JANET DONCASTER.*
Janet Doncaster shows plenty of talent, but it is not nearly so in- teresting as many stories which show much less. Mrs. Fawcett may succeed in fiction, but if she does, she must gain the peculiar art of so telling a story as to carry on her readers' interest with the flow of the narrative ; and this art at present she certainly has not attained. The style of Janet Doncaster is stiff, and there is visible effort in portions of almost every chapter. For instance, the photograph of Norborough in the opening of the tale, though it is evidently the work of a clever writer, is full of overstrained -emphasis. It is a study after Miss Austen's fashion, but instead of being easy and playful, as Miss Austen would have made it, it is only contemptuous, and the picture of the vapid village gossip is just jarringly enough told to make one distrust the art, and observe the false notes more than the true. For example, the following wants but little of being a very lively and skilful picture of the -way in which one village gossip leans on the judgment of the village gossip next above her in social influence, but it does want that little. You feel that it is an effort to describe with humour and skill, made by one who has humour and skill, but who, for all that, has not got hold of the right method, and misses artistic truthfulness by the difference between laborious talent and the easy faculty of vision :— " Mrs. Sedgely generally brought her contribution of gossip first to the Greys. If a tale had the sanction of Mrs. Grey, Mrs. Sedgely always felt much greater confidence in repeating it ; 80, for the sake of her own peace of mind, she generally brought her story up to Mrs. Grey to receive its credentials. For instance, about eleven o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Sedgely would come slowly into the warm dining-room where Mrs. Grey and her two daughters were sitting, give them each in silence a
damp kiss, then sink into a chair, and say solemnly, suppose you have heard, dear Mrs. Grey ? '—Heard what, Miss Trotter ?' Mrs. 'Grey would say, in a snappish voice. Mrs. Sedgely had been, previous to her marriage, governess in Mrs. Grey's family ; and when Mrs. Grey wished to impress Mrs. Sedgely with a sense of her own superiority, she generally called her late dependent by her maiden name. This always had the effect of afflicting Mrs. Sedgely with a kind of nervous imbecility, which made her longer in coming to the point than usual. 'Perhaps it isn't true,' she would say, with a melancholy smile. They do say such things here. I am sure not more than half of them are true.'—' What is it, Mrs. Sedgely?' breaks in one of the young ladies. Well, dear, I may be wrong. I shouldn't like it repeated on my authority, but they do say that Mr. Hope, the new brush-maker, who married Miss Spence, has returned here with his bride in a third-class carriage.' If Mrs. Grey replied to this, 'Nonsense, Mies Trotter, I was in Mrs. Spence's shop yesterday, and she told me that her daughter had • Janet Doncaster. By Millicent Garrett Fawcett. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. not returned at all at preilent,' Mrs Sagely Would never regain sufficient confidence in her tale to be able to repeat it to her other friends Whereas, if Mrs. Grey replied, 'The Norborough tradesmen are mean enough for anything, Mrs. Sedgely,' the good lady would go away with a light heart, and repeat the story of this astonishing instance of stinginess half a dozen times a day for the next *fortnight. At the end of which time the story had assumed the form that Mr. Hope was so mean that he had actually compelled his young wife to walk all the way from Gipping, the county town, to Norborough, a distance of twenty miles ; that she had fainted on the door-step of her new home, and that her life was now despaired of. In vain Mrs. Hope appeared at church, rosy and smiling, in her wedding bonnet and in a shawl of extraordinary splendour. Norborough insisted on shaking its head and saying, Ah, poor thing! it's all very well to put a good face upon it; she does bear up wonderful! But we know very well what she's had to go through.'"
There is the same want of ease and harmony in the delineation of the more important characters. The hero of the tale, if there be a hero, and the heroine, are neither of them taking characters.
Mrs. Fawcett wishes us to like them, but she does not in the least succeed in making us like them. Janet Doncaster herself is, of all the heroines we have met with in novels, the one by whom it
would have been least possible to be fascinated. We fancy even a jar in the young lady's voice, though we need not say that we never heard it. We rather took a fancy to her on learning that as a child, "when she said her prayers at her mother's knee, Mrs.
