HANNAH.*

M103. CRAIK has selected the vexed question of marriage with a deceased wife's sister as the subject of a story which is very like a lecture with illustrations, or one of those controversial narratives in which the party opposed to the author's " 'doxy " is a man of straw, triumphantly knocked out of time at every round, and finally thoroughly beaten and happily converted. We know the ineffable silliness of the obdurate specimen heretic, whether he be the deluded idolator dear to the zeal of the goody school, the gorgeous vacillator who affords Mr. Disraeli an opportunity of exhibiting his adoration of dukes and his ignorance of doctrine, or the singularly feeble young Anglican " priest " who gets promptly set to rights by Lady Georgiana Fullerton. We know, in all such cases, that we are about to assist at a quarrel without one of the two parties supposed to be indispensable ; to follow a one-sided argument without the chance of reply. We anticipate that the performance is going to be exceedingly dull, and we very rarely deceive ourselves.

Ilannah is a book of the class to which the prize fictions written for the Temperance League belong ; a book in which a " cause " is advocated with all the persuasiveness and zeal at the author's command, but without toleration for the moral and actual aspect of the other side of the question.

It would be hard and foolish to condemn a novel for not being an exhaustive treatise, fairly reasoned, if the author did not, as Mrs. Craik does, assume the attitude of a final judge, against whose decision no one but a fool, or a person maliciously deter- mined to resist right and persevere in wrong, could possibly revolt. We regard with perfect good-humour the terrible example of the Temperance-League fiction, the unsuspecting and prosperous distiller or maltater who, after many years of dispensing, with an unawakened conscience, the pernicious staple of his trade to a bibulous public, through the various iniquitous media of the licensed-victualling clam, finds out why it is that his wife has lost her mind, his sons have gone to the bad, and his daughters adopted habits of " alcoholization." Perhaps the piling-up of bankruptcy in the penitent maltster's case does try our patience, but chiefly because it is illogical, and has a tendency to remove his penitence from the category of the pure operations of conscience. We should like that maltster better if he had died a millionaire and left his fortune to the Temperance League, merely providing for a neat record on his tombstone of his regret and his reparation. As a contribution to the argument on the wife's sister question Hannah is of no more value than any of the stories to which the Temperance League has decreed its moderate rewards. A whole concatenation of circumstances is brought to bear upon one especial theory, exactly unlike life, and a number of people conduct themselves consistently with a purpose to illustrate it, exactly unlike society. An exceptional case, combining every point that has ever been made or strained in favour of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, is put forward as one quite normal, * Hannah. By the Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman," Bo. London: Hurst and Blackott.

snore likely to occur than not ; and the social hardships which arise from the interdiction of such marriages are delineated with vigour, -especially one form of hardship, which would be pathetic, if it were not ludicrous and slightly coarse. A woman who literally frets herself to death because her husband flirts with her sister, but -who has not strength of mind to forbid that sister the house, and who makes moan about it as follows, is very like another terrible example of the TemperancesLeague stories, who experiences Mrs.

Kenwig'e difficulty in "nursing a healthy babby " without the aid of liquor, which gives her the horrors :—

" Adeline burst out hysterically, 'Keep Bertha away from me! the sight of her will drive me will. Keep them all away from me, or I shall betray myself ; I know I shall! And then they will all laugh at me, and say it is ridiculous nonsense, ag perhaps it is. You see, she is by law his sister too. He couldn't marry her, not if I wore dead twenty times over. Sometimes I wish ho could, and then they dared not go on as they do. I could turn her out of the house like any other strange woman who was stealing my husband's heart from me.'—' Why not speak to them plainly? Why not tell them they are making you un- happy ?'—' And be laughed at for my pains, as a sickly, jealous-minded fool! Because he can't ever marry her,—the law forbids that, you know. After I am dead he must choose somebody else, and she too, and nobody will blame them for anything ; and yet they have killed me.'"

A woman who flirts with a man to the point of killing his wife with jealousy because that man is her brother-in-law, and a man -who takes his share in the pastime because the woman cannot expect him to marry her when he shall be free, are simply a detestably depraved pair, who would be bad in spite of any law.

Mrs. ;Craik's arguments have an unhappy tendency to cut both ways, and she makes a conspicuous blunder in her selection of the circumstances under which she introduces her typical martyrs to the reader, and, indeed, to each other. The Rev. Bernard Rivers and Miss Hannah Thelusson, sister to his deceased wife, have met only once, during a formal three days' visit of the elder sister to Rosa, the pretty younger one, with whom the handsome young clergyman, heir presumptive to a baronetcy and a large fortune, has contracted "a frantic love-match." Rosa dies, and Mr. Rivers invites Hannah, who is governess to the Ladies Deere, daughters of the Earl and Countess of Dunsmore, to come and take up her abode with him, to be the mistress of his house, and replace the lost mother to the infant. Mrs. Craik has chosen this position ill. It is so unusual, that it weakens rather than strengthens her argument, and it entirely disregards the familiarity, the absolute need of a beloved and trusted relative, the urgency of circumstances which, apart from certain moral considerations,

form the strongest popular arguments in favour of legalizing marriage with a deceased wife's sister. Hannah accepts her brother-in-law's offer, an arrangement which is regarded with dis- amen:laden from the first by Mr. Rivers' family, and only moder- ately ootnmended in the parish. Hannah falls in love, first with the baby—who is decidedly the most tiresome baby in fiction, for

Mrs. Craik makes her the text of innumerable sentimental sermons—and then with Mr. Rivers, a divine whose physical beauty is rather unpleasantly dwelt upon, and whose "sweet temper "—chiefly illustrated by excessive weakness, and selfish-

ness which Hannah finds delightful—becomes a positive nui- sance. The " niceness " of being married to a sweet. tempered man, or if ha is your brother-in-law, of wanting to marry him ; the " privilege " of looking at a sleeping child and talking to yourself about the education of its immortal soul over- night, and running round the breakfast-table with it in your arms in the morning, pursued by the handsome brother-in-law papa, with a good view of darling ROSa'S picturesque resting-place in the distance, become a little fatiguing after one has shared those pure delights throughout half a volume.

