A GOLDEN SORROW.* Tins is a very pleasant and lively
novel, with glimpses of a great deal more power than the general conduct of the story actually displays. Mrs. Cashel Hoey is, we suspect, troubled with a tender- ness which authors do not usually feel towards their "puppets,".—as Thackeray incautiously termed and delighted to term the cha- racters of which he pulled (and displayed) the strings for the public amusement. She cannot be hard-hearted enough to show them as they are, or ought to be in order to make them the proper subjects of art, even where it is really needful to her success. For example, the whole force of this story, —and at the crisis of it that force is very considerable,— depends on the retribution which the heroine prepares for herself by a thoroughly loveless and worldly marriage (the only excuse for which is that it is made to provide for herself an escape from the tyranny of an intolerably cold and despotic father), and by the morbidly eager and selfish desire which results from this miserable marriage, when once made, to realise at least its pecuniary advantages,—a desire which her bitter apprecia- tion of the great sacrifice of self-respect and of happi- ness it had cost her, would be sure to engender in a mind not elevated enough for true self-reproach and self-contempt. Now Mrs. Hoey has conceived the worldly side of her heroine's nature with some force, and with still greater force that passionate eagerness to save something substantial out of the wreck of happiness which a woman capable of committing the sin of such a marriage without realising its sinfulness would be likely to feel. But Mrs. Hoey has a tenderness for her heroine, nevertheless, whom she quite rightly conceives and paints as full of capacity for love, —for were she not so, the story would hardly interest anyone as it does,—and this tenderness induces the author to introduce palliating circumstances into her heroine's life, which greatly interfere with the unity and interest of the tale. It is evideutly essential, for instance, to that unity and interest, that Miriam, the heroine in question, should, before her wretched marriage, have known, and had some presentiment at least of her capacity of loving, the man for whom she ultimately conceives the great passion of her life ; but this would have been a circumstance aggravating so much the evil of her loveless marriage with a wealthy old man, that the authoress apparently shrank from it. Yet Mrs. Hoey has sacri- ficed much of unity and strength in her story by deferring to the end the first meeting between her heroine and the one man who has the power to awaken her love. She has no doubt feared to introduce that vulgar and common-place ele- ment of interest in modern novels,—the struggle in the wife's mind between unlawful feelings and repulsive duties. But this was not necessary. There need have been no attraction strong enough to do more than greatly heighten the suspense of the reader by sug- gesting at the beginning a clearer and more unquestionable anticipation than it is otherwise possible to have of the rela- tion likely to exist between Miriam and Lawrence Daly, and so adding to the story a keener interest in the former's unconscious efforts to countermine his interests by the selfish securing of her own. There should have been a shadow of fear running through all the story, of that which actually occurs at the end of it, when Miriam finds that she had really injured the only man whom she would gladly have given her whole life to make happy, though without knowing at the time whom she had cheated of his inherit- ance. As it is, the reader's fear, when it conies, is at first not keen enough ; for Miriam, though she owes much to Lawrence Daly on her brother's account, is not even personally acquainted with him ; and though she unwittingly injures the man whom she afterwards loves, there is not so much intensity in the situation as it not merely admits of, but seems to demand. Again, the middle part of the story flags, from the want of vital oonnection between the beginning and the close,—the want of rapid movement which
Gado; Sorrow. By Mrs. Cashel Hoey. 3 vole. London: Hurst and Blacken. results from leaving the best part of the plot to begin and end in the latter portion of the third volume, instead of growing regu- larly from the commencement to the conclusion. The "period of retardation," as the Germans, in their technical criticism, have de- nominated that stage in the plot of a drama where the action be- gins to be checked, and to sway in doubt between the two opposing influences of the situation, lasts in Mrs. Hoey'a tale immoderately. long. During Miriam's life in Paris, when the interest of the novel, so far as it affects her brother and sister-in-law, has almost come to a stand-still, and its interest as it affects herself and Lawrence Daly, has hardly begun, we are becalmed in a still pool between two currents, with only a languid in- terest in the future. Also, we cannot help thinking that it would greatly have helped our author in the delineation of Miriam, who, admirably conceived as she is, is only half painted, if Miriam had had in her heart a current of sentiment sufficient to teach her something of the moral peril in which she stood, and the sin of which she had been guilty in her worldly marriage. As it is, Mrs. Hoey relies a great deal too much on physical description for her sketch of Miriam, especially on a trick her eyes had of giving out a golden light when she was in excitement or trouble,—a very praiseworthy characteristic, no doubt, but one of which it is possible to weary, especially if the reader is too short-sighted to study the physiognomy of eyes in general, and cannot tell even by drawing on his own experience what sort of character that implies. Physical traits should always be quite subordinate to the character, though some great humorists like Dickens have fallen into the great blunder of trying to make them embody the character. Then, again, it is rather a defect in art to make Miriam's second great evil action, in which she makes her brother help her, so very purposeless. As she knew that almost all her husband's property was invested in Indian securities, she must have known,—ignorant of business as she was, —and certainly her brother must have known,—that in all human probability these securities were personalty, to which the wife, and not the heir-at-law, would succeed.
