The Press. — London, England, 1856-11-01 00:00:00

NOVEMBER 1, 1856. Nittratart. Art and Nature at Home and Abroad. By G. W. Thornbury. Two Vols. London : Hurst and Blackett. WE have not met with so original a work for many a day as these two volumes by Mr. Thornbury. They have the freedom and freshness of genius. Acute observation is combined with great research, yet the style is so dashing that the last thing we think of is the variety and the extent of knowledge which these sketches evince. Mr. Thornbury has the rare faculty of seizing hold of what is vital in the present and the past, and of re producing it with all the glow and vigour of its pristine colour. These is so much genuine imaginative talent in these volumes, that we confidently expect he will distinguish himself, whatever walk of literature he may hereafter pursue. History, romance, and the drama, are all before him. Should he choose either of the two last, he can hardly miss ex cellence. The volumes are made up of essays of the most opposite character. The title of the book, " Art and Nature," very indifferently expresses its character. Some of the essays are on London, some on the country . ; some on the cities of the Continent ; some on times past, some on times present; some on man ners ; some on art ; some on great men ; some on odd fellows. There is no attempt at order in the arrangement. The whole reads like the overflowings of a richly-stored, vivid, and fanciful mind. The breadth of thought will strike every reader. Mr. Thornbury writes as though he had only his own amusement in view. lie is the very steeple-chaser of essayists, rapid, brilliant, and daring. His sketches have not the finish of those by Washington Irving, which they something resemble in their lifelike portraiture, hut they have more spirit; the pencilling is less minute, but the sweep of the hand is freer. The first paper in the book, " Poetry of London," is less attractive than the chapters which succeed it. We like the essays on "Beggars," on "Fountains," and on `. In-door Life and Out-door Life" as exemplified in different countries. " Teniers at A msterdam" shows more penetration. The leading characteristics of the painter are grasped in a masterly man ner : The world of Teniers is a disreputable second-rate ale• house world, very far on this side of heaven. His men do not love, they lust; they do not drink for society's sake, but to get drunk ; they are mean, selfish, dirty, and de spicable. Yet such were the men who tore Do Witt to pieces, and shouted as William steered towards England. Louis XI V. longs to have them as his subjects ; and such men as Vane and Bradshaw }earned to make Holland and England one republic. The fact is, it is only a nest of oddities that Toners paints : men that he has seen through windows in dusky streets, startled by their sudden shout as he mused by looking out for stray sunbeams and chance gloms lurking all day under archways. In the streets, too, Ben Jonson himself could not be more alive to humour. His characters are almost as indi vidualised as those of Dickens His ale houses have a jug hung up for a sign, with sometimes a spoon beside it, a sufficiently obvious allegory to the traveller. Not unfre quently there is a garland round the jug, and often, too, a sign with an heraldic bearing. Below, always the same large•nosed, toothless men, with loose breeches, and looser morals, play at bowls, shoot at the butts, and dwarfish men eye them with dull eagerness, their hands behind their back and heads thrown forward. The storks, who build in Dutch roofs, are poising in the air careless of the arrows. lu the distance is a spire, where the men once a week pray. At Tenicra' dances there is always a man asleep and snoring, a pair of lovers, a man filling his pipe, a group of critics, a wealth of vegetables, and the imme• modal brass pan. The man who fills his pipe does it with protruded lips and arms and face ; and the man who sings over his ale does it with wry mouth and shut eyes. The Dutchman does not care much for natural things dune naturally, but prefers odd things done oddly. In his country roads we meet with pilgrims holding out their broad tapped hats for alms. They carry the hooked staff, the scrip, and the water•bottle. Sometimes we pass a cavalier, with short cloak, boots, and doublet, who is having his fortune told by a gipsy. His stately burgo masters wear costly robes, and their flowing beards mingle with the fur that trims its front, and with their muffs. Still his world is a dismal world, noisy with pots ham• mering on a thousand tables, noisy with drunken Dutch shouts and curses, the upsetting of barrels and chairs, and the angry tearing of cards. There is no blue sky, no children, no pure love, no fathers, no home, no religion. - - - - - This is admirable writing. It is impossible for description to convey pictorial ideas more THE PRESS. clearly. The next paper, on " Old English Mansions, " is poetic from the