The conclusion of the story, as at first written, is particularly striking. Janet, after an illness, has come to herself: "She did not know the place where she was. The air was warm and perfumed, the windows shaded, the room quite a stranger to her. An elderly woman, with a black silk mantle on her head and over her shoulders, spoke to her. She did not understand the meaning, but she knew the words were Spanish. Then the tide of recollection rushed back, and the black cold night came fully before her, which was the last thing she recollected. 'My father,' she said, rising as well as she could. The woman had gone to the window and beckoned, and in another minute Mr. Ferroll stood by her bedside. 'Can you still love me, Janet?' said he. 'Love you! oh yes, my father.'"
It seems a pity that a concluding chapter was afterwards added, containing a description of Janet's life with her father in Boston, and of his dying moments and last words, which might well have been left to the imagination. The original conclusion was more impressive without these details.
It is rather curious, too, that Mrs. Clive should have written another volume to explain why Paul Ferroll killed his wife; but possibly she thought further explanation was necessary, since she prefixed to the latter volume a quotation from Froude's "Henry the Eighth": "A man does not murder his wife gratuitously." In this book she changes the names of all the characters except that of Ellinor. Paul Ferroll is Leslie, and his wife, Anne, is Laura. Ellinor, the young and beautiful girl out of a convent, completely enchants Leslie, whom Laura had intended to marry; and Laura contrives, by deliberate malice, so completely to sever them that he makes Laura his wife, while Ellinor returns to the convent. "Violent were the passions of the strong but bitter man; fierce the hatred of the powerful but baffled intellect. Wild was the fury of the man who believed in but one world of good, and saw the mortal moments pass away unenjoyed and irretrievable. Out of these hours arose a purpose. The reader sees the man and knows the deed. From the premises laid before him, he need not indeed conclude that even that man would do the deed, but since it was told in 1855 that the husband killed his wife, so now in 1860 it is explained why he killed her."
This second volume is decidedly inferior to the first, but it shared in the popularity which "Paul Ferroll" had already achieved, and the author's vigorous portraiture of characters and events was well marked in both volumes.
With her third volume, "John Greswold," came a sudden falling off, at any rate as regards dramatic force. "John Greswold" is the autobiography of a young man who has very little story to tell and does not know how to tell it. No grip is laid on the reader's attention; no character claims especial interest, but the thing that is remarkable in the book is the literary touch, which is far more perceptible than in the more interesting story of "Paul Ferroll." The book is somewhat inchoate, but contains short passages of real beauty, keen shafts of observation, and an occasional flight of emotional expression, which raise the writer to a greater literary elevation than the merely sensational incidents of her earlier novels. She has gained in reflective power, but lost her dramatic instinct. Consequently "John Greswold" was less successful than "Paul Ferroll."
The conclusion of the book, vague and indecisive, shows the author to be marked out by nature as one of the Impressionist School. It is powerful and yet indefinite; in fact it could only have been written by one with a true poetic gift. "The seven stars that never set are going westward. The funeral car of Lazarus moves on and the three mourners follow behind. They are above the fir wood and that's the sign of midnight. Twenty-three years ago I was born into this world and now the twenty-third has run out. The time is gone. The known things are all over and buried in the darkness behind. Before me lies the great blank page of the future and no writing traced upon it. But it is nothing to me. I won't ask nor think, nor hope, nor fear about it. The leaf of the book is turned and there's an end—the tale is told."
"Paul Ferroll" may be considered as the precursor of the purely sensational novel, or of what may be called the novel of mystery. Miss Brontë in "Jane Eyre" uses to some extent the same kind of material, but her work is far more a study of character than the story of "Paul Ferroll" can claim to be. In "Paul Ferroll," indeed, the analysis of motive is entirely absent. The motives that actuated Paul Ferroll are to be gathered simply from chance expressions or his actions. No description of the human heart has been attempted. The picture of the violent, revengeful, strongly passionate nature of the man is forcible enough, but it is displayed by action and not by introspection. It is for this reason that Mrs. Clive may be placed in the forefront of the sensational novelists of the century. She anticipated the work of Wilkie Collins, of Charles Reade, of Miss Braddon, and many others of their school, in showing human nature as expressed by its energies, neither diagnosing it like a physician, nor analysing it like a priest. A vigorous representation of the outside semblance of things is the peculiar characteristic of the so-called sensational novelist; and it is in this respect that "Paul Ferroll" excels many of the novels of incident written during the first half of this century. It heralded a new departure in the ways of fiction. It set forth the delights of a mystery, the pleasures of suspense, together with a thrilling picture of "the strong man in adversity," which has been beloved of fiction-mongers from the first days of fable in the land.
But perhaps it was successful, most of all, because it introduced its readers to a new sensation. Hitherto they had been taught to look on the hero of a novel as necessarily a noble and virtuous being, endowed with heroic, not to say angelic qualities; but this conviction was now to be reversed. The change was undoubtedly startling. Even Scott had not got beyond the tradition of a good young man as hero, a tradition which the Brontës and Mrs. Archer Clive were destined to break down. For Scott's most fascinating character, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, was confessedly the villain of the piece; and the splendidly picturesque figure of Dundee was supposed to be less attractive than the tame and scrupulous personality of Henry Morton. It was a convention amongst writers that vice and crime must be repulsive, and that there was something inherently attractive in virtue—a wholesome doctrine, insufficiently preached in these days, but not strictly consistent with facts. To find, therefore, a villain—and a thorough-paced villain, the murderer of his wife—installed in the place of hero and represented as noble, handsome, and gifted, naturally thrilled the readers' minds with a mixture of horror and delight. The substitution of villain for hero is now too common to excite remark, but it was a striking event in the days when "Paul Ferroll" was published, although there had been instances of a similar kind in the novels of the eighteenth century. The new fashion gained ground and speedily exceeded the limits which Mrs. Archer Clive would no doubt have set to it; but it is nevertheless in part to her that we owe this curious transposition of rôles, which has revolutionised the aims and objects of fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century.