The Press. — London, England, 1856-09-13 00:00:00

SZPT. 13, 1856. fear his tongue and the hard words which it was wont to utter. This baron bold held nothing in respect. E'en of the best he ever said the worst. But this apart, he was a brave stout knight, in council sage, a valiant man of war, and lord of lineage high ; but this, his humour and his biting words, took from him much that was of right his due. He, going straightway to the king, thus said : " Sire, an it please yon, it is time to dine." " Ques," replied Arthur, in an angry tone, " sure thou west born bat to awake my wrath, and out of season ever W discourse. Have not told thee, ay, a thousand times, nought should induce me to partake of food, when thus my court had met, till some adventure had turned up, some knight were vanquished or some maid set free ? Go sit thee down at bottom of the hall." EQuez went without a word among that joyous throng, 'Where men of all conditions, knights and lords, minstrels and mountebanks, ceased not their tricks, their gay di,' course, their laughter, till the hour of noon. At noon, King Arthur called Sir Gawain, and thus spoke : " Fair nephew, cause our chargers to be brought; for since adventure cometh not to us, we must fain seek it in the open field; for, should we longer stay, our knights indeed would have a right to think that it were time to dine." " Your will, my lord," Sir Gawain said, " shall be obeyed." And again, elsewhere, the composition runs : The yeoman now prepared himself for fight, and seized his dart as though in act to strike; but Janfry, fearing for his horse, awaited not the blow, but gallopped off amain. As o'er the road he sped, the man let fly the missile with just aim ; it hit the shield, and that with force so great red fire and flame forth issued at the stroke, which did not pierce it through. The sharpened point curled upwards on the steel, and the wood flew in shivers. Sir Janfry turned his steed at once and bore down on his foe, counting full surely that the fight was done ; but 1,, at that instant he had leapt aside, and in the act dis charged a second dart, which lighted on his helm; so fierco the stroke the casgne seemed all on fire; yet it resisted, though its lord was stunned. The yeoman, seeing his second blow had failed, was as a man possessed--so dread his rage as neither to have hart the knight or broken his bright arms. Janfry, whose senses had now back returned, thought only of his horse, which he rode here and there to guard it from the blow of the third dart. Not this, however, was his foe's intent, for he still thought to take the beast alive. Like lightning swift he came, and, whirling round the dart, launched the fell weapon with these haughty words : " By Heaven, slave, thou now shalt leave the horse, nor shall thy hauberk, helm, or shield protect thyself !" This is a style of rendering which can be described only as Mcvphersonisell paraphrase. The English editor should either have given plain prose, taking care to use a richly coloured and antique diction, or else to have adopted the style employed by Walter Scott in his poems. In argumentative works it is possible to blend two styles, but in poetical composition it is almost impossible. A preliminary dissertation and some critical and historical notes would have given addi tional value to the letterpress. But, taken as a whole, we may say that the work is an im provement on books of its class, and its illus trations are of great beauty, combining toge ther much of the quaintness of Kenny Meadows with the architectural drawing of Prout's cathedrals. As becomes the subject of the work, they aro chevaleresquo and fanciful. Dred : a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. London : Samp son Low and Co. (Second Notice.) A REPERUSAL of " Dred " has done much to strengthen our opinion that it is not the work of a single pen. It displays such different qualities of mind as are rarely found in one person, and abounds, often to tediousness, with passages of rhetoric which seem to us quite foreign to tho vivacious temperament of Mrs. Stowe. Sometimes the transition of style is abrupt, and we change at once from the slat ternly causerie of American drawing-rooms to the sonorous eloquenc e o f the professor's chair ; but at other times different styles run into each other, and are so blended that it is difficult to follow their respective veins, or to believe that in the process of composition they could have been so completely fused. Generally, the desorip tion of characters seems to be by ono hand, and the conversations — save when they take a didactic tone—by an other ; and it is remarkable that the person ages —except indeed the nigger servants, all admirably drawn and sustained—seldom come up to the characters assigned them, either in their dialogue or action. The