The Press. — London, England, 1856-02-02 00:00:00

yittraturt. Amberhill. By A. J. Barrowcliffe. Two Vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Truman not free from the faults of the spas modic school, and though the general tenor of the story is of that tragic cast which inclines to the repulsive, yet there is great power in " Amberhill," and its faults are forgotten in the sustained excitement of the narrative. It purports to be the autobiography of a young lady of strong passions and irregular prin ciple, whose rebellious spirit against the decrees of Providence is at last struck down and utterly crushed by the accomplishment of her most ardent desire—abundant wealth—at the moment when it does but add to her aftli stion. The opening of the book shows fine percep tion of natural beauty. The tranquil parson age, in which the youth of the narrator passes, is brought before the eye so as to form a distinct and charming picture. But the garden is shaded by a huge cedar of Lebanon, which " spread out its broad black branches " like layers of clouds in the twilight and " heavy wings by day." The heavy shade of this tree is typical of the gloom which per vades the tale. The father of the heroine is disquieted by conscientious scruples. He is in the Church, but not of it. He cannot make up his mind to resign his good living—affording him a thousand a year—yet feels that he is sinful in preferring his convenience to the dictates of conscience. We are not informed of the nature of his scruples, but he dwells con tinually on the sentence, " He that loveth son " or daughter more than me, is not worthy " of me," and he feels the sting of the words as keenly as if our Lord himself stood visibly before him, and spake them with reproachful lips. His wife is his better angel, and coun sels him to forsake all for conscience sake. In addition to his own children, he allows an income to his orphan niece, Alice, whose for tune has been lost through his good nature in sparing an unprincipled guardian. We ex tract a passage from the first chapter which will show the key in which the story is penned, and the bewildering terror which runs through it from the first page to the last. Mr. C.E.Nlay is at his bible, when his wife enters : He bent his head upon her shoulder, and she smiled above him, like a protecting angel. " Mary, you are my staff, my crutch : I think I can be strong with you beside me." " We will lean together on a better staff: I am mortal, dearest, and a woman." He raised his head again, with a look of pain and writhing. " Oh, I cannot think of it ! Our children ! the old, old bitterness : our children ! " " God gave them to bless us, not to tempt us, Henry. Better they should die at our feet than live by their father's sin." " There is Alice, my sister's child, have I not wronged her enough ? Must I take the orphan's bread to buy peace for my own soul ? Oh, never, Mary, never ! " " Think manfully, dear love ; &amiss the thoughts that tempt you, till they can tempt no longer. Ecruember, too, we are not penniless. 1 have an income while I live, and Alice shall be cared for. Do I look old yet, Henry?" She shook the bright hair, which no cap had yet con• coaled, from her beautiful face and forehead, still almost girlish in their appearance, though she was nearly forty years old. My father looked up into her sweet eyes. but he did not smile. " And Amberhill ? " "Will be a slot of light, my husband, in all our memories." "An Eden, Mary : a Paradise, whence Heaven expels us, to be wanderers on a stony world." " No, Henry, the beautiful gate of the Temple, which we leave only because it is the hour of sacrifice !' A sharp rustle over head—a dull, plashing sound upon the grass, and a shower of rose leaves fell round my mother's feet where she was kneeling. It was the first great drop of the thunder-rain falling through the trailing boughs over the open glass door. There was no more sunshine ou the lawn; the black shadow of the cloud lay upon the breathless flowers, and the drowsy butterflies had disappeared. The note of a single bird broke the stillness, but it was a plaintive sound, like a whisper, and full of fear. A quick flash of lightning followed immediately, with the thunder close behind. My mother started up and went to the open door. My youngest brother, a beautiful child about four years old, was in the garden driving his hoop round the large lawn. Me called to him to come iu bet Ore the rain fell. Ile a Lopped and laughed, but .did Ile m to43d and laughed, but d i d not 'c , ale any nearer 11161.1.1.1..11.1 THE PRESS. the house. My mother called again, but the child stood still, laughing and tapping his hoop, which was in his hand. He was too far off to hear what she had said, and too daring to care about the thunder. Another drop of the heavy rain fell, lead-like, among the roses. She ran out into the garden, across the