Valerie Aylmer
A Novel. By . New York : D. Appleton & Co.
IT must often have happened to our reader, if he is also a play-goer, — and especially a play-goer of these later times, when the theatre has taken to holding the mirror up to nature with so much freedom, —to have seen upon the stage among the masculine characters certain figures —very pretty and charming figures sometimes— which were rather puzzling. They were dressed, these figures, in men’s clothes, and they behaved as much like men as any persons upon the stage, and more. Were they faithful lovers and devoted husbands ? Such fidelity in lovers and devotion in husbands was never seen before. Were they seducers and roués ? They were incomparably beguiling and abandoned. Were they dandies? Their foppishness exceeded all other foppishness. Were they assassins? The murderousness of those assassins! — it made one’s blood run cold.
And yet, there was something which rendered the spectator doubtful if they were all that they seemed to be. Perhaps it was the very excess with which they developed the dramatist’s ideas, the extreme vigor with which they represented masculine character, that awakened misgiving. You might not declare that they were women, but it was incredible that they were men like other men, though they might be such men as the ladies would be could they gratify that aspiration of theirs, “ If I were only a man ! ”
We are confirmed in this suspicion, which is very likely unfounded, by the appearance of the ladies when they wreak this desire in fiction ; for in their personation of lovers, husbands, and brothers there, they remind us of the surpassing manliness of those mystifying figures on the Stage. Even when they would deceive us as authors, and call themselves by men’s baptismal names upon their title-pages, they are defeated by the behavior of their people in men’s clothes ; and we should know that Christian Reid was a lady, because all the men in the book are ladies, or at the best, ladies’-men, and are severally much better and much worse than they could be if they were what they pretend to be. In such minor personages as Valerie’s fat her, General Aylmer of Aylmers, and her uncle, M. Vacquant, this fact does not appear so strikingly ; but there is no doubt of it when you come to her lovers, Charley Hautaine, who had loved Valerie from childhood, who was “ clever, high-spirited, brave to a fault, thorough-bred within and without, and handsome as a prince in a fairy tale,” whom everybody loved, “even the girls with whom he flirted, and the men whom he rivalled,” and who had done warlike wonders in the Confederate Navy during the war, and had light clustering curls, and played upon the guitar, and sang duets, and had fought duels, and had thrown his dearest friend out of a window and crippled him for life; Julian Romney, M. Vacquant’s step-son, who had “ all of boyhood’s smoothness of outline and clearness of tint in the face, whose refined features and waxen complexion suited its rich brown curls and lustrous eves ; all of boyhood’s grace in the slender figure that bore upon it the stamp of such thorough-bred elegance, yet who had a curve of disdain about the mouth, and a cloud of petulance on the brow, which deepened and lightened continually, without ever quite vanishing, and made the most careless observer sure that this man had never in his life known the curb of wholesome restraint, imposed either by others or himself,” and who, in fact, after being flirted with by Valerie (la (belle des belles they called her in her native Louisiana, where they know ever so much French), takes more and more to gambling and is finally killed in a duel; and, above all, Maurice Darcy, the soldierartist, Valerie’s cousin, of Irish blood, and a prodigy of coolness, suppressed passion, cutting sarcasm, and generosity and genius, such as is found only in ladies’ novels, who hates Valerie’s coquetries, and saves her life, and wins her, and breaks with her, and has “ quick gleams flash into his deep-gray eyes,” or as it were “a stone mask fitted over the features,” or “ a cloud, heavy and dark as night,” rolled over them, according to his moods ; who is often the guest of M. Vacquant, his uncle, whom he tells plainly he does not forgive, and never shall forgive, for his ill-treatment of his mother, who paints the most wonderful pictures, and is with “the Emperor Maximilian ” up to the last moment in Mexico.
We should fear that the worst effect of this sort of thing might not be the bad literary art, but that after a while the young men might think of taking the lady novelists at their word, and instead of remaining the sensible, slow, easy-going fellows we all know and like, might begin to ask themselves whether, if women liked those pretty monsters they painted, it was quite worth while to behave with any sort of sanity and goodtemper. But fortunately it is worth while, for the sake of one’s own comfort, and besides, in novels like “ Valerie Aylmer” any one may see that the whole tone of society is as flagrantly unnatural as the men. We speak now for the North ; we cannot declare that, in Baltimore and Louisiana people do not talk and act as Christian Reid says. The circle is very, very patrician, and in purity of blood and breeding alone is one which we cannot hope to see in the North, or ever associate with on equal terms. Pretty nearly everybody has been a champion of the Lost Cause, and has fought with unspeakable heroism ; and some have become so joined to lost causes, that they follow the failing fortunes of despotism in Austria and Mexico. They are mostly of French extraction, and they are of the Catholic religion ; and we have an uneasy feeling (which we dislike to express) that they would think themselves much better than one of our best Boston families. They read nothing commoner than “ Blackwood,” in the thin air of those heights, and they interweave in common parlance genteel morceaux of the langue Française, like qu' importe, tapis, atelier, mes amis, voila tout!, par exemple, dêbut, and an revoir. Hardly any conversation is without these embellishments, and the feebleness of the book is forever staggering into italics.
It would be difficult to give a general idea of the comprehensive absurdity of “ Valerie Aylmer,” and we are not even going to tell the plot of it. We do not know whether it is more sad or more amusing to note how entirely it seems to be evolved from a young girl’s ignorance of the world and knowledge of the most unnatural literature, and how it seems unconsciously to have been put together from this deplorable reading. The art of doing this at all is something in the author’s favor, and youth is something; and at times we fancied that the dialogues of the book, preposterous as they were, had a movement of their own, and did not leave the development of the characters altogether to the author’s explanations ; but we are not sure of this, and the only kindness at parting which we can think of is to remind the author that she can easily outlive “Valerie Aylmer,” and that she cannot help doing better in another novel.