BOOKS.
THE VILLAGE ON THE CLIFF.*
THE Author of The Story of Elizabeth, like all other writers of true genius, creates for herself the school of art in which she excels. The two stories which, as far as we know, are all we as yet owe to her pen, have a subtle and delicate beauty of their own which is like nothing else as yet in the work of our English novelists. In the constructive and narrative part of her work she is not great. Both these stories are of the slightest possible structure in relation to incident ; and even as regards character, though the lines are most delicately drawn and the general ex- pression exquisitely given, there is an airiness of touch and a tendency to vagueness of outline reminding us of some of Mr. Boxall's finest portraits, which always show a tendency to indeterminate and vague conception on some side or other of his picture. What the present author seems to understand best, indeed to have made her own in the field of imaginative creation, is the world of involuntary emotion especially conceived in rela- tion to the strong and positive current of events which seems to take so little note of it, and to plough through the fanciful dreams and useless longings of those whose lives it sweeps onward with an almost satirical air of mocking indifference. There is no writer of fiction known to us who paints the flush of these emotions with so subtle, and true, and sincere an insight, who with perfect freedom from even a shadow of sentimental man- nerism, helps us to see character so vividly through the medium of the impression they produce on a temperament of little active power and intense susceptibility to the great driving forces of circumstance and the managing volition of others. Her favourite situations are all derived from the collision between helpless human emotions and the almost cruel force of external * ?he Village on the Cliff. By the Author of The Story of Elizabeth. With Six Illustrations by Frederic Walker. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. circumstances. What she loves best to depict, and depicts with extraordinary beauty and insight, is a world of inward feeling in direct contact with a resistless current of events which seems to render that world of feeling a mere land of dreams,—the managing dowager manipulating with kindly but yet unfeeling touch the whole future of a shrinking girl's inward life,—the queenly peasant girl battling proudly against the love which would humiliate her by bringing her into comparison with a world of manners and etiquettes she does not understand,—the formal but sunny-hearted French maire delighting in the importance of his petty official duties, yet with some little room left for the sunshine of a genuine love which is the brighter and more touching from its contrast with his simple satisfaction in outward forms and pedantries. No writer paints this contrast between the hard outward world and the warm inward world of emotion with so free and delicate a touch as the Author of The Story of Elizabeth. Sentiment in her hands becomes a true golden mist hovering over the hard real earth. With delicate truth she sketches the mood of self-compassion which is part sadness, part satirical pathos, part wonder and fear ; the pain which is bitterer in memory than in the moment when it first strikes the heart ; the presentiment which when it is fulfilled becomes an anguish of regret ; the humour which is more restless and keen for the irresolution and divided sympathy which are at its roots. External nature, too, is lightly and finely sketched, and always in the same relation to the im- pression which it produces on a mind preoccupied with a world of feeling of its own, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, always vivid. Take the following passage describing Norman scenery, for instance :— " Petitpere's short cut was longer than it should have been, but Catherine would have gone on for ever if she had held the reins. All the grey sky encompassed them—all the fields spread into the dusk— the soft fresh winds came from a distance. The pale yellow shield of the horizon was turning to silver. The warm lights were coming out in the cottage lattices. As the evening closed in, they wero sprinkled like glow-worms here and there in the country. Sometimes the cart passed under trees arching black against the pale sky ; once they crossed a bridge with a rush of water below. There was not much anywhere, nor form in the twilight, but exquisite tone and sentiment everywhere. They passed one or two groups strolling and sitting out in the twilight as they approached Petitport, and the rushing of the sea seemed coming up to meet them at times. They were all very silent."
Everything in that description speaks of a receptive mood glowing with something more than peace. The "rushing of the sea coming up to meet them at times " would alone tell this. Had the mood of the observer been less happy, there would have been a menace, or at least a sense of awe and loneliness, instead of an omen of friendly advance, in the sound. Take the following, again, and notice how wonderfully the external scenery is made to lend itself to the desolation of poor little Catherine :- "Catherine sat down on the side of the old well ; the vines were creep- ing up the iron bars, the grapes were hanging between the leaves. There was one great ripe bunch dropping against the sky, painted purple upon the blue. A few wasps were floating drowsily ; a bird flew swiftly by, glancing down for one instant with its bright, sleepy eye. There was again that scent of fruit and indescribable sweetness in the air. As she sat there, Catherine began to feel as if she had known it all from the beginning. It was like that strange remembrance in the farm kitchen, only less vivid. It was all very sweet and lovely ; but she thought, with a sudden thrill, that the ugliest London street along which Dick Butler had walked would be more to her than this. Was she never to seo him again ? Ah ! was she never to see him again ? And as she thought this, his face seemed to go before her eyes. They had boon singing a little song the night before at the chateau,-
' Si vous n'avez rien it me dire, pourquoi vonir auprds de moi?'