lawn, over the gravel walk, and among the shrubs, where the little fellow, seeing her coming, had flown, with a merry scream of pleasure, to hide himself; and soon reappeared, bearing him in her arms, kissing his laughing cheeks and pressing the little struggling limbs to her bosom. Thus burdened, with bare head and flowing hair, she came running towards the house, the nearest way, over the grass again, and under the frowning boughs of the dark cedar tree. I could see it 111 without moving. Then there was a blind light, and a great shock of sound, and in the midst of the light I saw my father spring forward, and I heard his scream above the noise of that terrible thunder-clap;—then all was dark, and I saw nothing, and the rolling sound pressed upon my brain like mountains ; and then my sight came back, and I was standing at the open door, and the great cedar before me was cleft in two and smoking ; and under it I was there in an instant ; yet my father was already kneeling beneath the black, smouldering boughs, with the head of his dead wife upon his knee, and his dead child upon the grass beside him. To free the father from his chain becomes henceforth the great object of the daughter's life. She has a miserly uncle enormously rich, and she anticipates his death with eager ness. She visits him, obtains his favour, and, as the relation between them is in reality much slighter than the term uncle implies, he proposes that she should become his wife. She considers whether she shall not accept his proposal, when an end is put fp it by an accident. He is waylaid and hurt. She ob tains his pocket-book, finds a cheque there for a thousand pounds, which she gets cashed secretly, and has the money torn from her by her brother. She is accused of the robbery, but gets off through the address of a young barrister who is staying with the magistrate. A new phase of her life now commences. She writes, and her works become popular. She is thrown much into the young barrister's society. He is rich. She becomes passion ately attached to him. He makes her an offer of his hand, but tells her that his heart is too dead for love. Now her prospects brighten. She thinks her father's deliverance is near at hand. But still darker clouds gather about her, and the book closes in a tumult of horror, which we must think quite foreign to the pur poses of genuine fiction. It may be supposed even from this slight sketch that the character of the heroine is exceptional, and that her emotions are, as judged by the ordinary standard of humanity, exaggerated. At the commencement of the book, when she hears the words delivered by her father, " He that loveth," &c., she writes : They are graven on my heart, and burned into my brain, and chained like hellhounds to my memory. I have made them my tempters here, and they will be my accusers in the great hereafter. When she sees her miserly uncle : I could have poisoned but God spares us many temptations I felt a swelling grief and anger at the thought that so many times the price of my father's ransom from daily misery was ready to fall into his lap, and was yet unreachable because the life stood between them I knew that at that moment I was a mur• derer in my heart. When she is with her uncle (her uncle nomi nally), and she thinks of his proposal to her, My own feelings gathered up into a central loathing, which alternately scorched and chilled me. But, with all this violence of sentiment and style, there are in the book some of the shrewdest sketches of character we ever met with. Her father gets a curate to relieve him from duties which are irksome to him, and Mr. Philip is one of the sternest of Calvin ists : He was a man with rigid lips and deep black brows, one who could imperturbably stare at you like a tiger as long as sou continued speaking, and then answer with a mono syllable. At the first moment, and ever afterwards, he seemed to tne like a limb of the dark old cedar, with light ning glaring out of its knotty eyes. He had a fine forehead, and was clever. His sermons soon made a commotion in our parish : the good people had been used to receive manna and the dews of Hermon from my father's lips ; they got hailstones and fire from his curate's. Mankind, in his conception, were put upon the earth and yoked together expressly to drag certain tons of Duty up to Paradise, and the gospel was the cart-whip to stir them up with when they got tired or lazy Mr. I'hillip's faith in the whip, however, was sublime in its intensity. The only pity was, that it never seemed heavy enough for him. He preached the glad tidings of damna tion with the zest of a vampire. He caught the sinner in the clutch of his strong hand, and Hogged him till he fell; Iyheit the _terrified soul lay sickening fur some sign of SATUhDAY, pity, the same hand unsparingly struck down the up. raised agonised head and the beseeching arms, the blows