Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/96

90 light-hearted, honest girl, who is forced by poverty and her motherless position to travel alone from town to town to fulfil her engagements in various provincial theatres. It is the point of the story that Fulvia, by nature romantic, is betrothed to an upright, steady, but absolutely matter-of-fact German, who has not allowed this tendency any scope. Consequently, she makes to herself imaginary woes when we first encounter her, woes that cause her to think she is tied irrevocably to an unsympathetic, though worthy soul, and which make her long to know warmer feelings. How she finds the lyric enthusiasms of another less true than her "German tin soldier's" mutism, how she returns to the love she had lightly and idly thrown aside, is related with a fineness of perception that makes us regret the more that the dénouement is awkward and strained, marring a book otherwise excellent and out of the common run both in matter and manner.

Unquestionably the finest, best worked out and ablest of the author's works is the story that treats with pathos, delicacy, and tenderness of the rise and ultimate extinction of a youthful ideal, and the powerful tale of the North Italian rice-fields, in which the Marchesa Colombi has for the first time left the burgher class to write of the peasants whose life she clearly knows well, and with whose sorrows she manifests a virile sympathy. Indeed both these books are more vigorous than their predecessors. The scenes of both are laid in the same portion of Piedmont, the province of Novara; and in the former case we have an excellent series of pictures of the country life led by the small landed proprietors of Northern Italy, lives rather empty and monotonous, that run in a fixed groove out of which escape is only possible by a move into the city – a move many of these persons can rarely afford to make. In Italy there is not the same constant intercourse between town and country dwellers that there is with us, and hence the teeming rich life of the one rarely overflows into the more placid course of the other. The hero of 'The Sunset of an Ideal' is Giovanni Berti, only child of the village doctor, – an ignorant plethoric man, useless as a physician, valued as a boon companion by the notabilities of the neighbourhood. For his sake they club together to educate the boy, who is greatly neglected by his father, and in especial he is noticed by Signor Pedrotti, the village nabob, who invites him to his table during the holidays, on which occasion the lad becomes acquainted with, and enamoured of, the nabob's only daughter. The girl returns his affection, and in due course Giovanni asks the father's consent to their union – a consent refused with ignominy to the poor landless youth who has been educated by his bounty. The insulting terms in which the refusal is couched, Giovanni's assurance that Rachel will be true to him, for he knows her serious loyal nature, call forth all the manly resistance in his character. He sets out for Milan, resolved to make name and fame for himself, so that the father may be proud at last to call him son. The law is the career in which he has embarked, and for many years it is very uphill work, but the image of Rachel is ever before his eyes to comfort and uphold him. The narrative of his struggles and privations is told with that admixture of pathos and gaiety which marks true humour,