The Press. — London, England, 1854-06-24 00:00:00

iMnlllawnie 594 As we have been compelled to give a quali fied opinion on Mr Wilkie Collins as a writer, we shall quote an extract which reveals at once his merits and faults. We dislike, with the majority of English novel-readers, having our attention rivetted by elaborate descrip tions of scenes like the following : The Temple of harmony, as its name denotes, was principally devoted to the exhibition of musical talent, and opened at a period of the night when the performances at She theatres were over. The standing orchestral arrange ments of the place were all comprised in one bad piano ; to which were occasionally added, by way of increasing the at tractions, performances on the banjo and guitar. The singers were called " ladies and gentlemen." The Temple itself consisted of one long room, with a double row of benches, hearing troughs at their backs for the reception of glasses of liquor. It had a slightly raised stage at the end for the performers: and its drab-coloured walla pre. tended to be panelled, but made so bad a pretence of it as to merit no notice, and even to got none. Innocence itself must have seen at a glance that the Temple of Harmony was an utterly vicious place. Vice never so much as thought of wearing any disguise here. No glimmer of wit played over the foul substance of the songs that were sung , and hid it in dazzle from too close observation. No re lic of youth and freshness, no artfully assumed innocence and vivacity, concealed the squalid, physical deterioration of the worn-out human counterfeits which stood up to sing, and were coarsely painted and padded to look like fine women. Their fellow performers among the men were such sodden-faced blackguards as no shop-boy who applauded them at night would dare to walk out with in the morning. The place itself had as hale of the allurement of elegance and beauty about it as the peo ple. Here was no bright guilding on the ceiling—no them of ornament, no comfort of construction even in the furniture. Here was no viciously-attractive pictures en the walls—no enervating sweet odours in the atmo sphere—no contrivances of ventilation to cleanse away the stench of bad tobacco-smoke and brandy-fiavoured human breath with which the room reeked all night long. Here, in short, was vice wholly undisguised ; recklessly showing itself to every eye, without the varnish of beauty, without the tinsel of wit, without even so muc h as the flavour of aleanliness to recommend it. Were all beholders instino tively overcome by horror at the sight? Far from it. The Temple of ii exmouy was crammed to its last benches every and the proprietor filled his pockets from the purses of applauding audiences, The tendency of Mr. Collins's pen is to stray into such delineations, after the fashion of the French writers; and one with so many social resources open to him ought to be more select iu the choice of his scenes. He may Le satisfied that his powers are not suited for "low life." The passage in which he moralises on the phenomenon, so often witnessed, of inen deserting the road that leads to wealth and social comfort in search of the laurels of the artist or the author, exhibits his peculiar fluency of rhetoric, an exclusive reliance on which is his besetting fault. It is true in the main, and forcibly written. If he had really possessed genuis there would have been nothing very remarkable in his history, so far ; but, having nothing of the kiwi, holding not the smallest spark of the great creative fire iu his whole mental composition, surely *here was something extraordinary and unaccountable, something very discouraging to contemplate, iu the specta ale of a man resolutely determining in spite of adverse borne circumstances and strong home temptations, to aban ton all those paths in life, along which he might have walked fairly abreast with his fellows, for the one other path in which he was predestined by Nature to be always loft behind by the way. Do the announcing angels, whose mission it is to whisper of greatness to great spirits, ever match the infection of fallability from their intercourse with mortals? Do the voices which said truly to Shakspeare, So Raphael, and to Mozart, in their youth time—You are chosen to be. gods in this world, ever speak wrongly to souls which they are not ordained to approach ? Tt may be an, There are men enough in all countries whose lives would seem to prove it—whose deaths have not contra dicted it. But even to victims such as those, sacrificed as they s7e to a delusion which seems, on first sight, to be the most total offspring of all mortal fallibilities, there are pleasant sest.m.,splaces on the thorny way, and flashes of sunlight, slow and then, to make the cloudy prospect beautiful, though only for a little while. It is not all misfortune and disappointment to the man who is mentally unworthy of a great intellectual vocation, so long, as he is morally worthy of it ; so long as he can pursue it honestly, patiently, and affectionately, for its own dear sake. Let him