LOST FOR LOVE.*
Miss BRADDON'S latest novel is in her second manner, and adapted to her second public, the class of readers for whose favour she has entered into a brisk, but vain competition with Mrs. Henry Wood. We all remember her first, or blue-eyed- murderess manner, when her women were fascinating fiends, and her men were ennuyes, with a tendency to suicide ; when she was great in upholstery, knowing in horse-flesh, cunning in coulisses, and before she developed her present knowledge of classical literature, European languages, Indian history, the fine arts, medical science, and Holy Scripture. We prefer her first manner ; it was not dull; her golden-haired ghouls were daubs, but they were not bores ; and her preposterous, desultory banisters and pompous Cornishmen—why do novelists love to nicker pride and pomposity in Cornwall?—were preferable to her profound philosophers, her eminent artists, and her grave, inscrutable physicians, whom she converts from free thinking, and an evil tendency to stay away from church, by a process so uniform, that we look for saving grace in her later as confidently as we looked for bigamy in her former novels. The race-course, the music-hall, the behind-the-scenes, the lodging-house life,. tawdry as were the bits of finery with which she contrasted them, were preferable to her dreadfully genteel style, her model young ladies, and her inevitable colonist, with a simple mind, a large fortune, an only daughter, and disease of the heart, that charmingly convenient complaint which has superseded consump- tion, of which the novelists of a past generation, who had to- kill their people not suddenly, but sweetly, made lavish use.. In short, she was more readable before she removed from Bohemia, and pitted herself against the leading manufac- turer of novels for readers of the lower middle class, whether " Church " or " Chapel" in their religious principles. She has. no chance in the struggle ; she cannot touch her veteran rival in gorgeous common-place, the nice adjustment of murder and mo- rality, servants'-hall episodes, the romance of the apothecary and the greengrocer, funeral etiquette and expenses, the gossip of the back-shop, and pulpit eloquence. Miss Braddon lacks the direct, bold, entirely confident Philistinism of Mrs. Henry Wood, and she cannot boast of the undeviating devotion of that lady to the accredited literary morality of this kind of fiction. The Cartons was a very old story before Bulwer's reformation was heartily believed in, and many good people looked askant at My Novel, so long as Alice or the Mysteries was remembered. The three or four novels which Miss Braddon has written since she finally adopted, after a brief transition-stage, her present lecture-room- plus-tabernacle manner, are heavily handicapped by the evil repute (among her new clients) of Lady Audley and Aurora Floyd. No such clouds obscure the lambent lustre of Mrs. Henry Wood's fame.. She is securely enthroned in the affections of her readers, in virtue of an unsullied career. Her worst enemies can never accuse her of an attempt to soar for a subject above the beneficent in- stitutions of her native land. The modest coroner's inquest, the homely justice-room, the unassuming smugglers' cave, are full of inspiration for her ; and she is thoroughly consistent. She resorts to no garnishes for her plain English fare, but serves up murders and mutton, suicides and rice-pudding, stolen cheques and thick bread-and-butter; and as she never fails to say an emphatic grace over each heavy meal, she satisfies alike the appetite, the taste, and the conscience of her readers.
Miss Braddon says grace, too, but she admits " kickshaws."- The people who read her novels in her second manner are people who not only do not like French verses, bits of German philo- sophy, scraps of art criticism, elaborate metaphors drawn from musical science, classical allusions and mythological illustrations used with as indiscriminate a profusion as pepper shaken out of a full castor with the perforated top off, but who also regard them with suspicion, not to be appeased-by any amount of Bible-texts per contra. She is hampered by the self-imposed • Lost for Love. A Novel By th Author of "Lady Andlefa Secret." London Chstto and Windup. restrictions of her new method; she is beset with the remnants of the former superstition ; she tries for consistency ; she endeavours to combine solidity and piety with learned elegance. The result is that her latest novel, Lost for Love, is a hetero- geneous performance, which may be aptly compared to the con- tents of the old clothes-shop in which a portion of its scene is laid, where the rich and lovely heroine finds a grandmother nicely calculated to soothe the democratic breast, and an uncle, formerly of publichouse and petty-larcenous propensities, whose conversion to a clear perception of the charms of labour and the beauty of holiness reads like a lost page from a report of " The Brick-Lane Branch." There is nothing new in the book, just as there is -nothing new in Mrs. Gurner's wardrobe-shop,' and the contents are as incongruous, though, if we had time and space, we could fit several of the old suits to former wearers who walked the now forsaken paths of Miss Braddon's earlier predilection. The velvet jacket of Walter Leyburne, and the exquisite toilette of Loo Garner—an elegant, gifted, brilliant creature, the exact kind of girl whom we recognise immediately as the daughter of a person of Jared Gurner's description, and the result of the social training of a wardrobe-shop—have been worn threadbare by a long sue- .cession of Apollo-like young artists and their lady-loves, but they are doubtless destined to serve many another turn.
