Lastly, let us linger and dream with mellifluous Lamb, and hear him, in his own unrivalled music, declare the nature of the spell which gave the glory to his vision: ling catastrophe which is wont to stand between literary historians as the great gulf fixed between old-world and modern ways of thinking. That it was helped forward and "To such a one as myself, who has been de- event we do not dispute. Undoubtedly the received a more definite character by that frauded in his young years of the sweet food overthrow of old institutions and authoritaof academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant tive creeds did tend in imaginative natures, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or to endue past things and persons with that other of the universities. Their vacation too, tincture of romance to which the proat this time of the year, falls so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and saic present seldom attains. fancy myself of what degree or standing Imine had been opened; revived GothiBut the please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch cism had won its disciples; the rising liteup past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel- rature of Germany, with all its fascinating bell, and dream that it rings for me. of humility, I can be a sizar, or a servitor. have found its vent, war or no war. We In moods mysteries of chivalry and legend, would When the peacock vein rises, I strut a gentle- should have missed some inspired flights, man-commoner. In graver moments, I pro- some kindling imaginations. On the other I am much unlike that respectable character hand, we might have antedated the calmer I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-investigations of a later day. "ANTIQUITY, makers in spectacles, drop a bow or curtsey as THOU WONDROUS CHARM!" we should still I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of have exclaimed, with Charles Lamb. the sort. I go about in black which favours the And will not the time come when antinotion Only in Christ Church reverend quad-quity too shall have ceased to exert its rangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short of a seraphic doctor. ceed Master of Arts. Indeed, I do not think 44 The walks at these times are so much one's own- the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors, inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some founder, or noble, or royal benefactress (that should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon their overlooked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then to take a peep in by the way at the butteries and sculleries, redolent of antique hospi tality; the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fireplaces, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago, and spits which have cooked for Chaucer. Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the cook goes forth a manciple. Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity; thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat. jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half-Januses are we that cannot look forward with the same idolatry which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!"* From what has been said, it will be evident, we apprehend that the sympathetic interest in the past which Lamb thus eloquently describes, had been a growing taste since the middle of the eighteenth century, and was not wholly the result of that start * Essay on Oxford in the Vacation. witching spell? Not, indeed, on the most the past, the present, and the future each imaginative minds, on those to whom the possess imperishable sources of ideal power, but on the multitude who think their thoughts at second hand, and require a certain amount of freshness in the groundwork of their mental entertainment. Does not the rapid disappearance of one after another crazy monument of the elder days, and the re-clothing in modern brilliancy of others, point to a time when present inventiveness will be all in all, past achievements nothing? Even now, when wandering through the aisles of some renovated cathedral, or witnessing, in some specimen of nineteenth-century Gothic, the imitative skill of a Pugin or a Scott, is it the retrospective sentiment that kindles in us the most, or is it the admiration of tact and design in the adaptations that have supplied former decay, and raised the old art to life in modern combinations? New houses of Parliament have sprung up where the old halls of St. Stephen's once stood. New offices are displacing the dingy tenements where Walpole and Bolingbroke once swayed the destinies of Britain. Trim railway stations obliterate thhe memory of oldworld hostelries, and steam movement gives travellers scant time or opportunity to think on local traditions, or anything save the business of the passing moment and the prospects of the future. And so the lingering fancy that dwells among the ghosts of dead generations may—it is no impossible contingency cease one day to fascinate From the Eclectic Review. THE GAYWORTHYS.* WE wish to write our most appreciative word of this admirable and unexceptionable book. We feel while we read it that a new master of fiction has arisen, and some aspects of the book compel us to regard it as the most helpful and purposeful story we remember for a long time to have read. It is possible that to some of our readers these terms of commendation will be rather deterring than inviting. Fictions with a purpose are very often exactly the books to which one makes up a purpose to give a wide berth. Yet within the last few years we have had many exceptions to such fears. Mr. Kingsley's finest fictions were written eminently with a purpose, and the vast and disproportionate structures of Les Miserables were all wrought together by a purpose. It would be idle to lay the finger on other manifold illustrations. It sometimes, however, seems to us that all sorts of societarian ideas and theories, may find their vent, and fulfil themselves, through the pages of fiction. But when some writer seeks by the same means to set the distractions of nature and life as fine discords into a great religious harmony, the purpose is suspected and denounced as inartistic and religious cant. Hence a popular idea prevails-prevails very extensively, too, among religious folk - that while fiction is permissible as a recreation when separated from religious aims, it becomes disgusting when subjected to them. Certain orders of religious writers have themselves something to answer for in this matter. Religious stories are usually quite as dreary trash as the dreariest of the stuff Mr. Newby's press pours yearly through the third rate circulating libraries, for the delight of the brainless and heartless daughters of our watering places. There are, however, fine exceptions to the general dreary desultoriness of religious novels; but we are disposed to regard The Gayworthys as the finest of all. It is full of nature the scenery of woods, and hills, and farms, and hearts, and souls. It is full of radiant and kindly humour; and now and then the author shows that the teeth of wit might not be wanting, only that all things and characters are beheld in such an earnest. but human, and pitying, and holy light. There is plenty of experience here, innumerable passages which reveal what the writer knows and has felt. The Gayworthys: a Story of Threads and Thrums. By the Author of Faith Gartney's Girlhood. 