DR. CAMPANY'S COURTSHIP.*
THE author of Dr. Jacob shows in these short tales much of the power and brilliancy which gave that novel its charm. She fails, indeed, almost as completely as Mr. Anthony Trollope in her story of the Venetian Revolution,—a' subject on which both these • Dr. Company's Courtship, and other Tales. By the Author of Dr. Jacob, John and &e. London : Bradbury and Evans.
writers have tried their hands in their shorter tales, — while neither of them succeeded in conveying the peculiar charm which hangs about Venice, and the unique life of that most unique of cities, to their pages. This is more remarkable in the case of our present author than of Mr. Trollope, for he is not usually his happiest in embody-
ing purely local as distinguished from social influences,—more especially local influences of the beautiful and poetical kind,— in his tales, though he has succeeded remarkably in the case of Prague. But the author of Dr. Jacob has this power in a very high degree. She hai painted South-German life and South- German scenery in Dr. Jacob, Lisabee's Lore Story, and John and. I with the power of a true artist, and the same may be said not only of her South-German, but also of her Algerian stories in the present book. "Leone's Story" and " Out of the World" are exquisite sketches of Algerian life, under the spell of which we seem to feel the pale English sun blazing like the sun of the desert, "which is as a bridegroom coming out of hiSchamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." The grand ilex and cedar forest springs up with its sharply defined forms and dark rich colours before our eyes, we see the extraordinary trans- formation which the snowstorm casts upon the scene, and hear the tempest raging through the giant trees, almost as if Algerian scenery were amongst our actual memories. The same perfection of touch is given to many of the stories of South-German life,— especially to the story called the " Burgkeeper's Secret," and still more perhaps to the grim and tragic little tale called " Schloss Schaubek." All these, brief as they are, are genuinely artistic stories, with a brilliant and fresh local colour, and a sufficient human interest to give the whole tale a distinct aroma of its own. But in the Venetian story our authoress has been common-place and ineffectual, without original touches either as to scenery or as to character,—unless the sketch of Emilia Rota, female patriot and plotter,—may perhaps be excepted as savouring of distinct individuality. This Venetian tale, and the previous one, called an "Eastern Love Story," which is really nothing more than a few pages of descriptive writing, are the only tales quite without something of artistic power in the book ; and most of them have a touch of moral subtlety which makes the external description, happy as it is, quite secondary in its effect.
The subject of most of these tales is the effect of concealed crime or guilt on the mind and demeanour of those who have committed it. Except in the single case of "Leone's Story,"—one of the most perfect of its kind,—this, or what is in some respects analo- gous to it, the vein of insane feeling running through a clever madman's character, is the subject of all the tales which evince power in the volume. Hence the subject of all of them is more or less painful, and yet is almost always treated with a certain artistic delicacy which completely prevents any feeling of repul- sion or disgust. There is nothing over-analytic, nothing prying or inquisitive about the tone in which this hectic vein in the character is dissected. It is not at all in the metaphysical mood that this influence of secret guilt or crime on the character is delineated. On the contrary, our author takes far more pains in setting her moral picture in a fitting framework of physical scenery than in analyzing the secret roots of the demeanour she delineates. Still there is a moral though not metaphysical subtlety in the manner in which she paints these painful subjects. The first story in the book, for instance, is the story of a murderer who has killed his mistress, the mother of his natural son, a poor girl from a fish- ing village, in a fit of passion, almost twenty years ago, without being suspected of the crime, and who is drawn back either by a sort of fascination, or possibly by some desire to see his son, to the scene of the murder at the beginning of this tale. He suddenly encounters his son (who has fallen down in a sort of fit to which the young man has been more or less liable), completely loses his own self-control, and gives a strong clue to suspicion,—but not before he has fallen in love with, and done his best to steal from her own lover, another girl of higher culture and position, residing for the time within view of the scene of the old murder. The effect which our author has here most carefully studied is the influence of the long suppressed guilt in giving to this man's character and demeanour the sort of power, the latent capacity of excitement which, in the eyes of women of a certain restlessness and romance of feeling, possesses a peculiar spell of its own. The influence on Marian of the great experience, self-command, familiarity with weaknesses of the heart, and so forth, which a long course of years spent in the painful consciousness of this bloodshed have produced, is very vividly touched off, and the contrast to this passion sketched in the smuggler's daughter's rude
