NOVELS.
THE RESCUE.*
OF the younger writers of fiction who have emerged from the rack in the last few years, Miss Sedgwick has earned the grati- tude of her reviewers by the exhibition of a quality by no means invariably to be counted on in our modern literary Amazons. We know no better way of rendering our meaning clear than the line of the Greek epigram which says : solwx0; &rev xgetTCJI, Tirrit tamer, ob zarixer li,—beauty without charm only pleases, but does not hold fast. Now the women in Miss Sedgwick's novels for the most part have not only good looks, but are pre-eminent for their charm. And to portray a woman with charm it is imperatively neeessary that a writer should have distinction of style,—with whrokozeviable accomplishment p
Miss Sedgwick is fully equipped. n to this happy gift for the portrayal of rare, exquisite, and date natures must be added the courage which inspires her to day the modern con- vention, and instead of evolving an elaborate tissue of misery from materials rich in the promise of happiness, to invert the process, and cheat the reader of his expected feast of despair. Miss Sedgwick does not deal whole-heartedly in happy end- ings, it is true; her habitual mood is one of gracious melan- choly, and her humour has a plaintive accent. But one arrives in time at a sort of Indian summer, a state of calm and tempered sunshine, which is at any rate vastly preferable to the atmosphere of gratuitous gloom diffused by so many of our younger romancers.
We have spoken of Miss Sedgwick's courage in discarding the already discredited formula of the unhappy ending, and substituting therefor that of what may be called the unhappy, or at least the unpromising, beginning. Viewed in the light of hard matter of fact, nothing could be less suggestive of ultimate felicity than the fantastic "take off " of The Rescue. A young man of thirty falls in love with a photograph, taken nearly thirty years previously, of a beautiful girl now old enough to be his mother, and resolves to track her out in the ob- scurity to which she was condemned by an unhappy love match with a French drawing-master, who treated her shamefully and died. All that he can ascertain about her is that she is poor, deelassge, cast off by her relatives, and forty-seven. To render such a theme not only plausible but engrossing, to represent Eustace Damier's resolve not in the light of a grotesque infatuation but a chivalrous desire based on a sound instinct, to brighten the lot of a much-tried but heroic woman, and to develop the consequences of this resolve in a manner at once romantic yet natural,—this is no slight achievement, yet it must be certainly credited to Miss Sedgwick. Clara Vicaud—the original of the photograph— turns out to be all and more than the fancy of Eustace Damier painted her,—more tragically beautiful in feature and in soul, and even more in need than he had guessed of the companionship he was ready to offer. For the tragedy of her position is not, unhappily, confined to her past ; there is an ever-present anxiety in the person of her daughter,—beautiful, soulless, unscrupulous ; the inheri- tress of the worst side of her evil father's corrupt nature. Then the situation is further complicated by a double mis- understanding, mother and daughter alike wrongly believing Damier's affections to be engaged by the latter. And when this misunderstanding is cleared up, the daughter's dis- appointment turns to savage resentment and vindictiveness. Altogether, Miss Sedgwick must have been sorely tempted to solve the problem by wholesale resort to violent tragedy. The actual denouement is at once more logical and more artistic, but we will not discount the pleasure of the reader by indicating the solution here.
Though the story is inevitably somewhat sombre in colour, it is not wanting in strong situations and powerful appeals to the generous emotions. Of Miss Sedgwick's skill as a writer we must content ourselves with one specimen,—the passage which describes Eustace Damies's first sight of the photo- graph which altered the entire course of his life :—
"It was a faded earte-de-visile, and the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose, and without [38 • The Rescue. By Anne Douglas Sedgwick. London : John Murray. . ed.] modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing silk on the back of a high dedr, a hand hanging, half hidden against the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the late sixties—in the fashion of the Second French Empire; yet though her dress spoke of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face was not that of a French. woman. One's first impression—not too superficial, either—was of a finished little mondaina; but, finished, poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty ;—indeed, as Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch as in ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long. Her face was heart-shaped, the dark hair, parted over the forehead and drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the narrowness of the face below ; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions to an essential one : her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen, and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting face—stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more than two decades—stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped in this sensation—of a spell woven around him, of an outstretching from the past, of something mysterious and urgent—when Mrs. Mostyn came in."
Miss Sedgwick writes with distinction, but once or twice, in her avoidance of the obvious, she lays herself open to criti- cism. For instance, she speaks of the anxiety of Madame Vicaud's daughter to make a "luminous match," and repeats the phrase without being conscious of the disconcerting equivoque. In the art of nomenclature, again, she leaves something to be desired. "Lord Epsil," for an English Peer, is more suggestive of a French than an English novelist. Lastly, it may be urged that the hero, though capable on occasion of resolute action, is wanting in masculinity, could only have been drawn by a woman, and will not altogether appeal to the male reader. But with these deductions, we are free to congratulate Miss Sedgwick very cordially on the discretion and tenderness with which she has handled an unusually poignant domestic problem.
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