Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/821

1868.] them), you feel the whole guilt must, of necessity, belong to you, not them; which, for the sake of their consciences, is charming.

An accident, or Archie's uncompromising honesty, had saved them both; and already Gerald's imagination was moved by the thought of his own generosity; but the thought, too, that Archie would be always Archie—fair, pure, unsullied—in his recollection. Ten minutes ago, with the girl's blue eyes upraised to his, he had desired, as strongly as he ever desired anything in his life, to take her with him for that drive through London. The picturesqueness of the situation fired his fancy! Driving with this little half-foreign girl, in her sailor's hat and white dress, along the streets of London in a hansom, listening to her childish talk about all she saw; holding her hand furtively in his, probably; and watching the changed look on her face when he began to tell her at last how much he cared for her. No; at this point the picturesque situation became commonplace, and he had not fully thought it out. Only, if a darkened life, if ruin, if despair, had chanced to ensue in after times, Gerald would have looked back, and firmly believed, and made every one else believe with him, that he meant no wrong! Circumstances, picturesque circumstances, had been too strong for him—just that. —pp. 109, 110.

Later in the development of her story, Mrs. Edwards shows us the working of the sentiment of honor in Gerald, and of conscience in Archie. It was honor or it was conscience in each, and without conscience or honor, we can have no protection from baseness and craftiness.

It remains for me to speak of the absence of exaggeration, of false sentiment of affectation in Mrs. Edwards's story. She writes with point, with strength, with sincerity. No timid paragraphs, no thought overloaded with words, mar her work. She has not the weakness of descriptive writers, and she uses nature as a background, not as a theme. We have writers who make the mistake of writing stories in order to put into print vague and amazing descriptions of nature; their characters dwindle, and they weary the reader with commonplace or unnatural description of what they fancy rather than of what they have seen. The masters who know how to use nature (I mean landscape backgrounds for their figures) are few in number and have great names. Mrs. Edwards is true, is expressive, but not powerful in her management of the milieu of her dramatic personages. She must be content to rely upon her studies of character for her place among novelists. Her studies are admirable; her style is sharp, clear, vivid; and the soil of her life, if not rich, is varied, and capable of producing novel and interesting specimens of human nature.

— is incompressible, and so, unfortunately, are ideas, after they have been clothed in words and no time remains in which to provide them with scantier covering. Therefore, the article in the last number of, upon William Blake, which was based upon Mr. Swinburne's book about the painter-poet, was, for lack of space in which to print it entire, curtailed of the closing passage, which dealt with Mr. Swinburne's own remarkable, but far from thoroughly-admirable performance. We give it here, as in old days the banquet or dessert used to be given in another room and a little while after the body of the feast

It only remains for us to notice the manner in which Mr. Swinburne has performed his task, which has been for some years under his eye and hand. In calling it a critical rhapsody, we have described it in brief to the best of our ability. It is a very indiscriminating and a very high-strung performance. It is full of reckless assertion and distempered eulogy, uttered with the extreme of verbal contortion, although often with real verbal power. In his search after novelty of epithet and striking contrast, he speaks of "the solid grace and glad gravity appropriate to children;" again of "the glorious violence of reunion between soul and body, meeting with fierce embraces, with glad agony and rage of delight;" and again, tempted by a kind of alliterative madness, of "such a fiery outbreak of spring, such an insurrection of fierce floral life and radiant riot of childish power and pleasure." Even the best passages of his work are marred by our unavoidable and ever-present consciousness of the labor with which he works himself up to his high pitch, and the pains with which he sets up his antitheses and picks out his shining words. There is no restraint upon his epithets, no limit to his praise. He mounts the highest rhetorical elevation he can pile up, and there screams out his adoration of this evangelist, prophet and