Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/91

1885.] less permits herself no episodical divagations, but proceeds to tell her tale simply, minutely, directly. Its pathos, if there is to be such, must be supplied by the reader out of the theme put before him. She paints life as it is, not merely the exterior of a small burgher or arid aristocratic existence, not only the characteristic conditions of Italian society, but the conditions that go on in the human soul, putting them forward in their true light, and showing how these often arise from mere chance circumstances. She is absolutely unprejudiced, and handles all manner of questions with judicial impartiality, but she is not on this account immoral. On the contrary, she shows plainly the contradictions and errors into which man falls when he leaves the straight paths of virtue. Hence her stories are better than many a sermon – are better than those moral tales in which the author wags his mentor finger as he paces by the side of the reader. Hers is the very essence of modern romance-writing, that overlooks nothing and indicates all, making all mental phases of equal importance, between whose lines every one can read out something analogous to his own life. She is one of the microscopic writers who put their instrument relentlessly over all things, and who would succeed in making the mental life of even an amœba interesting. Her powers of minute analysis, her vivisection of quivering human hearts, showed its full mastery in 'Cuore Infermo,' her first long novel. The groundwork of the tale is simple. It is the intimate history of a husband, Duke Marcello di Sangiorgio, and his wife Beatrice, or perhaps, more correctly speaking, only of his wife, since his life is merely that which she makes it. They both belong to the aristocracy of Naples, a society which, in its corruption, frivolity, and decadence is painted with a master-hand. Masterly, too, are the scenes introduced, such as a first night at the San Carlo, the ceremonials of a high-life wedding. The pair have been married by convenance, but it so happens that he is ardently in love with her, and this at once puts her on her guard. She is cold to him, keeps him at a distance, responds to his transports of love with such apparent indifference, that at last she drives him to seek distractions elsewhere, though he never for a moment wavers in his affection for her. She is an enigma to us, and on that account rather antipathetic, until we get the key to the mystery in a letter to her father, who has interceded with her on Marcello's behalf. Her mother, it seems, died of heart-complaint. She knows it, and is resolved that she, for her part, will not die of this disease.

"My father," she writes, "I do not wish to have the heart of my mother. I desire to live long. As I live, life pleases me. I shudder at the thought of death, of the grave, the darkness, the cold. I desire to live, I repeat. I assumed as a mere garb this appearance of coldness which every one thinks is indifference, and I have had so much need of it that it has become my character. So much the better. Call it egotism. I do not deny it. I will not make one step, one gesture, to abandon my safeguard; I do not understand sacrifices, abnegation. You yourself have said it; I have not the heart of my mother. If only it were true that there is no connection between the physical and the moral heart! If the germ of the disease is in me, I will not voluntarily give it the faculty to break out; I will not love, I will not be disquieted, anxious, jealous. I will not suffocate my griefs and my lamentations. If evil fortune has chosen that I should marry Marcello Sangiorgio, a man enamoured of