Doncaster having impressed upon her she was not to learn any form of prayer, but to ask of God from her heart whatever she most desired to have, she prayed for a red cloak 'wiv velvet buttons, 'xackly like Amy Grey's. Vere is anover at ve shop." But no sign of grace so promising as the young lady's wish for a pretty dress ever appears in her in after-life, and for all one reads of her here, her amiable childish delight in being gay and admired, may have been effectually extinguished by Mrs.
Doncaster's gentle, puritanic fervour. If so, it certainly was not replaced by any vein of feeling still more amiable. This is the way she snubs a somewhat snobbish admirer :—
"Pardon me, Miss Doncaster,' he said, 'I must stop one moment to admire these very remarkable plants. Something quite new, I suppose; how very luxuriantly they grow?'—' Yes,' said Janet,. with mock gravity, 'they are very pretty. They are quite a new acquisition to our flower-garden. They were introduced some little time ago from America, I believe.'—' Indeed ! I never remember to have seen them before. I am sure my friend, Sir John Cook, would like to order some for his gardens at Crawley Park, immediately. Could you favour me with the name?'—' With pleasure; the name, if I remember rightly, is potato 1' "
We quite agree with Mrs. Doncaster's view of this conversation, and, indeed, in spite of her narrowness, we infinitely prefer Mrs. Doncaster to her very hard and abrupt daughter. To take another instance, when Mrs. Sedgely speaks to Janet with some awe of her call at the Hall, that young lady is, to our minds, as odious as ever, not so much in her irony, as in the harsh manner of it :—
" will own my heart did beat rather fast when I found myself in the drawing-room,' she said. 'But you really must go, dear Janet, and your dear mamma too. I am sure you are not afraid of any one; and Lady Ann is—Well, I hardly know how to describe it. You feel, of course, that there is a great difference, you know between an earl's daughter and yourself, and yet she is very affable. Oh, yes, extremely affable. After a little time, I quite enjoyed talking to her.'—' It's rather an alarming prospect, Mrs. Sedgely,' laughed Janet. 'It's a case of 'glad homage pay with awful mirth,' isn't it ? Well, my dear,' said Mrs. Sedgely, 'it's a duty we owe to our superiors in rank. That's how I've come to look at it. I don't mind telling you in confidence, that at first I thought I really had nothing fit to make the call in. But then, when I heard what Lieutenant Smalley had said, I felt that go I must, and that it would be just as wrong to give up going because I hadn't a new dress ready, as it would be to give up going to church because I didn't happen to have a new bonnet.'—' Oh, never mind, ISIrs. Sedgely mamma and I will go and do our duty like Britons. We are so used to wearing old clothes, that they won't disturb our peace of mind at alL' " From beginning to end, through her misadventures and mistaken marriage, and through her love, we cannot once really like Janet Doncaster. In the first place, she has "clear, brave eyes," and that sets us against her early in the tale. We know from experience that women described as having "clear, brave eyes" are sure to be objectionable. And in Janet Doncaster there is a per- petual rasp, which is probably intended to express strength, but which is to us very unlovely. And when she has married, just to save her mother's last days from overwhelming anxiety, and by no means chiefly, if at all, for the sake of the unhappy young man who makes her the offer, she makes our distaste for her greater than ever by the manner of her prompt and hard- hearted desertion of him, though we are quite ready to admit that she was most shamefully treated in being persuaded to marry a drunkard without warning. However, it is not as if she had married him simply by way of yielding to his importunities. On the contrary, she would never have married him, ignorant though she was of his infirmity, but for the sake of her mother's passionate
anxiety to see her settled in life before her own death. Nor does she even tell the young man or his relations that she feels no love for him. She accepts his offer only in order to make her mother's mind easy, and thereby is, we think, almost as deficient in good faith, though in a milder degree, as her lover and his people are in a graver degree. And though, of course, that does not render the concealment from her a bit less base and cruel, it should have made her feel that to some extent she owed the reparation to him, which in much greater degree he or his relations owed to her. At all events, the complete absence of pity, the predominance in her mind of pure disgust, towards a man with whom she.had at least lived, and apparently lived happily, for a fortnight as his wife, is an offensive and unfeminine trait in Janet Don- caster's character, which takes all possibility of charm out of her for ever. Then the man with whom she does fall in love, Mr. Forsyth,—the "Mr." is always dropped, by the way, in speaking of him, which is, we suppose, in some way a tribute of respect, though it increases the jar which is the chief sensation we derive from the whole book,—is, though more shadowy than Janet, almost as disagreeable. The chief feature in his character appears to be a tendency to hasty, and as it seems to us very un- natural generalisations,—very unnatural, we mean, for a clever man to make. We are told of these hasty generislisations twice :—
