Al REY ■ WE cannot see why criticism, that is,
the expression by one man who has read many books of his opinion as to the merit or de- merit of another man's book, should not be absolutely free, why he should not say exactly the thought which arises in him as he reads. The thought very likely may be worthless, but surely it must be worth more than the thought which he, so to speak, makes up, the thought which comes to him when he has compelled his mind to appreciation or dislike by appealing to some standard to which, be it true or false, his mind did not, on that occasion, instinctively refer. Least of all can we see why, when the work to "Meru, a Novel. By the Author or Abet Drake's Wife. 2 vole. London: Bentley. 1869. be criticized is really a prose poem, when instinct, that is, is likely to be much truer than thought, the critic should not be thus set free to say precisely that which rises in him to be said. If we were to write that which conventionally ought to be written we should say of Hirell that it is a powerful novel, in which the plot lacks some element of realism which would make it natural ; but if we were to express the unbidden thought, it would not be that, but something liker this. Siren is a tale written by a poet who has not yet, but may have yet, perfect articulation, who has a poet's imagination without a poet's tongue, or faculty of calling before others the image standing so clear before himself. So deep occasionally seems his insight, more especially into the dark side of human nature, that it may well be he has a perception of the laws and aberrations of the mind deeper and truer than those of the writer who is studying him, and failing from want of that insight to understand him. If that is so, as in that writer's judg- ment it very well may be so, he has only to say that Hirell is beyond him; but if it is not so, as by the first conditions of his art he is bound either to assume, knowing the while that he is assuming, or to be silent, then he must pronounce Hirell, in spite of all its merit, and its merit is very considerable, a failure, an effort to paint a being who never could have existed, or, existing, never have done the acts Hirell is said to do. With all allowances for that unconscious implacability which seems inseparable from Mr. Saunders' ideal of the female character, and which in certain types of that character may exist to the degree, he believes, Hirell, the " beam of light," the angel of the house, seems still to us unnatural.
We may say at once, to save time, that we have no criticism to make on any other part of the book, not even on its rhapsody about Wales, and its discussion of early British history,—a sub- ject which makes the author enthusiastic, he believing, with Mr. Wright, that we must be all at least half Britons. Mr. Saunders always writes the best kind of descriptive English, English as simple as cultivated talk, but rising now and then into strength and fer- vour; he always describes well, and his notion of an incident or an episode would be perfect, but that he tries sometimes to make not it, but his description of it, a thought too vivid. Let us accept him as having succeeded as perfectly as may be, or if he will, as perfectly as he would like to think he had succeeded, in all minor points, and still the question, as he would probably allow, would reduce itself to this, —has he succeeded in Hirell? If he has not, she being the life, and spirit, and soul of the story, the object for which the book was written, the figure without which the drama has no meaning, he, as artist, has failed, as in our hearts, with the great reserve we have above described, we believe him to have failed.
Hirell is the exquisitely beautiful daughter of Elias Morgan, a small Welsh freeholder of that stern Calvinistic type which, somehow, Englishmen think peculiar to Scotland, but which is found much more frequently in the Principality, a man such as Balfour of Burley might have been, had the idea of using the arm of flesh never occurred to him ; a man of will so concentrated and yet so unselfish, deriving its frightful strength so entirely from prin- ciple, that it becomes, in contemplating him, impossible to sepa- rate mere fear, fear not unmingled with dislike, from reverential awe. Exquisitely beautiful, a Calvinist to the heart's core, Hirell has still the besetting sin or quality of organizations like hers, the latent love of luxury, beauty, refinement, pleasure, as pleasure is understood by the intellectual. When the story opens, she has just come, as she thinks, within sight of them all, her father having inherited, as he thinks, a fortune, some £7,000, of which, in the first volume, he is again deprived. Once more, however, the vision in another way opens to her. John Cunliff, an English gentleman, heir to a baronetcy and a great estate, is pursuing, with what he believes to be love, and Mr. Saunders half accepts, half rejects as love, and treats with considerable delicacy, but little incisiveness, a married woman, Mrs. Rhys, and lodges under a feigned name at the house of Elias Morgan. There be falls in love with Hirell, who, pausing only to feel sure that he is a Christian in her sense of Christianity, loves him to rapture with her whole heart and soul, as passionately and wholly as ever did heroine. He, too, loves her asstrongly as it is in his nature to love, which in many ways is strongly enough, and is thoroughly conscious that in her he has found the partner who raises him to his natural or ideal height, who can make him noble as well as content. Just before their marriage, however, Cunliff, a philanthropic politician of no mean mark,—at least, that is his author's intention, though we do not profess quite to understand his politics,—inherits his baronetcy and estate,sees office clear before him, resolves that Hirell, an untutored girl, could not be his wife, and with an exquisite refinement of cruelty takes her to see his house and lands, tells her the story of
the Lady of Burleigh, reveals to her the similarity of their fates, declares that he cannot marry her, and hints at love without marriage. This last brutality, by the way, is conveyed with a little over-delicacy, so conveyed that Hirell would either, as we read her, not have understood it, or if made clairvoyant by her peasant training, have forced his meaning from him in much clearer terms. It is hinted, rather than said, that the pain of surrendering her lover almost makes her consider the offer which yet drives her almost distracted ; she half dies of love, and when he, repentant, renews his suit for her hand, writes him letters as fine as Clarissa's to Lovelace, swears finally not to marry him, and then a few hours after his final offer and rejection, in a paroxysm of semi-religious, semi- grateful, and all-hysterical feeling, accepts a rather bumpkinish second lover, who had courted her hopelessly for long. She, be it remembered, is no merely lovesick maiden, or one who must cling, but a girl full of inspiration, a girl who when called on by her father could stand up before a crowd of mocking English navvies, rendering her father's fiery extempore Welsh permon, sentence by sentence, as it poured forth, and this, while suddenly conscious that among the crowd surging up to the eminence on which she and her father stood was her recreant lover :—
" 'Hirai,' he said, sternly, 'the welfare of all these children of the Almighty Father assembled here, must be more regarded by me than the suffering of my own one child. You must not shrink—you shall not—send forth your voice and trust to Him to make it heard. Now follow me instantly.' And he cried in a loud voice,—' Gweddiwn.' Immediately a piercing, plaintive tone followed like an echo with the English, ' Let us pray.' And throughout all the long prayer it never failed,_ but like a silver bell struck by the same hand that had just sent the diep sonorous sound from one of iron, rang out clearly, thrillingly, and sweetly. At first the fair young face, with auburn hair pushed back under the black bonnet, and sweet eyes clouded and wandering as if they saw nothing, provoked much rude staring and admiration ; but before many minutes the short sentences thrown out by that grand sonorous bass and sweet treble of repetition, began to strike home in many a wild, wicked, and miserable nature, till the air grew more and more silent and clear for the passage of the two voices. At last the attention of the crowd became rapt and unbroken; smoking, nut-crack- ing, orange eating, orange-peel throwing, everything seemed forgotten, but the grand crowding mountain of heads, and God's doubled-voiced messenger, who spoke as with the month of archangel and seraph."
