FAIR PASSIONS.*
Ir is not very difficult to guess the sort of story we shall have when " Fair Passions " stares us in the face on the left-hand side of every page in the three volumes, and "The Setting of the Pearls" on the right-hand side ; when the motto on the title-page is " Fair passions, and bountiful pities, and loves without stain ;" when the preface is " Qui s'excuse s'accuse ; " when the first chapter is called "No daisy whiter," and the second "My love she's but a lassie yet," and the rest en suite ; when the story opens in a room like " an ocean cave," " whose low walls and domed ceiling were tinted a watery green ; " when the " little lady's " name is " Marguerite d'Alteyrac O'Neil," " but my father calls me Daisy ;" when verses and lines of poetry are scattered thickly throughout ; when—in fact, when the book. For in one form or another it is almost all sentiment, serious, or romantic, or sickly. The authoress must, we think, be unconsciously sketching her own mental and intellectual constitution when she describes how the American poetess of her tale " thrilled " and " gushed " incessantly. The story is conceived in a spirit truly munificent of touching, painful and exercising situations,—is, indeed, one would think, prepared on purpose for those who have no other troubles, and who, in the words of a Yankee help '—one of our authoress's happiest inventions—are always " weepin' damply over the distractin' approach of considerable comforts," and whom Mrs. Pigott-Carleton, declining to "layout a few dry handkerchiefs," will "leave free to pickle any affliction they kinder fear won't keep." The story is of a young and very beautiful couple who spend three days of married life, and are then separated by a mysterious pro- vidence and a storm at sea ; and the first division of it is their life together. The second follows the fortunes of the husband, who is saved, by a case of instantaneous conversion in the heart of a lovely flirt, from marrying again ; and the third takes up the wife, who had passed the night with her life-belt in a tempestuous ocean, and whose faithful love keeps her safe for her husband, to whom she is reunited in the last page. So that we have a little trinity of stories, and are saved by Mrs. Pigott-Carleton's thoughtful kindness from being completely mastered by our feelings, by the clever expedient of pulling us suddenly up at the end of each division, and giving us a fresh start on a different road, and with quite new companions. But still in all this rich variety, the authoress has an eye to her main object,—the pro- viding of emotional scenes. In the first part, there is Daisy's lonely widowed father, Daisy's desolate self, without even that lonely father's love, his death, and her marriage and final fare- wells to the few humble friends of her childhood, the exquisite joy of the three days' wedding trip (with a touching episode of a child who has gone mad from the loss of his brother), then a telegram, a hasty embarking, and the terrible catastrophe of the storm, when each believes the other lost. Mrs. Pigott-Carleton arranges so many good reasons why each has no doubt of this, and so many others to account for the stopping-up of all the natural channels by which the truth would soon have come to each,—such as the sudden death and removals of mutual friends, and the preternatural conscientiousness of a post-mistress, who burns letters to deceased correspondents rather than pry into their affairs, and who has, apparently, been left uninstructed by a careless postmaster-general that she should send such epistles to the Dead-letter Office—that it is at once ap- parent to any reasonable student of these adventures, that neither husband nor wife will ever even dream that there is a * Fair Passions; or, the Betting of the Pearls. By the Ron. firs. Pigott-Carleton. London: Tinsley.
doubt about the death of the other. This, of course, makes it particularly sweet that neither falls in love again. The second part begins at the death-bed of the old baronet, the father of our young widowed husband, and then we get into what is really the authoress's element—if she only knew it—and are refreshed with some spirited scenes in the hunting field and the ball-room, spoiled, however, again, by these irrepressible struggles,—of the hero to please his old mother and marry his cousin—of the cousin to resist her honest love for a certain Colonel and marry, from spite and ambition, the rich young baronet, his nephew—and of the said Colonel to quell his agony and his jealousy and submit to his fate.
It is curious how ladies who seem to have " fast " proclivities for horses, hunting, flirting and a little devilry, take to soft gushing sentiment and poetry and sorrow with an instinct, we suppose, to " make believe very much " what they are conscious of wanting in reality. Fun is Mrs. Pigott Carleton's forte, and just a leetle wickedness, and so she runs away from her natural, and what she supposes to be her worse self, into rose leaves and tears, white hands, and charity and devotion. The third part introduces us to a protestant sister-of-mercy who nurses the rescued young wife, and who is called a "gentle old lady," but who has views about the management of persons of feeling which compel her to behave in an angry way (" on'y p'etence you know !") and who consequently opens her first interview with the widowed girl— wounded in body and mind—by exclaiming sternly, " Keep quiet ! do you think I mean to have my trouble for nothing? Hands off ! Right away !"—at another time flinging a wet sponge across the room at her patient, with the order to " Lie down immediately, or I will bolster your ridiculous bead next." But this is only the " gentle old lady's" idea of playful kindness, and the volume overflows with the generosity and petting accorded to the young thing by her, and by a semi-barbarian man of forty, half Irish chieftain, half Spaniard—" the Dankice "—who is in love with the young widow. Here we have her movements of gratitude and fits of depression and struggles to be cheerful ; and Dunluce's struggles for self-mastery,—first when he sees she does not love him, and afterwards when he learns, from an old news- paper, that her husband is living. Then there is all the feeling at this discovery, and at the parting—unto death in Dunluce's case—and on approaching her husband's home and learning—as she supposes—that he is just married again, and then that he is not ; and at the final meeting, which is contrived in the most outrageously romantic manner. This exhausting flood of fair pas- sions—anything but fair to the reader—is not a thunder-shower, however tremendous, but a steady forty days' deluge. Passions of love, hate, jealousy, tenderness ; struggles with doubt, sense, mammon, pride ; scenes of devotion, gratitude, grief, suspense, joy, are rained over nearly every page of the book. But we can say this much for them, that they all end in mastery over the world, the flesh, and the devil, and if they could but be divested of gush and of the decorator's overloaded ornament, many of them would exhibit considerable power of portraying the passions—both fair and black—natural to the situation.