coming in measured merciless succession, till they fell only on broken bones. The description of his room is in the sauce spirit : He had his meals in his own room, where he also wrote his sermons. He bad put on the walls an old engraving of the " Last Judgment," another of the " Expulsion from Paradise," a third of ," Peter's Crucifixion," a fourth of the " Rich Man in Torments," horribly putting out his tongue. His inkstand was a little bronze Satan, hall prostrate, whom his pen transfixed between the shoulders every time he dipped it in the fluid. He had a statuette of Sampson tearing a lion in two, and another of Prometheus bound— the only peace of paganism in his possession, except, per haps, his own Christianity. In quite an opposite manner is the account of her rich uncle's farm : She took me through a stone passage, up an uncarpeted staircase, into a good-sized bedroom, where two or three knobs of coal were playing at glowworms in a grate about the size of a mousetrap. It was a largo grazing farm of waving land, with a broad stream running through one of its hollows, and the owner's character was written in its very hedge-rows. Everything that would pay for growing was fair and flourishing; every thing without a prcfit among its elements was pinched and neglected. The fences were all sound at the bottom, but no labour was lost in pruning them, for the cattle liked the shade, and the grans grew rank under it; the land was thoroughly drained, but there were holes and puddles in the footpaths, the outhouses were well roofed, and their woodwork well painted, but not a penny was spent in cleaning their old brick walls. The man himself is most amusingly described. Had Dickens and Miss Austen laid their heads together, and corrected each other's con ceptions, they could not have produced a more natural character than that of old Mr. Bannis ter. Probably Tennyson suggested the passage in which Lilian describes her walk after listening to the miser's suit : T sprang up with tears of anger in my eyes. Was tho world merry because I had another grief to hear ? I walked with irritable feet through the copse among the underwood and nettles. The brake bent sarcastically and pointed at me with his leaves. The foxglove held up her head in scorn ; the fungus puffed his cheeks at me even the white stellaria stretched her white neck between the brambles and stared contempt. What had I done that they should treat me so ? Some of the sentiments are acute, as fur ex ample the following : There is a force of gravitation in the thoughts of men which seems denied to their affections. In the great systems which unite us into powerful societies we are held together, for the most part, by some coincidence of intel- lectual knowledge. There is no greatness, and little power, in those small homely groups whose impulse of attraction is only the oneness of the heart's desires. And yet our knowledge is finite always, while our loves may be as infinite as God. The first view of the Alps is introduced in a burst of descriptive power : Deep down, seen as from the eagle's nest, the broad Bernese plains spread out their shades and colours, and beyond them in a vast chain of peaks and precipices was the great outline of the mountains. Wild, lawles forms, flinging their savage masses iu reckless strength out of the earth ; shapes of force, and daring, and defiance, swung headlong and uncontrollable from side to side ; upstretching cones, vast plunging chasms, and jagged summits; they stood there like Will and Passion made manifest in stone. Tho conclusion of this singular story is shocking, though perhaps, considering the peculiar nature of Lilian and the violence of her emotions, it is the most appropriate that could be imagined. The book no doubt proceeds from a female pen. It resem bles in many points the fictions of Miss Bronto and her sisters, and reveals the passion and energy which may lurk under the soft exterior of a woman's form. If we suppose the story to be the work of an artist, the leading character to be imagined, and her whole career from first to last to be shaped by design, wo must regard it as a won derful work of creative genius. But we rather surmise that it is, in great part at least, the reflection of the writer's own temperament, and that another fiction from the same hand would be in a similar manner. The main blots are the passages which fasten on Lilian a degree of shameful culpability inconsistent with her general character. All that relates to the thousand-pound cheque is improbable in itself, and unnecessarily degrading. But, notwithstanding its faults of exaggeration, the tale is so instinct with the nerve and eloquence of passion, as to possess a kind of fascinating effect, which compels the reader who once takes it up to read on as under the influence of a spell, and while reading to involuntarily pity, sympathise, and admire. 112