The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-17 00:00:00

MISS BRADDON'S NEW NOVEL.

Eleanor's Victory. By M. E. Braddon. Three vols.
Tinsley Brothers. _ _

" Eleanor's Victory" will more than sustain the
reputation already won for the author by her two
remarkable works—" Aurora Floyd" and "Lady
Audley's Secret." It will more than sustain Miss
Braddon's reputation, not by advancing it, but
rather, we would say, by purifying it. As a work
of:art the narrative here presented to us is—of course,
in no puritanical sense, yet, for all that, purely and
simply enough—unexceptionable. It is, throughout,
what the two earlier, and (we must confess) far
more enthralling fictions by which this literary
amazon won her spurs is the arena of romance—
right womanly ! We have nothing here to do any-
more witk horse jockeys and dog fanciers. As we
traverse the new pathway along which
Miss Braddon now conducts us, guided,
as we advance along its most devious
windings, by the intricate and elastic, but tenacious
and wholly unbroken thread of her narrative, our
nostrils are no longer offanded (even occasionally)
by overpowering whiffs from the kennel and the
stable-yard—oppressed now by the close atmosphere
of the Lofty's garret, now by the reeking fumes of
the low taproom or beershop—until the whole
web work of the story, among the meshes of which
the siren whose cunning fingers have woven it
has contrived to entangle us, seems to have
become saturated with a strange inerradi-
cable flavour mysteriously compounded of rank
ammonia and stale tobacco. Such—who shall
deny it, that has ever read, or even looked into the
histories of either Lady Audley, or Aurora Floyd ?
—such literally is the general character of the air
Miss Braddon's readers have hitherto breathed, and
to which they were gradually becoming shamefully
accustomed, and were beginning almost—shocking,
though it may appear, to speak thus of our authoress's
more infatuated admirers—almost—to like ! A
different atmosphere altogether is breathed by the
readers of " Eleanor's Victory"—a different atmos-
phere is respired, in other words, by the imaginary
characters peopling the little world of this new and
most romantic narrative. The scene of the story
here related lies for the most part in the green,
fresh, wholesome country side, among the fields and
woods of old England, hard by the royal town of
Windsor—either at Woodlands, the seat 'of old
Maurice de Crespigny, or at Tolldale Priory,
the estate of Mr. Gilbert Monckton, the wealthy
London solicitor. The incidents of the fiction,
it is true, carry us as well alternately to
Paris or to London—conducting the reader when
in Paris mostly to the gaslight boulevards,
and when in London to the homely purlieus of the
little back street, or cul de sac, here spoken of as
the Pilasters in the Cockney regions of Bloomsbury.
Eleanor—Vane by birth, Monckton by marriage—
is, as the title at once indicates, the heroine. The
Victory that title specifies is the one achieved by her
at the very close of the fiction, not over her foe,but over
her own passionate yearning for vengeance. In all
three of Miss Braddon's principal fictions, the heroine
occupies the central position in the picture—predo-
minates, so to speak, far and away over the hero:
whether the good or the bad, whether the bluff
Yorkshire squire, or the handsome horse-train-
ing adventurer—whether, as in the present
instance, Mr, Monckton, the attorney, or
Launcelet Darrell, the gambling, swindling,
forging, fribbling Ne'er-do-weel. In all three of
these stories again—there is a Secret. Lady Audley
has her Secret. Aurora Floyd has her Secret.
Eleanor Vane has her Secret. Only, in the last
mentioned instance, the secret is held aloof, not
from the reader, but solely from the heroine's friends
and foes—save one, the dearest, and truest, and
manliest of all her friends, Richard Thornton (Dick
Thornton, we should rather call him), the scene
painter. It is in the Pilasters that Dick has his
habitat, smokes his ball-dog meershaum, lounges
about in his shirt-sleeves or his pigment-stained
working coat, the kindliest of good-natured fellows,
loving in his heart's core (unacknowledged to any-
body but himself) grey-eyed, amber-haired Eleanor
Vane (who is not for him, however), and cherishing,
as only such a model nephew can, the worthy,
homely, kind-hearted Signora Picirillo. We don't
quite know but what we have a sneaking
preference for the untidy ways and sordid sur-
roundings of the Signora's menage at the
Bloomsbury Pilasters, to all the luxurious comfort
and splendours of Tolldale Priory, with its ancient
rooms and its modern furniture, its costly paintings
and its parian statuettes. The battle all through—
though long delayed—is to be (the reader sees
it soon enough, and waits for it eagerly when
once he has seen thus that is to be)—between
Eleanor and Launcelot ! Between the good-looking
young, idling, scoundrel, who lures old George
Vane, Eleanor's father, to his ruin at one of the
Paris gambling-tables, and through that ruin goads
him to a ghastly suicide in the grey of an autumn
morning. The plot: of the story here told is
for the most part wonderfully ingenious. Only
one flaw in it as a plot—namely, one
aris-
ing out of a needless violation of the
probabilities—can we point to. That flaw, to our
thinking, is one that might readily enough have
been avoided by so skilful a romancist as the
author of " Aurora Floyd," being the unnatural
suddenness with which Eleanor slips into an
engagement as travelling companion to the
very woman by whom Eleanor's own husband, Mr.
Monckton, had years before been jilted. As we
read the chapter recounting the manlier in which
this astoundingly wonderful coincidence is brought
about—the chapter where the fugitive wife, just
after her flight from Tolldale Priory is showing off
her brilliant powers as a pianist to the profession al
negotiator of these engagements,the Principal, that
is, of the Governese's Institution—we hear the
whistle of the scene-shifter ; we see the ungainly
sliding-flap sticking at an angle all askew in the
ill-adjusted groove; we smell the orange-peel, and
the sawdust; all is tinsel and cotton velvet, rouge
and spangles. Otherwise than in this exceptional
instance, we are carried onward in the narrative
under the agreeable influence of a complete illusion.
Nevertheless, there are one or two inconceivable
idiots, at times quite distressingly prominent, among
the dramatis persona. Little blue eyed Laura
Mason, for example, with her prattling talk and
her everlasting simper, is—alas ! that we should
have to say it of a pretty girl in a love story—a
perfect ass. One hardly has patience at times to
glance with half an eye down the pages rendered
frivolous by her nonsensical small talk—very small
talk. Her mother, Mrs. Major Leonard, is nearly
as great an idiot, when we come unhappily towards
the end of the story, to make her acquaintance.
But her empty headed husband, the Major, com-
pensates the reader for the drivelling foolishness
of his pretty wife and daughter, by an opportune
kind heartedness and a blunt common-sense that
make us forget oven his own crass stupidity
when not under emergencies! What possibly can
be said, however, of our respect for the sound judg-
ment and the good taste of the clever London
lawyer, who has made such an egregious nincom-
poop of himself as to fall desperately in love with
ao very shallow a creature as that pretty Margaret
with the yellow hair and the torquoise eyes, even-
tually the wife of Major Leonard, and, as such, the
mother of Laura the beloved of Launcelot ?
All
respect for Mr. Monckton's taste and judg-
ment pass away from us for ever—so soon
as we drop into the acquaintance of the Lennards
and come to appreciate the character of that same
Margaret. That Eleanor's Victory will obtain the
popularity of " Lady Audley'e Secret" and " Arrow
Floyd," we cannot believe for an instant. The story,

