| <The Saturday Review, June 30, 1866>
| <A Life’s Love>
| <pb n="789">
| A story delicately planned, characters tenderly conceived, a 
| noble aim in all that regards human life, and a meaning of 
| true spiritual beauty underlying the whole design ~~ what 
| can be wanting to make a book, which has all these most 
| excellent qualities, a perfect and assured success?  It would 
| seem as if the critic who could point out faults after he has 
| signalized so many first-class virtues must be of a carping 
| and unsympathetic nature, who makes rather than finds the 
| blemishes he catalogues; yet <hi> A Life’s Love, </hi> 
| though it has all the qualities we have spoken of, is not a 
| perfect success, unskillful manipulation spoiling one of the 
| best-planned and most carefully thought stories we have 
| read for many months. Had the execution been in any way 
| equal to the design, it would have taken rank among the 
| foremost novels of the day ~~ as it is already one of the 
| foremost for sweetness and delicacy, and for the cleanly 
| wholesomeness of a pure endeavour. But it fails in the 
| shaping power; and without that, the clay may be of the 
| finest quality, but the vase will not be of real merit. The 
| central idea may be of the loveliest character, but the story 
| will fail in real power. It is the union of the power to 
| conceive with the ability to execute which makes the true 
| work of art; but many writers think that they are safe if they 
| possess only one of the two. If they can frame a striking 
| plot, they let the manner of telling it take care of itself; and 
| if they have a good and lively style, they think the story of 
| secondary importance. Hence the large amount of good 
| work spoilt with which the reading public is flooded at the 
| present day, and the vast preponderance of careless 
| cleverness over careful dullness so remarkable in modern 
| light literature. It is not that our writers want for brains, but 
| that they want for a sustained and equalized care ~~ 
| perhaps we should be nearer the mark if we were to say, an 
| equalized power.
| The story of <hi> A Life’s Love </hi> begins on 
| Halloween, 1766, and the opening scene is laid in the shop 
| of John MacFarlane, an honest <p> "body" </p> who sells 
| silks and ribbons; <q> 
| </q> says the author, quaintly. Here meet and 
| congregate the four children whose lives and loves are 
| hereafter chronicled; of which four, three are MacFarlane’s 
| own, and one is Elison Erskine, the orphan daughter of 
| Captain Douglas Erskine, shot in a duel at Paris two years 
| ago, leaving his little girl doomed to an eerie existence ~~ 
| part misery, part mischance, with a large portion of 
| highflown romance to fill up the measure of discomfort. 
| For there is no denying it, Eelie Erskine is an 
| uncomfortable little creature from the beginning, and far 
| too good for any ordinary human being. Living in Glasgow, 
| and known to the MacFarlanes as much as a tobacco lord, 
| wearing a scarlet cloak and walking on the Plainstanes, 
| could be known to a humble draper wearing snuff-colour 
| and slipping down the street outside the cannon palisading 
| with the herd, is Andrew Ramsay, a low-born churl who, 
| by a good marriage and careful business habits, has 
| amassed one of the princeliest fortunes of the time. He has 
| two children, Isobel and Angus; and with Angus Ramsay 
| and Elison Erskine lies the main interest of the book. The 
| key-note is struck in the scene that takes place on 
| Halloween at Stanley House, where the tobacco lord and 
| merchant prince lives, and where the children are trying 
| <p> "spells" ~~ among them little Tommy Munroe, 
| afterwards Major-General Sir Thomas Munroe, and <p> "a 
| little lad from a flat opposite the Laigh Kirk steeple," </p> 
| who was afterwards Sir John Moore. These, however, are 
| names introduced only on this occasion, and never appear 
| again. The children are burning nuts at the hall fire, when 
| Angus says: ~~ <q> </q>
| This gives the key-note; and the substance of the coming 
| story may easily be guessed at. As time goes on, the 
| children grow up into men and women, and Angus and 
| Elison are in love and engaged; but Elison’s grand-aunt, 
| Mrs. Crauford, interferes between them ~~ her pride not 
| taking well with the alliance of an Erskine with a Ramsay 
| ~~ and the betrothal is set aside until Elison shall be of age, 
| and her own mistress. At present she is but sixteen; and the 
| good old lady rightfully judged this to be too early for any 
| maidenly lass to enter into such matters, or even to know 
| her own mind, and what was love and what was only fancy. 