" The tall, graceful figure swept away, and two seconds afterwards the young man heard Lady Ann's voice in the drawing-room, laughingly give some description to her nephew of her first experiences of the Norborians ; whereupon Forsyth made inwardly some very wide generalisations on the character of women. Lady Ann had left him on the doorstep with her eyes full of tears, and every gesture expressing the strongest emotion ; she crossed the floor of the hall, and the next moment she was entertaining Mrs. Leighton and her son with some ridiculous anec- dote What fickle, changeable creatures women are! 'Is Mrs. Leighton, Charlie Leighton's wife, staying here ?' asked Forsyth of Mrs. Williams on their way to the dining-room.—' Yes ; she came here to spend the summer near us, so it is all the more aggravating that we have to go away.'—' Where is Leighton ?' asked Forsyth, in a tone which conveyed just a tinge of amusement, and the least suspicion of disgust. But Mrs. Williams was equal to the occasion. The way in which she said I don't know,' was sufficiently expressive to make Forsyth change the conversation. After that they talked about the weather. But this interesting topic was not engrossing enough to prevent Forsyth thinking about what ho had just heard of Mrs. Leighton. She must be thoroughly bad,' he thought ; suppose she married poor Leighton for his money, secured a settlement on good terms, and has lived happily ever afterwards, without troubling herself even to know where her husband is.' He thereupon formed some rapid generalisations as to the absence of moral sense in women ; what was called moral sense was, so far as the female mind was concerned, a pure conventionalism. After all, he concluded, it was only what was to be expected, that the physical and intellectual inferiority of women should be accompanied by a corresponding moral inferiority."
And this is pretty nearly all we learn of him, except that he is much given to University reform, that he falls in love with our- unattractive heroine, and that he talks to her "as if he were oblivious of the fact that he was a man and she was a woman," which is not a good mode of talking, and does not at all imply, WI Mrs. Fawcett seems to hint, a real respect for her intellect, any more than it would for a scientific man to talk to a politician as if he were oblivious of the fact that he had given his life to science and his interlocutor to politics. Much the best picture in the book, not excepting that of the Evangelical saint, Mrs. Doncaster, is that of Lady Ann Leighton. She is sketched with a skill that gives promise of more power than anything in this tale fulfils. Mrs. Leighton's dependence on Lady Ann, and Lady Ann's devotion to her nephew, are painted with what seems to us true power and knowledge ; nor do we do Mrs. Fawcett the injustice, which we see one of her critics has done her, to believe that she intends her readers utterly to despise and dis- like Lady Ann. That, in the lie which she tells Mr. Forsyth, and the concealment she makes from Janet, she commits a very heinous sin,—for which indeed, we suspect, such a woman would have felt more remorse than Mrs. Fawcett attributes to her, —Mrs. Fawcett of course intends us to believe ; but there is nothing at all in the tale to show that Mrs. Fawcett wishes Lady Ann to be regarded "as a type of all that is villainous," and for our own parts, we believe and hope that Mrs. Fawcett feels a certain weakness for Lady Ann. Her devotion to her nephew, un- scrupulous as it la, is at least on a grand scale.
There are occasional signs, we think, that Mrs. Fawcett has power which will enable her to get over the stiffness and hardness of manner displayed in the telling of this tale. But our deepest objection to Janet Doncaster is that throughout it an unlovable type of women and an =gentle type of men are painted with evident sympathy. We cannot like Janet Doncaster. We cannot .enter into her reasons for deserting her husband in his misery and weakness. Again, she does not seem to us to give reasons that go half deep enough for refusing to continue her intercourse with Mr. Forsyth after they have discovered their love for eaeh other. In a word, while we do not in the least believe that the tale was written to enforce a moral, it does seem to us intended to embody a higher view of what women should be, and actually to embody a lower view, than the ideal usually current amongst cultivated men and women at the present day. And for that reason, while we recognise the talent in Janet Doncaster, we dislike the book.
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