THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS.*
THE Eustace Diamonds, though as full of good painting as most of Mr. Trollope's tales, has hardly fulfilled the promise of its commence- ment. We had supposed that in Lady Eustace we were to have Mr. Trollope's equivalent for Thackeray's "Becky Sharp," but we hardly think that we have got it ; or if we have, Mr. Trollope's equivalent for Thackeray's "Becky Sharp" is but a poor one. It is quite true that Lady Eustace, though she is never guilty of murder, as Becky Sharp certainly is, is a much meaner and more contempt- ible creature than Becky. She is far less enterprising, far more cowardly, equally selfish, less capable of a disinterested regard such as Becky certainly feels at the end of Vanity Fair for Amelia, and more wholly false, more utterly incapable of discriminating between truth and falsehood in herself. Becky is the most daring and crud of adventuresaes. Nothing stands in her way when she sees anything to be gained by pushing it out of her way. She seduces her friend's husband without the slightest scruple. Her own husband and child are mere cyphers of which she takes no account. She is utterly insensible to the claims of the affections, and does not know what either a womanly scruple or a moral scruple is, when she is aiming at wealth and power. She sacrifices the life of the selfish fool, Jos Sadley, without a compunction. Still she is not so low but what she is perfectly aware of her own lies and meannesses ; she knows truth from falsehood ; she stands above her own crafts and wiles, and is per- fectly aware of their true character. It is hardly possible not to feel it on the cards even to the last that her character might under certain circumstances assert its power, and break through that labyrinth of intrigues in the construction of which it has delighted. Becky in her deepest depth of evil is still herself, and the evil is subsidiary to her ambition and love of ease. Lizzie Eustace is too utterly false to understand where her falsehood. begins,—when she is using it deliberately as a means, and when she is toying with it out of mere inability to be true. She is liar by nature, not by policy. Even her cleverness is not like Becky's. cleverness, a power in itself, something in the exercise of which the owner so delights that she can always be good-humoured in her villany, whether she wins or loses. It is a thin cleverness which gets its owner constantly into trouble, not out of it, and the exercise of which never occupies her mind, as it does that of a really able adventurer. There is something, in its way, grand about Becky's evil. She is wicked and cruel by free choice. Lizzie Eustace is wicked by the law of a mean, and cunning, and greedy nature, with no power in it to be otherwise. Indeed, throughout the long story of her craft and meanness, we do not remember a single occasion on which Mr. Trollope suggests that there was even a glimpse on her part of a better and a worse, or the faintest possible struggle to choose the former. Yet with a will so lost in. temptations as hers, one wants, at least for the purposes of Art, the consciousness of evil and the struggle against it, however faint,
* The Eusiceee Diamonds. By Anthony Trollops. 3 vols. London : Chapman and Hall.
to relieve the oppressive sordidness of the story. Where you have an evil will like Becky's, choosing with the most contemptuous indifference to right or wrong the course that most subserves her own interest, there is at least a sufficiently pure embodiment of iniquity to satisfy the artistic instinct. But Lizzie Eustace is a mere greedy and cunning reptile, who seems to give a bad flavour to the story without giving to it the dignity of voluntary wickedness. If you can create a man or a woman above conscience, deliberately substituting their own interest for conscience, the picture has, at least, a grandeur of its own. But with creatures like Lizzie Eustace, you want to have some glimpse of conscience to give you the sense that she is worthy of moral portraiture at all. There is something a little too suffocating for Art in this picture of the greedy cowardice and sly mendacity of a pretty woman with- out the vestige of a sense of right and wrong, without a vestige of passion, without a vestige of true anger, without a capacity even for any hatred rising above the level of spite. That Lizzie Eustace is a striking picture in this sense we will not deny. But it is a very unattractive picture, and we cannot help thinking that a writer with more of taste for the inward portraiture of character than Mr. Trollope, would have found some means to relieve the ignoble tone of the picture by something better than beauty and wealth. Seen from within, there must have been occasionally a sense of ignominiousness and degradation that would at least have enabled the reader to feel, what at present he cannot feel, something of pity for such a bit of living and breathing pretence and dissimulation as Lizzie Engem.
