IN MAREMMA.* GENIUS and sublime rubbish seem: not too far

removed to have a certain affinity, and an author's productions will sometimes differ from one another as widely as Turner's best pictures do from the meaningless daubs he painted towards the• end of his career. In his case the discrepancy was caused bye optical disease that prevented his seeing aright; and may there• not be a similar explanation for the same unevenness on the part of a writer ? May not the brain be from time to time• liable to some sickness which, while it lasts, makes all things' distorted and discoloured ? This at least would seem a plausible theory to account for the phenomenon of a person endowed! with as much real genius as " Ouida," yet condescending at times to write and publish what is mere nonsensical trash. The book now to be considered makes her genius ap- parent in the powerful and pathetic story which she tells of an Italian girl, possessed of great beauty and a strength that is quite marvellous, who takes up her abode alone in an old Etruscan tomb, on a wild moorland ; here she subsists almost entirely upon roots, berries, and bread which she makes for herself out of wild oats ; exists in a Robinson-CI-woe-like sort of fashion ; and has strange adventures. Her character, way of life, and herculean strength appear all pretty equally impro- bable ; but the reader is too much interested to take exception to that, and it no more interferes with his enjoyment than the knowledge of the non-existence of fairies, gnomes, and elves spoils the pleasure of a child deep in some of Hans Andersen's; creations. The book is far more likely, in our opinion, to be found fault with for improbability of another kind, which we will come to presently, and for its melancholy termination.

The scene of the story is between Orbitello and Telamone, a

• In Maremma. By " Onida." London : Ohatto and Windus.

name awakening recollections of Dante's Purgatory and of the " gente vana" mentioned in the thirteenth canto, as believing that the acquisition of that port would insure them great

maritime power., In a village along this coast lives a solitary, reserved, strong, loving, honest old woman, named Joconda. A brigand who is being carried off to the galleys commends his baby girl to her care, and she undertakes and is faithful to the charge. This child is the heroine. She grows up beautiful, irnocent, truthful, violent, brave, proud, and as wild as a hawk ; loving freedom, the sea, animals, and an out-door life, more than anything else ; habitually silent, like her foster-mother, who, " always thought that no harm could come from holding your tongue, though much might come from wagging it ;" and so in- different to all human beings except Joconda, that she is com- monly known by the nickname of Musoncella or Musa,—which name, we are told, is always given to a girl who turns her face away disdainfully. She and Jocouda have but little in common with the petty, mercenary, greedy, selfish villagers who con- stitute their world, and from whom they stand apart. In one of Musa's lonely rambles she accidendtly discovers an old Etruscan tomb, of several chambers hollowed out in the rock, to which she takes a strange fancy. Her father having escaped from the galleys, she saves his life without knowing who he is, and is bitterly offended because he returns her kindness by robbing of its gold the tomb in which she had hidden him. Then come the death of Joconda, and poor Musa's touching sorrow for.her ; the hasty, careless burial affects and troubles the girl greatly, for,—

" She thought she could have better borne her loss if the dead body had been laid gently down upon those rocky biers in the Etruscan tomb, there to wait till the moonlight should touch her and take her to itself, as it had touched and taken the Etruscan king. But how could she ever rise from that narrow bed, from that stifling sand, from that ghastly, crowded place, where the dead lay like mounds of putrid fish, thrown down and forsaken ?"

Disgusted at the dishonesty and meanness of the neighbours, she cannot endure to live longer amongst them, and retreats to her favourite tomb. She returns in the dead of night to dig up Joconda's coffin, and take it with her to her new home, and then establishes herself alone in the wilderness, with no domestic inmates save a mule and a dog, finding abundant occupation and amusement in providing for her simple wants, and in watching the habits of the innumerable birds, fishes, insects, and flowers around her, and being evidently inclined to think that "the noblest study of mankind" is anything but man. All this is excellently told in the first volume, and though, no doubt, highly improbable, is yet vigorous, romantic, graceful, exciting, and a thorough work of genius, which proves that " Ouida " has the rare gift of being able to write a fascinating tale without intro- ducing any love-making at all,—for as yet, that subject has been altogether excluded from the pages.

