How much the apparent merit of a book depends upon the mood in which we peruse it! When I first read “Lorna Doone” I went over it rapidly, anxious to extract the meat of it as quickly as possible; and while I found many quaint observations and poetical descriptions, the style was diffuse and sometimes crabbed, the narrative was often tedious, and to my mind the book was lacking in fidelity to truth and deep knowledge of human nature. The love passages seemed particularly weak, and I found it hard to understand how a dull-witted countryman, such as John Ridd declares himself to be, could write so well and so ill in different places.
But “Lorna Doone” must not be read in that way. When I took it up a second time, lingering over some of the more striking portions of it and no longer disturbing myself about the plot, I found it quite different from what it had seemed to me at first. It is a story unlike any other, and with a charm which is all its own. The deliberate minuteness of the narrative interferes indeed with the action of the characters and the dramatic power of the tale—it is hard to seize the salient points in it; it seems lacking in perspective; the picture islike one of the very old masters, to be studied more in detail than as a whole. The characterization of most of the personages is not very striking, and yet there is one that is finely drawn—that of John Ridd himself; for it is he, and not Lorna, who is the chief personage of the story. Here the archaic diction, the homespun phrases, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and the quaint philosophy show very plainly the essential characteristics of the narrator, a modest, sturdy, honest, big-hearted farmer, Herculean, slow in speech and in wrath, but terrible when aroused. The roots of his character are planted deep in the soil. “I feel,” he says, “with every blade of grass as if it had a history, and make a child of every bud, as if it knew and loved me.” He is a lover both of nature and his kind, such a man in a smaller sphere as our Lincoln must have been. What wonderful descriptions of farm life, of the ducks, the pigs, the horses, the birds, as well as of natural phenomena, the sunsets, the deep Doone valley, the great snowstorm which buried all the earth!
Many of the scenes are admirably described, as where he watches the passing of the bandits along the Doone track and sees the figure of the little girl thrown across the saddle; the murder of his father by the outlaws and his mother’s solitary visit to the stronghold of the murderers in vain quest of justice; his first expedition to the Doone Valley, and his meeting with the beautiful girl who afterwards becomes his wife; his interview with the terrible Chief Justice Jeffreys,whose eyes “were holes for the devil to glare from”; and, finest of all, the sad story told by Benita, the Italian maid, of the fate of Lorna’s parents and the attack upon the coach when Lorna was carried away. Such excellences are more than enough to redeem the tediousness of the less important parts of the book, and to entitle it to a high as well as a unique place in literature.