account given of leading personages of the story is usually very elaborate, and marked by touches THE PRESS. of logic not natural to a female pen. Thus of Tom Gordon, the villain of the tale, we read at page 32, " He was a much worse character " for all the elements of good which he pos " sessed ;" and the same thought is repeated at page 428,—" Tom Gordon was a worse " slaveholder and master from the very fact " of certain desirable qualities in his mental " constitution ; for as good wine snakes the " strongest vinegar, so fine natures perverted " make the worse vice." In many parts of the book we are struck with this union of ratio cinative perception and significant imagery. Some masculine minds—as those of Francis Bacon and Edmund Burke, for example— combine poetic feeling with logical faculty and lively imagination. The combination, however, is rare ; and the latter alone within our recollection united the philosophy and the passion, the piercing judgment and the moral rage, which are to be found in passages of this remarkable work. We quoted last week some sentences exhibiting intense appreciation of the power of the Bible. The following are not less remarkable. The reader will observe how finely the image assists, and almost forms, the thought : It is remarkable that in all ages, communities and in dividuals who have suffered under oppression have always fled for refuge to the Old Testament, and to the Book of Revelations in the New. Even if not definitely under stood, these magnificent compositions have a wild and inspiring power, like a wordless yet impassioned symphony, played by a sublime orchest►a, in which deep and awful sub bass instruments mingle with those of ethereal softness, and wild minors twine and interlace with marches of battles and bursts of victorious harmony. They are mush mistaken who say that nothing is efficient as a motive that is not definitely understood. Who ever thought of understand ing the mingled wail and roar of the " Marseillaise ?" Just this kind of indefinite stimulating power has the Bible to the souls of the oppressed. There is also a disposition which has manifested itself since the primitive times, by which the human soul bowed down beneath the weight of mighty oppressions, and despairing in its own weakness, seizes with avidity the intimations of a coming judgment in which the Son of Man,tappearing in His glory, and all His holy angels with him, shall right earth's mighty wrongs. _ _ To whatever pen we may refer passages like these, no ono can doubt that they evince equal mastery of thought and mastery of composi• tion. Sometimes a penetrating thought is flashed forth in a single line. The writer, reflecting on the bitter and cruel animosities which have so often desolated mankind, ob serves emphatically,—" The world has been " thousands of years and not yet learned the " first two words of the Lord's Prayer." The reference is of course to the immense signifi cance contained in the phrase " OUR FATHER," as expressive of perfect community of kindred, and of equality in the sight of God. To return to the characters of the story, many of them are described with great subtlety. Of Mrs. Nesbit, the conventional religious old lady of the book, it is shrewdly remarked : Religion she looked upon in the light of a ticket which, being once purchased and snugly laid away in a pocket- book, is to be produced at the celestial gate, and thus secure admission to heaven. . . . Like many other apparently negative characters, she had a pertinacious intensity of an extremely narrow and aimless self-will. Her plans of life, small as they were, had a thousand crimps and plaits, to every one of which she adhered with invincible pertinacity. The poor lady little imagined, when she sat with such punctilious satisfaction while the Rev. Mr. Orthodoxy demonstrated that selfishness is the essence of all moral evil, that the sentiment had the slightest application to her, nor dreamed that the little quiet muddy current of self-will which ran without noise or indecorum under the whole structure of her being, might be found, in a future day, to have undermined all her hopes of heaven. - - - - - - - This train of thought is further developed in a conversation between Clayton and Nina. She asks : "What do you suppose the reason is, that good people are generally so stupid ?" " A great deal," said Clayton," is called goodness which is nothing but want of force. A person is said to have self-government simply because he has nothing to govern. They talk about self-denial, when their desires are so weak that one course is about as easy to them as another. Such people easily fall into a religious routine, get by heart a set of phrases, and make, as you say, very stupid good people. The account of Clayton, commencing at page 9, is in the more earnest style of the