and almost coarse affection for her own betrothed,—the illegitimate son of this murderer,—is finely conceived. What this story, like most of our author's tales of this description, wants is an adequate conclusion. It is curious how uniformly she shrinks from anything like a proper artistic ending to the situation she has conceived. Her stories seem written, not indeed to illus- trate pictures, — for the situations on which she concentrates her aim are always too complex and not sufficiently instantaneous in their crisis for delineation on canvas,—but to paint guilt or shame at high tension ; and when that tension is once relaxed, the author hushes up the story very abruptly, and bids it, as it were, come to an end how it may. In the story of which we have been speaking, and that of two other murders of a different kind, "Schloss Schaubek" and "The Burgkeeper's Secret " and again in two other stories of guilty life and love, " Out of the World " and "The Cannstatt Conspirators," the same indisposition to pass out of the particular phase of emotion which our author has conceived as her theme in the story is almost equally seen. She kills off, or banishes, or in some way or other gets violently rid of, the characters whose flush of guilty dread or happiness she has studied, the moment the secret is out. She does not usually care to show what state of mind preceded it, or what it leaves behind it, when it passes away. Her interest is in the delineation of the subtle effect which this sort of guilt, driven inwards, has on the outward demeanour and influence of men and women ;—the moment that inward pres- sure on the soul is lightened, the interest of the story is for her at an end. There is a kind of quickening of the blood, a stimulus to all the faculties of the mind, in a pressure of this kind on the character, which almost resembles the quickened sense of hearing which accompanies a great condensation of the air. This our author has painted very powerfully in " Out of the World" and several other of her tales. The following extract we give not in any way as a specimen of the author's ability, but as expressive of the strained state of mind on which her stories chiefly dwell, and the tonic effect which she conceives it to have on all the intellectual faculties. The first speaker is a wife who has left her husband for another man,—an artist,—with whom she is travelling in Algeria :-
"' I cannot forget that I was a woman once, and that I am something lower now. Oh, Harold ! tell me again and again that you love me better for having so sinned. I never wholly believe it ?'—He grew very grave and gentle then, and kneeling beside her poured out as burning a love story as ever lady listened to. Soon Emilia's tears ceased to flow, the flush died away from her cheeks, and she clung to him caressed and caressing. You so seldom take things "eriously,' he said, or I should before have proved to you how much bmter and loftier you have made my life —"Loftier. Oh, Harold!'—' Ay, loftier. Till I knew you I doubted and disputed about everything. What I painted was worth nothing, because I held myself to be worth nothing. Now I am doing good work, and if you understand art in the least degree you would be proud to feel how much I owe you.' He was so grave that she felt bound to be gay. And now let us run out and play,' she said. I hate serious talk, I don't want to be lectured to upon art. If you painted the best pictures over seen in the world I shouldn't love you one whit more, and perhaps you'd grow conceited and run away.' The artist had spoken truly. Strange as it may seem, the very passion by which his moral nature was abased elevated and enlarged his artistic faculty. Nothing would have made him capable of great things ; but the consummation of a happy love was developing his capabilities to the utmost. He no longer copied Nature coldly, but he interpreted her, bringing to his work thoughts ever changeful and ever tender, fancies fairer and freer than the dream of poets. No wonder that he said to the hour, Stay, for thou art fair.' No wonder that he took little dis- credit to himself, rather the reverse, for having done evil that good might come, and harvested his golden sheaves joyfully, never counting how many were left on the field."