But with all these drawbaelts, and some carelessness in drawing the principal characters, which are left far vaguer than Mrs. 'Joey need have left them, A Golden Sorrow is a very pleasant and lively, and in parts a very vigorous story. The opening is very lively, and the sketch of Mr. Clint, the ill-tempered, drinking despot, is throughout good. The Californian episode is exceedingly graphic, and shows how vividly Mrs. Hoey,—if she has not herself seen Californian life,—has reproduced in her imagination not only its broad features, but its characteristic details. What can be more admirable, for instance, than the sketch of Walter Clint's and Lawrence Daly's temporary servant at the diggings, the man known as "Spoiled Five "
" This was a short, thick-set man, very lame, with a shock head of red hair, and only one eye. The blind side of his face was much dis- figured by a rugged scar which traversed the cheek-bone, and by the loss of the eye, which had evidently been destroyed by an accident, and in place of which there was now only an ugly seam, crooked and leaden- hued. The right and sound side had a pleasant expression, and the one bright brown eye had a surprising, contradictory merriment in it, con- firmed by the uninjured handsome mouth and strong white teeth. From the fingers of the left hand all the ends were missing ; they had suffered by the same accident which had crippled him and destroyed hit eye ; and the circumstance had inspired the wits of the diggings with the happy idea of calling him Spoiled Five.' He was as well known in the valley as the 'innocent' of an Irish mountain village is to all the country round ; and, considering that he had come out there from Ireland a strong young man, full of health, energy, and industry, and had been reduced, within a month of his arrival, to a state of entire helplessness and hopeless dependence, without the remotest prospect of ever seeing his native land again, 'Spoiled Five' was a wonderfully contented individual. In that rude and cosmopolitan place his affection for the old country never declined ; among that lawless and godless crowd, his fidelity to the old faith had never faltered. He picked up a livelihood by making himself generally useful, and it was quite wonder- ful what he could do with his one good' hand and its maimed fellow. Washing, carpentering, glazing, tailoring, in the modified and modest. form of mending, cooking, a surprising readiness in repairing every- thing that went wrong with vehicles of all kinds, a by no means con- temptible knowledge of farriery, and a wonderful knack of 'minding' the sick,—these were some, and only a portion of the accomplishments. of Spoiled Five. He made a very good living for himself by their em- ployment, and had become quite an institution and a tradition of the place. He was the oldest inhabitant now. Many men of many nations- had come there, and had made their pile, and gone away, or had failed to make their pile, and likewise had gone away to the other parts of the Golden State, or to other occupations. Many had died there, of injuries, or disease, or drink, but Spoiled Five remained, contented enough. The old folks at home, for whom he had been bent on making a pile, were gone to their rest, and there were to be no new ties in life for him.. He hated yellow-men and 'loafers,' but otherwise was always on very good terms with the mining population of the fifty or sixty miles of the valley over which his habitual wanderings extended,—for he was very migratory; and he had of late attached himself particularly to Walter Clint and Lawrence Daly. Spoiled Five's ono eye was a remarkably quick one, and had recognised immediately on their arrival that the new chums wore gentlemen, and Daly an Irishman ; and he made himself very useful in the first days of making acquaintance with their strange location and their wild neighbours. By this time it was generally un- derstood that they had the first claim on the services of Spoiled Five."
And perhaps the next best sketch of the kind in the book is the sketch of Deering, the rascally doctor of the diggings, who by but a few strokes is made into a thoroughly graphic picture. All the incidents, moreover, of the life at the diggings are living from first to last. Mrs. Hoey's imagination has evidently been more fully roused in this part of her story than in any of that at home aantil she reaches the crisis.
And yet Walter Clint's gentle and penniless wife Florence,—the only one of the principal characters with which we are fully satis- ted,—is a fine sketch,—reminding us not a little of the heroine in Falsely True, though there is much less severe trial to elicit the finer qualities of character in this case than in that ; Florence is what it is so difficult to draw, an almost fault- less character that is neither namby-pamby, nor pallid like a washed-out saint's. It is just the character to throw Miriam's into relief, and if Miriam had been painted with anything like equal success, the novel would have been more than a pleasant and lively, a remarkable one. But Miriam is half-drawn. The passion in her could not have been so completely latent as it is at the time of her marriage ; nor are we sure that the genuine pride which she so frequently shows in meeting the suspicions of her husband, is
-quite consistent with the meanness of her enterprise for securing to herself his wealth. Is there not too much of spirit, too much of even common self-esteem in Miriam, for this intrigue ? The poorer qualities of men quite as often interfere with the
-actual commission of crimes as the better qualities. We can hardly believe that the woman who would have left her husband from pure offended pride one day, would have forged a will for him the next in order to obtain an equivalent for the wifely duty which she had never paid him. Miriam is finely conceived, and in some senses is finely executed. She is very well delineated at the opening, when she receives her father's ill-natured refusal of her request to be allowed to stay at school another half-year. She is powerfully painted when she first discovers that the only effect of her crime has been not only to injure the only man she loves, but to render it simply impossible for her without the basest treachery to encourage his love. She is not amiss in some of her contests with her husband,—of whom, by the way, we want a more detailed picture. But on the whole, the impression left is of a certain hesitation in the conception of the author,—hesitation as to the degree of her heroine's love of ease and wealth, on the one -side, and of her capacity for love on the other. For what she -does, she ought to have more of the coarseness of true worldliness in her, something of a taint of a worse kind than the picture substantiates. For what she is, or seems to be, in other respects, in relation to her brother and his wife, she ought to have more sense of degradation in her loveless union than she seems to have ; Miriam is a powerful conception, and wanted much stronger drawing to work that conception out. But, though A Golden Sorrow has so much ability, and so much suggestion of power in it, that we cannot help being vexed that the idea has not been more fully embodied in the book, the novel is full of life and pleasant graphic qualities ; and though the heroine is let off far too easily for her evil marriage and its eviler moral fruits, the story has that pure and wholesome atmosphere in it which is, unfortunately, too often absent from our modern novele.
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