book : The upper part of the face gave the impression of thoughtfulness and strength, with a shadowing of melan choly earnestness; and there was about the eye in con• versat►on that occasional gleam of troubled wildness which betrays the hypochondriac temperament. The mouth was even feminine iu the beauty and delicacy of its lines, and 881 the smile which sometimes played around it had a peon liar fascination. It seemed to be a smile of but half the man's nature; for it never rose as high as the eyes, or seemed to disturb the dark stillness of their thoughtful- ness. The reader will be reminded of an acute observation in " Coningsby," we think, that nothing is so fascinating as the smile of a, naturally grave face. It is the combination of passages like the above with very commonplace chit-chat that makes the book so puzzling. Nina is, for the most part, plainly a feminine creation of a somewhat vulgar order. She is represented as a gauzy, fluttering kind of being, made up of fly-away ribbons, shaking ringlets, and airy lace, with a stock of " notions " fresh from a New York boarding-school; yet early in the book we find her expressing one of those yearnings which every earnest human heart must have often experienced :—" I wish we " knew more about heaven, so that it would " seem natural and home-like to us as this world " does." This chapter the eleventh, as well as the previous one, evince a combination of some of the best yet most different qualities which are combined in the work. Who that has ever wandered by the banks of a stream will not fail to recognise the truth of this description of its windings : This stream went meandering among the pines like a spangled ribbon, sometimes tying itself into loops, leaving open spots, almost islands of green, graced by its waters. On the next page the impression of the tranquillity of death is beautifully con veyed : The expression of exhaustion, fatigue, and anxiety which the face had latterly worn, had given place to one of tender rest, shaded by a sort of mysterious awe, u if the closed eyes were looking on unutterable things. The soul, though sunk below the horizon of existence, hod thrown back a twilight upon theface, radiant as that of the evening heavens. And a few pages further on we meet with an admirable defence of romance against the censures passed upon it that it raises false ex pectations, dissipates the mind, leads people to pursue phantoms, and so forth : " And yet," said Clayton, " all these objections would lie against perfectly true history, and the more so just In pro portion to its truth. If the history of Napoleon Bonaparte were graphically and minutely given, it would be open to the very same objections. It would produce the same cravings for something out of the common course of life. There would be the same dazzling mixture of good and bad qualities in the hero, and the same lassitude and ex haustion after the story was finished. And common history does not do this—simply because it is not true — does not produce a vivid impression of the reality as it happened." In these chapters, also, the character of Mr. Carson, one of the most thriving respects.- bilities of New York, is most amusingly de lineated. Were we about, which we are not, to assign parts of the book to different authors, we should feel extremely perplexed how to ap portion the negro characters. The real hero of the story is poor Tiff; his simplicity is as laughable as his affection is pathetic. He is an old greyheaded stooping negro, who wears spectacles, thinking they give him a look of importance, quite ignorant that the sights are only common window glass. He has followed the daughter of his master's house—a great old Virginia family—through all the misfor tunes caused by her marrying a careless selfish fellow ; and when she dies Tiff takes charge of her young family, and prides himself infinitely on being their "nigger." When he takes them all to the camp-meeting, he is care ful to give them instructions on their deport ment towards himself : " Tell ye what, chil'en," said Tiff, " we'll live like princes! And you mind, order me round, lull. Let folks har ye; 'cause what's de use of having a nigger, and nobody knowing it ?" It is one of the merits of the book that the slaves are not shown as universally discon tented with their lot. On the contrary, they are generally represented as having great en joyment in their servitude, and as priding themselves ou the position of their owners. Thus, when poor Tiff goes to the mansion of Nina Gordon to see what relief he can obtain. for them, he has an angry discussion with Old Hundred, the Gordon coachman, on the respective dignity of their families. There id a passage in chapter xxi. so amusing and so characteristic that we must make room for it. Rose, the cook, is the wifo of Old Hundred,