BOOKS.
COLONEL ENDERBY'S WIFE.*
THIS story has been rightly spoken of as involving a tragedy, and a tragedy of no ordinary power. In writing last week on the reasons why women so seldom write dramas, we ventured to express our belief that the author might, if she would, give us a genuine tragedy without the help of that somewhat too elaborate setting by which our novelists lighten the labour of their direct portraiture of character and deed. We will add that, in the present case, Lucas Malet's tragedy—which is not, on the whole, a heart-breaking, but rather an inspiring kind of tragedy—would, we believe, decidedly gain in effect if it could be set free from the much too extensive commentary on life with which she delays at times the progress of her narrative. Schiller and Goethe used to discourse to each other on " the retarding element" with which it was right to delay the progress of a tragedy, after all the human forces which were evidently destined to end in tragedy had been brought into play. But then, what they referred to was not mere dilatory discussion and comment, but more or less effective human resistance to the tragic causes at work, resistance which gives us time fully to measure their power and to gauge their calibre. Able writers like Lucas Malet too often substitute for this temporary equilibrium between the tragedy-causing and the tragedy-resisting forces of life, mere dilatory comment, more or less shrewd, on the situation. which does not really enhance the significance of the story, even when that commentary is powerful of its kind. We find ourselves often quarrelling with Lucas Malet for her very long dissertations on the poverty of human nature at times when the reader craves direct progress with the drama of the situation, and not dissertation of any kind about it. Indeed, take this very powerful story as a whole, and we have only one fault to find with it, that the element of dissertation is introduced much too freely, and often with the result of making the reader impatient, instead of with that of throwing any new light on either character or situation. And we say this without meaning to be in any degree disrespectful to the ability of these dissertations, though, no doubt, they are often decidedly more cynical than the truth of life requires. They are often subtle, often humorous, once or twice almost as poetical in the highest sense as the chorus of an 2Eschylean tragedy, though it is not then, of course, that we complain of them. But they are still oftener out of all proportion to the progress of the story and the development of character. We should much like to see Colonel Enderby's Wife stripped of this
excess of George Eliot-like dissertation, and reduced to the natural dimensions of the tragedy which it contains. There would still remain not a little vivid description, not a little weird and weighty reflection; but all that seems introduced to lengthen out an otherwise too short dramatic story, should disappear.
We cannot doubt that this story will live amongst the great English fictions of this century. For it moves in the higher imaginative world without any deficiency in realism. There is noble poetry in it without dreaminess, or want of grasp for the truth of human nature. Its ethics are not " ethics of the dust," but ethics of the heavens,—at least, if we take the larger sense of the word "ethics," for in the narrower sense we fear the author is impatient of what she ought to reverence. Why Lucas Malet takes so much care to throw doubt on all the spiritual buttresses of these nobler ethics, as she does, we cannot say. We suppose, however, that while she clings to the moral outcome of the nobler creed, she has turned giddy in. the attempt to sift the truth of it from the dubious and the false, and has more or less given up the solution of the problem in despair. Still, there can be no question but that to the moral outcome of the nobler creed she does cling, and but little, we fancy, that she holds fast to some vague form of the Christian faith, though she scatters more sneers than are at all relevant to her story on the various competing dogmas with which the Christianity of our age presents us.
The main effort of the story is to paint a joyous and brilliant nature with hardly more than the scantiest possible germ of anything spiritual in it ; and though we have the greatest doubt whether there ever was any character so far developed in other respects, and yet so utterly destitute of sympathy and pity, as that of the heroine, Jessie, we will admit that, if there could be such a character, it is drawn here with all the force of circumstance and detail requisite to make one accept it as something more than fiction. Jessie Enderby can hardly be called an Undine of the nineteenth century, for Undine, though in one sense she was supposed to be soulless, was not supposed to be without pity and sympathy; and, indeed, there is far more true sympathy to be found in a faithful dog than any of which the beautiful and brilliant creature who is here presented to us as so full of fascination, gives us any trace. But whether such a being be or be not possible,—and we sincerely believe that it is hardly possible for pity to be so entirely wanting in any nature in which there is so much of the bright intelligence and radiant play of human insight,—Lucas Malet has drawn for us a character to which it is impossible to deny the reality of a very vivid and memorable portraiture. The scene in which Jessie Enderby is rebuked by Mrs. Colvin for flirting with her son, —with whom she has danced continually without its ever having occurred to her that such conduct could be misconstrued, even though it went on after her husband's attack of mortal illness,— and in which Jessie flames into sudden fury at the accusation, is one of singular dramatic power; and though we could not extract it here with any justice to the author, as it needs its setting in the story to be fully understood, it will remain in the memory as vividly as the scenes with her husband on which the final issue of the tragedy turns. We cannot say that even now we believe that Jessie Enderby, or any one morally very like Jessie Enderby, ever existed. But, at any rate, we shall continue to remember her, as we remember Hawthorne's ' Faun,' or the same great writer's 'Little Pearl.'