work, though ever so obscurely, in this spirit towards his labour, and he shall find the labour itself its own exceeding great reward. In that reward lives the divine consolation, ever gentle and ever true, which,though Fame turn her back on him contemptuously, and Affluence pass over unpitying to the other side of the way, shall still pour oil upon all his grounds, and take him quietly and tenderly to the hard journey's end. To this one exhaustless solace, which the work, no matter of what degree, can yield always to earnest workers, the man who has succeeded, and the man who has failed, can turn alike, as to a common mother ; the one for refuge from envy, from hatred, from misrepresentation, from all the sorest evils which even the thriving child of Fame is heir to ; .the other from neglect., from disappoint ment, from ridicule, from all the petty tyrannies which the pining bondman of Obscurity is fated to undergo. HE JRES Yet, even here on, a lofty theme, does not the reader feel that the utterance is too rhetorical to be pathetic ? With some reality of matter and terseness of style, the effects of . Mr. Collins would be far greater• But, with more reflec tion and practice, these may come, and it is in his own power to graduate very highly amongst our fictionists. In the meanwhile, we may re cord that " Hide and Seek " is, on the whole, a great improvement on " Basil," and we can recommend it to the attention of our readers as being well worthy of perusal. The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. Now Edition. Loudon : Longmans. A HISTORY of cliques would be a curious book, and would serve to show how often a certain kind of fame or notoriety depends on the acci dent of connection., the eqmmercial world, when a number of persona agree to " draw " on each other to obtain that credit which would be denied to single names, their securi ties are facetiously termed " pig-upon-bacon bills" Tho Edinburgh reviewers at the com mencement of the last century were a similar confederacy. All whose ambition, taste, or legs would not carry them up to the " ninth story or fiat in Buccleuch-place " were set down as neither statesmen, diplomatists„ his torians, poets, nor honest men, while those who had toiled up to that "elevated residence," even though they denounced Byron as worse than Settle, and attacked Sophocles for his bad Greek, were reported fit to lead the councils and direct the taste of the entire empire. 14 is as astonishing to take up the catalogue of names they insisted in vain on making famous as it is to regard the splendour of so many that they proposed to extinguish. Now, there must have been some great merit in Sydney Smith, not in obtaining the praise of the " Northern horde," but in escaping its consequeuees and impressing on a consider able section of the reading and thinking world the belief that he was an able man. All praise must be comparative; and, while we cannot for a moment deny the strong desire and bril liant power of Sydney Smith to expose, plea santly , said effectually, many errors, much fanaticism, and (in all but his own party) that plentiful commodity which, by the Sus et no rma loquendi, we call " humbug," yet who can give the credit of any depth , to the man who as sumed that the bill of 1829 would quiet the priesthood of the Church of dome, and in 1839 boasts that he does not repent his opinions— who in 1830 speaks patronisingly of the gi gantic mind of Brougham, and gives us "such names mingled" as " Lavoisier and Adam Smith"? The excellences of Sydney Smith are not amongst the common excellences of Englishmen. Ho excelled in a pleasant hu mour, the result of evident content of mind and high spirits; and was further un-English in paying not the least regard in party matters to the depth or weight of the sarcasms or re flections he threw out on his opponents. One seeks in vain throughout his works for any more than a jeering admission of the honesty or sincerity of any man who happens not to be of a particular mode of political opinions; and there cannot be a doubt but that the desire of polishing a point led him into personalities which might have been, as far as his own sot were concerned, painfully retorted. The Edinburgh Review, in fact, in its early time fought much more for faction than for measures; and Mr. Percevars alleged re versions and the pensions to Mr. Canning's family are found much more often alluded to than any broad questions of the time. The great bulk of these three volumes, as our read ers already know, is mado up of Edinburgh Review articles, in every one of which the reader will find much of Sydney Smith's telling humour allied (where party politics are not concerned) with much truth. In personal estimates and description of character and style ho perhaps was greatest. Who, for ex ample, that ever has had the misfortune to endeavour to find meanings amongst Jeremy Bentham's " Characteristicalnesses " and " Compensateabilitinesses" will not enjoy this written daguereotype ? hether it be necessary there should be a middleman between