Perhaps it is the chief fault of the whole book, that both man and nature are so much sketched in this excited mood,—that neither of them are painted in completely natural colours,—that man is delin- eated with his feelings strained to a point of intensity which makes him scarcely the loose-fibred, every-day creature we most of us know so well, and that nature is painted as she appears to us at such moments only,—in the attitudes in which we throw a spell over her, —not in those more frequent and perhaps more instructive attitudes in which we surprise her at her real work, and give up our minds to the study of her great vital processes. No doubt description of nature written in these moods is as artistic,—perhaps in one sense more artistic,—than any other kind of description of nature, as it identifies more completely than any other the human figures and actions with the natural framework in which they are set. Still it is not the only kind even of descriptive art. Men's faculties are not always strained till they impress their own mood on nature. The poet who said,-
" And so I deem that there are powers Which of themselves the mind impress, And that we feed this soul of ours By a wise passiveness,"
knew something both of true nature and true art when he thus wrote, and it is a kind of nature and art far too little represented I the collection, —is the only one in which the quiet and re- ceptive side of art is fairly represented. In the others the light- hearted natural characters are introduced almost solely to serve as foils to those in the high tension of guilt, and to placing in this conspicuous position tha ode " Poscimur—siquid ' translating which he significantly asks of his harp in heighten the effect of the latter. Take, for instance, the striking vacm, and finely conceived little story of " Schloss Schaubek" as an order,— example. Karl, the light-hearted and flaxen-haired Tiibingen student, is sketched and introduced only to be confronted with the half-crazed kitchenmaid, who mistakes him for her former lover come back at last to fulfil the pledge of marriage which he had given and never kept. The scene in which she is described as sitting in what she deems her wedding dress staring with vacant eyes at the young man who resembles her former lover so strikingly, while he merrily eats and drinks, too glad to have found a shelter from the night and the snowstorm, and little dreaming of the tragic fate he has courted by seeking refuge there,—is one of the most eerie ever painted in a brief tale of this kind. But as in almost all the other tales, the light- heartedness is solely intended to heighten the ghastly effect of the murder and the double mistake of identity. There is something as ghastly in the murdered man's fiancée afterwards mistaking the poor kitchenmaid's former lover for her own dead lover, as in the original mistake which led to his death. And in both cases the joy- ous demeanour of the young Germans thus mistaken for each other is evidently solely intended to heighten the effect. Otherwise the joyous demeanour of him who was really guilty but did not suffer for it, would not have been supposed to survive so perfectly the reproaches of his own conscience. The author delights in heighten- ing the passion of her story by these sorts of foils. Yet, to our minds, she does much more in this case to increase the genuineness and tragic effect of her tale by one little realistic touch, than by these carefully studied contrasts. She makes the half-crazed girl who commits the murder,—a kitchenmaid at Schloss Schaubek,—smell strongly of garlic. And this contrast between her sordid occupa- tions and her vacant brooding over revenge, seems to us far more effective than the contrast between her and her victim :—
"After some minutes of impatient waiting, we heard a step on the atone staircase of the inner apartments, the iron fell back with a clang, and a young woman invited us to enter. She was dressed in the short blue serge petticoat and white cotton vest usually worn by the district peasantry. Her hands were red ; and one might tell, from the odour hanging to her garments, that she had just been employed in cooking garlic ; she was, in fact, an ordinary house steward's daughter or maid. Yet, at the first glance, I felt as if I would have given worlds rather than see such a face. To define the precise impression it made upon me is impossible : it was beautiful, perhaps one of the most beautiful faces I remember ; but its beauty had the peculiarity of seeming utterly apart from her other self, an extra sense, as it were, only hers by some strange joy and awful despair, called into expression by the one, made deathless by the other,—a beauty that struck chill to the heart.
Wine was brought—Neckar, Hock, Moselle—and to all we did due justice. Carl drank most freely: his fair girlish face glowed with added warmth; his blue eyes shone ; he tossed his light curls from his forehead and seemed to see glad spirits in the air. I was more sober, but quite as happy. Both of us talked extravagantly of the future, as half-tipsy young men will do ; both of us praised each other's betrothed ; both of us counted the holiday pleasures in store for to-mor- row. Suddenly I was made conscious of a presence in the room that sobered me. It was the steward's daughter. She sat far removed from us. For some minutes I could not understand why there was something more remarkable and unearthly about her appearance now than at first, but on closer scrutiny I saw the reason. She had changed her soiled serge petticoat for one that was white and thin. It might have been a wedding dress ; it might have been another white garment, the last one wears. She had also fastened a faded ribbon in her hair. As she sat gazing at us in this guise, her pale face and white dress giving double prominence to her brilliant eyes, no wonder we both grew silent and serious."
That passage gives a fair measure of the sort of power most com- mon in these tales. To us there is something wonderfully eerie in the whole conception of " Schloss Schaubek." The crazy girl smelling of garlic, who commits the murder ; the melancholy girl, who supposes that her own lover is come back when she sees him whom the other had really believed herself to be murdering, are both ghastly conceptions, and the scene in which the former sits silent, dressed in white, and waiting to be, as she fancies, married, without even a glance of recognition from him whom she supposes to be the father of her child, has more of real dread about it than any scenes we remember, except,—to compare small things with great,—the great scene in the Bride of Lammer- moor.
Of power of this sort these tales have enough and to spare. Of airy, light, pleasant naturalism they have exceedingly little, less than we should have expected from the author of Dr. Jacob.
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