| But Elison and Angus both hold themselves engaged, in 
| spite of the prohibition; and it is only a question n of time 
| between them ~~ of honourable waiting, and loyal 
| adhesion. Again, long years pass, and Elison is of age. 
| Angus, now a handsome young officer, comes back to 
| Glasgow to claim the fulfillment of her promise; the 
| engagement is recognized by the seniors, but by reason of 
| her grand-aunt’s illness, Elison cannot marry her lover at 
| the moment, and the delay saves her from future trouble. 
| For Violet MacFarlane, one of the children who, in the 
| opening chapter, was busy getting shoulder-knots and 
| bright red patches from John MacFarlane, has by this time 
| blossomed out into one of the loveliest girls in or about the 
| old city; and on violet MacFarlane, Angus, light, unsteady, 
| and already a seducer, fixes his roving eyes, while still 
| betrothed to Elison, living in loving dreams in Erskineland. 
| We can scarcely blame him for his preference, though so 
| blameworthy in his duplicity; for Elison, though meant to 
| be all that a woman should be ~~ graceful, pure, angelic, 
| and heavenly ~~ was something too shadowy and high-set 
| for a decidedly earthy sinner like Angus; and if Violet 
| becomes too angelic on her side in the end, in the beginning 
| she has the flesh and blood of naughtiness very strongly 
| marked, and, by just so much fitness as lies in the 
| community of evil-doing, is a more likely mate for Angus. 
| After a few months’s flirtation, and a few weeks’ serious 
| love-making, the secret gets wind, and Violet is kept under 
| watch and ward by her parents, who are hurt and indignant 
| that their honourable name should be trailed through the 
| mud of slanderous gossip, and that ever child of theirs 
| should have done this evil thing. A secret love affair with a 
| man as good as married, and married too with an Erskine, 
| and such an Erskine as Elison! Wounded pride for the 
| miserable sin of their own, and loyalty to the great family 
| son long loved and respected, made both father and mother 
| severe, if not harsh; but their anger only precipitated the 
| event, for Angus, thinking himself unable to live without 
| his Vi, proposed an elopement; and Violet, one day crying, 
| <q> </q> sprang into a 
| carriage and pair drawn up before the door, and was made 
| Mrs. Angus Ramsay out of hand.
| After this poor Elison becomes very dreary and wearisome. 
| She mainly dresses in white, and seems to spend her life in 
| singing appropriate hymns, either to her harp in the 
| twilight, or out of doors in lonely places when the weather 
| is seasonable. She carries her eyes either cast up to the 
| clouds in an ecstasy of sorrow, or cast down to the earth in 
| dumb and gentle despair; for she loves Angus Ramsay all 
| the same in spite of his disloyalty,
| <pb n="790">
| and she cherishes this love and a broken heart with a 
| persistency which, at first very soft and tender, at last palls 
| on the reader terribly, and makes him inclined to be utterly 
| savage with both author and heroine. All this time, from the 
| first moment of their meeting as babies to the present hour, 
| through boyhood and hobbledehoyhood, young John 
| MacFarlane has cherished a hopeless passion for Elison. 