liveliness of its reminiscences. There is a pleasant reflection at the end of the essay on the union of patriotic with aristocratic feeling:— Oh, privilege of birth ! to think that a man can buy ready-made avenues, old mansions, ten•stalled stable, ex cellent pinery, ghost, &c., included, and yet cannot pur chase a set 9t' family traditions; cannot look at unchanged land that his fathers looked at, pictures they loved, rooms they hallowed. The self•risen man has other hopes, and looks forward, like a conqueror and a discoverer ; but he has no traditionary greatness to incite, to warm, and soothe and strengthen him. He is a first man, and has to name his creatures and map out his world. It may be better to be the first than the last, but the ideal of family feeling he cannot know. That rich heirloom he leaves for his children. If ever there was a feeling which incited to true patriot• ism, which has been the basis of many nations' greatness, which is holy, admirable, and excellent, it is that regard for ancestry, which Itome and Venice once knew, and England still boasts. The love of soil is not acquired in lodgings or picked up by tourists; it is too sacred a thing to be felt by shal low-hearted prodigals, dandies, and fools. Intellectual selfishness strives to found a name, and not a family ; it despises sympathy, and cares not for a posterity to whose praises a dead man's ear will be deaf. But despise not, Radical, the man who loves a birth-spot, where he emerged from eternity, where he saw his mother die, where he was first glorified by even a dearer love than that of a mother's—where he first heard a child call him father —where he hoped, sighed, prayed, wept, and taught— where he ran and walked, thought and wrote, married, and was buried. Angels are cosmopolites ; but how can man be? Philosophers, who love nobody but the whole human race—as an Irishman would say—may be citizens of the world,—sufficient for me to love my own paternal hills, my river, my meadows, the one roadway that leads up to the one house where f sat and thought, and loved for a time, and waited to be told the secret of eternity. It may be supposed that so fanciful an author does not want for humour. It is richly dis played in the chapter on English and French manners. Take, for example, this bit : SCENE— English travellers at a French Table d'Hole, say the Hotel Anglais, Rue St. Honore. Cries of " Coffee—caufee—cafaay—eafee." " Garsson —gorson—garsen." " Boy—you there—you fellow in the striped jacket—waiter," Kellner Cameriere —I say Bottega—Margner." "'Am and eggs, I say, what a shame ful pat of butter." "Do you call this 'am ?" " More 'am," " Donnez moy de boor." " Cate—yes—another tasse— -1 mean another cup of coffee." "Oh ! these d— f9reigners. I suppose I've asked that German waiter four teen times for more 'am, and he keeps bringing me a bootjack and a Bradshaw." " tio, no, sir—l—give me your plain joint." Add to this the clatter of knives and forks, the movement of feet, and the din of voices. Imagine fat, jewelled women, who cannot get seats, har pooning fowls from behind your chair, and calling out at intervals—" Law, Mr. Thompson, what an imposition— shameful. Do they call this a breakfast, and no sugar tongs ?" The biographical sketches contained in the book are masterpieces. Hogarth is, as it were, recalled to life in Leicester square. The great painter of mankind showed his ruling passion to the last : Every one has heard the story of ➢fozart and the pro. phetic Requiem; almost a similar presentiment fore shadowed the death of Hogarth. One day, after dinner, at his house at Chiswick, he told his friends he was going to paint the end of all things. "If that is the case," said one of the guests, laughing and filling his glass, " there will be an end of the painter." " There will, indeed," said Hogarth, sighing heavily, " and, therefore, the sooner the work is done the better." The next day he began. He painted a broken bottle, a worn•out broom, a cracked hell, a shivered hourglass. "So far so good," said the artist, " nothing remains but this," and he dashed in a broken palette, " finis" he said, "all is over." In a month that busy band was still, and nine days after Churchill WAR buried out of sight, and the two satirists were at rest at last. The essay on Cromwell is more finished. The reader will admire the art with which all the better and grander qualities of the man are collected and fused together, while the darker shades of character are but thrown in to give force to the portrait and make its light more striking. The passage in which the fierce despondency of spirit that seized him previous to his entry on public life is described, shows both subtlety and breadth of thought : A gloom—the usual precursor of all great mental changes—overshadowed him ; a deep, black melancholy— like that which drove Luther to wander night and day through the cloisters of Erfurth, crying, "My sin, my sin !"