HEARTS AND DIAMONDS.*
Tins story at least deserves the limited commendation given by the nervous guest to his host's fare, when precipitately retreating from the Scylla, " Very good what there is of it," he rushed incon- tinently into the Charybdis, "Plenty of it such as it is." In very provincial English, approaching, in one instance, to the style of Mrs. Gamp,—where the heroine is spoken of as making " a deter- mination which well would it have been for her had she taken months before,"—and with every now and then a curious misappre- hension of the meaning of words and expressions, we have nearly 850 close pages almost entirely devoted to the discipline required to bring a young lady of talent and feeling into a state of proper Christian elevation ; the agents are a curate obtained in the village hard by, and some circumstances very far-fetched. The public is very much indebted to the clergy, and the clergy are not at all indebted to the writers of novels for the freedom with which they are used as some- thing to fall back upon—as the piece de resistance of the novel writer ; —they are to novels what " stock " is to soup, always ready and solid and nourishing, whether as shining lights or as awful warnings. No end of changes are rung on them in their various characters, from the highest to the lowest grade of the spiritual ladder; they are saintly, worthy, useful, worldly, fashionable, un- principled, roué, vile ; reminding us of the changes rung on the occupations open to men, enumerated in the rhyme so extensively affected by children in the season of stone-fruit ; had the average novel-writer only a tithe of the insight into the average clergyman which Mr. Anthony Trollope possesses, we might hope for a sketch, here and there, tolerably resembling nature ; as it is, the natural man is generally lost sight of by the creators of the fictitious clergyman ; very properly, the saint is the favourite, and we are presented in Hearts and Diamonds with two ; one elderly and revered, whose discipline has been completed ; the other young and admired, but so good that the authoress evidently thinks that admiration cannot spoil him, and that discipline, of which he has much, humanly speaking is neither required nor deserved.
The story is grave and heavy, and is, on a large scale, almost a return, both in matter and style, to the moral tales of our child- hood, which we remember as bearing such titles as " The History of Maria Makepeace and Caroline Carenaught." As of old, we find, with unalloyed satisfaction, that Caroline is still the name for the naughty girl, though Miss Ramsay has sadly forgotten herself in selecting so modern and so meaningless a surname as Waldegrave. We have also the good chapters about Sundays and visits to the poor, which it is so proper to have in a good book, and which we all remember skipping with a sense of slyness and shame in the Swiss Family Robinson, and other literature of our childhood ; and. we have the visit of the heroine's young friends, which might have been taken whole out of the.ancient books we are speaking of :— " About this time, Marian Astell and Rachel Heath were invited by Caroline to pay her a visit. The latter she welcomed with real plea- sure, and Rachel's cheerful, sensible conversation afforded her not only • Hearts and Diamonds. By Elizabeth P. Ramsay. 3 vole. London: Tinsley Brothers.
a pleasant, but a useful variety. It was a great event in the lives of these two girls to spend some weeks at such a place as Walde- grave Park, and never had tho difference in their tastes and dispo- sitions been more perceptibly marked. Rachel's mind was open to derive enjoyment from everything she saw that was new or beau- tiful: she admired the house, the fine old trees, the pictures, and was grateful to Caroline for putting so much pleasure within her reach. Marian, on the contrary, had no taste for the beauties of nature except as they contributed to make a place magnificent ; and the chief effect of the visit on her was to stimulate an envious longing to possess things as fine as her brother, upon whose 'good luck' she was never weary of expatiating. She had also a constant craving for amusement, and was disappointed at there being so few visitors. When she found that there was no prospect of her being introduced to gay society, she became very discontented ; and before many days were over, declared that she much preferred Hackney, with the variety of neighbours dropping in, and little tea parties, to the solitary grandeur of Waldegrave Park. To all such hints Caroline was impenetrable, and tried, in vain, to interest her in visiting the schools and the poor people."
The tale is simple, unburthened with adventures and unrelieved by humour. Caroline's aunt, with whom the story opens, had been a lovely girl, and bad lost her sight during fever ; the elderly clergyman who teaches her resignation, offers himself as her suitor, addressing his proposals, as in duty bound, to her father, the general, in the following much approved manner
," Do I understand you? ' said the General; 'but I will speak plainly ; do you mean that you would ask Julia to be your wife ?'—' I would be so presumptuous, at least, as to ask your permission to address her ; but I am aware of the obstacle my age creates : I am forty-seven, she is eighteen ; the disparity is too great for me to hope it could be got over by you, still less by her.'—‘ To me it scarcely appears an obstacle,' said the General. ' Truly happy should I be, doctor, to see my child the wife of such a man as you. I speak the sentiments, I,am sure, of her mother, as well as my own. But you must plead your cause with Julia yourself.' The doctor did plead his cause, and with success. In the course of a few weeks Julia Manners became Mrs. Mildred."
