The Press. — London, England, 1857-11-14 00:00:00

1112 f ittrature. NEW NOVELS. Mattleverer's Divorce. By tho Author of .‘ Whitefriars." London : Skeet. Stininterleigh Manor ; or, Brothers and Sisters . London : Masters. 3. Riverstun. By Georgiana M. Craik. London ; Smith, Elder, and Co. 4. Hassan ; or, the Child of the Pyramid. An Egyptian Tale. By the Hon. C. A. Mur ray. London : J. W. Parker and Son. 5. The Ruling Passion. By Rainey Hawthorne. London: Bentley. " NOBODY now," said Dr. Johnson eighty years ago, " talks much of style. Everybody com " poses pretty well ;" taking cate to make his meaning clear by adding—" We have no such " inharmonious periods as there were a hun " dred years ago." Something of the same kind may be predicated of the quality of our present novels. Nobody now writes the trash with which, thirty or forty years since, the circulating libraries were inundated. The " fashionable novel," which provoked the mirth of Pelham, the weariness of Kate Nickleby, and the satire of Mr. Snob, are, we believe, on the verge of extinction; or, if they flourish at all, have descended from the par lour to the kitchen, and from the counter of the polite bibliopole to the office of the Sunday newspaper. All classes of society now are much better acquainted with each other than they were in the days of the Regency. No linendraper's daughter in the remotest county town of Great Britain would now be deceived by manners and incidents which in those Augustan days found credence with young ladies and gentlemen. The course of educa tion has been greatly enlarged. An acquain tance with continental languages and conti nental models has aided in cultivating the taste and expanding the minds of the present generation of writers. And the vastly-improved position of the middle classes has enabled the novelist to find subjects for his art without travelling beyond the range of his own expe rience. We are not now alluding to the lumi naries of literature—to the few great names which shine together with such brilliancy at intervals of more or less duration in our lite rary annals. We are speaking of the great mass of writers, whose works aro popular without being famous, and who certainly gain as much by literature as literature gains by them. We do not feel that is at all an unfair description of a very numerous class of authors, to whom the public is indebted for a vast deal of amusement and relaxation ; who write with good taste, good sense, and some constructive skill ; who produce, in fact, what may honestly be called good novels, without being at the same time great works of art or great lessons of life. Of this description of novels, during the last few seasons, the name has been legion. Some dozen years ago appeared concurrently a series of religious and political fictions, which wrought a marked change in the public taste. Novel readers began to desiderate in all future candidates for their favour some thing of a more masculine tone of thought, greater distinctness of purpose, and truer pic tures of life than had previously contented them. But when that religious and political excitement had died away, an improved taste remained, and with it, as we have already re marked, improved capabilities of gratifying it The leaning of the age was towards the inves tigation of social problems. The school of social novels was the result, and works of great merit have been produced in greater numbers than, perhaps, has ever happened before in any department of literature. More than half the stories which our pre sent notice will embrace would a quarter of a century ago have been the talk of the season. Several such we have recently praised in these columns for their intrinsic merits. When we feel that a book it a good one we do not like to bestow on it a merely frigid ap proval because it may not rasa the standard of Charlotte 'Renate, Sir Duister Lytton, or Mr. 'I'HE PRESS, NOVEMBER 14,1857. Thackeray. But we cannot affect to regret that condition of literature in which it is pos- sible for such books to be in the second class. Having prefaced thus much, that our criticisms may not be misunderstood, we shall proceed to offer a brief account of the volumes before us. Of the first three, the merits, though dis similar, are nearly equal. 1. " Mauleverer's Divorce" affects to be a narrative of real events, and professes to ex pose the injustice and oppression to which women are, or rather were, subjected by the marriage law of England. As we do not take the same interest in divorce cases that Lord Brougham does, we cannot inform our readers which of the many late domestic exposures is here exposed over again, or whether the as sumption of reality be not altogether a trick. We do not, however, think that it is. The introduction is written in a tone of feeling which if feigned is, to say the least of it, in exceedingly bad taste, but which it genuine will probably not be without some of the effect which the authoress seems to anticipate. This actuality is well sustained throughout the entire tale. Either it is substantially true or narrated with consummate art, the effect of which is heightened rather than diminished by the truly womanish absurdities into which the authoress hurries herself. It is very improbable that a divorce a mensa et thoro would be refused on the grounds here stated to have been fatal to Mrs. Luxmoor. There was no condoning of her husband's outrage on the schoolgirls; and this, in connection with his cruelty, would have been amply suffi cient grounds. Nor is it much more credible, on the other hand, that a divorce a vinculo ma trimonii should have been granted with such'ease and rapidity as Lord Mauleverer's. But, then, to represent a woman imagining that judge and counsel were all prejudiced against her be cause they were men, and interested therefore in upholding the supremacy of their sex, is a genuine touch of human nature, and excites our admiration as heartily as the alleged animus our laughter. Barring legal tech nicalities, the book is really written with great power. It is blemished, in our opinion, by the existence of a double plot; but each is very cleverly worked out, and our interest stimulated to the last. The incidents arc perhaps not original. The heroine, daughter and heiress of a proud old Tory lord, and meek oppressed lady of the true conventional stamp, runs away from her paternal