We prefer the agony. There is a good deal of it, and Hannah has the biggest half, as indeed, we think, she deserves, for nothing can be more deliberate than her assumption of the false position of a woman living in the house of a man whom she cannot marry, and

relationship with whom she disclaims. This is where, in our 'opinion, the grave moral defect of the book lies. Such a position must constitute a case of conscience. The law of the land and the Canon law of the Church to which these fictitious people belong say, 4 You are brother and sister, marriage is forbidden to you.' Mr. Rivers, a minister of the Church which maintains this law, says, 'I

am not Hannah Thelusson's brother,' and Hannah Thelusson says,' I am not Bernard Rivers' sister.' They deny the tie, and yet they con- tinue to live in the same house until a catastrophe occurs, an arrange-

tnent which nothing but the fullest, most serious admission of the tie could justify to society or to themselves. The strife of feeling is keen and severe, and it is well delineated ; but no care, no craft can pre- vent its jarring painfully upon the reader, no special pleading can -puzzle us out of our perception that there is a subtle indelicacy underlying the whole story, which we feel most offensively when the author lays stress upon the self-restraint of the lovers, and is particular in stating that, after the most compromising avowals they do not shake hands. It is noticeable that Mrs. Craik utterly repudiates platonics ; she is diffusely emphatic on that point. Of course, the lovers go through misery, scandal, separation, a tre- mendous struggle in the effort to part, and of course they renounce everything except each other and darling Rosa's child, who is still

young enough to substitute " mamma" for " auntie" in her talk, of which we are treated to an unreasonable quantity, without difficulty or question. Hannah flies to France, where she is befriended by a French Protestant lady, who gives her some very curious infor- mation about French law and French customs. This portion of the

book would have surprised ue if we had not read Fair France, but that

process has rendered us as impervious to surprise occasioned by Mrs. Craik, as Mark Tapley was to the sentiment in general. A lady

who, having never entered a Catholic church in her own country, goes into a Norman cathedral and describes an afternoon service, of which she says she really does not know whether it was mass or confession, may put any sentiments she pleases into the mouth of Madame Arthenay unchallenged. We remember to have heard Mrs. Craik's condition of uncertainty described as equivalent to saying one had seen an animal, but one did not really know whether it was a cow or a canary-bird. To what shall we compare the complacent carelessness which confounds Franco with Ger- many in a matter of law, and of the very law which the book is written to illustrate? Madame Arthenay suggests that Sir Ber- nard Rivers should avail himself of French law, which per- mite, and French customs, which sanction such marriages as that which he ;wants to contract. We have nothing whatever to say to the author's opinions, but we protest against her facts. Marriage with a deceased wife's sister is forbidden in France by the law of the Catholic Church and the Code Napoljon, subject to the power of the Pope and of the chief of the State to dispense "pour des causes graves," and French society accepts such cases of dispensation, like other undesirable exigencies, as making the best of a seandal, but does not in the least sanction or approve them. Only in Sweden, and in certain parts of Germany, are such marriages legal and canonical. Mrs. Craik has merely been again undecided between the cow and the canary-bird.

The martyrs are not interesting. Mr. Rivers, who requires to have his "innocent wants" perpetually supplied, and whose "crossness is pathetic, like the naughtiness of a sick child who does not know what is the matter with him," is hardly the ideal clergyman of a large and troublesome parish, in which people want to marry their deceased wives' sisters, and then to marry somebody else, because the law does not bind them. He is in- tended to be very charming, but we do not take kindly to a clergy- man who forsakes his own family, relinquishes his clerical duties, leaves his home, his property, and his dependents, in short, aban- dons every duty and responsibility of his life, in order to indulge a passion which is forbidden by the law of his country and his Church, and into whose meshes he has walked with deliberation- Rosie is more than three years old when she has to say " mamma " instead of "auntie "—little short of ludicrous.

There are little bits of good writing scattered about the book. They do not refer to Hannah, who is a bore, with her dead Arthur, to whom she talks about Bernard, and her dreadful baby talk, under the fond imbecile name of " Taunio," with the oppressive infant, but generally to the minor characters and incidents. There is a good sketch of a great lady, who is surprised, when asked for an inter- view by the governess, to discover that she can have anything to talk about except Lady Mary's drawing and Lady Isabel's deport- ment ; and there is a well-drawn picture of village life in England. But, on the whole, Ilannah is a weak book, especially in its male characters. The author has never been fortunate in that respect, though many excellent people have a rooted belief in the gentle- manliness of "John Halifax," but she has steadily declined of late. Her noble-minded peer with a hump, her feeble, unconscien- tious twaddler whose wife considered the care of him "a woman's kingdom," and now Mr. Bernard Rivers, are notable steps in that decline. Her molly-coddles are far less tolerable than her prigs.