Yet, this woman, half saint, and half prophetess, and beneath both whole woman, this embodiment at once of purity and of love, -within a few hours of the final rejection of her lover, feeling for his rival nothing but grateful liking, distinctly not loving him, though, it may be, believing love would come, accepts that rival. Robert Chamberlayne is in hopeless despair :— " 'Robert Chamberlayne,' said Elias, my child and I have this night wrestled with her sorrow, as Jacob wrestled with the angel ; we have Caked of and considered, with much prayer for divine guidance, how best we may bring back to her the peace of her mind, and the happi- ness of her heart, both of which have even thus early been lost to her. We have considered, too, that it will be well to save her from having her soul tempted to break a vow she has vowed before God never to marry the erring, but I trust repentant man you once called your friend, John Cunliff. We have considered, too, Robert, that you, having been faithful in your love for her as Jacob to Rachel, generous to her in her time of trouble and exile, as Boaz to Ruth—we have considered that to you more than any other should the work of comfort and cherishing belong ; and to that end I give her to you, and she gives herself to you —not now with the love you deserve, but in the full trust and belief that it will come. She said to me, Robert, that last night, when you rose even from addressing your Maker to answer her call, your voice went unto her heart with a strange warmth and comfort. Was it not eo, Hirell?' Robert, as he listened to these words, had been looking upon the sweet chastened face of Hirell, with eyes that at first were doubting and perplexed ; but that soon had vied with the early morn- ing skies outside, in glistening light and depth. When Elias said, Was it not so, Hirell?' he placed at the same time her hand in Robert's, and Hirell answered faintly—' Yea.' Then Elias gently unwound the cling- ing fingers of her other hand from his, and drawing her nearer to Robert, said—' Take her, then, Robert, and be not impatient with her sorrow, which I have strong belief will only cover her soul for a time; therefore regard it only as the veil with which the women of the Scrip- tures veiled themselves when they were first brought before their hus- bands, even as Rebecca veiled herself when she beheld Isaac coming to meet her. I have judged it best that the marriage should be very soon, for the aakea of both you and of another.' Then Robert drew her to his heart and kissed her, and in his smile she seemed to see a reflection of the great peace and sunshine of that home of his, where she was to spend her life. As she closed her eyes upon his shoulder, a sense of rest came over her, she stretched her hand towards her father, and as he gave her his she held it close to hers and Robert's. 'Yon .will love him very soon, Hirell, and dearly,' said Elias; ' he is not a gifted man, but he is what the Lord loves better, an honest man in whom there is no guile.'—' Father, I know him.'"
It may be our own shallowness, but to us that final scene is at once a desecration and an unreality,—a desecration because, if it occurred, Hirell would have been but a mere " miss," a girl with- out depth or force or specialty of character ; an unreality, because the saint here painted in colours so bright that even the canvas,
too clearly seen beneath, cannot dim them, could not, even under the pressure of her father's sense of divine guidance, have accepted a man for whom love was to come—with the babies—nor could the girl here described, with her thirst for refinement and for luxury and for intellectual excitement, with her belief that she, if made Lady of Burleigh, would have strength given her, and also have strength belonging to her to be Lady of Burleigh successfully, have stooped all at once from John Cunliff, base as he might have proved himself, to the jolly and good-hearted but still far inferior Kentish farmer. There would have been, must have been, some relic of the old pride as well as the old love to suppress, and if she was suppressing them in that scene, if she was even, as is admitted, taking Chamberlayne without love, what was Hirell? Not, clearly, the heroine of the preceding three volumes. There may be a thought in the author's mind which reconciles the character and the act, a notion of an undergrowth of love for Chamberlayne going on all through the long struggle with Cunliff ; and we think there is that thought, but if so, the defect of imagination is exchanged for a defect in artistic expression, which jars on the mind as strongly as the more serious want.
This, a sense of imperfection left by the image of Hirell, is, we repeat, the only defect in a story otherwise at once both poetic and powerful ; and there is much the same defect, though much less in degree, in Mrs. Rhys. Mr. Saunders seems to appreciate the self-restrainedness,—we do not mean self-restraint—of women to a degree which impairs his perception of other sides of the female character, to make of that one quality not only a force, which it is, but the force, which, in such characters as he paints, it is not. He did precisely the same in Abel Drake's Wife, where the fine character of the wife is spoilt by its unnatural hardness and implacability.
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