SYLVIA'S CHOICE.* WE have been unjust both to this touching
story and to the reading public, in that we have not long ago done what we could
* Spices Choice. 2 vols. By Georgians M. Craik. London: Hurst and Blackett.
I to introduce them to each other. But we have suffered poetical justice for our neglect, inasmuch as we have, at length, read it at a season when the weather has certainly rendered any further cause of depression—for the story is painful as well as touching—quite superfluous. But neither bitter cold, nor snow-laden atmo- sphere, nor black heavens, nor all the other wintry ills that flesh is heir to, could so excite our self-commiseration as to deaden our sympathy with the hero of this admirable story, whose sad fate is described in very simple, but very touching language. We almost make the sorrows of the loving and devoted, but weak and nerveless man our own. In his hour of greatest need he is angrily taunted by his wife with his want of courage and energy, of strength of will, of resource, of all useful knowledge, and accused of culpable neglect and selfish carelessness, in not having foreseen and warded off the impending ruin ; and worse than all, informed, with scarce an attempt to veil the naked cruelty of the truth, that she had only married him for his money and his position. It is a perfect picture of utter, hopeless dejection ; too- weak for despair, too gentle for scorn and indignation ; of a heart too loving to stand alone, yet not strong enough to break ; of a life of the affections suddenly left desolate ; of occupations and interests too various and shallow to be pursued in poverty ; of a conscience keen enough to desire to set up again fortunes that his thoughtless- ness had wrecked, but of a mind too unpractical to see, and a will too weak to take any road to such a consummation. The hopeless, dreary desolation of such a nature is more intensely pitiable than that of a stronger and deeper one, that could, though through a greater agony, at least catch glimpses of possible, if distant, peace and joy. We have seldom read a passage in fiction that has touched us more by its pathos than the account of the last few weeks in England, of the kindly, sensitive, loving Richard Duncombe, after it has been decided to ship him off to Australia—on the pretence that he might retrieve his fortunes in the Colonies—and to establish his wife and little daughter in her old home with her parents. We wish we could give the entire chapter unmutilated :— " 'I'll borrow a hundred pounds of you,' be said to Sir William.— 'Yes; you will give me more than that, I know, if I want it, but I shall never pay you back what I take, so draw in your purse-strings, and lend me nothing more than what I ask for. The groans of those poor people who are to get their thirteen and twopence in the pound are sounding in my ears already, and the weight of their unpaid thousands is lying on my shoulders. I don't know, and I shall never know, how much of the burden of that load I ought to bear,—but I know that I want little enough to add other debts to it to make it heavier.' . . . . Yon are my Mentor, and I am an unwilling Telemachus,' he said to his father-in-law once, with one of his sad laughs. know I am a dead-weight on your hands—but it won't last much longer now. The Lyra' sails on the 15th, you say ? Well, she shall take me out in her—and then your work will be done, and you may all sit together that night and drink to my success in the new world. "Success, and a long life there!" I think that may be the form of the toast.' And then ho laughed again, and Sir William looked at him doubtfully, not knowing whether he spoke itr jest or earnest, and coughed a little uneasy cough. He stood by the nursery window one day, murmuring some verses to himself while the child played. She was playing with the animals out of a Noah's ark on the window-sill, and he had been playing with Noah's animals too, but presently his thoughts had strayed away from Noah, and he had began to murmur those lines that she could not hear.—' What are you saying, Papa ?' cried curious Sylvia, tugging at his sleeve. And then, after a moment or two, he sat down, and took ber on his knees and turned her- face to him.—' What am I saying ? Listen, and see if you can under- stand,' he said :—
" Bloom, 0 ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away. With lips unbrightenod, wreathless brow, I stroll ; And would you learn the spells that drown my soul? Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hopo without an object cannot live."
—' I don't like it,' said Sylvia, with precipitation. She had been listening,. knitting her soft brows, and contemplating her father with a solemn gaze.—' Why don't you like it, little one ?" he asked.—' I don't think it's pretty. It sounds so sad,' she said.—' Yes, it sounds sad. But many Bad things are vory true things. Sometimes the sad things are the truest of all. Sylvia,' he said suddenly, when you grow up to bo a big girl will you remember how we used to play together, will you re- member the old study where we used to be so happy ?'—'I should like to go back there,' said Sylvia with decision.—' Should yen? Well, I am afraid you will never go back any more, but—give me a bit of paper, and I'll see if I can make a picture of it ; let us see which of us can recollect all about it best.' He got a piece of paper, and sat down at the table, with the child still upon his knees, and began to make a drawing of the room they both had known so well. It was an incorrect, unsatisfactory little sketch, but the child watched its progress with intense interest and delight. Presently, as she wriggled about upon his knee, her elbow swept the picture he had been making from the table, and it fell upon the floor. A few minutes afterwards she ran away and forgot it ; and then poor Richard Duncombe picked it up, and looked at it for a moment or two, and folded it up, and carried it from the room. There was a sort of feminine tenderness about him that made him do things sometimes like a woman. He took the poor little sketch, and kissed the bit of it that stood for Sylvia, and locked it in his desk. ' She will never miss it,' he said to himself. There were a few childish scratches of the pencil in one corner that she had made.
They had been meant to represent a house. They bore no resemblance to any object under heaven, but Richard Duncombe's lip quivered as he looked at them,—not only to-day, but on many a day after this, when the sea lay between him and Sylvia, and no memorial but this remained to him of a thing that the little hand had touched."
