Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/407

400 frequently wearisome habit of "sermonising” on their actions—of drawing heads of "practical improvement of the subject"—and of spinning out to undue lengths the exposition of their feelings, and the reflections to which they give rise. Indeed, we should like her tales all the better were they in two volumes instead of three, and were the two supplanted by one we should manifest no factious opposition. Her excellent heroes and heroines are all given to talk, and some of their cousins to twaddle; for, in her wish to be easy and natural in the conversation entrusted to them, she certainly doses us at times with rather watery draughts—harmless enough, no doubt, as far as we, the recipients, are concerned, but query, as regards herself. A kindred looseness and platitude attaches to the construction of her plots, and the elaboration of their progress. Story is not carefully studied, but used too palpably as a mere mechanical convenience for educing the dynamics of character. There is rather a surfeiting of scenes of heart-distraction—a sameness of sorrow—repetition of inward conflict, recurring and re-echoing itself like the woful monosyllables of Greek tragedy. But it is in the natural history of sorrow, in the sanctuary of grief, that the fair author best reveals her power; and it requires but the experience of art, and the self-restraint imposed by intelligent experience, to place her beside the highest of her sisterhood in the reality of pathetic description. Let her cultivate this, rather than the lively and the humorous. The gods have not made her "funny," nor will she make herself funny.

If those who have read the "integral series" of our author's novels were more "taken" by the "Ogilvies" than by either of its successors, the probable cause lies in the freshness which it enjoyed by virtue of prior publication; for, sooth to say, there is a certain sameness, not only of style and diction, but of invention and character, about the series, which palls somewhat on repetition, and leaves an impression of languor or satiety which attached not to the first-love. There may be greater force of writing and more finished skill of construction in the "Head of the Family" and in "Olive," but the force is but a new phase of the older vis, and the skill is but a variation of the former method; and so the "Ogilvies" retain a charm de facto, if not de jure, and press a claim upon the memory by the law, "qu'on revient toujours à ses premiers amours." There are few portraits in the later tales which exist not, in some stage of development or other, in the first. Our interest is mainly attracted towards Katharine Ogilvie, whose impulsive temperament, undisciplined susceptibility, prideful passion, and mental distresses, are described with high and well-sustained ability; it was right and proper (mark the atrocity to which the critical conscience is inured!) to kill Katharine at the close, and to make the coffin her bridal bed, and the shroud her wedding-garment, after a manner which would have delighted the "Old Mortality" taste of Webster or of T. L. Beddoes. Her cousin Eleanor is twice as good, and—as is common in actual life as well as fiction—only half as interesting; not that she is too good to be true or loveable; but, somehow, a spice of error, a soupçon of mischief and wrong-headedness, does materially add to the flavour of character analysis. Hugh Ogilvie is but a lay figure; but there is life in the death-scene of Sir James of that ilk, in whose worn-out brain the warp of long-ago memories crosses and grows tangled so strangely with the woof of to-day's dull facts. We like the story of young Leigh Pennythorne—wrought