besides being not nearly so enthralling as tither of
those two wonderfully interesting narratives, ends
altogether too happily for the securing to itself
of any such popularity. The green curtain falls like
a last pang completing and perfecting the poignant
emotions excited by a tragedy. But there always
seems to as an intolerable insipidity in the " dressing
up" of the dranzatis personce, the heavy father, the
youthful lover, the fair young lady who loves him
and is beloved, the shrewish mother-in-law, the low
comedy serving man, the pretty abigail, with the
neat waist and ancles, and that everlasting apron
with the preposterous little watchpockets—the
"drawing up" of the whole set of these " in line"
behind the footlights as the curtain descends upon
the last scene of a genuine five-act comedy. Worse
evt.n than the sense of insipidity thus produced is
!hat caused by the announcement of something
like the happy living together ever afterwards
of good and bad alike at the end of a
romantic story like this one about " Eleanor's
Victory." The ,Bride of Lammermoor would
certainly not possess the glamour with which it is
so resplendently endowed by the genius of Sir
Walter, if the Master of Ravenswood had not been
swallowed up in the quicksands, if Lucy had not
been discovered, the morning after her nuptials, mad
and blood-bespattered in the chimney corner. As
for the Old Curiosity Shop it would never have been
held (as it is) in almost sacred remembrance by us,
sanctified by our tears for the death of Little Nell
—had Miss Trent been discovered in the nick of
time and brought home, in ruddy health
and a carriage and four, by her in every
sense Punchy uncle, the good-natured Single Gen-
tleman! Particularly if Mr. Daniel Quilp, of
Tower Hill, had turned out a reformed character,
making it up permanently with Mrs_ Jiniwin, and
frequenting Little Bethel out of a pure spirit of
devotion, rang a deux panniers, with Mrs. Nubbles
on one arm and Miss Brass upon the other. We
don't believe in these sudden transformations. We
only tolerate them about Christmas time, and then
only for the pure love of fun, in the gorgeous halls of
bliss, or the fairy dells of delight at the tran-
sition stage of the pantomime. Launcelot's
exemplary after-life 'will be unwelcome, we
believe, to the majority of the readers of
"Eleanor's Victory." Apart from that distastefully
insipid incident, the new story here completed by
Miss Braddon is fully entitled to that cordial recep-
tion which it is now receiving every day more and
more widely, by right of her expanding and ex-
panding reputation.