Barristers belonged to Miss Braddon's first manner. They came handy for plots in which somebody was always breaking or evading the law. Physicians, as associated with the domesticities, as typically decorous, and as favourites with the British house- holder, belong to her second. In Mrs. Henry Wood's novels, doctors come next to bankers in number and excellence, but she kills them off in epidemics with much less scruple ; she cannot bear to kill a rich man, even by diphtheria. Miss Braddon pro- duces several variations of this prototype ; her latest doctor is a great creature, and she does not kill, but converts him, turning him from the evil of his exclusively scientific ways by the soft influence of Flora Chamney, who learns from him to enjoy Horace and Dante in the original Latin and Italian, in a course of instruction imparted on summer evenings at a villa on the Thames.
In this " unlettered girl, unschooled, unpractised," the only child of the rich colonist with a heart-complaint, we perceive in- dications of a third manner, which may win for Miss Braddon a higher position among novelists than she has hitherto attained, but which would need for its cultivation the unsparing suppres- sion of most of her present characteristics. She has abjured the sensational school of her first manner, and now, if the promise of Flora Chamney is to be fulfilled, she must abandon the little bits of moralising, the pious episodes, the Bible-texts, with which she dexterously conciliates the other side, when she has strayed into a dangerous proximity to former themes, and which form the most unpleasant features of her second. She has never drawn so good, true, and loveable a girl as Flora Chamney, and if she had only abstained from what we are forced to call by the hateful name of cant, and had left out the classical and artistic jargon by which the readers for whom she writes at present may be dazzled, but which they will inevitably skip, this would have been an admirable study of the quiet sort. There is a curious inconsistency between the author's treatment of her heroine's character, and her develop- ment of that of Flora's husband, Dr. 011ivant. The grave physician is introduced in the usual style,—house in Wimpole Street, old mahogany furniture, old-fashioned mother, devoted to the doctor and to the furniture ; deeply scientific mind, secluded habits, and sceptical views of religion. Cuthbert 011ivant is intended to be pre-eminently a " fine" character, lofty-minded, unselfish, un- impulsive, devoted to his profession, a deep student of it, and a man of strong, but gentle nature. The rich colonist, Mark Chamney, is his old friend, and on their first meeting after many years, in the respective characters of doctor and patient, he discovers that Chamney has heart-disease. His next discovery is his old friend's charming daughter, with whom he, most pro- perly, falls in love, notwithstanding the great disparity of age between Flora and himself. The velvet-coated artist, Walter Leyburne,—one of the poorest creatures who ever dabbled in water-colours—comes in the way ; Flora loves him, and he is the doctor's rock ahead. The story is readable enough, with the im- possible beauty of the wardrobe-shop in the back-ground, and Leyburne wavering between his stronger feeling for her, and his weaker feeling for the entirely eligible Flora, his affianced bride, until the exigencies of the second volume demand that Dr. 011ivant and Leyburne shall meet and quarrel at the edge of a cliff over- hanging the sea, and engage in a pugilistic encounter. Then the doctor, " calling science to his aid," regardless of the locality, "planted a blow on his antagonist's temple, which sent Walter reeling backwards, helpless and unconscious," right over the cliff. Under these circumstances, what does the doctor, "the man of iron nerve" (with all the mental and moral attributes quoted above), do ? Leyburne is " dead, of course," he not unnaturally thinks, and prepares to descend to the beach. Half-way down, 011i- vant meets Jared Gurner, Flora's unknown uncle of the wardrobe- shop (he is at this period unconverted), who tells him Leyburne is dead, and that he (Gurner) saw the " murder." The great physician accepts the scamp's assurance, is satisfied to let the corpse be borne out by the tide uninspected ; the man of the world, of cool judgment and iron nerve, instantly submits to chantage by Gurner (afterwards settled at a fixed salary of £300 a year) ; the fine-minded, high-souled student strolls home, after the event, in a frame of mind thus described :- "' At such an hour as this [evening] one would think that nature meant all men to be good,' he mused, but then nature belies herself as often as mankind. Yonder restful sea will have her fit of wickedness, —savage winds will come tearing over those peaceful hills ; Nature will indulge her bad passions just like the weakest of us.' The doctor looked back along the summer waves. Somewhere under that blue water Walter Leyburne was swaying gently to and fro, entangled among seaweeds, perhaps, and with cold anemones cleaving to his hair, lullabied as gently by that soft murmur of ocean as ever his mother
rocked him in her arms 'Better than to be stretched in a narrow coffin, and shut up in a room that all living things avoid,' thought the doctor."
Such disinterested contemplation, from the picturesque and senti- mental point of view, of the rival whom he has just accidentally killed, as he believes, ought to prepare the reader for anything Dr. 011ivant may subsequently do, in his combined capacities of friend, lover, and physician. It is, however, a little surprising to find him keeping the accident secret, sympathising with Chamney and Flora in their anxiety about the missing man (who considerately suppresses himself when he revives, in order that he may jilt Flora and marry Miss Gurner, her unconscious cousin), actively aiding in a vain search, and calmly condemning the girl whom he loves, and his friend and patient (with a heart-disease) to the worst of all tortures,—that of suspense. The subsequent marriage, the discovery, the estrangement, the reappearance of Walter Leyburne, the reconciliation, and Dr. 011ivant's conversion to Low-Churchgoing, are well told, and Flora never loses her attraction ; but no serious approval of Lost for Love is possible, in the case of such perverse inconsistency between the attributes with which the leading personage is invested, and his conduct throughout the circumstances in which he plays the principal part.
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