JOSHUA HAGGARD'S DAUGHTER.*
IT IS all true that the reviewers say about Miss Braddon's last story,—that there is tawdriness in the descriptions, and forced humour in the sketches of society, and inconsistency in the treat- ment of characters, and vulgarity in many incidental speeches ; but there is something else, too, which gives the book its interest, and makes it noteworthy. There is power in it, and power of an unusual though incomplete kind, of a kind which suggests a young and inexperienced mind, rather than a practised and slightly worn novelist. From first to last, from the moment when he steps down to the beach in the storm at Combhaven to the moment when he dies of remorse and heart-break, Joshua Haggard is a figure such
as it is not given to Mr. Mudie's fodder-providers to create, or perhaps to refined persons wholly to understand. They do not often see a small Dissenting minister who makes money as a grocer and draper, and is also this kind of person, possessed of high spiritual gifts,—
" The person whose approach commanded the general attention was a man of somewhat striking appearance. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a head nobly mounted on the throat of a gladiator, penetrating black eyes, boldly-cut features, a swarthy complexion, a square lower jaw, and a capacious, strongly-marked brow—he was a man to attract attention anywhere. Intellect and power had set their seal upon his face, and his bearing was that of one accustomed to command. A man of superior mind, stranded for life in such a place as Combhaven,might naturally think himself a king. The new-corner's costume was that of the yeoman class. He wore knee-breeches, coarse gray knitted stockings, and stout buckled shoes. His only distinguishing character- istic was a white cravat, but this was a symbol which marked his power and authority over that little group of rough fishermen ; and Mrs. Jakes, the landlady, who stood at her door listening to the dis- course of her customers, dropped a low curtsey at sight of the man in the white neckcloth."
Joshua Haggard, impelled by the feeling of right, by the sense of his own prowess as an amateur seaman, by thorough and genuine confidence in Providence, and also by a slight contempt for the weaker men around him, saves Oswald Pentreath, the squire's son, from imminent death in a furious storm, and has thenceforward to learn the truth that lives in a popular superstition. Rescuing a drowning man is in Combhaven believed to be a flying in the face of Providence, sure to be avenged by the saved man's in- strumentality :—" Why, as no good never come o' reskying a drownding man. You fetches him out of the water at the risk of your own life, don't 'ee ? Yes, and that there man's bound to do 'ee a hinjury. He can't help it. Why, mate, arn't it a common saying all along this 'ere coast,—
' Save a stranger from the sea,
And he'll tarn your enemy ?'
The deepest wrong as the minister ever had done agen him will be done by that young man. Them as lives to see it may remember my words." Joshua Haggard has a daughter, a girl with a darkly handsome face, and grave, affectionate nature, and to her Oswald Pentreath makes love ; and his miserly father's consent being won by the girl's dower, all is arranged for their marriage, when Oswald's shallow affections wander away. Joshua Haggard, in a pastoral journey, has met a girl washing her feet in the river, has ascer- tained that she has run away from some strolling players, and true to his work in life, finds her a home as a servant and companion to two oldish maiden ladies in humble life. With this girl, Cynthia, be falls in love deeply and lastingly, and she accepts him as her husband, partly out of love, but partly out of gratitude and innocence of character, which last feature Miss Braddon has exaggerated to absurdity. Cynthia's beauty of nature is possible enough, but her beauty of character takes a form which, in a girl born in a travelling-van, brought up in a circus, and so little cared for that she runs away to field-labour in order to escape brutal treatment, is too improbable for sympathy,—though Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist, managed to reconcile all the world to an improba- bility at least as great. It is scarcely probable that a girl brought up absolutely without knowledge of religion should be as she is represented to be, so moved into deeper love by the spiritual beauty of her husband's character ; and still less probable that she, a circus-rider, promoted to be a servant, should be so susceptible to the homeliness of his surroundings :—
" There was something indescribably touching in the young wife's childlike affection for her husband, her intense belief in him, her un- bounded admiration for his talents and powers as preacher and teacher, her implicit faith in his judgment. If flattery be a pleasant poison, Joshua was in a fair way to be poisoned by the sweetest of all flatteries, —the exaggerated estimate which springs from womanly love, Love * lashaa Haggard', Daughter. By Miss Braddon. London: J. Maxwell and Co. with a woman of this temper is but another name for worship, and Cy nthia's love had begun in a spiritual idolatry which had set Joshua but a little way below the saints and apostles he had taught her to reverence. In a man so truthful as Joshua closer communion revealed no flaw, familiarity was not followed by disillusion. After two months of married life, the husband still occupied the pedestal upon which Cynthia had elevated the teacher ; but although she had suffered no dis- appointment in the man himself, her vivid and romantic mind began to find something wanting in his surroundings. The atmosphere of her daily life was depressing ; the young, eager spirit yearned for work of some kind, and was fling back upon the dull blank of idleness. She sighed for keener air, a wider horizon, yet scarcely knew what she de- sired. She had secret aspirations for her husband, and rebelled against that common-place trade which occupied one-half of his life—that buy- ing and selling and getting gain, which seemed to her enthusiastic mind a practical denial of the Gospel which the trader preached on Sundays, the lesson which he taught his flock on week-days. These divided duties, this solicitous service to a worldly master, struck her as out of joint with her husband's sacred character. To her, who had known no other Church than this Dissenting community, and who hardly knew that they were Dissenters, Joshua was as holy as if Epis- copal hands had been laid upon him, and she was troubled by the incongruity between the trader and the priest."