THE ALBERT CROSS.

TO THE EDITOR OP THE SIIN.

SIR,—I have read your leading article bane Sun
of last evening, on this subject, and I think that the
idea is excellent ! I hope that the Queen, who, like
her lamented husband, has naturally scientific and
literary attainments, and who has always shown a
disposition to patronize mental efforts, may be in-
duced, or " graciously pleased," to use the jargon
of the Court Newsman, to act upon the suggestion,
thereby doing justice to literary merit, and further
perpetuating the name of the Prince, in a manner
more useful and pleasing than can be done by the
erection of a hundred monuments to his memory.
Literary and scientific persons require some tangi-
ble and special mark of Royal favour to bring them
on a level with military characters—each useful in
their particular vocatiod—and the " Albert Cross"
would admirably answer this purpose.—Yours,
obediently, MERCURY.
October 16.

The Attorney-General and the Solicitor-
General.

(From the Law Times of to-day)
Two facts are certain, that Sir It. Palmer was
returned for Plymouth as a Conservative; that Mr.
Collier was a candidate as a Radical ; that Sir R.
Palmer, the Conservative, was turned out, and that
Mr. Collier, the Radical, got in, and that now they
are colleagues. It is certain that there has been no
change on the part of Mr. Collier, and therefore, to
bring Sir R. Palmer and Mr. Collier together,
Sir R. Palmer must have gone to Mr. Collier;—
either this, or they are still unlike in their princi-
ples, in which case one or the other must be acting
for a Government from which he differs. We do
not design any blame to Sir R. Palmer for this. It
is simply the custom of lawyers--a licence tacitly
allowed to those who are compelled by an evil cus-
tom to look for professional promotion through the
paths of politics, and who have therefore no help for
it but to choose the path that will most certainly
lead them to the laudable objects of their ambition.
The fault lies not with them, but with the practice
that now regulates professional promotion ; and Sir
Palmer is only a more striking illustration of a mis-
chief we are very desirous to reform.