The Press. — London, England, 1856-08-09 00:00:00

• AUGUST 9, 1856. the career of an individual who, with no advantage of fortune or education, raised him self to an influential station in society, and in all the duties of domestic life and State citi zenship played a truly noble and conscien tious part. It is Never Too Late to Mend. A Matter-of-Fact Romance. By Charles Reade. Three Vols. London : Bentley. THE previous tales of Mr Reade, though sketchy, exhibited so much originality and power, that we anxiously expected from his pen a more matured fiction. Ho has now given us three good-sized volumes, extending t )gether .to more than a thousand pages of t )lerably close print. If the quality were equal to the quantity we should have to con gratulate him on a great success. Our task is less gracious. His present tale is not an advance on his previous efforts. It exhibits their defects in an exaggerated degree. t is more fragmentary, more affected in style, and less natural in matter. With his . broader stage, Mr Reade seemri to have lost his force. He wanders about it distractedly. His three volumes are made up of three distinct sub• jects, with the slenderest possible bond of cohesion. Each subject might have worked up into a good story, but all are partially spoilt by the clumsiness of the attempt to j,.in them together. The first half of the first volume, and the last hundred pages of the third, contain nearly the whole of the main story, and quite as much as ordinary readers will care to peruse. These portions of the book are almost complete, and would have made, in Mr. Reade's peculiar style, an at tractive domestic romance. _ _ _ George Fielding, a farmer, has the ill-luck to be cultivator of very poor land. He is behindhand with the world, and grumbles at his lot, the more as he is deeply in love with his pretty cousin, Susan Merton, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. who owed his pro sperity to the assistance he had received from his sister, George's mother. The maiden has two other lovers, William Fielding, the younger brother of George, and one Mr. Meadows, a hard-headed, prosperous man, who has but to hold out his hand for gold to rain into it. George is thre itened with a dis tress ; he tries to borrow, but the malignant influence of Meadows is against him. When the story opens circumstances accumulate to overwhelm him; he is irritated into a fight with his brother; he is sharply reproved by his sweetheart; he is disowned b 3 her father, his uncle ; his honest name is jeopardised. He receives an offer to go to Australia, and clutches at it, bargaining only that Susan shall be his, if he returns with a thousand pounds in his pocket to show that he has something in him. Amid the tears and heart groanings of parting, an old Jew, Laurence Levi, who has had a mortal quarrel with Meadows for reasons to be sought in the book, comes forward and offers to befriend the luckless George It is too late. His mind is made up. His betrothed he leaves to his brother's care. The narrative of these occurrences consti tutes one-half of the first volumes. It is written with amazing spirit, and with such flow of in vention as leads one to imagine that the author can continue through three volumes in the same strain. The fertility in crowding incident upon incident, and character upon character, evinced by Eugene Sue and Alexan dre Dumas, is combined with that minute N or traiture of rural life and its habitudes which m modern day English writers and English painters alone seem to have the faculty of setting forth. Mr. Reade's conceptions of character are admirable. He places per sonages before us with a few scratches of his pen, just as an accomplished artist with careless touches of chalk creates a likeness. Mr. Reade can go further. He can represent with admirable skill these characters in action up to a certain point. While they run on pre cise lines, or dance upon wires, there is no fault to he found with them. But when he attempts to go beyond this, and to combine them in the complicated, yet natural evolu tions of real life, he fails. His characters never grow; they are ready-made goods, and we see all of them that is to be seen as soon THE PRESS. as they make their appearance, whether in smock-frock, gaberdine, or clerical coat. They may surprise us at first, but they never sur prise us afterwards. There is no depth in his portraiture. After George's departure from Australia, some 350 pages of the fiction are occupied with the discipline of a gaol conducted on the silent system. There is great force in many of the sketches, but the reader feels that the whole account is dragged into the book with out any natural connection with its other parts. The horrors of the system, and the possible brutality of governors and turnkeys, and despair of prisoners, may be a proper subject for fiction, but these should have legs of their own to stand upon, which here they have not. A mind with any artistic talent would at least have split this dreary episode into fragments. The redeeming point in it is the character of Mr. Eden, one of the best the author has ever presented, with the piety, the loquacity, and the confidence often met with in clerical personages. When this episode is got rid of, we encoun ter another quite as dreary. George Fielding goes through surprising adventures in Aus tralia ; he is followed by the old Jew, Laurence Levi; imaginary scenes at gold-diggings are related in detail, and a number of brutes are introduced for no other purpose apparently than to show to what degradation brutish na tures may sink. After a volume of this wretched Australian compilation (for it is no better) we return to the story nearly at the point at which it was left at page 150 of vol. i. _ _ Through some strange perversity of mind, the author shows most affectation in those parts of his narrative where it is most inappro priate. Two Australian ruffians are nick named by him Mephistopheles and Brutus, and these names he has an insane propensity to print without capital letters whenever they occur :—Ex. gr. The two worthies have pur chased a lot of tracts from a pedler, suppos ing them to be flash stories : mephiato. "Mend your ways," a tract. brutes. I'll break his head instead. mephiato. "Narrative of Mr. James, the missionary.' bruins. The cheating undermining rip. mephiato. And here is another to the same tune. bruins. Didn't I tell you so. The hypocritical hum• bugging rascal. When these brutes contemplate a murder, the author, with his own peculiar notions of typography, relates : The assassins now divided their force. mephistopheles took his station to leeward of the tent. Brutus to windward. It is impossible to think very highly of a writer who descends to such paltry tricks with the hope of creating effect. A more serious fault in the book is its lapse of truth. Let the reader turn to that part of the book, commencing