OTTILIE.*
'Tuts is a graceful little sketch of German life in the eighteenth 'century, so graceful, that it is almost disappointing in its scantiness. The main subject of the idyl is left something too faint for the author's purpose. There is plenty of skill in the delineation of the weakly sentimental Christoph, whose selfishness and feebleness are the background on which Ottilie's self-devotion are displayed ; but that self-devotion itself is sug- gested rather than painted, and never brought vividly before us, -even on those occasions on which it is most clearly indicated .and implied. This is, we think, a fault, though the intention of the idyl is rather to bring the German manners of the times vividly before us, than to dwell on individual figures. What Vernon Lee aims at is to show what the culture of Germany in the last thirty years of the last century and the first ten years of this, was like, what elements it lacked in which the ansterer life of the first part of the eighteenth century had not been deficient, and how unbridgeable was the chasm between the ignorant practical life of the German townspeople and the feeble and passionate (estheticism in which the literary life of the century first showed itself. That Vernon Lee's little story succeeds in illustrating-this, we do not deny ; but it would have succeeded much better if Ottilie had been at least as clearly defined as her lover, Councilor Moritz, who, though only out- lined, is outlined very clearly. In Councillor Moritz you have a figure not unlike that of Goethe's father, a man hard, definite, not at all deficient in warmth of feeling, but utterly contemptuous in relation to that want of self-restraint in which the senti- mentalism of the revolutionary period was beginning to pride itself. Ottilie, brought up with as clear a sense of self-dependence and as strong a respect for the duty of reticence and self-restraint as Councillor Moritz himself, is, nevertheless, capable of all the self-devotion of a true woman of the highest calibre. But this, though it is suggested, is not adequately shown to as. Vernon Lee appears to shrink from giving us any picture of Ottilie's state of mind when her selfish brother insists on her 'choosing between himself and her lover,—which really means on her giving up her lover for himself. Nor does the author venture to delineate her adequately in the later scene, in which the brother who has so selfishly -insisted on Ottilie*s giving up her best hopes of happiness for him, -coolly upbraids her with wasting his life because she wants him to be cautious about taking the final step of abandoning her for a wife of whom he knows little or nothing. Ottilie is charac- terised solely by what she does. The author has not the courage to attempt to show her as what she is, in any important scene with the brother for whom she has to sacrifice so much. This is a defect, even in relation to the chief object of the book, —the picture of eighteenth-century manners in Germany which it contains. The inner life of that century was not so -reserved that a woman of force and character, who had been twice compelled by her brother to perceive that he expected her to sacrifice herself wholly to him as if she were nothing in the • Otf fir: an Eigh.rtnth•Contury Id21. By Vernon Lee. L -Lion : T. Fisher "Hawk,.
balance, would have failed to give him some•glimpse of the scorn with which she must have regarded selfishness so profound.
For the rest, we have nothing but praise for this agreeable little sketch, which is drawn with full insight into the period described and very considerable grace of style. Here is a • passage in which the author describes with even more skill than usual the jealousy with which the brother discovers that his sister is placing another in the position which he had always thought sacred to himself :— "
" Little by little I began to be aware of a change ; was it in myself or in my surroundings ? I cannot tell, but I felt it nevertheless painfully. It was like the first gentle motion of a boat ; the traveller can scarcely say whether it is he or the shore that is moving, and if he abandon himself to the impression he becomes filled with an in- definable discomfort. Gradually the feeling became stranger;it was as if I were being pushed by imperceptible degrees out of the circle occupied by Ottilie and the Councillor. They were getting nearer each other, and I proportionately further and further from both. Yet there was not the slightest coldness or diminution of affection on the part of my sister. I was still what I had always been for her, but—but another was becoming, not indeed what I had been, blab something quite different and superior in her affection. I felt all this long before I could explain it to myser; but when I did explain it, the feeling became insupportable to my excessively sensitive and egotistic nature, rendered morbidly jealous by having been my sister's sole thought, her life, her tyrant. What was I now ? Merely her brother. I was at once effeminate and passionate in temper, requiring constant caresses and flatteries, and capable of furious outbursts if denied them. A strange mixture of the child and of the man—I, who ought to have been simply a boy. Feeling as a child, I felt overcome by heart-breaking loneliness; I would have cried and sobbed and forced my sister to soothe me. Feeling as a man, I despised my morbid affection, and would have looked at everything with almost brutal indifference. I had moments of the bitterest weakness, and others of the most stubborn stolidity. At one moment I could scarcely refrain from throwing Myself into my sister's arms and entreating her to send away Moritz. At another I was ready to tell the Councillor that he was free to take Ottilie, that I did not care what she did, that I wished only for liberty. At times jealousy would drive me out of the house, and I would throw myself sobbing on the grass of the ramparts. At others I sat buried in my books, answering rudely and insultingly whatever remark was made to me. And I was for a long time the only one who suspected the real state of matters. Neither Ottilie nor Moritz realised their feelings towards each other, and old Willibald was blinder than either of them. But the extraordinary change which had come over me was unmistakable ; there was no poss:bility of being blind to my melancholy, my sulkiness, and my outbursts of violence. Ottilie, in- capable of solving the riddle, asked the Councillor's advice on the subject. The cold, resolute, unsentimental man laughed at it all, and told her to send me to school if she would cure me. He has been spoilt: 1 heard him say ; and from that moment I hated him implacably."
Let us add that Wilhelmina is hardly as happily sketched as the other figures in this graceful idyl. Her playfulness as a bride is pretty enough, but her sulky inexorability when she finds her husband softening towards her after their first estrangement is of a kind quite different from that which the character, as hitherto sketched, had led us to expect. A com- mon-place little beauty of a sentimental kind, without depth and without much character, would hardly have been likely to set her heart so stiffly against a husband with whom she had been heartily in love, solely because she had discovered that she was not all in all to him, as she had been at first. But as regards the other figures of the little story everything is definite and satisfactory, and everything in keeping with the epoch. What we regret most is that the central figure ialeft so much more to the imagination than the very inferior figure intended to be a pendant to it, and to bring out its significance and meaning.
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