castle to escape the tyranny of a French governess. As she wanders in the woods she meets with an im poverished descendant of Caractacus, in the person of an Eton schoolboy—a Sir Vivian _gyp Howel—whose father had been cheated out of his estates by a wealthy manufacturer delighting in the euphonious surname of Suet, and who had built a large house on the pro perty. Old Suet, however—John Thomas are his other names—has been left guardian of the young Welehman, and it is to his guar dian's house that her newfound champion escorts her. She there meets a Miss Sophia Sutcliffe, an old friend, in the capacity of governess, and agrees, for various reasons, to pass herself off as her sister. The fair Sophia, it turns out, all the while is the wife of Mr. Luxmoor, the tutor of young Mr. Suet, and for reasons of her own exerts herself to effect a marriage between his pupil and her supposed sister. This is effected without much diffi culty. The heroine's father is of course furious, but is ultimately reconciled. The Luxmoors settle down on a fat Welch living close by the castle. And now comes the cardinal event of the story—Sophia's separa tion from her husband, and ineffectual attempt at a divorce. These events lead to an intimacy between the heroine's husband, now created Lord Mauleverer, and Mrs. Luxmoor, to the progress of which our interest is now confined. to trace the fortunes of Sophia up to the close of the book, or narrate her wiles in detail, would be tedious. Su ffi ce it to say she commits adultery with Lord Mauleverer, on purpose to obtain a divorce from her own husband, and imputes it to Lady Mauleverer, in order to separate her from hers. She is successful, and the book ends. This story is undeniably interesting: the language is fervid, but not too much so fox the subject; and the situations are occasionally atriking. But it is curious that the authoress has overlooked the obvious moral of her tale. It was argued against one of the clauses of the Divorce Bill that to permit parties divorced for adultery to marry would be to offer a direct premium on that offence. Could there be a better illus tration of this view than the conduct of Mrs. Luxmoor and Lord Mauleverer? The autho ress has unconsciously penned the bitterest satire upon the cause she has undertaken to plead, and we do not think her injured sisters will thank her very warmly for tho issue of " Maulevcrer's Divorce." 2. " Summerleigh Manor," which we under stand to be a young lady's maiden effort, is a very clover story, and written in an en gazing style. It is the history of a family of children—four• daughters and three sons—in which the authoress traces the gradual de velopment of their dispositions, and the influ ence, either for good or evil, which their education exercised. Both the father and the mother and the governess are described as kindly and sensible persons, but without any glimpses of a higher life than the purely con ventional, and incapable of detecting or appre ciating the faculty of imagination. Owing to the first-mentioned qualities they do not seek openly to coerce their daughter's choice in marriage. But their example and training is naturally not without its effect, which leads one of the young ladies, a most sprightly and amiable character, into a very ill-assorted union. The eldest girl, Alice, who had always been a little overlooked, in consequence of her retiring and sincerely religious tempera ment, is wedded to the man of her choice, but feels the effect of her maiden life in fits of nervous depression and superstitious tremor when parted from her husband, who is a captain in the royal navy. But it is round the youngest daughter, Margaret, otherwise " The Daisy," that the chief interest of the story is thrown. Her genius is for art, and long and dreary is the struggle by which she gradually succeeds in emancipating herself from the drudgery of the schoolroom, and securing a certain portion of leisure for the cultivation of her favourite pursuits. How she made friends for herself out of her own family circle, and how she daily increased in goodness, simplicity, and tenderness, the reader must discover for himself. We are confident he will be charmed with the easy grace of the dialogue, the natural posture of the characters, and the tone of purity which pervades the whole composition. The brothers and sisters when together form a very pleasing group, enlivened by the gaiety of Henrietta, the fun of Keene, and the piquant oddities of the little artist. The following is a fair speci men of the genial home pictures with which this volume abounds—Charles is the naval captain aforesaid ; the subject of the talk is emigration : " Oh, it wonld be such inn," continued Dora; " Rupert would go hunting and shooting, and Brian fish and plough and cut down trees, and I would bake and sweep the house, and milk the cows, and have a spinning-wheel, and once a year you would go to wino town a great many hundred miles off, and bring back all the things I irritated for our housekeeping." "Yes, aid how many would you forget?" " Anal why are you to do everything?" said Henrietta; " are Margaret and I to do nothing?" I think I know who would do nothing," said Rupert, throwing aside his pencil and commencing to cut out of a card a model of an Australian boomerang. " But I don't think Henrietta would like the bash," re marked Margaret. " There would be no society." " And no books for you, and no paper and pencils," re turned Henrietta. " Oh, Rupert would ride off to some settler and exchange books," said Dora. " Well, I must say I think I should go with the waggon by way of a change," said Henrietta. " It would be very nice when Rupert came home with the books," said Margaret. " Something famously horrid," said Rupert ; " and, Dora, Rome day when you were making damper, with your arms up to the elbow in flour, you would see a wild Indian creeping in, like this, with his tomahawk, all ready fur a spring. How should you like that ?" " T would take a musket and shoot him. Besides, we should be very kind to the Indians, cud make friends with them." " I am afraid all this would not go very well with that white silk frock, Dora," said Henrietta. " Well, I should like to see her in the bush," said Ru pert ; •' Dolly and the old peacock. they are just tit for one another. I shall come and bee you. if my ship toaebee at any port near enottgb.'