The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-04 00:00:00

1190 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 4, 1858. of -4 Qtely ' II " heti, , to subdue the earth, to fight for our homes and country if necessary. Therefore I say that wrestling, inasmuch as it is asevere trial of strength, temper, and endurance, may be, and ought to be, one of many right and proper ways of rejoicing before God at these feasts. And I say to any man who has strength for it, and can keep his temper, and carries away no vain or proud thoughts if he wins, and no angry or revengeful thoughts if he loses, play by all means. No doubt there are men who ought nut to play, who ought to abstain wholly fro►u these games, as some men ought to abstain wholly from drink, who cannot use such things temperately, which is the more worthy and manly way—men so constituted that these sort of games rouse all that is brutal in their natures, others who become braggarts and bullies from success in them. To such men (and each of you can easily find out whether be is such a man) I say abstain wholly. Can anything be more manly, more feeling, more genial, or Christian-like than the principles and sentiments evolved in these extracts ? They are such as make a people a nation, and retain them in their nationality. They are such as make all men neighbours, as Christ himself de scribed a neighbour in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and they contain in them the true germ of National Greatness. We entreat our readers to lay them to heart ; most earnestly we trust that rich and poor will read the entire book, and see it by the light of the same spirit which has prompted ourselves in reviewing it. Eric; or, Little by Little. A Tale of Roslyn School. By Frederick W. Farrar, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Edinburgh : Black. This book has been a disappointment to us. Mr. Farrar s talents are evidently good, and they have been carefully trained. He left Cambridge with a high reputation for classical scholarship, and he has gained more than one prize there ior histori cal and philosophical compositions in English. Knowing this, we expected from him a book of more masculine character than that before us. He has given a shock to some of the impressions of the peculiar excellence of a Cambridge training which we had derived from the report of some Cambridge men. Mr. Kingsley, for example, is fond of claiming for the members of his own university a superiority in manliness to men educated at Oxford, and of charging these with dilettantism and a want of intellectual robustness. A stranger to both Universities, if he compared the studies pursued at the two seats of learning, might be disposed to adopt this opinion. Ile would find Cambridge prescribing a Spartan diet of rigid mathematics and rigid philology—Oxford, a more indulgent mother, spreading her table with belles lettres. Or if he judged that Cambridge sacri ficed too much to a pedantic completeness and accuracy,—if he regarded Oxford as wiser in her indulgence than Cambridge in her strictness, — still he would not probably deny that these are the characteristics of the two Universities re spectively. When you have an opportunity of comparing an Oxonian and a Cantab, you find, if they are good specimens, that the former has wide knowledge, the latter accurate knowledge ; if they are bad specimens, that the latter is dull, the former is superficial. We do not care to decide which University is the wiser, but we think that of the besetting sins of the two systems that which besets the Oxford system is the more mischievous. Dulness does not always do much harm ; superficiality generally does. Besides, dulness is out of fashion now ; while superficiality is the great vice of the age. It is for this reason that we are sorry to see Mr. Farrar sliding into it, who, with his talents, and trained as he has been at the University which more than any other abhors this vice, ought rather to be found entering his protest against it. We have called superficiality the great vice of the literature of the age. It has grown up of necessity with the growth of literature. When books were few and read by few, the temptation to write books was not great ; and when a man became an author, it was, in a considerable num ber of cases, because he had something to say. When reading was not reckoned among the ordi nary and principal occupations of life, authorship could not be a lucrative profession. But now that everybody reads, a large number writes, and a book does not, as once, make itself a public, but the public makes the book. Made now for a temporary purpose, books are composed of brittle mat A-ids ; it requires less merit to meet a demand thati to create one. The bad effect upon litera ture of the immense demand for it is visible in every department, but in works of fiction perhaps most of all. There arc far too many works of fiction, far too many indifferent writers of fiction. Nothing injures an art more than the ambition of incompetent men to excel in it, as no one injures religion more than the Pharisee. The incompetent artist injures art first by producing bad and lifeless works, secondly by blunting the public appreciation of good ones. Satiated with mediocrity, men have little notice to spare for excellence. The public makes itself ill with the unwholesome novels which constitute the chief intellectual food of a large section of it, as chil dren make themselves ill with the sugar round a twclfthcake. Unwholesome we call these novels, though they arc generally very moral, often very religious, because they are for the most part false and hollow, dictated, not by a genuine inspira tion, but by a vain ambition, which of necessity runs into excess and extravagance, misses the tranquillity of true genius, and betrays its insin cerity by its bad acting. This description applies to the greater number of second-rate novels. There is, however, a section of the second class in which faults of this sort are avoided and faults of another sort committed. To this section belong the novels of ladies, who have commonly good taste enough to avoid extravagance, but then, partly from ignorance of the world, and partly because they are women, they fall as far short of Nature as the others go beyond her. There is thus a mediocrity which is violent and spas modic, and a mediocrity which is tame and sentimental. After the ladies, we think that the clergy furnish the greatest number of specimens of tame mediocrity in novels. Concerning the utility of novels in general, high authorities have pronounced various opinions. We think total abstinence from novels as irrational as total abstinence from wine. To abstain from Thackeray, George Elliot, or the late Charles Dickens, is indeed to be ungrateful for the good creatures of God. But from second rate novels—that is, from indistinct and untrue pictures of things which the novelist has never seen, from descriptions of adventures of which he has really no clearer conception than his reader, from random dicta about art, literature, and politics, from a facile, inexhaustible flow of hazy and rhapsodical eloquence—we at least shall always pray to be delivered. We cannot but believe, however little such a doctrine may be in fashion, that such productions must