NOVELS.
CECILIA.*
WE had occasion to speak last week of the inequality of a writer of great talent. Mr. Marion Crawford, on the other hand, more than perhaps any other novelist now before the public, can be counted on to satisfy the expectations of. the public and provide an entertainment of consistent excellence. The writer of this notice once heard an ardent but inefficient devotee of golf ingenuously remark : " It is a very strange thing, but I never play up to my true form." In fiction, as in pastime, in these days of large outputs, the "in and out" performances of some writers is a matter of common observation. Mr. Marion Crawford is an extremely indus- trious, even a prolific, writer, yet the standard of achievement attained in his bOoks is wonderfully uniform. This is par- ticularly true of his novels of contemporary'Italian life. His later studies of American society fail somewhat to convey the impression of lifelikeness, they seem to be lacking in 1,‘ sob:14V" and freshness. But in the Italian series, to which he has just made a welcome addition in Cecilia, his power of charming and interesting his readers never fails him. Occasionally, he gives us a curious glimpse of the survival of mediaevalism in the peninsula—e.g., in the form of superstition, or the adoption of the poisoning habit—but for the most part he is concerned • Cecilia. By F. Marion Crawford. London : Macmillan and Co. [d&J with the portrayal of the most-engaging and admirable traits of 'a iingfilarly engaging race. Noblesse oblige is his constant theme, and there is no better antidote to the disgust and depression engendered by the perusal of Matilde Serao's wonderful pictures of the ignoble squalor, the callousness, and the general rottenness of urban life in Italy than the coin- ranio:aship of the gracious ladies and chivalrous gentlemen vino people the canvases of Mr. Crawford. There is surely .‘-enter excuse for the idealisation of excellence than the mag- .1ifying of wickedness. A good portrait is worth more than a ilaaly focussed photograph, and Mr. Crawford'a portraits, if not invariably convincing, are neither fashion-plates nor aureoled insipidities. No novelist has done more to promote and,maintain the peculiar interest that the English-speaking world has always taken in Italy than Mr. Crawford, and this, too, not by the familiar device of glorifying the defects of her qualities, but rather by insisting on the admirable, winning, aid noble traits in her sons and daughters which have endeared her to the world at large. Whatever justification there was for the prejudice against the Inglese Italianato in the sixteenth century, the Italianate American as represented by Mr. Crawford is a figure whom Italians have the best of reasons to regard as one of their truest friends.
The central motif of Cecilia—the conflict of love and loyalty that arises when Pythias discovers that be is in love with and beloved by the object of Damon's affections—is not unfamiliar. But by the setting and novel treatment of his theme Mr. Crawford lends it a wholly unhackneyed character. Guido d'Este- is the son of an ex-King by a morganatic marriage,—a Alarming, gracious young man with a touch of the Hamlet in hum ; the young Marchese Lamberti, his bosom friend, is a sobust sailor, a " first-class fighting man." Yet it is La.mberti, not Guido d'Este, who, in spite of himself, captures the affections of the beautiful, wealthy, and highly accomplished Cecilia Palladio. To account for the otherwise inexplicable preference which Cecilia displays for the less attractive of the two men, Mr. Crawford represents them as controlled by a mutual telepathy based on their relations in a previous state of existence. It only needed for them to meet in -their present reincarnation for the spell to work. But inasmuch as Cecilia becomes engaged to Guido before she fully realises the strength of this mysterious bond, the reader can easily imagine the complications that arise. As the story progresses, the reader discovers in Lamberti qualities for -which he hardly gave him credit at first,—a refinement of feeling and a delicate chivalry for which his robust exterior by no weans prepared us. Still, we are not at all sure that the romantic reader will be altogether reconciled to the c/L-nouentent. Reconciled or the reverse, however, he cannot fail to be grateful to Mr. Crawford for his ingenious and attractive variations—psychical and otherwise—on an ancient theme. ,.
Previous page
