Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/408

Rh out as it is by touches of real pathos and shrewd observation; the balance of mind and matter, of intellectual culture and bodily sanity, being fatally disturbed by educational fallacy; the poor lad's experiences—now as diseased in mind, and now in body, first one overladen scale and then the other watching its fellow kick the beam—are narrated with touching and teaching effect. It is a tearful sketch, that of the dying boy lying on Wychnor's shoulder, during his last drive along the Chiswick lanes—his head growing momently heavier, his hands damp and rigid, his eyes closed, and his white check looking grey and sunken in the purple evening light—followed by the beautiful calm of dissolution in his mother's arms, after his "Mother, you will let me go?" in answering and questioning appeal to her wild, earnest, beseeching gaze; and, like the Apostles on the holy mount, we feel a chastened fear as we enter into the cloud which hides him from our sight, when there falls over that twilight-shadowed room a solemn silence, long and deep—in the midst of which the spirit passes away—and the passing is only certified when, as the moon rises, its pale spiritual light falls on the calm face of the dead boy, still pillowed on his mother's breast—and when she, if interrogated like one of old, "Is it well with the child?" can and will answer, "It is well." Such are the scenes in which the author excels; but probably this one, of Leigh Pennythorne's last hour, excels them all. Lynedon is carefully drawn, and plays in some passionate and stirring interviews; hut his masculine traits are hit off by a womanly hand.

Turn we to "Olive." The most clamorous stickler for a knowledge of the antecedents, all and sundry, of a novel's hero or heroine, must own himself content with a novel which, at page one of its three volumes, records hour the first of its heroine's life. We are introduced to Olive Rothesay at that incipient stage. hear the old nurse's benvenuto, "Puir wee lassie, ye nae a waesomo welcome to a waesome world!"—and our primary glimpse of the young lady reveals a small nameless concretion of humanity, as the author calls it, in colour and consistency strongly resembling the red earth whence was taken the father of all nations—no foreshadow of the coming life across the tiny purple, pinched-up, withered face, "which, as in all new-born children, bore such a ridiculous likeness to extreme old age"—no tone of the all-expressive human voice thrilling through the wail of her first utterance—no dawn of the beautiful human soul in her wide-open, meaningless eyes—in brief, a helpless lump of breathing flesh, faintly stirred by animal life, and scarce at all by that inner life which we call spirit. Is it commonplace to dwell on the details of babyhood? Well, to redeem Olive's infancy from that charge, she is represented as no glorious model of cradle loveliness—no peerless vision of immortality in long clothes—no radiant embodiment of an etherial essence, intent on a "boatie;" but just a "puir bit crippled lassie," with a crooked spine. We respect an authoress who can produce such a heroine, and who, in place of decking her with hyperbolic charms even in her swaddling-robes, strikes the sad key-note of her after-history by putting this moral into Nurse Elspie's mouth: "Aweel! He kens best wha's made the warld and a' that's in't; and maybe He will gie unto this puir wee thing a meek spirit to bear ill-luck. Ane must wark, anither suffer. As the minister says, 'It'll a' come richt at last.'" And our vexation at the frivolous young mother's repugnance to her deformed child is softened by our foresight of the