vol. iii. p. 13, in which Meadows is represented as acting the part of an Australian proprietor, and selling out of hand for 12,5001. some land in Australia which he had a few moments before purchased for 5001.. and say whether anything more thoroughly unreal was ever presented under the garb of " matter of fact" fiction. The incident is as little in accordance with the character of Meadows, as with the usages of London mercantile life. All that relates to the Jew is just as unnatural. Mr. Reade seems to pride himself most on that part of his book which details the horrors of the silent-system gaol. The governor is depicted as a brute delighting in the torture of his unhappy prisoners, yet able to sympa thise with the sufferiegs of Uncle Tom, and touched with indignation at the cruelties of Legree. After driving some prisoners to suicide, and torturing others to death, he is at last detected, tried, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment, on which the author bursts out into this choice specimen of rant : I revoke that sentence with all the blunders on which it was founded. . . . . It shall stand alone in all its oblique pity, its straightforward cruelty rnd ab• surdity ; and no judge shall dare to copy it while 1 am alive, for if he does, I swear to him by the Grid that made me that all I have yet said is to what I will print of him as a lady's whip to a thresher's flail. I promise him on my honour as a writer and no hireling, that I will buy a sheet of paper as big as a barn•door and nail him to it by his name as we nail a pole-cat by the throat. I will take him by one ear to Calcutta, and from Calcutta to Sydney, 761 and by the other from London via Liverpool to New York and Boston. The sun shall never set upon his gibbet, and when his bones are rotten his shame shall live. Ay I though he was tbirty years upon the bench, posterity shall know little about his name and feel nothing about it but this—t'iat it is the name of a maddle•head who gained and merited my loath.ng, my horror, and my scorn ! The case of a certain county gaol in the west of England is, we suppose, intended by the author. Every one will agree with the writer that prisons should, as far as practicable, be reformatories, not places of torture. The best of them require to have the light of publicity thrown into them, and no false scruples should save from exposure the officers who abuse their trust. But fiction may abuse its trust also. While indicating realities, it can exaggerate or pervert them to any extent. It has power to promulgate slander which cannot be mistaken, but which yet cannot be punished. It can so label hideous falsehood as to make it pass for fact. It may defame without responsibility, and lie without being called to account. From the best part of the book we quote the passage describing the parting of George and Susan : In a hutch near the corner of the house was William's pointer Carlo. Carlo observing by the general movement that there was something on foot, had the curiosity to come out to the end of his chain, and as he stood there giving every now and then a little uncertain wag of his tail, George took notice of him and came to him and patted his head. " Good bye, Carlo," faltered George ; " poor Carlo— you and i shall never go after the partridges again, Carlo : the dog shows more understanding than the Christian ; bye, Carlo." Then he looked wistfully at William's dog, bat he said nothing more. William watched every look of George, but he said nothing at the time. " Good bye, little village church, where I went to church man and boy ; good bye churchyard where my mother lies ; there will be no church bells, Susan, where I am going; no Sunday bells to remind me of my soul and home." These words, which he spoke with great difficulty, were hardly out of young Fielding's mouth when a very painful circumstance occurred; one of those things that seem the contrivance of some malignant spirit. The church bells in a moment struck up their very merriest peal ! George Fielding started, he turned pale, and his lips trembled. " Are they mocking me?" he cried. "Do they take a thonght what I am going through this moment, the hardhearted—" " No! no ! no I" cried William ; " don't think it, George ; I know what tell ye." " *hit is it?" " well, George, it is Tom Clarke and Esther Borgherst married to-day; only they couldn't have the ringers till the afternoon.' " Why, Will, they have only kept company a year, and Susan and I have kept company three years; and Tom and Esther are married to-day ; and what are George and Susan doing today? God help ma! Oh, God help me! What shall Ido ? what shall Ido ? " And the stout heart gave way, and George Fielding covered his face with his hands, and burst ont gobbing and crying. Susan flung hsr arms round his neck—" Oh ! George, my pride is all gone ; don't go, don't think to go ; have pity on us both. and don't go." And she clung to him—her bonnet fallen off, her hair dishevelled—and they sobbed and wept iu one another's arms. Meadows writhe.l with the jealous anguish this sad sight gave him, and at that moment he could have cursed the whole creation. Re tried to fly, but he was rooted to the spot. He leaned sick as death against the palings. George and Susan cried together, and then they wiped one another's eyes like simple cosintry folk with one pocket-handkerchief ; and then they kissed one another in turn, and made each other's tears flow fest again ; and again wiped one another's eyes with one handkerchief. • • • • • She trembled violently ; and then George gave a cry that seemed to tear his heart, and darted from them in a moment. _ . . Poor_ Susan uttered more than one despairing scream, and stretched out both her Mods for George. He did not see her, for he dared not look hack. " Bob, loose the dog," muttered William, hastily, in a broken voice. _ _ The dog was loosed, and ran after George, who, he thought, was only going for a walk. Susan was sinking, pale and helpless, upon her brother's bosom. " Pray, sister," said gentle William ; " pray, sister, as I must." A faint shiver was all the answer; her senses had almost left her. When George was a little way up the hill, something ran suddenly against his legs—he started—it was Carlo. He turned, and lifted up his hand to Heaven ; and William could see that George was blessing him for this. Carlo was mcre than a dog to poor George at that cruel moment. Soon after that George and Carlo reached the crown of the hill. George's fignre stood alone a moment between them and the sky. He was seen to take his hat off, and raise his hands once more to Heaven, whilst he looked down upon all he loved and left, and then be turned his sorrowful face again towards that distant land, and they saw him no more ! It is strange that Mr. Reade, with so much ability as he undoubtedly possesses, should have run into the affectations which disfigure