But this state of things cannot be expected to last long, in a book on whose title-page is inscribed the words of Francesca da Rimini, "Amor cle a nullo anzato amar perdona ;" and we see

breakers ahead, when a motto like that is to be justified by an author whose idea of love is this :—

" Love is for ever unreasoning, and the deepest and most passionate love is that which survives the death of esteem. Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone. Love is born of a glance, a touch, a murmur, a caress ; esteem cannot beget it, nor lack of esteem slay it. Questi the mai da me non fin diviso, shall be for ever its consolation amidst hell. One life alone is be- loved, is beautiful, is needful. is desired,—one life alone out of all the millions of earth. Though it fall, err, betray, be mocked of others and forsaken by itself, what does this matter ?—this cannot alter love. The more it is injured by itself, derided of men, abandoned of God, the more will love still see that it has need of love, and to the faithless will be faithful."

Our forebodings come true, for the work grows less satisfactory after love-making begins, and by the time the conclusion is reached, the hearty approval bestowed upon the first volume will have been considerably qualified. Three lovers come to Musa, and of these, two are men good and true, generous, courageous, faithful, and high-sonled like herself ; from both of these, however, she turns away contemptuously, with a per. versity that makes one impatient, and casts herself into the arms of a fickle, shallow, ungrateful coward, who is completely unworthy of her. There is an unnaturalness about this which offends the reader far more than that already alluded to. " Like likes like," says the proverb ; and one resents the unreality of which " Onida" is guilty in representing Musa as failing utterly to appreciate the worth of two loyal natures, clearly akin to her own, and endowed with the virtues she esteems, and making her single out, and lavish the whole wealth of de- votion of her intense, concentrated character upon, a man full of the faults she scorns and hates most bitterly, whose tastes are thoroughly dissimilar to hers, and whose sole recommendation to her favour is that he is hunted and in danger. In real life, peril alone would not have been enough to awaken and keep alive the passionate attachment of a person like Musa for such a despicable, ignoble creature as Luitbrand d'Este, and to make it happen in fiction jars objectionably upon one's sense of fitness. What can there be that is pleasant, edi- fying, or in any way satisfactory, in following the course of a girl's infatuation about a cur who, whilst at her mercy and dependent on her, takes all she can give, lets her slave for him, and teaches her to love, and then abandons her heartlessly the very instant that he needs her aid no longer P In order to give this cur the importance due to him as the object of the heroine's affections, his portrait receives from the author an amount of attention which we deprecate as wasted labour, for his is a weak, selfish, good-for-nothing character, needing continual variety to content it, never seeking anything beyond gratification of the moment, and the study of which is an unwholesome and dis- agreeable operation, by which nothing is gained.

The local colouring is agreeable and gives the impression of being correct, though, as we have never visited the Maremma, ourselves, we do not speak from knowledge on this point. Classical and historical similes and allusions are brought in so freely as to become at times wearisome ; but some of the similes taken from nature are very graceful, such, for instance, as the following, to exemplify how blind a man sometimes is to charms which, after a while, come upon him suddenly like a revelation :-

" While it is winter, the porphyrion sails down the willowy streams beside the sultan-hen that is to be his love, and sees her not, and stays not her passage upon the water or through the air ; she does not live as yet to him. But when the breath of the spring brings the catkins from the willows, and the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he awakes and beholds her ; and then the stream reflects but her shape for him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was still winter with Este—a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of his adversity."

" Ouida " has evidently a strong love for natural history—both

of things animate and inanimate—and has that readiness to find interpretations for the actions of creatures and to weave little romances about them which, fanciful as it may be, is usually a mark of a genuine lover of animals ; thus the movements of the turnstone make her see in him a dislike to stepping upon wet pebbles, and the sight of a water-rail by himself suggests to her that he has arrived before his female, and will,— "Look around him, calling, and wearing his little mind out with seeking her high and low upon the waters of his favoured pool, she all the while most likely flying steadily and faithfully towards him, but afar off, where he could not see her, and where, perhaps, a shot would lay her low and widow his tender constancy."

In conclusion, we would observe that the force, interest, and talent of the book can by no means be judged from the fore- going sketch, as our anxiety not to reveal enough to interfere with the pleasure of those who have not yet read it has led us to give but a very scanty outline of the story.