Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/331

Rh one that any embarrassment, any exigency, could render excusable? The woman's heart said, No! It told Emilia that the claims of the heart were the strongest, the most indefeasible of claims: that no duty could be stringent enough to justify the disregard of them. Yet she was hemmed in on every aide. "It is easy to talk of earning one's bread—the difficulty is, how, desolate and unfriended as she was, to begin. Every one with whom she was connected would have concurred to obstruct that path—every person and circumstance around her to impel her into the other." Her lover, "and he not even a declared lover, was far away; but had he been within reach, could she have called upon him for assistance? Impossible, under the circumstances of vague uncertainty with respect to his intentions in which it had pleased him to let her remain." Mrs. Marsh has been roundly rebuked for allowing Emilia to accept the unloved suitor, whose wealth is to save her father and herself from abject ruin. And it is apparently assumed by the censors who thus abuse the story, that the author converts this particular feature of it into doctrine, and applauds, and proposes for universal imitation, the decision to which her distracted heroine was finally impelled. Whereas, in fact, she does nothing of the kind. She explicitly avows herself consciously unable to determine whether Emilia was, under the stated pressure of events, right or wrong; emphatically adding, "But this I know, that a delicate sense of right, after all, revolts from such a sacrifice; because a secret consciousness seems to exclaim, that in this one relation of social life sentiment is all in all, and that no duty can be stringent enough to oblige us to that great blasphemy against nature, the conjugal relation without prevailing love; at least, without a heart disengaged, and at ease." Emilia would perhaps have been a "perfect woman," had she chosen the other path; but "perfect woman" is so distancing a contemplation to man compassed with infirmity, and implies so much of the procul este profani bearing, that we are, on the whole, thankful to take her with all her imperfections on her head, for better for worse, till a yet severer casuistry us do part: and so we plight her our troth.

All this metaphorically, of course: for here is her actual husband—a sharp-witted barrister, and horribly jealous withal—so that it is not likely we should be seriously figurative. Mr. Danby is capitally set forth, and constitutes a real "character"—slightly inconsistent and improbable, perchance—but so all real "characters" are. He is no exaggerated fugleman of a company of those chamber practitioners who become, by virtue of their profession, singular in their habits, suspicious in their tempers, and acute rather than broad in intellect. Yet he has deep feelings, quite unknown to himself, lying congealed within his breast. The "foundation" of all he does and thinks is so invariably just and right, that we long to sec his rectitude tempered with pity, his plain-speaking with gentleness, his austerity with mercy. The portraits of his mother and her sound-hearted serving-woman (the good Genius of the tale) are also cleverly done; and there are painfully truthful strokes about that of old Wyndham, alike in his selfish prosperity and in his imbecile dotage. Johnny Wilcox, too, is excellent—a very broth of a boy. Colonel Lenox is so disagreeable and egotistic, that we are thankful he did not become lord and master of Emilia. Lisa is too vulgar in her feather