A WOMAN'S TRIUMPH.*
Tuts is one of the class of novels that are sufficiently good to make us think they ought to have been a great deal better. Lady Hardy is, of course, no novice in the work of novel-writing, having long ago honourably won her spurs, if we may apply such a metaphor to a lady. She writes with a good deal of intensity and sometimes with real power. She has the gift of weaving a story that will enchain the reader's attention, and her latest is not be- bind her earlier works in that respect. The ordinary reader who begins A Woman's Triumph unsuspectingly, intending to lay it aside and come to it again, will find it difficult, except at a cost of resolution probably unusual with him, to tear him or herself away from it, and will be pressed with anxiety as to the fate of the heroine to return to it. So that in one respect there can be no doubt A Woman's Triumph is a successful novel. There are also others in which the book deserves commendation. The general level of the writing is fairly good, and in some of the scenes there is the manifestation of real power. We know few things of its 'kind in recent novels more impressive than the description of the interview between Jasper Brantynham and Philippa towards the -close of the third volume. It is full of pathos and passion, the expression of which, though occasionally a little stagy, is yet pro- foundly affecting.
Nevertheless, A Woman's Triumph is a novel that we cannot but regret its author has written. If a novel should be anything more than a means of providing amusement, and enabling one to wile away a few hours agreeably, this one is a mistake. It is a mistake as to its plot, it is a mistake as to its characters, it is a mistake as to its morality. The fact that it offers us an interest- ing story and some scenes of unusual intensity and descriptive power only heightens the regret that the capacity thus shown .should not be allied to higher reasoning powers and a better- balanced judgment. The whole plot is crude, not in its develop- ment, but in its original conception. We cannot doubt that if Lady Hardy had devoted more time and thought to it, without on that account giving less to the execution of her plan, she would have produced us an equally interesting work, and one free from the blemishes we cannot but attribute to it. Her characters might have been made to act in a more self-consistent and less unnatural manner. Her story might have illustrated with equal power and efficacy, and without so many absurd anomalies, the self-sacrificing nature of woman's love. And we might have been saved a good deal of what we may term brushwood and under- growth that appears quite unnecessary in view of the end. There is not a little of this superfluous matter, which seems designed to prepare for something that is never fulfilled, or at least, that we never know to have been fulfilled. There are interests and incidents in the story that lead us to expect results that never come. We are left at the last in ignorance of a good deal we might and probably do desire to know. There is thus round the -entire work an air of incompleteness and want of proportion that irritates the reader who looks for something more than an interest- ing story. In short, as we have already said, the book is so good up to a certain point and in certain directions that we feel disappointed at not finding it equally so in all.
We have an excellent opening in the description of the domestic eninage of Philippa Maitland and her father, to whom we are in- troduced just as he has lost in financial speculation all his own and Cs daughter's money. He is a well-meaning, but weak old gentle- man, who is always expecting fortune to befriend him, and who grows very miserable and a source of misery to his daughter as well as himself when fortune does not come up to his sanguine expectations. Philippa at this time is quite a girl, who has been trained in the lap of luxury, with all the enjoyments she could wish at her disposal, when she is suddenly called upon to face a future without money or any idea of how to get it. She is described to us in glowing terms as perfect in womanly beauty, and as possessing a wonderful voice, fitted to make her a triumphant opera prima donna. Her father can play the violin,—the one thing he can do A Woman's Triumph: a Novel. By Lady Hardy. 3 TOIL London : Tinsley Brothers. besides gambling. Jasper Brantynham, the hero of the tale, is a young barrister of brilliant intellectual capacity, who befriends Philippa and her father, and of course falls madly in love with the former. He is the son and heir of a rich old country gentle- man, whom he seldom visits, because his father has given a second mistress to Brantynham in the person of a second wife, with whom and whose son Jasper is not at all on friendly terms. In due time Jasper marries Philippa, but secretly, from fear of his father, who is prejudiced on the subject of the wife of the heir of Brantynham, and whose health is such that any sudden disclosure of exciting news might cause his death. But he conceives the notable plan of taking his wife to Brantynham as his betrothed, that his father may grow to be fond of her, and then it will be easy, he fancies, to break the news. Urgent business, however, calls him to India, and Philippa is left a guest at the hall to remain there till he comes back. Hardly has he gone than Philippa begins to be tormented by the addresses of Joseph Atherton, the son of Jasper's step-mother. Doubts about Jasper's real love for her, the idea that he has married her out of compassion, and that he was in love with Kate Atherton (Joseph's sister) before he sought her hand, with many