MR. STEWART'S INTENTIONS.*
Iv must have been difficult for the author to finish this story without an emotion, of melancholy in which the mass of her readers probably will not share. For their purpose the book is a good book,, full of situation and surprise, people who talk cleverly and are the subjects of incidents which it is worth while to watch, but she must be conscious that it falls very far short of her own ideal, and the critic for once may sympathize rather with author than readers. The novel would have been very good if only it were not so clear that it might have been very much better. It is full of ideas of characters whom the novelist has succeeded in indicating, but has not succeeded in making real. Its author is mittross of all the appliances which help to make a good tale, can frame an exciting plot, " create " characters who interest or annoy, report lively and natural' dialogue, describe incidents. clearly and without apparent strain. But she lacks the power of incisive description, of making her parsonszei expreis fully the desi-gri they half reveal. They are like figures sketched &am memory, recognizable enough, but wanting the hundred lines, the • Mr. Stewart's intent:ons. Ey the Author of Grandmother's Money. Lenaak Hurst told Bleckett.
little touches, the hard courage of stroke, which even the highest artists can only retain when gazing on the model.
The defect is the more marked because she chooses for subjects only strongly-mat k.2(1 faces, people with distinctive characteristics, strong men, cross-grained women, a-uuormal varieties of temper and intellectual power. One can tolerate weakness when the clay only represents. drapery, and there is an indistinctness
which is consistent with grace, but when the subject is Hercules' arm, the gladiator at full stretch, power and not gracefulness, doubt as to the way the muscles lie is fatal to artistic success.
There are no less than five characters in Mr. Stewart's Inten- tions which are intended to be individual and strong, and in four of them at least the meaning, though apparent, is not fully worked out. Take, for instance, the brothers Stewart. They are intended obviously to be men of a good and not infrequent Scotch type, men well educated enough, and full of capacity for affection, but hard, selfwilled, and inclined to mistake the instinct of dominance for the power of self-reliance, to confound their own freedom with the right to interfere with that of others. Both are proud and inclined to rise, but in Richard the pride makes him faithful, energetic, and haughtily brusque ; in Mark it adds a touch of unscrupulousness, and more than a touch of scorn.
When Mark appears on the scene he has become a rich mer- chant in Edinburgh, re-visits his brother, whom lie finds acting as land bailiff, and falls in love with the girl who is supposed to tell the story, and who may be described in two words as a clever mouse. The strength of the man is kept prominently before you by all manner of little touches, most of them very skilful,—in the way he puts down the rector who wants to anticipate his after- dinner speech, smashes the footman who will not bring the "trades- man" coffee in his turn, defeats the great lady who dislikes him for rising so fast, and makes his love accept him before he has proposed. Commercial troubles, however, fall upon him, and the strobg man throws over the penniless girl he has won to propose to another who loves him, and will bring him a noble fortune. Strong men have done that before, and will again; but instead of accepting his fate, Mark Stewart falls in love with the girl he has deceived, and when she suspects the truth con- fesses it thus. The wealthy fiancée asks him :—
"I have found out a few truths that require no denial on your part, and that at least speak of a desire to keep me in the dark concerning all that I had a right to know. You were engaged once to Miss Casey?' --4 Yes. That you would have known before my marriage, had I not been forestalled in the avowal.'—' Whilst that engagement was in force, you met with business losses that brought you to the verge of bank- ruptcy. You were a poor man—you confessed that to me afterwards— when you asked my aunt for her consent to my engagement with you, and told me of your love, Mark, was it—oh ! WAS it—for my fortune ?' —4 God forgive me—yes !'—She drew herself awayfiom him, and came, shrinking and trembling, closer to me. She folded her hands upon my arms, and held me fast ; the whole truth had come to her, and she cared to hear no more. There was no explanation that she wished to listen to after that confession Mr Stewart took her silence towards him for consent, and went on-4 I did my best to keep my faith with you—my honour had been pledged to love you, and there was no -effort after the early days in my attempt to prove that you were nearest to my heart of all the world. Bel, I loved you! For your confidence in me, year belief in my sincerity, that trust which under all circumstances you showed for me—above all, for yourself, I loved you afterwards—
I pledge my honour to it."