tend to the ruin of creative art amongst us, forming as they do the principal intellectual nutriment of the community. We cannot see another fine and accomplished mind entering on this too broad and well-trodden road without a protest. Mr. Farrar, a scholar and a thinker, possessing the leisure and the in clination to write books, gifted too with no mean literary talent, should produce something less flimsy, something a little more sterling and sub stantial than this " Erie." We do not complain of it as crude, immature, imperfect ; imperfec tions we could pardon, if we found them, but we do not much remark these in " Eric," though it is a first attempt. We complain of it as a feeble conception, a paltry performance. We do not wish it mended ; we wish it had never been written. is just now the model of a boy's book, „ T om Brown " was most appr o p r i ate l y written by an " Old Boy." If the auth or h a d not really been a boy in spirit he could not h ave wr i tten his book , and he would have done well not to have attempted it. Mr. Farrar, on the contrary, has indeed the spirit of a most conscientious and fatherly schoolmaster, but the spirit of a boy he most manifestly has not. His book may therefore be called " Tom Brown's School-days, with Tom Brown left out,"—the most unfortunate attempt to mend a good book that ever ended in the marring of it. There is in " Eric" as much sensible and valuable information upon the prin cipal temptations of a public school as would make a good essay upon the subject. There is as much fervid declamation as would make one or two impressive sermons. There are, besides, some passages of graceful description. But the characters are drawn with a feeble hand; the incidents are trite and not related with much vivacity. Orchards are robbed and boys birched; dishonest actions are done in class by the baser boys and disdained by the more magnanimous: boys are overtaken by the tide, and one of them dies with much melodramatic effect, and goes, in all probability, to heaven ; disgraceful actions are imputed to the wrong party, and the true culprit, after a period of thrilling suspense, is detected and expelled with great triumph ; by the impressive example of a virtuous boy gradually corrupted, and finally sinking, to the despair of his parents, into an untimely grave, we are taught the grave lesson that facilis desceusus Avenel. Really we have heard all this a hundred times before ; no story of school life was ever written which did not contain most of these incidents. Nothing but superior vivacity of narrative or description could have made it worth Mr. Farrar's while to repeat them to us; and, as we have said, vivacity of narrative is precluded by his point of view, which is always the school master's desk, and not the schoolboy's form. The interest of the story is completely subordinated throughout to the moral platitudes which it is intended to inculcate. The book is in short a sermon,_ a good sermon no doubt, and one which it would do boys good to lay to heart, but not, we think, one which they are at all likely to lay to heart. But that our readers may judge for them selves we will give them what seems to us the most eloquent passage in the sermon : Bull had been to school before, and of this school be often bragged as the acme of desira bility and wickedness. He was always telling boys what they did at "his old school," and he quite inflamed the minds of such is fell under his influence by marvellous tales of the wild and wilful things which he and his former school-tellows had done. Many and many a scheme of sin and mischief at Roslyn was suggested, planned, and carried out on the model of Bull's reminiscences of his previous life. He had tasted more largely of the tree of the knowledge of evil than nny other boy, and, strange to say, this was the secret why the general odium was never et pressed. He claimed his guilty experience so often as a ground of superiority, that at last the claim was silently allowed. He spoke from the platform of more advanced iniquity, and the others listened first curiously, then eagerly to his words. "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Such was the temptation which assailed the other boys in dor mitory No. 7 ; and Eric among the number. Bull was the tempter. Secretly, gradually, he dropped into their too willing ears the poison of his polluting acquirements. In brief, Bull was cursed with a degraded and corrupt ing mind. hurry over a part of my subject inconceivably painful ; I hurry over it, but if I am to perform my self-imposed duty of giving a true picture of what school life so metimes is, I must not pass it by altogether. The first time that Eric heard indecent words in dormi tory No. 7, he was shocked beyond bound or measure. Dark though it was, he felt himself blushing scarlet to the roots of his hair, and then growing pale again, while a hot dew was left npon his forehead. Bull was the speaker ; but this time there was a silence, and the subject instantly dropped. The others felt that "a new boy " was in the room ; they did not know how he would take it; they were unconsciously abashed. Besides, though they had themselves joined in such conversation before, they did not love it, and, on the con trary, felt ashamed of yielding to it. Now, Eric, now or never ! Life and death, ruin and salvation, corruption and purity, are perhaps in the balance together, and the scale of your destiny may hang on a single word of yours. Speak out, boy ! T ell these fellows that unseemly words wound your consc ience; tell them that they are ruinous, sinful, damnable ; s p eak out and save yourself and the rest. Virtue is stro n g and besutiful, Eric, and vice is downcast in her awfu l p resence. Lose. your purity of heart, Eric, and you have lo st a je we l which the whole world, if it were "ow en tire and per fec t l chrysolite," cannot replace. Good spirits guard that young boy, and g ive hi:u rice in this his hour of trial ! Open his eyes that he ms ee ay the fiery horses and the fiery chariots of the owls Books written for boys may be of two kinds; they ma n y be about boys, or they may be about men. or our own parts, we are inclined to agree with Dr. Johnson that children do not like to be told about children. We are inclined to think that boys would like as well to read Pope's Homer, or " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," as to read " Tom Brown." It ought at least to be remembered that a book may perhaps remind men vividly of their school-days without strongly interesting schoolboys. We are charmed by " Tom Brown " because it pictures to us a state of things which is not our own, but which once was our own. If that state of things were actually present the book might still have a charm, but it would lose this particular charm. On the same principle it is possible that the books most in teresting to boys are those which describe, not their actual condition, but a condition which they expect at a future time to be theirs. The lives of men may have the same attraction for boys which the example of " Tom Brown" has shown that the lives of boys clearly described have for men. But, be this as it may, it cannot be questioned that if boys are to be described it should be done with a boyish spirit. To allude once more to that which