other morbid fancies, continually torment her. Such ideas are fostered by Jasper's stepmother, whose great longing it is to secure Brantynham in the family by getting the heir married to Kate. When, as time goes on, Philippa does not receive letters from India, all the doubts and fears which tortured her soul grow in intensity, and at last, goaded to fierce excitement by the per- secutions of Joseph Atherton, she leaves Brantynhatu secretly and in haste, determined to sink her identity and be for her husband as if she had never been. Jasper, thinking her dead, will then be free to marry Kate, whom he loved first. This plan is carried out. She goes abroad and puts herself in training to become a public singer. Notification of her death is sent to Jasper, who, after coming from India, had vainly sought to fathom the mystery of his wife's disappearance and whereabouts. Philippa, under a changed name, becomes a great singer, taking captive the multi- tudes in Italy, and winning large sums of money, to the delight of her imbecile but greedy old father. How a gifted popular singer was likely to remain concealed from her husband, who was a wealthy country gentleman in England, widely known in many circles of city and country society, does not seem to have occurred as a difficulty to Lady Hardy. Strangely enough, however, the lady, who, through a romantic private friendship with the great singer, becomes the unconscious instrumen- tality in introducing the husband and wife to each other is the very lady whom Jasper, after succeeding to the estates on his father's death, marries, being weary of living a soli- tary bachelor's life. He does not love her in any passionate way, but has a kind of placid liking for her, which is deemed enough in so obvious a manage de convenance. As stated, the second wife is the means of finding the first one. Travelling abroad with her husband, she hears that her friend and great singer is in the same place and insists on taking him to call on her. Mutual recognition of course follows. Philippa in the spirit of self-sacri- fice she has been represented as embodying, of course does all that is possible to prevent an open escktndre, and to keep the knowledge of her relation to her husband from the second wife. Jasper, after the first reproaches were over, feels the old love revive in all its in- tensity, but is schooled by Philippa to consider her as dead to him
still, that so the second wife, who is about to become a mother, may be saved the terrible consequences of knowing the real state of matters. But all the same, the second wife dies very soon, the baby dies too, and so Jasper and Philippa are finally rewarded for all their trials and troubles.
In all this we are puzzled to know what it is that "A Woman's Triumph" consists in. Was it the triumph of Philippa over her own love for her husband, when she madly withdrew from the sphere of his life in order that he might be free to marry another? Was it the triumph over poverty which with her father Philippa is made to face early in the story, and which by her own exertions later on was converted into wealth ?
Or was the triumph she achieved over the fickle crowd of opera-goers by her wonderful voice ? Or lastly, was it the triumph over circumstances that was finally won when, through the death of his second wife, Jasper Brantynham was able to acknowledge Philippa openly ? In each and all of these there was a triumph of some kind, though we question if the last and greatest could be enjoyed by either husband or wife with- out very considerable remorse. It seems to us that Lady Hardy has committed a mistake in calling her book by the title it bears. But the mistake is much greater which allows Philippa to be guilty of such absurd conduct as is attributed to her. First of all, it is inconceivable that a woman such as she is represented would have consented to visit her husband's father's house with him as his betrothed when she was his wife, and allow her husband to start for India without disclosing the relationship to any of his friends. Such conduct on his part was cowardly baseness, and for her to acquiesce in and permit it was worse than folly, considering the consequences that might have followed. But if it is simply incredible that Philippa and Jasper—being what they are said to have been— could have so acted, how possibly can we believe that Philippa should have thought so lightly of her wifely duties as to pave the way with elaborate art for making her husband guilty of bigamy? It is more conceivable that a high-souled woman such as she is -epresented would have put an end to her life and thus really —llowed her husband to marry the woman he loved, or that she supposed he loved, than to have acted in the stupid way she is said to have done. Not only is she thus exhibited as defec- tive in her moral nature, but her actions are altogether confused and foolish. Why did she not sift the tale of Jasper's first love to the bottom, and find if it were really true ? She assumed it to be so almost on its first suggestion to her. And when she ceased to have letters from him she acted similarly, while he on his side does not appear to have been much wiser.
These are but a few specimens of the faults of the book, the list a which might be multiplied almost indefinitely. They are enough, however, to prove our assertion that it is a failure as a work of art. Lady Hardy ought to take warning. She is in danger of making mere intensity a substitute for all the other qualifications of a novelist. It is a great mistake, and this book proves it, interesting and attractive though it be as a mere story.
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