Remember the same scene in Shirley, and compare Mark Stewart with Robert Moore. The strong man who wins Miss Casey so quickly, and then sacrifices her to his own interests, we under- stand, and the weak one who simply forgets his love and seeks another we also understand, but how enable us to comprehend the man who does both ? Surely by leading in some way up to the truth, by hinting at the weak place in an otherwise hard cha- racter, by leading the reader to anticipate in the perfected figure that possibility of change which is not evident in him when merely sketched in outline. This the author never does, and this want of perceptiveness or of patieuce makes her subject, at first so clear and bold, seem at last hazy and indistinct. No reader, however clearly he sees Mark Stewart, can be sure that be sees the figure the artist meant to draw. Richard Stewart is better, but in him also there is the same want of completeness. His talk gives always the true impression of a fine nature crusted over with a hard shell, but we never gain the clue to his action, however patiently it may be watched. That such a man so like his brother should also be attracted by his brother's first love is natural, or at least conceivable, but that lie should leave a theft unravelled suspicion of which has fallen on himself, should pay up money he had never taken, thereby giving suspicion new ground, should do anything except insist on the clearing up of the whole matter through the agency of the police,—this is the line of a weak not of a strong man, and the resulting impression is that the figure is not so clear as we at first thought it was. The limb which looked so defined is either awry or not so defined as it looked, and the eyes strain after further clearness in vain. The author will pro- bably reply that Richard Stewart screens the man he suspects because he secretly loves that man's sister, a feeling which is in- telligible. But he does denounce him to the sister and others, and therefore on this theory at once obeys and disregards his own im- pulse, which is weakness, not strength.
It is the same with the women. The novelist has a fancy for describing ungovernable women, girls in whom caprice, or passion, or a touch of latent insanity, exaggerates all impulses, mars every effort at education or self-control. She describes two of them, one well born, prosperous, and a lady, the other an un- educated orphan, servant to her antitype, and the reader expects that the influence of diverse circumstances over identical charac- ters is to be brought out. That, too, was, we take it, the idea of the narrator, but it is not -realized, Isabel Mannington, the lady, being on the whole the more vulgar of the two. One sees her through two volumes pretty distinctly—the proud, half-mad, imperious girl, who fancies herself abhorred, and then loves passionately, but is utterly honourable, utterly contemptuous of her father's small devices to gain a fortune, and then com- mits a burglary for her lover's sake — not by his instiga- tion, mind, but for his sake. Nothing in her character leads up to such a catastrophe, nothing suggests that her mind has not conceived of right or wrong, or that the instincts of caste which render a theft of money among such people nearly impossible do not exist in her. She simply does the deed, and in spite of her explanation becomes at once shadowy,—a character possible enough perhaps, but not the same as the Bel Mannington of the previous story. Either Bel could not steal actual cash or the reader has mistaken Bel, and the perplexity makes the character meant to be so clear, indistinct. Emma Eaves, again, is spoiled by being too much of a lady. She is " low " enough to listen habitually at keyholes, yet she treats the man she loves as only finicking young ladies in novels ever treat their lovers, and refuses un- necessarily to marry him because a needless and absurd promise has been exacted from her by a woman to whom she was under no obligations. The character described would have refused to make such a promise in a storm of half-melodramatic indigna- tion, unless indeed habitually at the mercy of the first impulse. That was perhaps the author's idea, but she has refused herself the space to work out the very complex notion suggested,—a girl of the lower class, full of caprice, obeying ordinarily every
im-
pulse, conscientious enough to keep a vow against her lover, un- conscientious enough to defend stealing if done for his sake, yet dominated all through by one consuming passion. Space being refused, the touches which might make such a character possible are omitted, and there is only a figure in a mist.
We have not sketched the plot of this story, and do not intend, that kind of precis of a novel seldom tending to edification, but we cannot-leave it without a remark on the singular completeness with which the plot is worked out, the perfectness with-which the two secrets are kept from the reader as well as the characters until they are revealed. Surprise does not add much to the literary value of a novel, but it does to the pleasure of reading it, and we confess to having been, in the second instance at least, the story of the theft, utterly taken by surprise. There is real art in the way in which the story leads up to the wrong criminal.
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