Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/330

316 and romantic sympathy. Hic plurimus ignis semper, And so glowing and bright is the flame of love which burns perennially on her altar, that the coldest bystander must needs undergo a partial thaw, and become persuaded that he too is an adept in the mysteries of the belle passion, and plume himself on his entire capacity to say with the Virgilian shepherd, Nunc scio quid sit amor.

To pass, in review, even by way of hurried allusion, the complete set of Mrs. Marsh's works of fiction, is a notion foo trying for either our modesty or memory. Could she count them up herself, without a few dozen breaks and stoppages? Let her meditate that query, before she taxes us with heedless neglect. Meanwhile, out of the serried phalanx before our mind's eye, we select one or two for more particular observation. And first, the tale which is not uncommonly pronounced her chef-d'œuvre, "Emilia Wyndham."

The heroine is one whose early ambition it is to be heroic. Her youthful thoughts turn, as her mother interprets them, on deeds of high courage, of strenuous effort, of vanquished difficulty, of victory achieved—"of dragons and monsters of the wilderness—of Una and her lion—of Clarinda and her lance—or rather of Joan of Arc and a country saved." Her aspiration is to suffer, to die, for those she loves—for their sakes she finds a charm in privations, pain, danger. "Let me be like that charming Lady Harriet Aeland, in the American war. Let me go with my husband to the battle, and nurse him in his tent, and follow him in a boat, and under the fire of ten thousand muskets, to the log-hut in the woods, among the wildest Indians." And poor (yet why poor?) Emilia's wish is granted, although she knows not what she asks. Scope for heroism is amply provided in her after lot, but not in such guise as had been the subject of her craving. And the doctrine of this book is—as expounded in its opening, and developed in its every chapter—that to those who consider rightly, heroism is a far nobler thing now, when it is no longer a sound to mark the glowing excitement, the lofty enthusiasm, which fights and struggles in the brilliant mid-day, gilded by the sun, all warm and genial; but the slow, silent, death-struggle of the soul in solitude, darkness, and obscurity, against the heavy, wearying, every-day evils of every-day actual life; sacrifices of the hourly and the small, but the sum of which is existence —not offered in the fervour of the moment, but given, as it were, by inches; the heroic devotion to others, and those others not even worthy; far from grateful, too often resentful: combining patience, perseverance, endurance, gentleness, and disinterestedness; such, as defined by Emilia's mother, is the heroism of our day. And such is the predestined test of Emilia's claim to be a heroine. And heroically she proves her "great right" to be so. One circumstance, indeed, there is in the disposition of the story, which materially abates from the approbation its general character is calculated to elicit; and that is, the question as to how far Emilia was justified in marrying the man she did not, could not love, and ignoring the existence, and the all but declared attachment of the man she did. It is a case for the casuists to decide. Could it be right? asks the novelist herself: was this