The book, which has only been touched upon in its leading character, will afford an excellent foil to Middlemarch in many ways. The latter, as perhaps the very title indicates, devotes itself chiefly to the English middle class. Fleurange gives pleasant glimpses of German and Italian life with what, from intrinsic evidence, might be judged to be a very true picture of the Russian court and social atmosphere. Though there are plenty of titled folk, it is a consolation for once to find a princess talking like a rational being; not always addressing her attendant as “minion,” her butler as “slave,” and terrifying the ears and eyes of the groundlings by the splendor of her cheap tragedy rhetoric, the glory of her equipages, or the coruscations of her diamonds. Her son, the count, does not, as do most of his class in the titled novel, divide his time between the stable and the green-room. The marquis is not “a villain of the deepest dye,” whether natural or artificial. Though an Italian, he does not carry a poison philter about with him; he employs no bravos, he never carries off Chastity in the shape of a milliner, to be finally chastised by Virtue in a smock-frock. In fact, all these titled folk are very unlike the article one is accustomed to find within flaming covers. The heartlessness and artificiality almost necessarily evoked in the high social atmosphere which Fleurange breathes for a time, is none the less strikingly brought out because it is not taken in epigrammatic parcels, as it were, and flung in your face, after the manner of the author of Middlemarch. The lesson of Felix Dornthall’s wicked life is none the less impressive because, when dying in the hospital ward, Charity stands by his bedside and prays for him as the ill-spent life flickers out in the darkness. It is no shock to human feelings to see Fleurange in her bitter hours kneel down and pray for help to a God she believes can help her. If life is not all “beer and skittles,” neither is it all a continual mistake and a bitter trial. If we cannot have “ideal perfection,” it may be a consolation to some to feel assured that we can do very well without it, and that there is something in the striving after real perfection worthy of human endeavor. To George Eliot, the world was born yesterday, and only grew with her growing faculties. Christianity has practically gone by, and this is not the age for its heroes and heroines. The sham and the cant of it only remain. As long as the sham and the cant produce such characters as Madre Maddalena, Fleurange, Dr. Leblanc, and Clement, we shall welcome the sham and the cant in preference to the reality which can only give us Dorothea and Lydgate as types of true nobility and all that the perfection of manhood and womanhood may expect to come to nowadays. Whilst admiring the wit, and the worldly wisdom, and that power which only ripened genius can give of saying the best thing in the best way which Middlemarch displays throughout, we confess to a little heartsickness at seeing all the nature of a woman author going out over Rosamond Vincy.
Fleurange is certainly a relief after the unnatural atmosphere of Middlemarch, where all is false, uncertain, cold, hard, and brilliant. Though the story is very human, and in this respect has not a whit less of earth than the other, it suffers nothing by an occasional glimpse of heaven. Poor humanity likes a little hope, particularly when it has a very sound title to hope. These two authors traverse it as a hospital; the one surgeon-like, knife in hand, cutting and lopping the useless and unsightly limbs with bright, keen weapon and merciless precision, leaving the dead to bury their dead; the other, like a sister of charity, to bandage the wound, and comfort the sick, and pray by the dying. How different is the same scene to the eyes of each, and how different is each in the eyes of the sick patients! While they admire the skill of the one, they shudder and turn instinctively from her; on the other streaming eyes are bent, and troubled hearts murmur, “God bless you!”
[GRAPES AND THORNS.]
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”
CHAPTER IV.
AN INCH OF FRINGE.
Mr. Schöninger had been in such haste to keep his engagement the evening before that he had made the rehearsal a short one, and the company did not remain long after he went. Perhaps the family did not seem to them quite so gay and pleasant as usual. Certainly no one objected much to their going. The only remonstrance was that uttered by Annette, when Lawrence Gerald took his hat to follow the last visitor.
“What! are you going, too?” she exclaimed involuntarily. She was learning not to reproach him for anything, but it was impossible to conceal her disappointment.
He showed no impatience. On the contrary, his voice was quiet and even kind when he answered her.