the cultivator and the possessor, learned econo• mists have doubted; but neither gods, men, nor book- a&TUItDAY 3 sellers can doubt the necessity of a middleman betwee n Mr. lientham and the public. Mr. Bentham is long; Mr. Bentham is occasionally involved and obscure; Mr. Bentham invents new and alarming . expressions; Mr. Bentham loves division and subdivision--and he love* method itself, more than its consequences. Those only, therefore, who know his originality, his knowledge, his vigour, and his boldness, will recur to the works them. selves. The great muss of readers will not purchase im prevenient at so dear a rata; but will choose rather to be come acquainted with Mr. Bentham through the medium of reviews—after that eminent philosopher has been walled, trimmed, shaved, and forced into clean linen. Ono great use of a review, indeed, is to make men wise in ten pages who have no appetite for a hundred pages; to condense nourishment, to work with pulp and essence, and to guard the stomach from idle burden and unmeaning bulk. For half a page, sometimes fur a whole page, Mr. Bentham writer with a power which few can equal; and, by selecting and omitting, an admirable style may be formed from the text. Using this liberty, we shall endeavour to give an account of Mr. Bentham's doctrines, for the most part in his own words. Wherever any expression is particularly happy, let it be considered to be Mr. Ben tham's :—the dulness we take to ourselves. His character of the new President of the Council has become famous. and will live, like Chatham's answer to old Horace Walpole, as an elegant extract Lord John Russell gives himself great credit for not having confiscated Church property, but merely remodelled and redivided it. I accuse him not of plunder, but T accuse him of taking the Church of England, rolling it about as a cook does a piece of dough with a rolling-pin, cutting a hundred different shapes with all the plieitic fertility of a confectioner, and without the most distant suspicion that he can ever be wrong, or ever be mistaken ; with a certainty that he can anticipate the consequences of every possible change in human affairs. There is not a better man in England than Lord John Rusaell ; but his worst failure is that he is utterly ignorant of all moral fear ; there is nothing lie would net undertake. I believe he would perform the operation for the stone—build St. Peter's—vr assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) the command of the Channel fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died—the church tumbled down—and the Chunuel fleet been knocked to atoms. I believe his motivea are always pure, and his measures often able; but they are endless, and never dune with that pedeteutuus patio and pedetentour wind in which it behoves the wise and virtuous improver to walk. Re alarms the wise Liberals; and it is impossible to sleep soundly while he has the command of the watch." , The public are so well acquainted with the style, opinions, and politics of Sydney Smith that it may seem out of place to have devoted a little space to this reprint ; but his works are works not of passing interest. We are at this moment merely trying the experiments of which ho was no mean advocate; while some of the measures recommended by his school have not yet happily been inflicted upon us. And we could wish nothing more heartily than that those who look back to that school as everything that was wise and profound would take up these three volumes, look at the hopes and assurances of 1804, and com pare the results which half a century of expe rience has given us. The present forms a beautifully-printed portable edition of a most various and enter taining collection of the works of the writer. Junius Discovered. By Frederick Griffin.— London : Triibner. Th. North British Review. No. =MIL— London: Hamilton and Co. M a.G ittms, who dates from Montreal, feels sure that he has discovered "Junius" in Governor Pownall, who was captain-general of Massa chusetts from 1757 to 1760. He was appointed governor of South Carolina, bid resigned that post to become comptroller-general of the com bined army in Germany. On his return to England, in 1763, he took up his residence at Richmond, Married Lady Fawkner, and sat in Parliament from 1767 to 1780. He died at Bath in 1805. As regards social rank and local habitation, Governor Pownall might well have been Junius, but intetnal evidence is all against him. " A large proportion of his published " works," says Mr. Griffin, " is on the subject " of antiquities," a study little likely to engage the genius of the fiery Junius. Governor Pownall, writing to a friend, under date of July 11,'70, says, " I here am marked by Go " vernment as the American partisan in " general," while Junius uniformly supported the policy of George Grenville, and discoun tenanced American resistance. It is curious • Another peculiarity of the Russells iu, that they never alter their opinions: they are au exLellent 1..0, but they must be trepanned before they eau be convinced. ...m,m.... f