it went. Dreams said nothing to her now. She looked at them in a sort of despair as they went by. ' Why does he come, why does he come ?' sighed the little thing, clinging to the iron crank. Why am I haunted like this ?' She felt as if it was cruel—yes, cruel of Fate to mock her and tempt her thus ; to have brought tho fruit, sweet and ripe and tempting, to her lips, and to whisper at the same time cruel warn- ings? This is for others, not for you. This is for the other Catherino, who does not very much care—this will be for him some day when he chooses. Do you wish You may wish, and wish, and wish, you will be no nearer—put out your hand, and you will see all these beautiful, purple, sweet peaches turn into poisonous berries, bitter and sickening.' And yet I did not go after it,' thought the girl, with a passionate move- ment. Why does this come to me, crossing my path, to distract, to vex, to bewilder?' Catherine was but a child still ; she leaned over the old moss-grown parapet of the well, and let her tears drop deep, deep into it. What a still passage it was down into the cool heart of the earth. She heard a fresh bubble of water rippling at the bottom, and she watched her tears as they fell sparkling into the dark silent depths. Nobody will find them there,' she said to herself, smiling sadly at the poor little conceit. ' I will never cry again if I can help it, but if I can- not help it I will come here to cry.'" Even the " iron crank " of the well against which she leans lends a chillness and hardness to the picture ; and the bird " that flew by, glancing down for an instant with its bright, sleepy eye," gives
just the effect of strangeness, of an observant but unsympathetic external nature, which is needed for the special mood.
There is something of the soft liquid German artistic touch, without the German sentimentalism, in these stories,—a special soft bright haze in the atmosphere of character, such as distinguishes the beauty of a premature summer day in early spring, or an Indian summer day in November, from the ordinary English brightness. Few English writers can command this soft radiance of style. Now and then George Eliot, who is usually clear, keen, and distinct, and gives only the softness of a rich speculative nature to her pictures, just reaches it, as in the picture in Adam Bede of Hetty in her dairy, with the guelder-roses peeping through the window ; and a very inferior novelist, the author of Dr. Jacob, has passages of the same sort of liquid beauty in some of the German scenes. Goldsmith's most beautiful descriptions have this liquid atmosphere in great perfection ; but it is very rare in our English fiction, and those who have the temperament which can give this warmth and unity of colour to their pictures too often fritter away their power in the attempt to spin out a story of incident and adventure, which straggles out far beyond the range of anything they can really feel. The great danger of a novelist, is the temptation to let his wish to tell an interesting story carry him beyond any situation into which he can warmly and vividly enter. The current of the story takes him into reaches where he loses the breath of any warm personal impulse to guide his imagination. There are true novelists,— Miss Bronte, for example,—whose genius leads them to develop character by incident and action. There are others who really find incident only a very secondary element in their art, and whose chief power consists in the skill with which they interpret the analogies and the contrasts between the outward world of events and the natures affected by it ; and if these events are made too important in themselves, of independent narrative interest, and not mere occasions for painting the variations of mood in the actors, they fail, just for the same sort of reason for which Turner or Holman Hunt would fail if asked to unroll their intense imaginative conceptions of scenery over a few hundred yards of panoramic canvas, which could never be seen by any one in a single glance, or even connected together in any single conception of nature when they had been studied separately. The author of The Story of Elizabeth knows her own genius too well to fall into the mistake of wiredrawing a perfect idyllic story into a second- rate novel, and we should doubt from the specimens of her power which she has given us whether she 'could ever write a story in which the interest was in any great degree narrative. Besides, however, the beauty of the style, and the delicate though slight sketches of character, there is a charm in the (very gentle) satire —the pleasant and kindly mockery at the illusions"which haunt human nature, as, for example, in the following passage on the very empty significance attached to all of us at times in the minds of others when we happen to come in contact with them only in very meagre and rather confined relations :- "' Baptiste, has Madame de Tracy mare's breakfast been taken up ?' =Madame desires a little more chicken,' said Baptiste, respectfully. Mademoiselle Picard has just come down to fetch some, also a little Burgundy wine, and an egg and some figs.'—Catherine used to wonder at the supplies which were daily sent up from every meal to this in- visible invalid. She had seen the shutters of her rooms from without, but she never penetrated into the interior of the apartment which Madame do Tracy mere inhabited. Once or twice in passing she had heard a hoarse voice like a man's calling Picard or Baptiste (they were the old lady's personal attendants); once Catherine had seen a pair of stumpy velvet shoes standing outside her door. That was all. Old Madame de Tracy was a voice, an appetite, a pair of shoes to Catherine, no more. Everybody is something to somebody else. Certain hiero- glyphics stand to us in lieu of most of our neighbours. Poor little Catherine herself was a possible storm and discussion to some of the people present—to Martha a soul to be saved, to Madame do Tracy a problem to be solved and comfortably disposed of ; to Monsieur Fon- taine, carried away by his feelings, the unconscious Catherine appeared as one of the many possible Madame Fontaines in existence, and cer- tainly the most graceful and charming of them all."
Is it, by the way, a stroke of gentle irony when our author tells us (p. 275) that " George Eliot has nobly written that the king- dom of heaven is within us ?" Does she mean to insinuate that George Eliot has become so entirely the literary interpreter of our modern Christianity that when she echoes the words of Christ they have a new power for us? or is she ignorant that George Eliot's " noble " words are taken verbatim out of the Gospel of St. Luke ? If the former, the irony is somewhat subtle, though not without a force of its own :—but we suspect that with all her delicate insight into the religion of sentiment, the author of The Village on the Cliff attributes this saying to George Eliot in the nineteenth century, and not to the New Testament in the first. No English writer is more intensely modern in the subjectiveness (to use a horrid but indispensable phrase) of her thought and feeling than the present author, and we doubt if the words of George Eliot did not seem to her truer than Christianity, though they rce really only the central thought of Christianity itself.
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