نا

gestion of what is unlovely. After all, unless a girl comes outright to folly or evil, even her potentialities of wrong have their charm, and Ethel Newcome is the more interesting because at a certain time she is ready to reverse the old saw and count love well lost for the world. She does not finally change her mind so much as have it changed for her by events and circumstances; and in this she, even more than Laura Bell, is like girls in life, and justifies herself as a work of the author's highest art.

THACKERAY'S ETHEL NEWCOME AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S JANE EYRE

THERE

HERE are so many of Thackeray's women that to choose any eight or ten of them must seem like ignoring as many others equally worthy of study. The reader may demand in fit dudgeon why this one or that one, whom he has always thought a significant figure, is left out; and against such censure it is not easy to provide. All one can say is that by universal consent such and such women have been chosen the novelist's great heroines, and that these must represent him, even if injustice seems done to others. In "The Newcomes," for instance, there are half a score of women who will come to mind at the mention of the novel: Lady Kew and her daughter Lady Anne Newcome, Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter Rosie, Miss Honeyman, Madame de Florac, Mrs. Pendennis, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, Lady Clara Pulleyn; these all have claims, nicely differenced and distinguished, and yet it is Ethel Newcome who remains first, and has the largest share of our interest if not our sympathy.

I

It seems to me that in Ethel Newcome the author has done his utmost to imagine a character of noble but not unnatural beauty. He has fancied her of a station of life in which her qualities could best show themselves,

with the light of the great world upon them. He has not pretended that she was at once perfect, or ever perfect, but he has wished her to appear capable of learning from her own faults, and from the errors and miseries of others. He is admirably successful in making us feel her growth: she really grows in our knowledge from a young, unformed girl, to a mature woman, who has come to the knowledge of right and wrong by the use of her own sense, and has finally chosen the right through a love of it. Her youthful love-making with Clive Newcome is pretty and winning, though she gives him up at the bidding of the world in the terrible old Lady Kew, her grandmother, and for a while she thinks she cares more for rank and splendor than for love. She might not so unjustly have them with Clive married; but it is of her own motion, from the instruction of the unhappiness she has seen so near her in her brother's marriage; that she breaks with the Marquis of Farintosh whom she does not love, and prefers a life of such usefulness as she can lead in her family, with her kind, dull, capricious mother and her younger brothers and sisters. She is never an insipid saint; and she fights evil in her wicked brother, as well as eschews it, chiefly employing the powers of sarcasm with which she is gifted. She is rather satirical with most people and is not afraid to measure wits even with her grandmother, who has a very trenchant wit, and wields it so mercilessly that all the rest of her family are in terror of her. In short, Ethel sums up in her character the virtues and defects of the highest type of Thackeray women, and, as women go, the type is not so low as might be, though he used to be accused of such a cynical hatred of women. Her greatest fault as a creation is that she talks too much in the interest of the author for the pleasure of the reader. I am far from implying that a woman in choosing the better part cannot

express herself with a breadth and depth worthy of any novelist, but if she is really doing it for herself she will do it in her own way and, as it were, in her own words. This is certainly not the case with Ethel Newcome in her last conversation with the Marquis of Farintosh, where her simple-heartedly selfish lover, not having the author or reader in mind, talks straight from himself, and is perfectly mean and natural. It is not that Ethel says anything out of character; but the critic who reads that scene can hardly help feeling its æsthetic deficiency, in the sort I have suggested.

II

Of course the psychological climax of the story is in the chapter detailing the conversations at Paris between Ethel and Madame de Florac, Ethel and Clive, and finally Clive and Madame de Florac, where the girl definitely refuses her cousin, after long wishing to accept him, and after more or less indecisive love-making between them. The voices are not the very voices of life, nor the words the very words, but the thoughts and feelings are, and at times the voices and the words Inevitably the writer who has written much becomes confirmed in his manner, and it is not surprising that there is so much, but that there is so little, of the Thackeray manner in these conversations, which are based upon a familiar Thackeray convention. Here is the make-believe that an old woman like Madame de Florac has kept a love-disappointment alive through a long, loveless marriage, and is promoting, against all the French proprieties, the meeting of her lost lover's son with the girl he loves, out of a romantic tenderness for her own past; here is the clever aristocratic girl who is better than her aristocracy (as we poor plebeians

like to fancy some aristocrats) and who has her dreams, that come and go, of well-losing the world for love; here is the youth, handsome, witty, gifted, who is tempting her to the better part. The girl is letting her heart go, and he is drawing it, and in the background is the old woman with her romantic wishes for his success. The lovers talk it all over with openness on Clive's part, and on Ethel's with at least transparent insincerity; and the result is, like the conception, more natural than the representation, as mostly happens with Thackeray, though in this case the representation is unusually good. I have been reading that chapter over again, and I am not sure but that in Ethel's final speech the author has insinuated a fine satire of her which escaped the unspectacled eyes of my youth. If this is true, he has done it so delicately that it does not audibly clash with the romantic sentiment of the closing passage between Clive and Madame de Florac.

"Ethel. "You spoke quite scornfully of palaces, just now, Clive. I won't say a word about the-the regard which you express for me. I think you have it. Indeed, I do. But it were best not said, Clive; best for me, perhaps, not to own that I know it. In your speeches, my poor boy-and you will please not make any more, or I never can see you or speak to you again, neveryou forgot one part of a girl's duty: obedience to her parents. They would never agree to my marrying any one below-any one whose union would not be advantageous in a worldly point of view. I never would give such pain to the poor father, or to the kind soul who has never said a harsh word to me since I was born. My grandmamma, too, is very kind in her way. I came to her of my own free will. When she said that she would leave me her fortune, do you think it was for myself alone that I was glad? My father's passion is to make an estate, and all my brothers and sisters