| But the Erskines, who thought they condescended more 
| than was good when they stooped to a tobacco merchant, 
| though a merchant prince, were scarcely likely to find their 
| equals in an honest draper’s son, though of the better class, 
| and with <p> "gowd i’ gowpens" </p> and to spare. John 
| MacFarlane loves, but Elison neither sees, nor, had she 
| seen, would she have responded. She sings appropriate 
| hymns explanatory of her heart and circumstances, and 
| takes but little heed of John’s curly head or faithful love, 
| till absolutely forced to pay some attention to both. At first 
| she spurns the young draper, who, by the failure of Andrew 
| Ramsay, and the consequent loss of the Erskine property 
| (the tobacco merchant owed them ten thousand pounds), is 
| now the proprietor of Erskineland. He and his father bought 
| the place, wishing the old lady and her grand-niece to 
| remain there as if it were still their own. But this offer is of 
| course rejected; and Elison and Mrs. Crauford go to live 
| away by the sea, in a kind of enchanted castle, where Eelie 
| still dresses in white, and wanders on the seashore in a 
| highly objectless and moony condition. To her comes 
| young John with his wise-like offer. At first she refuses; 
| but, being brought to see the solace lying in active 
| wholesome life, and having a dim suspicion that her 
| moonings are but a poor use of time, and her hymns but sad 
| stuff, she prepares to say <p> "yes," </p> and make a 
| canny housewife before she dies. While on her way to 
| Glasgow in this more cheery and healthy frame of mind, 
| she gets shipwrecked; and is buried with lilies on her 
| breast.
| In the meantime Angus Ramsay turns out a villain ~~ 
| forges, cheats, steals, and does everything that is base and 
| mean. Violet, obliged to turn milliner for the support of her 
| young family, changes in her character with the celerity of 
| a pantomimist. From having been passionate, proud, 
| willful, and, we must add, selfish, she becomes so 
| wonderfully saintly that she gets to be as tiresome as Elison 
| herself. Indeed, they are both too much like pre-Raffaellite 
| portraits for any healthy humanity to take an interest in 
| them, and have been evidently modeled on the features of 
| that school. They are women with white robes, and opal 
| jewels, and lilies borne crosswise, and loose hair diademed. 
| They are subjects for poetry, not prose fiction, and would 
| do better for a picture than a novel. And this is one of the 
| weaknesses of the book; it is too highly transcendental for 
| the <p> "local colour." </p> Sweet and pure as it is, it 
| might have been infinitely more effective, and quite as 
| noble, if it had been given in a simpler and lower key. Then 
| there is a want of roundness and flow in the style which is 
| fatiguing. It is an abrupt, staccato, angular style, that 
| requires incessant attention to keep up with. Things are told 
| in a jerky, half-allusive manner, and there is a terrible 
| dearth of nominatives, so that one gets the sensation of 
| having been jolted and bruised somehow, and drawn 
| ruthlessly over unnecessary stones. The Scottish dialect is 
| excellent, but the spirit of the time is not caught. Mrs. 
| Angus Ramsay, in the year 1790 or thereabouts, would not 
| talk of herself as a millinery <hi> artiste. </hi> The 
| Erskines of Erskineland could not have looked at the 
| MacFarlanes in any way as their equals; and the Ramsays, 
| merchant princes as they were, would not have lived in the 
| modernly luxurious manner in which they are made to 
| rejoice. Trade and gentility did not go together in those 
| days, especially in Scotland, where blood and family 
| standing rank higher than even here in England; and the 
| social painting is a mistake, though all else be true. Modern 
| fine-ladyism has not fully invaded Scotland even yet, but at 
| the end of the last century the highest ladies in the land 
| were proud of their housewifely qualities, and wrought well 
| at them too; and, though there was much pride of class, 
| there was also much simplicity, and in a manner equality, 
| of domestic circumstance. It is immensely difficult to avoid 
| these anachronisms, but they are blemishes nevertheless, 
| and hurt the taste of the educated reader. For such flaws as 
| these, then, we are reluctantly obliged to confess that <hi> 
| A life’s Love </hi> is not a perfect book; but there is so 
| much of excellence in it that we are sure the author could 
| do something of genuine worth if only he chose to try with 
| a will, remembering to infuse a slight admixture of iron 
| into the blood of his future Elisons, and to keep the 
| seraphic wings a little less visible and more closely folded.