INNOCENT.*
THIS is a story of considerable originality and much power, even though we are disposed to question the naturalness of the central figure of the piece ;—we say 'question,' rather than dispute,' because the standard of fact by which alone we can verify and judge so exceptional a figure as that of Innocent, is by no means acces- sible to most of us, and Mrs. Oliphant is so accurate an observer and so careful a painter of human character, that no critic can feel otherwise than distrustful of himself when he has to weigh his own estimate of the naturalness of any type against her deliberate judgment. Sometimes even the least confident critic may see the clearest evidence of mere haste or inconsistency in one of the surest and most accurate of painters ; but where that is not the case,—and it can hardly be so where the whole effort of the artist has been spent upon a figure placed at the very focus of the picture, —a critic will not be wise who adheres to those traditional as- sumptions of omniscience which have done so much to lower the character of his class, and takes no account of the deliberate judgment of an author who must be in many respects a better informed and more specifically cultured student of the subject than himself. Nor can any reader of this novel fail to be impressed —whatever his doubts as to the naturalness of the central figure— by the truthful and vivid painting of the group in which Innocent's is the most remarkable and unfamiliar character. If we are to. argue from the ability with which figures perfectly moulded on all the lines of our experience, and yet individually new to us, are drawn, to the presumption that a conception of a very rare type is, in spite of its wide deviations from the commoner lessons of experience, nevertheless justified by facts beyond the range of ordinary observation, Mrs. Oliphant would unquestionably be entitled to a very long delay of judgment before any ordinary judge could pass sentence on the impossibility of Innocent. For nothing can be better in its way than the drawing of the Eastwood family, all the chief characters in which are at once perfectly familiar and quite new, perfectly familiar in tone, quite new in their individual forms. It is hard to conceive anything more lifelike than Mrs. Eastwood, the widowed mother, with her easy- going ways, her soft motherly pride in her children, her pleasurable sense of modest heroism in having laid down her carriage to pay her eldest son's debts, her multitude of counsellors whom she freely consults but whose advice, except on matters technical, like the law, she seldom follows, her bitter self-reproaches for having found it rather natural and easy than otherwise to lose sight of her niece after her sister's death,—the husband being a man she had par- ticularly disliked, —her many simple subtleties in difficulty, and her- pathetic embarrassments under the accusations which her poor niece brings upon herself and her family. A pleasanter picture of a sensible, affectionate mother, not very clever, and not at all stupid, when exposed to a strain too severe for her powers of judgment, it would be quite impossible to conceive. And what a delicate natural picture is her daughter Nally, with her keener wit and deeper feeling, and yet a softness and sweetness finer even than her mother's! True, Mrs. Oliphant is tempted now and then to. sentimentalize a little over Nelly, to the partial injury, we think, of her effects, especially at the time when Nelly breaks off her engagement to her younger and less worthy lover. But there is a fair excuse even for an authoress in getting sentimental over Nelly. Mrs. Oliphant has never drawn a more charming picture. It has the airiness and softness of the most delicate of Sir Joshua Reynold's portraits of womanly youth and grace, and the story of her gradual alienation from her first lover is painted with such skill, that we only admire Nelly the more for a change of heart, which is not usually loveable in young ladies. Then, again, nothing can be much more vigorous than the drawing of the selfish eldest son, with his fever-fits of dissipation, his ordinary Charles the First air of melancholy refinement, his glowering eyes when the intoxication of dissipation is upon him, his feeling that in getting better after an illness brought on by his own dissipation "he is doing something for which all his friends are justly grateful. to him," and his frenzy of mingled passion and disgust for the low- born beauty who so completely captivates his senses. The Eastwood boys, too, are clever sketches, and Winks, the terrier, is a master- piece. We have seldom taken leave of any character in a novel with more regret and admiration than we feel for Winks on his last appearance • Innocent: a Tale of Modern Life. By Mrs. Oliphant. 3 vols. London: Sampson Low. 1873. "They were a very merry party, notwithstanding that the final examination was hanging over Dick's head, and the parting which must follow. Winks, for his part, after two or throe hours of it, got bored with the levity of the conversation, and rustled about so, that he was put out of the carriage to run, for the good of his health. He went along for a mile too, pleased enough, gathering dust in clouds about him. But when he intimated a desire to be taken in, the boys, hard- hearted beings, laughed in the face of Winks. A run will do you good, old fellow,' said Dick, with cruel satisfaction. A short time afterwards, I am sorry to say, a dreadful accident, nature unknown, happened to Winks. He uttered a heart-rending shriek, and appeared imme- diately after making his way towards the carriage, holding up one feathery paw in demonstrative suffering. The anxious party stopped immediately, and Winks made his way to them, laboriously limping and uttering plaintive cries. But when, all a-dust as he was, this hypocrite was lifted into the carriage, holding up the injured member, and was softly laid upon the softest cushion to have it examined, words fail me to express the sardonic grin with which he showed his milk- white teeth. There was no more the matter with the little villain's paw, my gentle reader, than with yours or mine."
