The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-15 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

Miss Braddon's New Romance.

Tha Doctor's Wife. By the Author of "Lady

.Audley's Secret." Three Vols. Sohn Maxwell
and Co.
" Another and another"—of Miss Braddon's
fictitious narratives—" still succeeds." Succeeds in
more senses than one. Succeeds (the one the other)

.n rapid sequence. Bat succeeds also in the sense
:each in Lii time) of instant popularity. 'We should

begin to have serious anxiety lest this singularly
accomplished authoress might be overtasking her
imagination injurieusly, by the extraordinary
strain she has unquestionably been putting upon
it within the last three or four years, but that

we recognise with peculiar gratification the
fact that her arVstic capacities evidence

very distinct and s?preciable advancement. As a
wo:k of art, as a contribution to imaginative
literature, her last work is in many respects her
best. It lacks the horrible glamour, no doubt
which enveloped as with a mephitic atmosphere
the ecenes and creatures depicted by her pen of
fascinatio❑ in" Lady Audley's Secret." It cannot be
pronounced as, ou the whole, quite so enthralling,
from first to last, as " Aurora Floyd "—Aurora

remaining still to our thinking the first and fore-
most amend all Miss Braddon's heroines. But, as
a work of art—it is bte, right that we should here
re-asnrt this very emphaticall;—both as a work of
art and as a more highly elaborated and strenously
thought-out contribution to imaginative literature,
" The Doctor's Wife" is beyond either of those
orlebrated historiettes. To begin with—it is not
(although unmistakeably, as well as avowedly,
from the hand of Miss Braddon) a Sensational
Novel. Nay, it is not only not Sensational--it
is directly derisive of the Sensational School of
Modern Novelists conspicuous among whom,
of course, stands quite notoriously, the authoress
herself. I❑ testimony of its satirical character
in this way as a good-humouredly censorious com-
mentary upon the extravagance of literary sensa-
tionalism, it is only necessary that we should refer
—and refer, moreover (as we can) in the highest
terms of commendation—to the singularly humour-
ous portraiture of Sigismund Smith, the Penny
Novelist—in its way, as a humourous portraiture,
an unquestionable 'masterpiece. " Ihe Doctor's
Wife," in point of fact, reveals in our authoress an

eminently delightful sense of the ludicrous. A sense
of the ludicrous so poignant, indeed, at times as to
be just fairly irresistible. Of this fact the every
touch (even the minutest) applied to the delineation
of Sigismund Smith, affords triumphant attestation.
As to the mere verbal facilities of word-painting,
Miss Braddon had already, of course, supplied her
readers with abundant proofs of her capabilities in
that direction as a vividly realistic woman-of-letters.
"A nice derangement of epitaphs," as Mrs Maloprop
expresses it, being among her most easily recognis-
able characteristics as a writer of fiction. It is no
marvel in tho leant, therefore, when we find
her, here, onco more, by some apt choice
of words or phrases, realising instantane.
ously a whole scene or locality—city or sylvan
it matters little which. We remember the per-
fumed cloister of the Lime Avenue, murmuringly
musical with bees,in "Lady Audley's Secret"—we
recall to mind the trelissed lodge under the fra-
grantly festooned eaves of which that pitiless
horse-jockey husband of Aurora Floyd's coolly
smokes his tobacco, looking out for the advent of
the travelling carriage—and we in consequence
welcome here as the merest matters of course
those singularly slight but marvellously sufficient
freaks and turns of the pen by which the same
writer contrives at moments to sketch a scene in u
sentence. As evidence of which—are we not with
her in imagination in the early morning out
upon the pavements of the Loudon suburb, at
her momentary mention, quite casually as it were, of
" the clattering tin pails and the slopping of nak,,"
there blending pleasantly, she renaluds us, with the
cry of the milkman. It is, as a realistic touch of
phraseology, like Mrs Beecher Stowe's realisation
of the raw windy day blowing in through an inch.
open window, where, in " Uncle Tom's Cabin," she
writes of the curtain " flopping and snapping" in
the uncomfortable current of air. Accus•
tomed though we had become to these minute,
though not by say means wholly insignificant excel-
lencies of style in Miss Braddon, WS acknowledge
ourselves to have been here fairly taken by sur-
prise, upon the recognition of her nice appreciation
and vivid sense of the ludicrous. The character
of Sigismuud Smith alone, would be quite sufficient
to make good her claim to be regarded as
a humorist. The whole conception of that
character is, in simple truth, unmistake-
ably and delightfully humorous. But, apart
from Sigismund, the book under notice has other,
and some among them hardly less distinct evi-
eences of Miss 13raddon's lively and exhilarating
sense of the ridiculous. Take, for auample, her first
mention of tue eldest among her new heroine's
brothers—that very type or arch-exemplar of the
genus—