But the curious, the characteristic, thing is that even in this supreme crisis of the story, Mrs. Wood's essential love of detail, and of somewhat commonplace detail, asserts itself over and over again. The incidents she takes pains to narrate are rational enough. There is no reason why pathos should be marred because a dying child asks for cheese with his tea, or because the sensible stepmother condemns Lucy to a diet of bread and water for some trifling offence, or because Miss Cornelia Carlisle displays her laughable eccentricities at Lady Isabel's bedside. The pathos is marred now and then, not because of these trifling yet irritating incidents, but because we get an impression that the author has forced a number of utterly prosaic people into a tragic situation for which they are eminently unfitted. The ducking of Sir Francis Levison in the horsepond is an example of this. The man was a heartless villain and murderer, yet he is presented to us in a scene of almost vulgar farce as part of his retribution. If the author had herself realised the insufficiency of her characters to rise to the tragic height demanded of them, she might have achieved either satire or intense realism; but there is a certain smugness in Mrs. Henry Wood's acceptance of the commonplaces of life which makes us feel her an inadequate painter of tragedy. We close the book with a suspicion that she preferred the intolerable Barbara to the winsome and erring Lady Isabel.
"East Lynne" owes half its popularity, however, to that reaction against inane and impossible goodness which has taken place since the middle of the century. Just as Rochester and Paul Ferroll are protests against the conventional hero, so Lady Isabel is a protest against the conventional heroine--and a portent of her time! We were all familiar with beauty and virtue in distress, from Clarissa Harlowe downwards. It is during later years that we have become conversant with beauty and guilt as objects of our sympathy and commiseration.
The moralists of the time--Saturday Reviewers, and others--perceived the change from one point of view, and were not slow to comment on it. Their opposition to the modern novel was chiefly based upon what they called a glorification of vice and crime. Now that the mists of prejudice have cleared away, we can see very well that no more praise of wrong-doing was implied by Mrs. Wood's portrait of Lady Isabel than by Thackeray's keen-edged delineation of Becky Sharp or George Eliot's sorrowful sympathy with Maggie Tulliver. What was at first set down as a new and revolutionary kind of admiration for weakness and criminality soon resolved itself into a manifestation of that remarkable _Zeit-Geist_ which has made itself felt in every department of human life. It is that side of the modern spirit which leads to the comprehension of the sufferings of others, to a new pity for their faults and weaknesses, a new breadth of tolerance, and a generous reluctance to judge harshly of one's fellow man. It has crept into the domain of law, of religious thought, of philanthropic effort, and it cannot be excluded from the realms of literature and art. It is, in fact, the scientific spirit, which says "there's nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so;" which refuses to dogmatise or hastily to condemn; which looks for the motives and reasons and causes of men's actions, and knows the infinite gradations between folly and wisdom, between black and white, between right and wrong. If science had done nothing else, it would be an enormous gain that she should teach us to suspend our judgment, to weigh evidence, and thus to pave the way for that diviner spirit by which we refuse to consider any sinner irreclaimable or any criminal beyond the reach of human sympathy.