But we cannot satisfy ourselves that Mrs. Oliphant has succeeded in painting her central and unique character in self-consistent or natural colours, fully as we recognise the beauty of many elements
in the conception. Innocent is meant to be a thoroughly neglected girl, in whom the life of sympathy and imagination, and of in- telligence so far as it depends on sympathy and imagination, dawns even later and more feebly than the life of mere memory and the power of intellectual acquisition itself. She is supposed to be tolerably familiar with two languages before she has the remotest insight into the ordinary texture of human interests, hopes, and fears ; she seems indeed to acquire words, and such a knowledge of
syntax as goes with the knowledge of words, before she has the most elementary knowledge of the inward life which gives rise to
the need for speech. We are puzzled that, being so near half- witted in most things, she is not much nearer it in the things which remain. It seems almost as if the authoress, anxious to preserve the beauty and attractiveness of the picture, bad endowed
Innocent with qualities which, considering her moral helplessness, she could not have had, just to save the character from the ignominy of imbecility. Thus Mrs. Oliphant represents her as fully under- standing and appreciating the request of Sir Alexis Longneville that
if ever the time should come when she wishes for another home, she would think of him, and so retaining it in her memory that she acts upon it ; she is represented as understanding fully that this appeal to Sir Alexis involves her becoming his wife ; and yet she is painted as knowing so little, that she was not sure that Sir Alexis would not put right her fatal mistake in giving the woman
she had disliked too large an opiate in her hurry and confusion, by " bringing her back to life, perhaps," and by "making the dream
come to an end." We must say that it is very difficult for us to conceive so much helplessness of mind combined with so much capacity. We could understand Innocent if she were really con- sistently painted as half-witted, with nothing but instincts as to persons to guide her, even though a little dawning of intelligence were represented as gradually coming upon her under favourable influences of the affections. But it is not easy to conceive so much that is like other people,—for instance, a mastery of two languages, and at least as much power to enter into the conventions of life as is requisite to enable her to live with other people without offending grossly against them,—combined with so complete an in- ability to divine ordinary motives and understand ordinary hopes. We doubt whether Mrs. Oliphant has made this out even to her own satisfaction. In an early scene, where Innocent expresses the pre- ference—derived from her Italian habits—which she feels for the cold, bare schoolroom at the top of the house, because it had more space, more view, and more air in it than the comfortable little warm room made gay and pretty especially for her by Mrs. Eastwood's and Nelly's kindness, and Nelly is very naturally offended and angry, our author analyses thus Innocent's wondering inability to understand how she had given offence :—
" Scolding was in her experience a phenomenon by itself, not attached by way of cause and effect to any other phenomena. Many times in her life she had been scolded ; but very seldom could she have told why. In this present case the cause was one entirely beyond her moral grasp. If she had broken a china tea cup, or torn a dress, these would have been tangible causes of displeasure, which her mind could have taken in; but this was altogether mysterious. Perhaps it was partially owing to the strange way in which she had been brought up, and the absence of natural love in her early life, that Innocent's entire mental constitution was of so peculiar a kind. She had no conscious- ness of the home affeetions, no need of them, no perception of their sweetness. Whether there might not be in her the capacity for a great love was yet unproved ; but she had no affections. Such a condition of nature is not so rice, perhaps, as we think. There are both men and women who can love with passion the lover or the mistress, the hus- band or the wife ; but who remain through all the warmth of that one possibility cold as death to all other affections. Tho decorous guise of ordinary life prevents such natures from making themselves fully visible in many cases. But Innocent was like a savage ; she was una- .ware of the necessity of those gentle pretences and veils of apparent feeling which hold civilised life together. Therefore she sinned openly, and, so to speak, innocently, against the softer natural sentiments which are general to humanity, yet did not exist in her own bosom. She knew nothing about them, and she had never been taught to feign a virtue which she did not possess."
But this complete ignorance of the preference people have for being liked, and for having their kindness returned, would imply surely a very much greater intellectual backwardness than is attri- buted to Innocent. What child's book, even, could she have read in any language without coming on assumptions of this kind as at the very basis of the simplest stories? And how could she have learned a language different from the one in which she was brought up, without at least intellectual energy enough to under- stand children's books ? It is no inconsiderable intellectual effort to master a second language as Innocent had apparently mastered English ; and yet she is represented as so absolutely passive-minded, that the simplest ideas have no meaning for her. When Nelly begins drawing a fancy picture of her cousin's home, Innocent asks her how she knows when anything is going to happen, to which Nelly replies that she does not know, she imagines, and Innocent exclaims "Imagine!" without attaching any idea to it. Now, we do not say that a child might not pick up the most necessary phrases of its own language without any of that con- scious mastery of the meaning of words which is implied in entering into the meaning of such a word as "imagine ;" but we do say that it is hardly possible for a child to have mastered the equivalents in another language of the commonest words in her own, without having encountered a great many more reflective problems than poor Innocent is ever given credit for. It seems to us impossible that Innocent should at once have known all she did in this way, and yet have fancied that Sir Alexis was perhaps going to bring Amanda back to life for her. In spite of the many beauties of the picture of Innocent, we feel almost certain that there are intrinsic inconsistencies in the picture, and especially that such a girl as she is de- scribed, would have seemed far more of a mere imbecile, would have had far less of the conventional appearance of other girls, than she had. Still, if you can get over the intellectual difficulties of the conception, it is undeniable that the growth of affection and of sensitiveness in Innocent is drawn with great power and beauty. The trial scene, and that which follows, when Innocent first awakens to the happiness of her aunt's and cousins' love, are very beautiful, and the whole book, even where it does not satisfy our intellect, has the interest of a very subtle and often very powerful study. There are few, indeed, of Mrs. Oliphant's many very clever novels that give so high an idea of the scope of her imagination.
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