Nor is there much tending to relieve the dead-level sordidness of the story in the better class of characters. Lizzie Eustace's rival, Lucy Morris, is one of Mr. Trollope's regular 'loving' heroines, but with less than the usual interest about her. She is very dis- interested, very impulsive, very imprudent, very affectionate, very trustful, and rather unrefined. She is meant to be a perfect lady in the station of a governess, but she is not quite that. She is undignified, and you feel that she wants something of breeding, and that, too, without the author so intending it. Her squabbles with Lord Fawn about her lover are intended to show the goodness and enthusiasm of her love, but they rather show a certain want of delicacy and reticence. We cannot say we care much for Lacy Morris. She is almost as involuntarily good a creature, as Lizzie Easton is involuntarily mean, greedy, and deceitful, and almost as wanting in anything like elevation of will. Again, Frank Greystock, who loves the penniless Lucy Morris, and who is so nearly drawn in to marry his cunning and supple cousin, has a less noble nature than even Mr. Trollope's invariable heroes, who always love one lady, and always almost desert her for another, usually show. Frank Greystock is painted as feeling exceedingly little compunction for his long and contemptible desertion of his betrothed, and for his unworthy love-making to his rich, pretty, and unwholesome cousin. He is, of course, pardoned and welcomed back again the moment he discovers what a contemptible little liar he has been flirting with, and he has no apparent sense of the deep .dishonourableness of his own conduct. Mr. Trollope keeps paint- ing this sort of infidelity of heart till he almost loses the sense of what it means. He has never described it with anything like the full moral discrimination with which George Eliot would paint such a situation. And yet he has never described it with so little moral discrimination as in this book. Frank Greystock is a fall- ing-off on his familiar double-minded hero. He is seduced from his allegiance by a far more ignoble attraction than Harry Clavering, for instance, and he is far less unhappy and far more easily pacified with himself than Harry Clavering. Frank Greystock does not relieve the sense of the ignoble which so powerfully pervades this story. And perhaps the most powerful part of the book, —the picture of Mrs. Carbuncle, who, though admitted into society, hovers on the edge of the demi-monde, and that of her set,—of course increases, and is intended to increase, this oppressive sense of meanness. We do not grumble at this. It is, as we said, the most impressive, and in the true sense the most moral part of the tale. If any one wants to know to what moral and social affinities such greedy cunning as Lady Eustace's tends, it is impossible to conceive a more striking picture than that of the loathsome meanness of the alliance with Mrs. Carbuncle, the interchange of false flatteries and of spiteful hostilities, the sickening attempt to sell Lucinda Roanoke to Sir Griffin Tewett, the elaborate huckstering about the value of the wedding presents to be given to Miss Roanoke, the relations of the whole set with that hard and cynical nobleman, who is something too good for them and very conscious of his contempt for them, Lord George De Bruce Carruthers (Lady Eustace's 4‘ Corsair "), the scandals into which the robbery of the dia. monde brings them all, and the utter baseness of the dinouement,—except indeed as regards Miss Roanoke, whose partial failure of reason in the prospect of her abhorred marriage has a true touch of the tragic. We do not in the least complain of this element of sordidness, which is the true moral of the book. It is the one powerful effect. But we do com- plain that there is so little to set it off, that the good characters are insignificant, the middling characters poor, and even the bad characters almost entirely sordid. We want a foil to Lady Eustace, Mrs. Carbuncle, and Sir Griffin Tewett. It cannot be even pretended that we find one in Lucy Morris, the Fawn family, or Frank Greystoek. As it is, the inarticulate misery of Lucinda Roanoke at being forced by her aunt into a match she loathes, and in feel- ing that want of resource, that proud inertia of nature, that inability to throw off the chains of circumstance, which prevent her from simply breaking off the match, is the only thing verg- ing on greatness in the story. That, though inadequately worked out, has tragedy in it, and tends to redeem the otherwise unrelieved sordidness of the latter part of the tale. Perhaps the sketch of the rough, hard, cynical Lord George de Bruce Carruthers tends also in the same direction. Mr. Trollope has written few things abler than the last interview between "the Corsair" and Lady Eustace, in which Lord George exposes her to herself, so far as that operation is possible, and treats her clever but inefficient lies with supreme, because such tolerant, contempt.
Of course there is wonderful talent in the manipulation of the story. The fight about the legal character of the diamond neck- lace,—whether ' heir-loom ' or 'paraphernalia,'—and Mr. Dove's opinions and advice to Mr. Camperdown thereon, are marvellous specimens of Mr. Trollope's technical skill. The Scotch hunting scenes are cleverer than even Mr. Trollope's hunting scenes usually are. The story of the two robberies and Lady Diatom's intricate and superfluous lies on the subject, are extremely skilfully manceuvred ; indeed, Mr. Trollope has rarely managed a plot so well. The slight sketch of the D uke of Omnium's dotage is painfully vigorous, and the picture of Lord Fawn's official and personal weakness, and upright moral cowardice, is one of the most striking of Mr. Trollope's innu- merable striking studies of modern life. Mr. Emilius, the sleek con- verted Jew preacher, who carries off Lady Eustace at last, is hardly so good. Mr. Trollope has there given too much rein to his pleasure in coarse painting, and has not quite produced upon his readers the sense of complete verisimilitude. And the same may be said of some of the other slighter sketches, such as that of Mr. and Mrs. Hittaway, the brother-in-law and sister of Lord Fawn, who are so intent on dissuading him from carrying out his engagement to Lady Eustace, but who do not impress us as distinctly as these subsidiary figures of Mr. Trollope's usually do. Still, on the whole, we cannot doubt that the defect of the novel is its want of anything like moral contrasts, its horrors in the way of sordidness and coarse- ness without any adequate foils, the feeling it gives one that the meannesses, basenesses, and moral vulgarities of life, overshadow the heavens and shut out the sun. It is a depressing story, in which all that is coarse and base is painted with lavish power, but where evil itself is not on a grand scale, and where the few good characters are so insignificant that you almost resent the author's expecta- tion that you shall sorrow in their sorrows and rejoice in their joys.
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