Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/333

Rh Hence he commands not that sympathy which might seem his due, considering the force expended by our authoress on the description of his wedding, and the means which brought it about; even her intensity fails to harrow one up to the proper degree, when she analyses his agonies of wounded pride and tenderness; of jealousy, rage, suspicion, all at arms within; such burning indignation, such withering distrust of all; he, the strong man, caught, foiled, betrayed, cheated by them all. In depicting Eleanor Wharncliffe, again, Mrs. Marsh set herself a difficult and delicate task, The story of Angela had given her an opportunity, as she somewhere remarks, to delineate a character tender, gentle, and softly susceptible, but with the addition of sublime spiritual strength: Eleanor, on the other hand, is to charm us by equal maidenly graces, but to lack that substratum without which the character in time of trial falls away. Eleanor is another Lucy Ashton; the delight of beholders, but the tossed and driven sport of circumstances—one who feels that yield she must to an irresistible force, "suffering the current of events to sweep her unresistingly where it will"—like the drowning wretch (to use the novelist's own similitude) who, having baffled with the waves, clinging desperately for life to the last plank, exhausted with his agonising efforts, at length submits to his fate, and closing his eyes, suffers the waters to overwhelm him. Bitterly she learns what that meaneth: to be weak is to be miserable. One courageous stroke would save her, when it comes to the worst; but she wants the energy for that one act. "She had been cowed when a child. Dire misfortune! She had lost the faculty of opposition even in the most just acts of self-defence. She had been so accustomed to be passive, that passive was all she could he in the greatest emergency." In sacrificing herself, her betrothed, and yet another and dearer, to parental intrigue, she has only to expect such peace as worldliness cannot give but can take away: the peace of helpless despair, the peace of those who suffer without resistance—"such peace as the poor Irish victim of starvation and fever experiences when he gives the matter up, and lies down under a hedge to die." But when she is irrevocably Randal's, she does not, "wasting in despair, die because" her sun of hope and joy is eclipsed, is gone down while it is yet day; but, in consonance with the moral principles of the writer, so often and characteristically enforced, she eschews "madness in white satin and Brussels lace," and, to the terrific disappointment of well-bred sentimentalists and well-seasoned novel-readers, she determines on devoting herself to perform a wife's duties—and lo! to the feverish trance of passion succeeds the sober glow of a sincere and dutiful attachment. The author foresees that many will think Eleanor a marvellous common-place or even unworthy creature, thus to accept her appointed portion, and that many will blame her, and justly, for letting that portion be forced upon her by the unreasonable violence of others. But Mrs. Marsh's sympathy attends this effort to realise a dutiful attachment; "for, let people say what they will, the dutifulness of an attachment is no ill ingredient in aid of its durability and strength." Compare this point of view, reader, with that which would have been adopted by a French romance-factor—a Paul de Kock or an Eugène Sue, and between the two doctrines choose ye! But with all the English sobriety and moral sense of Mrs. Marsh, she is careful and able to avoid a frequently inseparable dulness: not those practised