With this girl thus wrapped up in her husband, Oswald Pentreath falls madly in love, and Cynthia, in an innocent, child-like way, returns his passion, lets him send "Werther " to her, receives im- prudent letters from him, feels when he quits her as if pleasure had gone out of life, and finally grants him one more meeting, to tell him to go away for ever. She is perfectly honest all through, and intends to be perfectly honest to her husband, but her love is not very well described,—is at once too childlike and too con- scious for reality. Dante understood Paolo and Francesca better than Miss Braddon, and the love of a married womitn for an en- gaged man is not first revealed to her in such society by his reading " Werther" aloud. In this final meeting, however, Cynthia is steadfast, and orders her lover away for ever, and he obeys her, but kisses her as he departs; and unhappily the meeting and the kiss have been witnessed by Joshua Haggard, who warned by a maiden sister who dislikes Cynthia, and by a letter which Naomi in a passion of jealousy has given to the wrong band, has watched the pair, and utterly misapprehended both his wife's conduct and her motives. Maddened with jealousy, which on such a nature has the hold of an insanity, he challenges Oswald to a duel, and when the weak and wretched lad fires in the air, fires straight, and is thenceforward branded in his own eyes as a murderer,—murderer even for fighting a duel, doubly a murderer for slaying an unarmed man. His sermons, hitherto gentle, become fierce, a perpetual denunciation of that Satan who, care- less of such easy prey as harlots and publicans, now sought to drag the elect into his net ; his love for his wife is changed into a kind of loving horror, as if it would drag his soul down from heaven, and he banishes her into the open world ; yet he meets a charge of murder brought by Arnold's brother with a deep and firm disdain which imposes on all around; resolves to preach on, his own sin, as he argues, not affecting his certainty of his message or of his own gift for delivering it; and finally, when he hears that his wife, who had sought refuge in the house where she had been a servant, had died broken-hearted, he confesses all to his daughter, and so dies, killed with the bitterness of his remorse and shame. He was truthful even in his death. The few who knew his secret believed he had killed Oswald in a duel, but he will not die leaving a false- hood behind him :—
"'My letter told the truth,' he said, after that painful pause, but not all the truth. I am going to face an offended God—going to Him con- fident in His illimitable mercy. Naomi, do not hate me when I am dead ;' his hands wandered helplessly for a little, and then he clasped them round her neck, and lot his head fall on her shoulder ; do not hate me, dear. Your lover was murdered. He was generous, and I was a dastard. We stood up, face to face, each with a pistol in his hand. I was to count three, he told me, and then take aim. But as I lifted my hand to aim at his heart, I saw his arm flung up, his pistol pointed to the sky. It was but an instant, fleeter than a breath, before I fired straight at his breast. It was thirty years since I had pulled a trigger—not since I was an idle lad, and went rabbit-shooting with my father's old blunderbuss. Yet my aim was deadly. The bullet pierced his heart. He had fired in the air. I had just time enough to see and understand what he was doing before I killed him. This was the crime that weighed upon my soul and dragged me down to the pit. 0 God, I can see him now, with his face lifted up, the sun shining on it, his arm raised to fire in the air. It was but a flash, scarce time for thought, but when it was over I knew myself a murderer. 0 God, only an instant between everlasting glory and eternal condemnation, unless Thine infinite sacrifice can blot out mine iniquity.'" It is not given to Miss Braddon, though she has conceived Joshua Haggard, to bring out her full thoughts about him, so that he may be to others as living a figure as he doubtless is to herself ; butnevertheless, the creation of the strong-willed, strong-tempered Dissenting minister, living a lofty life amid his mean surroundings, overpowered by a jealousy which yet does not enable him to hate his wife, and though a criminal, believing his creed, and hating crime
to the last, is the best work she has done. He is not forgotten as you close his record. 'laggard's surroundings, however, with the exception of a strong-minded sister, who believes in religion, but is chiefly interested in the shop, are very inferior, both in conception and execution, Naomi, the daughter, who gives her name to the book, being a mere figure of whom all gracious things are said, but who creates no impression of herself, except that she is a rather feeble Esther Lyon ; Oswald a weak young man, whom Naomi would either not have impressed or would have retained ; and the remainder insufferably vulgar people, whom Miss Bmddon thinks comic, and whose ways and surroundings ahe describes with an irritating minuteness which not infrequently degenerates into utter vulgarity, that somehow, despite the power of parts of the book, leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. The contents of the butter-firkin, of which Haggard's sister so often speaks, smudge all the inferior personages, more or less, till sympathy with their fate is half-destroyed.
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