2 vols. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. Secret places of the heart are entered, secret chamber doors thrown open, closets where skeletons are kept, and little drawers where the souvenirs of life are preserved. The book has taken possession of us. We perceive that it is a book for much-enduring usefulness. We implore the publishers to get it as speedily as possible into some pleasant portable, cheap edition. We shall often think of it ourselves when we want to make some little book present. There is not a word in it that can do harm, and there are hundreds of strokes of the happy pen that you feel sure must do good. The sweet, quiet power of New England farms and villages floats over the pages like breezes from rural and sylvan scenes; pleasant, too, tantalizing suggestive hints of the deeds done in New England farm-house kitchens, quite impossible, we fear, to our cuisinery and epicerian ways; how the heart becomes strong and clear in the presence of lonely trials, winding chambers of old-world houses, with their snow-wreath-like sheets in the bed-chamber, and their bright, if blunt, talk in the household room, pictures of the quiet boat shooting down the river, of travellers lost in the solitudes of all but impassable and inaccessible mountain chains; what hearts think in the still church, bearing their own burden, while the minister talks his big words in the same building, but in reality ever so many leagues away; the little village, republic of farms, suddenly brought into the neighbourhood of noisy ships on stormy and adventurous seas, and this with all the strife and the attainment of virtue and piety, the wearing sense of disappointment and wonder, the cark and care of secret sin; human strength and human weakness in neighbourhood and in conflict: all these in foreground and in back-ground spread out by the artist on the canvas, form one of the most delightful unities, one of the most perfect, and sense and soul-satisfying pictures upon which, through such pages, it has been our lot to look, or our happiness to enjoy. We cannot doubt that while the stream of books and fictions flows on, bearing its annual tribute to oblivion, this will hold a steady place for many years on the shelves of the bookseller; constantly in request, because giving with such charming vivacity, and naïveté of genius, purity, and piety, if not the answer, the rendering into so clear a light as sometimes to produce the effect of a reply, those questions, those trials, and irritations, and wants of the human heart which, while we in our conceit fancy to be almost the sole inheritance of our generation and age, are, in fact, the property of all thought ting task either to note it or describe it, and certainly not to fill whole volumes with it. Among the professors of natural science and history, there are arachnologists gentlemen who devote themselves to the study of the ways and varieties of spiders so others may devote themselves to the study of the ways and varieties of reptile or simious tribes. There are observers of human nature who seem to imitate them, and construct the pages and scenes of fiction out of the least and lowest aims of which human nature is capable. Man's nature-in which we include woman's too— is tested by the power and the pressure upon him of invisible worlds and spiritual motives, and if the development of the serene lives of the lords of the table d'hôte and the dressing-room, and the fine ladies of jewellery, drapery, and fashion, reveals the lowest side- - the laughable and comic side - of our nature, religion, with its teachings, and anxieties, and hopes, reveals the highest. And here is a cooling and charming picture : — Only the dock always grows beside the netRebecca, in her white dress, with her pure gentle. It is God who takes care of that. Aunt tle young face, came out to the door-stone and stood behind Sarah. ful and sensitive natures, smitten with the painful sense of the disproportion of what they are, with what they seek-the disproportion of the immense and costly furniture of the soul, with the little round and cabin in which it has to content itself with setting up the furniture which it feels to have the richness of the gilding of eternity. Our American cousins are singular people, and they are singular in the stories they tell us; certainly we fear that we are not likely, in some respects, to send them back as good as they give us. We do not mean in the great masters of letters -no Bulwer, no Thackeray, even in the productions of the present-but we fall short in pictures like those conjured up in The Gayworthys. We know that we have such living, and feeling, and doing, but our great literary artists find it altogether beneath their condescension to describe such ways. In truth, the want of our English storytelling is happy, innocent homeliness. Town-life is the chief ingredient in our novels - town-life frequently of not a very lovely or lovable character; the pleasant torture chambers of lawyers' offices, the excitements and denouements of a Brighton rendezvous, the bewitchingly maudlin entanglements of high life, unnatural inventions and complications, sheer impossibilities made to harrow the sensitive reader like a ghost. Our rage for reality makes us utterly unnatural and unreal, so that one of the greatest masters of realism in romance now amongst us, and certainly perhaps its most popular representative, is one of our most unnatural writers. For nature, we have often said, is not to be represented by walking up and down either Fleet Street, Regent Street, or Brighton esplanade; the characters so introduced are natural enough to their degree, but they are wanting in the unconventional freedom of action. We do not take much pleasure in reciting and making an