—Wesley to dream of hell at Oxford, and Pascal to see graves opening at his feet—pressed down upon his brain. This melancholy is now as well known a symptom of religious enthusiasm as s red cheek is of a fever, or a pale one of dropsy. Cromwell's mind was alternately torn with doubts, lacerated with fears, and paralysed by despair. He was drifted in whirlwinds, and smitten with momentary lightnings. Now hell seemed boiling at his feet, and now 1047 heaven wts ready to rain Ore upon his head ; and over all, and through all, and above all, was night—Egyptian night —tangible, solid a ith its grave-like darkness. Sir Philip Warwick says a Huntingdon physician told him that, at this time, Cromwell would frequently send for him even at midnight, believing that he was dying; and when he walked abroad, he would tremble to pass near the town. cross, or the church-tower, lest they should fall upon him. In the same crisis, Fox, the quaker, fasted, and hid him self in hollow trees, till he heard God audibly speak, and Bunyan was shaken by terrible dreams, and voices from the darkest abysses of heft. It is such spiritual conflicts as these, that till our mad-houses yearly, with religious enthusiasts. It bears no more resemblance to healthy religion, than a madman's strength does to one in the normal state, but it is a state through which religious thinkers frequently pass. The moment of deliverance cornea, the climax, that restores the mind to health, and is its reaction. Loyola felt it, when he saw the Trinity upon the steps of the Church at Rome. St. Therese, when the angel pierced her heart with a golden arrow, Fox awoke from his trances to do good in his own crazed way. Bunyan, purified and chastened, to guide men to the bright city, %hither he had himself been ; the weak mind sinks at such times into insanity, but the strong awake from their sleep, like Samson, to snap the green withs that bind them. We have nowhere in the same space met with so fine a notice of Cromwell's character. Analysis and synthesis are harmoniously mingled to produce a grand historical por trait. The presence of ,the man is always skil fully kept in view. Mr. Thornbury's volumes contain matter to please all tastes. He is grave and gay, learned and superficial, picturesque and reflective, and in all moods and on all subjects he is vivacious and amusing. He terms his essays " The Recollections of a Tramping Painter." Will he excuse our saying that we think the pen must be more natural to his hand than the brush ? CHEAP "ORIGINAL" FICTION. 1. The School of Life. By Anna Mary Howitt. London: Ward and Lock. 2. Harry Ogilvie; or, the Black Dragoons. By James Grant. London : Routledge. 3. The Hills of the Shatemuc. By Elizabeth Warner. London: Routledge. IN that department of the literary world in which authors and publishers meet "on 'Change," it has been understood that the results of the current year with respect to novels will be of considerable importance as to the future form in which fiction is to appear. We have been assured that the it. Ils. 6d. system for publishing tales and romances is now upon its last trial ; and if it fail, it will be an interesting question how any decent price can be given for copyright of fiction published in a cheap form. For, of course. the notion that novels published at mere pamphlet prices could pay remuneratively, with expenses of advertising, is entirely out of the question. Yet, if novelists will not be paid for the time and trouble of composition, the public must be content to read old stories, or translations from the French and German. We make these remarks. as we have three " original " novels now before us, all published at low prices. The two systems of publica tion are so hostile to one another that it can scarcely be expected that they can continue long in operation. At present the facts stand thus : Publishers on the 1/. 11 s. 6d. plan are compelled to print in the first instance only a limited number of copies of a novel that pro mises well, as the cheap system produces so many rivals in the field. But, on the other hand, the houses which print cheap original novels give small prices (or none at all), adver tise sparingly, and leave the books to "work their way " The result is unsatisfactory to all parties—to the authors, the publishers, and to the public at large. We might name another class, the reviewers, who for some time past have been compeller' to wade through a most inferior description of novels. In short, we must give it as our opinion, founded on prac tical observation of the working department of literature, that a great reform is wanted in the system of publishing novels The country is actually littered with " cheap and nasty " novels ; the book-bazaars are crammed ; there are a myriad of worthless novelists who choke up the way ; and in so highly artificial and exceptional a branch of letters as Fiction, the ordinary economical laws of supply and de mand will not work practically. 'r - om these