Dr. and Mrs. Mildred—having thus been united—while driving in the East End of London, run over a handsome boy, the son of a dealer in earthenware ; the boy, later on, so takes the fancy of the beautiful blind lady that she half adopts him, and when she dies, which she does very young, leaves money for his education at Oxford ; he is too good for this world, but nevertheless lives and thrives, and gets a curacy in a parish which belongs to a Mr. Vassall, a member of Mrs. Mildred's family. Mr. and Mrs. Weide- grave being dead, Caroline is living with her aunt Vassall, and soon disturbs the peace which the young curate is drinking in from the lovely country surrounding his parsonage. After sundry struggles, our curate succumbs, and in ignorance that she is heiress to her uncle, the possessor of Waldegrave Park, secures her for his wife ; her uncle is incensed and disinherits her, but Caroline keeps this a secret ; and also that she had been asked to marry her cousin, the future Lord Haverton, though she had felt the compliment, and, whilst she looked down from a hill over her uncle Vassall's estate, had even soliloquized as follows :—" The domain of Haverton is far larger than this, and the house—a fit dwelling for one of England's nobles." She, on her side, has never realized—scarcely known—her curate's very humble origin. All sorts of troubles arise, and finally she insults her husband about his origin, and he runs away to join a missionary party in Africa ; this is, of course, the climax; a brain-fever attacks Caroline and, as usual, brings all straight, and her husband returns as repentant for his hastiness as she is for her undutiful pride.
The clergyman-hero is called High Church, but his abhorrence of all amusements is more akin to the proclivities of Low-Church meu, and we find him in turn cutting his wife off from dancing, archery and novels, and objecting even to music, unless it be sacred ; he never opens his mouth to her except to rebuke gravely, or to administer encouragement in a superior patronizing way even more objectionable than blame, or in good and edifying talk ; his very proposal is couched in terms which imply censure of her worldliness, and faithlessness in her disinterested love; he asks, " And would anything induce you to relinquish your station ?" And in the letter in which he takes leave of her—it may be for years, or it may be for ever—he is cruel enough to write, " You will anticipate what I have to say—it is comprised in three words —Subdue your temper." At other times his humility is quite Pecksniffian ; he is once nearly expressing indignation, but con- trols himself.—" After a very few minutes he took himself to task, saying, "Is it well to be angry? No, it is not." He commands in the most arbitrary way, and about* the merest trifles, requesting, for instance, as they are leaving home for a party, that the diamond necklace and earrings may be taken off, graciously permitting the bracelets and brooch to be retained ; and when his wife declines to comply, he calls her " Mrs. Waldegrave," and speaks to her with unusual formality ; he withholds forgiveness to a young wife as a schoolmaster might to a bad, rebellious boy, and accords it with the majestic airs of an autocrat ; and he has so limited a range of interests and so little general cultivation, that on one occasion, when it is desirable to show him off to advantage, it is necessary to take him to see the schools on his host's estates in order to draw him out. This is the gentleman that the high- bred, spoilt beauty is to love and obey, and that we are expected to admire as a pattern man, and as near perfection as frail human nature can hope to be. But very little ability is required to draw a picture of this kind of clerical virtue ; it is only to keep your hero consistently to the line of objecting to everything not solemn and good, and of maintaining a cold, hard pressure on those under his influence, to make them see with his eyes and to act in accord- ance with his conscience. The naughty girl is quite as well drawn as the good boy, and her character is a far more difficult one to delineate ; she interests us by her beauty, straightforwardness, and warmth of heart, which might excuse less helpless men than country curates for falling in love ; and her waywardness, enjoyment of pleasure, and fits of haughty insolence are followed by such ready contrition and real humility as would ensure the love for her remaining faithful in any tolerably patient heart. We only wish her curate were half worthy of her, and differ very widely from Miss Ramsay in her high estimate of her handsome young saint ; we should call him a hard, self-righteous young prig, and we heartilypity his pretty aristocratic young wife; but Miss Ramsay fails, when, without explanation of the process, she suddenly turns Caroline, for a brief period, into a stern, unloveable disciplinarian ; this never would have been one of the steps-in-advance of her impulsive, affectionate nature towards perfection. The other characters are so completely subsidiary, and play so very small a part that they scarcely call for notice ; Clement's plebeian relations are caricatures, Miss Ramsay evidently knowing nothing of the class to which they belong. Wealthy tradesmen do not dress in blue coats and brass buttons now-a-days, and their villas are not ornamented by huge scarlet vases ; nor would their wives write " honoured Madam " and " your Ladyship " to young ladies without title, and to whom their sons are engaged, though they do happen to belong to the upper ten thousand. There are many other proofs of our authoress's ignorance of the middle-class and humble things, for instance, six months after the marriage not one table-cloth, but all the table- cloths at the parsonage—of which there is a great heap—are in holes, and one, at least, is a mere rag ; now we know what much-enduring things table-cloths are, especially where there are no little boys to cut them, so that this incident is one of the transparent absurdities which authors so carelessly and so constantly commit. Sir Hussey de Beauvoir and Lord Haverston are pleasant and clever sketches, and Mrs. Vassall is something more ; her enduring sacrifice and gentle yielding love for her petulant and sell-willed niece, and her quiet wisdom, and yet the mere worldliness of her thought and aim, could not be better done ; hers seems, to us, the only character thoroughly understood.
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