The character of Jessie's step-mother,—the restless, passionate, ill-regulated woman who launched Jessie on her fate,— is drawn with admirable power and force, and succeeds, as it is intended to succeed, in setting off that of the brilliant, soulless girl with full effect. In Mrs. Pierce-Dawnay we do heartily believe. It is impossible not to believe in her, and not to believe that we have known her ; and perhaps no scene in modern fiction is more powerful than that in which she returns home, after marrying Jessie to Colonel Enderby, to find her house apparently deserted by all whom she had eared-for, and the monkey of the man whom she loved, the only creature to receive her, while even he receives her only with hideous grimaces of disgust and disappointment at the absence of his master. That master, too,—Bertie Ames,—is a sketch worthy of any one of the greater novelists of the day, and is painted with an ease of which few of them would have been capable. There is no laboriousness in the sketch, not a word too much, not a word too little. You see in Bertie all the cynical self-possession of a Raphael-Ben-Ezra, adapted to the half-Italian, half-English atmosphere which he breathes, and tempered with a gentleness
and affectionateness peculiarly his own. We hardly know anything more effective than the whole portraiture of this young gentleman, from his first introduction to the last line of the book. Nor is the character of Cecilia Farrell, the ungainly, blundering, duty-loving, too submissive woman, less happily conceived than either Bertie's soft cynicism on the one hand, or Eleanor Pierce-Dawnay's passionate and ill-regulated generosity on the other, for setting off Jessie's soulless beauty and brilliancy. What we admire in Lucas Malet is the keen artistic feeling which has conceived a group of characters so well adapted to bring out the main conception and so admirably executed for the purpose of bringing out that main conception, as those to which we have referred. We have not included among them that of the hero, Colonel Enderby, for we have our doubts whether, splendid as are some of the scenes at the close of the story in which he plays the principal part, his nature has been adequately conceived and painted. Even in the early scenes of the story,—the scene with his father and mother, for example, when he leaves his home practically disinherited,—there is too little careful painting to make us quite clear with whom we have to deal. Then, too, there is a suggestion of a time of partial deterioration when it is a question which way his character will turn, though there is no working out of that suggestion, and no trace of this less creditable period in his after life. Moreover, during the whole time of his courtship of Jessie, we are told a good deal about him that does not seem very informing, except as to the author's intention that we should admire him. Considering that it is on him that the story turns, we hold that his is the least successful character in the book, though there is no finer or more tragic scene in any story of recent years than the closing scene of his life. If Lucas Malet has failed at all, she has failed in giving sufficient body to the sketch of Colonel Enderby. We have heard him compared to Colonel Newcome. But Colonel Newcome is a living figure to us, and Colonel Enderby is not. We see the closing scenes of his life very vividly, but we do not see into him even in those closing scenes.
Still, take the book as a whole, and it is certainly a most powerful one, one which assures us of the presence among us of a new genius. Nor have we, to our thinking, had many passages in modern fiction full of a more truly 2Eschylean power than the following :
" The house of Love may be builded easily enough by any man and woman, out of such commonplace materials as a dance, or a song, a light laugh, a lingering pressure of hands, or those meaningless tears that come so easily into a young girl's eyes. Love would seem to be very humble-minded. He bids no heralds and ambassadors go before him, with blare of trumpets and waving of banners. He comes at haphazard along quiet country lanes, among gleams of moonlight over dewy lawns ; he meets us on the crowded city crossing, amid the shouts of the drivers, and under the very feet of the omnibus horses ; he has even taken to travelling in prosaic railway carriages in these latter days, and that with a disregard of class almost painfully democratic. He is quick, and subtle, and fearless ; yet he oomes softly and silently, stealing up without observation. And at first we laugh at his pretty face, which is the face of a merry, earthly child ; but his hands, when we take them, grasp like hands of iron, and his strength is as the strength of a giant, and his heart is as the heart of a tyrant. And he gives as to drink of a cup in which sweet is mingled with bitter ; and the sweet, too often, is soon forgotten, while the taste of the bitter remains. And we hardly know whether to bless him or curse him, for he has changed all things ; and we cannot tell whether to weep for the old world we have lost, or shoat for joy at the new world we have found. Such is love for the great majority ; a matter terrestrial rather than celestial, and of doubtful happiness aftevall."
Had Lucas Malet in her mind that fine passage in Shelley's .Prometheus Unbound when she wrote that passage ?—
".A.h sister ! Desolation is a delicate thing !
It walks not on the earth, it floats not in the air, But treads with silent footstep and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear ; Who soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above, And the music•stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aerial joy and call the monster Love, And wake and find the shadow Pain, as.he whom now we greet ?"
Whether she had that passage in her mind or not, her own is quite original enough to engrave upon us the impression of a noble imagination. But why does she spoil it by the dreary and well worn attack on the British Philistine which precedes it, and of which we have had enough and to spare from Thackeray, George Eliot, and all the semi-satirical novelists of oar time? Lucas Malet should be above echoing them, as she does more than once, —for example, in the rather dreary irony concerning " the apotheosis of suburban villas, solid worth,-and side-whiskers," which might be taken almost verbatim from•the•worst passages in George Eliot's Westminster Review essays ; or in the passage in which she says that any ideal life "would interfere fatally with our excellent system of large profits and quick returns." These are the remarks of cleverness with a touch of vulgarity in it, not of true genius. And in Lucas Malet we recognise a considerable imaginative genius, one whose career may, we hope, be worthy of this really fine novel, which it has been so great a pleasure to read, and which it will be a still greater pleasure to read again and again.
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