In the same way the studies of scenery and effects would often be beautiful if they were not made so very symbolical and illus- trative of the co-existing mental states in their beholders, and if their characteristics were not " piled up so very mountainous," that they come too near a midnight-storm photograph on the one hand, and a Baxter's oil-print on the other.
It is scarcely necessary to explain by instances the tendency to the unpruned luxuriance of luscious description of which we have spoken, for it is common to so many lady and to some gentleman authors. But we will take a very few of the countless word-pictures of the heroine—the secondary or rival heroine is as floridly described —between the ages of sixteen and nineteen years. The " childie" was a " pale, pink pearl," " a little, soft, rosy-toed, yellow-haired thing." She had " sword-coloured eyes," " a curled, rose-leaf ear," and " white-robed shoulders." She was " arrayed in tints that made her resemble a silver-edged, lilac-coloured cloud of sunset." She "linked her hands behind her head ; " "her arms were coiled upon the leathern cushion," and her lover worshiped her "turning up her flower-face to his by the simple expedient of grasping a handful of curls ;" he gave " a radiant smile down into the glowing, glorious eyes," and "she tossed her thought-brimmed little head, causing una furtive lagrima to fall shimmering into the cup of one half-blown rose that was nestling against her cheek," &c., &c., ad infinitum and ad nauseam. And the quotations of poetry and prose, which are innumerable, are selected with a view to make these pictures more pictorial, to " paint the lily " and "gild refined gold."
Our authoress has a talent for languages and dialects. This
book is written in English, broken-English, French, Irish, Scotch, and Yankee, with samples of old-English, German, Italian, and the language usually attributed to Jew money-lenders and picture dealers, who take orders from rich lovers for pictures drawn by their fair but impecunious idols who are beguiled into the belief that they are supplying an appreciative public. Of course we must not expect too much depth when the surface is so extensive, but all these languages are imitated with fair success, for even the English is not quite perfect. And this brings us to the pleasanter part of our subject, the points in which Mrs. Pigott- Carleton does shine, and might shine brilliantly if she did but un- derstand what her vocation is. She has studied her Artemus Ward and her Gamp with great success, and we have little doubt would obtain a first-class in an examination for membership of the Gamp club. But her chef d'oeuvre is the Yankee help, Miss Keren- happuch Cobb. This lady assists the gentle old sister-of-mercy and "the Dunluce " to take care of Daisy, and escorts her to England in the El Dorado, which " swiftly and steadily ploughed the broad grey-green ocean." Miss Cobb considers God's " doings all well meant," and is sure that " he acts from the best of motives." She dissuades her charge from rushing, travel-stained, into her hus- band's presence, and suggests that "the prettiest gal in creation will bear improvin' with a soapy sponge, after a long day of dust and smoke," and she remarks on board ship of the poetess passenger who is always talking of her late husband—a jeweller by trade—" For all Mrs. Bliss can't open her lips without an appeal to her jeweller in Jerusalem the Golden, I expect she'd feel some put out if he re- sponded by a flappin' of his way back in time for tea." But Miss Cobb is not the only humorous character. There is a sort of Lord Dundreary, who says some good things, as, for instance, " I never saw such roses in my life ; they have not a bit of digestion or constitution, or—or whatever you call the middle of a thing; they have blown until they have blown up." And his funny friend, who calls him Juliet, and won't stand his puns. " Merciful Moses ! Juliet has joked ! Hold him, somebody ; give him air. Sit up, old fellow, you will feel better directly. Were you ever taken in this way before ?" There is, too, an admirably real and clever love-scene between a child and a young man—only the child is three or four instead of seven, as we are told—which is exceedingly pretty, and amusing, and touching too, without, for once, any sickly sentiment. A hunt-breakfast and the hunt itself are de- scribed with a spirit and vividness and acquaintance with the details of such affairs, from which we judge that Mrs. Pigott- Carleton is a lady who goes across country herself, or has done so, or is intimate with and very observant of those who do.
If she would not soar so high and search so hard for romantic situations, sweet thoughts, deep feelings, and lovely settings for her pearls, her powers of humour and description, and her sym- pathy with right, would make her an able and satisfactory writer.
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