And though the reverse of a pleasing picture, that of the wife is even cleverer ; it is one of a creature perfectly heartless, and yet it is saved from any charge of unnatural monstrosity by the almost pathetic selfishness of the woman, who can think of and realise no grief or trouble but her own ; who shakes in passionate and helpless rage the chains which, by no fault or act of her own, bind her to the obscure poverty which
she loathes, and grinds her teeth at the credulous and helpless husband who never guarded the, for her, sole treasure—his wealth, and now holds her in the hated bondage of a tie, all the conditions of which, in her favour, she feels to have been broken. Nothing can be more revolting, or more illustrative of the worldly, conventional views of heartless fashion, than the calm, cold exchange of opinions—if opinions that are the same can be exchanged— between the mother and daughter, first on the subject of the marriage, and afterwards on the best way of disposing of the weak cause, as he is deemed, of their misfortunes ; and the difference in their selfish feeling for the poor, despised, and aban- doned incubus of a husband, is described with a keen and true -perception of the greater charity and pitifulness which temper
'the selfishness of age, and the longing for pleasure and triumph which sharpen the sense of injury in youth.
Again, there is a third and lighter shade of selfishness in Sir William, the father, due partly to the less self-occupied nature of a man, and partly to the fact that the trouble touches him more lightly than it touches his wife, on whom the daughter, in her misery, leans. The common-place, good-natured, indolent Baronet is sketched with a hand faithful to nature, both when he sits as father and as grandfather ; and Ferrer, to whom Sylvia is engaged, is another excellent portraiture of worthy common- placeness, with, perhaps, more principle and more purpose in
life, but with even less of any warmth of nature. Indeed, one of the defects of the book is that all poor Sylvia's friends, when her father is gone, are common-place and worldly, with only just so much good-nature—her mother is without any—as consists with strict mediocrity ; and that there is no admixture of a higher type of character ; but that suddenly, when the course of the story changes, the places of these ordinary people know them no more for us, and we turn to altogether another scene, where heart and mind, and not rank and fashion, direct the far simpler, but deeper current of events. There is a short interregnum, during which Sylvia is the bright, particular star, alternately of the one and the other sphere, and she shines not only as the central, but as far the brightest luminary. Not that she is so original a conception as either her father or her mother, but she is quite as natural, and far more
attractive. Her struggles for independence enlist all our sym- pathies—whether they are made to free her from the trammels of an uncongenial lover, or to enable her to take the place, which both her own heart and her father's elect to be the right one, at
his side. The desire to see these matters in their true light, the effort to persuade and convince those around her rather than put herself in painful opposition, the respectful love to her grand- parents and gratitude to her lover, and yet the shy firmness which opposes itself to their worldly principles and selfish wills, and finally achieves its purpose and takes its stand by the right—are all beautifully drawn characteristics of a sweet and pure, though independent nature. Whether it is at all probable that, during this interregnum, Sylvia could spend half her time with her fatly- and half with her mother, without her fashionable acquaintances discovering her plebeian tastes and vulgar occupations, we leave to the authoress's consideration. The tale is much too good to admit of our carping at trifles ; and for the same reason, we decline to pass judgment on the probability of so daintily brought up a young lady taking so cheerfully to her attic bedroom and her menial duties. The lover who ultimately carries off this charming Sylvia is, of course, a hard-working litterateur, much older than herself, and of the despotic type of character which is supposed by so many authoresses to captivate superior girls. However, his is not the most objectionable variety. He does not preach, nor train, nor cruelly break her in ; he only -loves her heartily, but puts on no airs to cover his natural roughness. We will leave our readers on pleasant terms with him and with the authoress, who, in her sketch of Mr. Britton, exhibits, for the first time in this story, a sense and power of humour. We will introduce him as a crusty convalescent, when Sylvia and her father go to cheer him after an illness :—
"'Lot her take her bonnet off, Drayton,' [Mr. Dnncombe has assumed the name of Drayton]—' and we'll have some tea. I wish you would ring the boll, and let me speak to them about getting tea.'— . There will be time enough for that presently.'—' No, there won't be time. You don't know how long they take to do things here. Will you ring for me ?' and he turned appealingly to Sylvia.—Mr. Duncombe laughed, and went to the bell and rang it. 'What a wilful follow you are 1' he said.—' Well, why don't you do what I tell you ? If I was a little stronger on my legs I would have my own way.'—' It seems to me that you get your own way pretty well, without much strength in your legs.'—' This is my stick,' he said abruptly to Sylvia, lifting up a stout staff from the side of his chair, and displaying it to her. ' I can get along pretty well with this now. I walk up and down the room when I get left alone. It's a good strong stick. Try it.'—Sylvia took it from him, but she did not quite know bow to try it. 'It seems beautifully strong,' she only ventured to say ignorantly after a moment' I wish you would ring that bell again. I don't believe you pulled it so as to make it sound. Oh yes!—here they are at last! Sarah,'—a servant had come into the room, and he began to address her eagerly,—' I want you to get tea—tea for ns all, you understand,—and get something with it,—ham—or beef—or—what have you downstairs ?'—' Oh, we don't want any meat. Please don't get any meat,' Sylvia said entreatingly ; but he only knitted his brows, and went on as if he did not hear her,— 'Have you any ham in the house ?'—' Yes, Sir,' Sarah answered.—' Then fry some ham,—and don't be an hour about You shouldn't interfere with me when I'm giving orders,' he said to Sylvia in a tone of reproach as soon as the door had closed.—' But you shouldn't order a meal like that when we don't want it,' she answered, half laughing.—'./ want it, whether you do or not. You seem to me to be beginning, just like your father, to assume that I don't know what I'm about.'—' Oh no, indeed I don't do that?-4,Well, don't strike in again when I'm telling people what to do.'"
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