Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/335

Rh the dreary hills, now up, now down, and ever and anon lost amid the boggy valleys, with their pools of black stagnant water, their tiny forests of bog myrtle, their tufts of coarse reeds, and the white cotton-grass waving its snowy head mournfully up and down in the chill whistling wind.

And now for a scamper across the rest of Mrs. Marsh's broad domains of romance, It was in 1834 that the "Two Old Men" opened their budget, giving us, as their opening tales, "The Deformed," and "The Admiral's Daughter." The former was spoiled by an exaggerated finale, which was not the last or least of its author’s misdoings in that line; for she is only too ready to employ a coup de théâtre when it will give a lift, or unnatural bound, rather, to a halting narrative. The latter tale is painfully touching, and wrought out with a remarkable blending of natural passion and gradual art; joyous radiance beams so cheerily about Inez Thornhaugh—black, blank, blasting misery makes such a wretch of Inez Vivian—that the contrast presents one of the most moving and memorable sights in modern fiction. A second series of these tales comprised "A Country Vicarage," in which a similar but far inferior contrast is drawn between the simplicity of maidenly life in pastoral innocence and the fierce distractions of feverish worldly existence—and a French sketch, called "Love and Duty," which reads (as, indeed, many of Mrs, Marsh's stories do) like a translation from some lively but pensive Gallic raconteur. Neither of these stories of the "Woods and Fields," as they were somewhat gratuitously entitled, showed an advance upon the earlier series, though both were told with freshness, and that intensity which is so generally characteristic of their narrator. And a disposition arose among some critical arbiters to consider her power as having culminated and exhausted itself in the tragedy of "The Admiral’s Daughter." But the production of "Mount Sorel"—the notable first-fruits of a notable series in periodical literature—silenced the ominous notes from the "rooky wood" of criticism, and evidenced in palpable distinctness the sustained skill and arousing energy of the novelist. True, it was fuller than its "forbears" of stylish affectations, and grievously afflicted sedate people of methodical habit, and classical taste by the disjecta membra it proffered as hale sentences, and the prodigality of its outlay in hyphens, asterisks, and marks of admiration, But then it charmed all by the portraits of Edmund Lovel, though he is not, technically, the hero, and Clarice de Vere, one of those sweet young creatures whom Mrs. Marsh is so apt to plunge into anguish "full fathom five," on the score of filial duty in its conflict with personal attachment. Hardly less interest belongs to the elder actors in the drama—one or two of whom are realised with excellent effect. "The Previsions of Lady Evelyn" contains some of its author's very best and very worst writing; there are sections in it of surpassing merit—pictures whereon the memory lingers with a sense of fascination—while chapters intervene of dull, almost irrelevant and incoherent garrulity, seemingly penned in the heedless haste which produces languid reading in proportion to its own disorderly speed. There is more equable and condensed vigour in "Father Darcy"—a historical romance which "does execution," of the Kentish-fire sort, among the apostles of Jesuitism, and approves the romancer a shrewd polemic as well as an eager Protestant. In fact, she is ultra-Protestant; and some of the descriptions, discussions, and scenes in