inventory of all the items of a lawyer's office; the inventory may be real enough when made, but what does it all come to? Our writers of fiction seem to delight in all but impossible social complications, and utterly impossible dilemmas of character. Compared with these, the volumes before us are marked by a simple yet sharp naturalness of delineation. Indeed, Very different indeed are the human it may be most fairly assumed that charac- forms which pass in succession through this ters become interesting as their experi- pleasant book. The bright and wise Joanences are placed beyond the mere visible con- na Gayworthy is full of things very pleasventional and sensual round of life. It is ant to hear or to see in print, and if sometrue enough that great multitudes never times sufficiently shrewd, never cruel nor have a life beyond such low and limited sharp, although she "don't know what knowledge; but it cannot be a very eleva- some saints would do if there "wasn't a THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1457. The pleasant south wind was blowing through the great maples that stood in a row between the road and the chip-yard; the scent of early roses came up from the low flower-garden, to which a white gate and a few rough stone steps led in and down straight opposite the door. Further on, beside the drive that wound with sudden slope around the garden, to the right, tohewn from a tree-trunk, and holding clear cold ward the great barns, stood the long trough, water that flowed incessantly into it through a wooden duct, of halved and hollowed saplings, leading from a spring in the hillside, away up behind the house. Here a voke of tired cattle were drinking, the ploughboy standing patiently beside; close by the great creatures' heads, upon the trough-rim, perched fearless chickens, dipping their yellow bills; and underneath and around, in the merry, unfailing pudbright June sun, genial, not scorching, hung in dles, splashed and quackled the ducks. the afternoon sky. There were birds in the maple trees, and the very grass about the doorstone was full of happy life. The world round them lying in wickedness," and feels aggravated with the perfections of Mrs. Prouty, who makes the "rest of the world to be an offset to her righteousness”. cummin, "She's so faithful among the faithless, and always in such a small way! She darns her stockings, Wednesday nights, -on the right side; and it isn't evangelical to darn them on the wrong. And not to get the clothes dried on Monday, when her wash is over, is nothing less than Antichrist. It's mint, anise, and gnats and needle's eyes. There isn't any room for Christian sympathy. And then look at Mrs. Fairbrother, with her whining ways and beautiful submission to her troubles and "chastenings." Other people are chastened too, I suppose. But she believes Providence keeps a special rod in pickle for her, and doesn't do much else of importance, but discipline and pity her. I'm tired of going about among such people." A fine character, moulded by faith and common-sense, is Joanna Gayworthy, fighting her battle of life, with the great blank future opening itself before her. Poor Joanna! her soliloquy, with its slight shade of disappointment, its heavy heart of grief and little dash of bitterness, is very characteristic, and we suppose that many lovely and estimable women have indulged in some such half-humorous and altogether sad feelings: relations are adjusted lest a single human soul should lose its wonderful balance and consciousness, and be lost." Yet the author says, after reciting the sweetly pathetic stories of the two old maid sisters, Rebecca and Joanna Gayworthy : But this - the story of their youth is told. never, - We wait, But you will know, now, as you see them so, while younger lives press forward to the front, and claim the fresher interest, how it came to pass, that, years after, there were these two old home at Hilbury. maiden sisters counting uneventful days in the All that most people knew was, that "there had been once, folks thought, a sort of kindness between Gabriel Hartshorne and Joanna Gay. worthy, but it never came to anything; and after his father's mind failed, and his mother died, he seemed to give up all thoughts of marrying, and just settled down to takin' care of the old man and looking after the farm As to Rebecca, she never was any way like other young people She was a born saint, if the Lord ever made one." This hints to our reader the kind of life "I should like to know how people come to bear their lives." It was in this wise she began the fight. "A whole winter, shut up there, with Jaazaniah Hoogs! Ten, twenty, sixty winters, perhaps." Joanna gave a little gasping scream to herself at the imagination. "And there's Prue. And Jane isn't much better, whatever she supposes. And I wonder what I'm coming to. I shall have Becsy for a while, maybe. She's all I've got; and then, somehow, she'll slip away from me, as she did just now; she's and character drawn in these volumes, and too good for us, I'm afraid; or perhaps some he will perceive how different they are from prowling missionary will come along, as they do in those flourishing and romantic complicathe memoirs, and carry her off to the tigers and tions, conventional sensationalism, which anacondas. And then I shall take care of father; but I can't keep him for ever; and Gershom 'll grow up and go away, and Prue 'll go after him; and I'm tough, and I shall live through it all, and grow fat-that's what it turns to with people like me. and nobody 'll really know anything about it, or care for me; and I shall be old Miss Gayworthy' for forty years after I shall wish I was dead and gone. Well! the world must always be full of other folks,' I suppose, and I shall be one of 'em, that's all." This is the great charm of the book, its deep faith in the providential ordering of human lives; that "the whole creation travaileth with us, and all our minutest most of our English novelists encourage: Therefore, you need not expect, O devourer of high-flown and deep-laid romance, to find in these pages profound mysteries, diabolical contrivance, unheard-of wrongs, and a general crash of retribution and ecstacy at the end. Yet, in ever so simple a New England family, there may be privacies and secrets; there may be conflicting interests; the tempter may find a cranny wherethrough to whisper, beguiling souls, by mean motives, to questionable acts. "There is a great deal of human nature in the world," and it isn't all over the water, where there are lords and ladies, and manorial estates; for upwards of two centuries it has been grow 1 |
