be strong or wrong ; and if the explanation of the whole thing is that "Barbara loved her first husband's ego,—his soul," and the conclusion that poor Jock was egoless, we do not now understand why, to use her own words, she loved Jock more than anything she ever dreamt of—more than any- thing in earth or heaven—more than anything alive or dead ; and still less why, just after saying this, and that in novel the first, she dismisses him for two years till it is time to begin novel the second. Perhaps—after all—reduced to prose, that is the main reason why she did dismiss him. Another novel was wanted. It is a professional view ; but it is a -view. Otherwise—with the deepest deference to Miss Rives's wrath, and her intimation that "books well meant, strongly written, and from a clean heart, resemble mirrors, wherein every one who reads sees his own reflection,—the pure, purity ; the foul-minded, foulness "—we submit that, after careful reading, we find our own image in the mirror to present rather a puzzle than anything else. Miss Barbara in the mirror has certainly rather a cracked appearance ; but too much psychology tends that way. And as for foulness, we submit again that hard words like that are utterly uncalled for. To say that the story is here and there a little coarse, is another thing altogether.
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