The Press.
London, England, 1858-10-30 00:00:00

NOVELS.

Shreds and Patches; or, Pathos and Bathos. By
Jane Kennedy. London : Kent and Co.
Deerbrook. A Novel. By Harriet Martineau.
A New Edition. (Smith, Elder, and Co's
Series of Standard Fiction.) London : Smith,
Elder, and Co.
To make use of a preface appears to be for a
certain class of authors a peculiarly hazardous
proceeding. To use a vulgar expression, they
are sure to put their foot into it, as soon as they
attempt to explain in their own persons what
their purpose has been. The authoress of this
volume tells us that we shall find " no consecutive
interesting tale "—" no harrowing details of the
workings of conscience" —" no unattainable
models of knowledge. or science,"—with several
other inuendoes levelled at the implied absurdities
of other novelists. We always suspect a person
who begins by dealing these swinging blows at
his fellow-labourers in the same field. He won't
live and let live—nothing is good unless it is done
in his way. We generally find that the writer who
is so gratuitously censorious turns out as incom-
petent as possible to fill up the:blanks or correct
the mistakes he supposes to have been made by
others. " Shreds and Patches," w•e are told, is
written " more in the hope that authors of great
powers may be induced to approximate then•
" fictions to the common realities of every-day
" life. . . . to induce those who have this
" talent [authorship] to see that the things
" passing every hour before them, are those
" which if pleasingly and graphically recounted
" would be the most productive of improvement
"to the mind." We should have thought that
the benefits of realistic fiction, with a dash of
morality and religion, hardly required to be dug
into us at this tune of day. Is not Miss Ken-
nedy satisfied with Miss Sewell, Miss Yonge,
Miss A. M. Goodrich, and the authoress of
" Dorothy " ? What would she have more ?
Or does she wish Mr. Thackeray to set up a
tabernacle in the vacant space opposite the

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Horse Guards, and lecture the authorities of that
establishment on the temptations of tape and the
sinfulness of shoddy, in a manner which shall
empty Quebec Chapel and drive Mr. Spurgeon to
atrophy and despair ? What is to be the nature of
the new school of fiction she desires to inaugurate
may be judged of perhaps by the pattern
she has laid before us, which, though it may
please the inventor, does not seem to us of a very
serviceable material. We might give some of
our readers an idea of its nature by requesting
them to imagine three or four of Mr. hang's
stories, such as his " Too much Alike," rolled
into one, with a double proportion of love and
matrimony, a selection of utterly commonplace
and meaningless events, and a quantity of charac-
ters which are either insipidities or caricatures, im-
bedded in a mass of moral reflections, digressions,
and extracts from other writers, the latter of
which only show any sign of originality. Miss
Kennedy's notion of improving her species is by
exhibiting a vast number of personages, who
chase each other about like people in a farce,
turn up here and there seemingly by pure chance,
make love to each other all round with various de-
grees of success, and are left at the end of the story
—if it is to be called one—some married and
settled, some totally unaccounted for. The num-
ber of love affairs is something astonishing. In
the course of the narrative no less than tea pro-
posals or engagements take place, most of which
are described at full length, and all the love
letters and speeches transcribed verbatim ; so
that the book might bear the title of" The Lover
Armed ; or, Severai different Methods of Success-
ful Courtship." Those who are curious on the
subject will find the particulars of these transac-
tions recorded at pages .5, 59, 71, 97, 102, 21.5,
227, 228, 257, and 263. It will be observed that
they run thickest towards the end, like plums at
the bottom of a pudding ; and the concluding
pages recount, in a manner truly delightful to
Jenkins, the wedding ceremonies of a model hero
and heroine, on which occasion we are not spared
even the colours of the dresses worn by the
attendant school-children. An author's notions
on social ethics, and the degree in which he is
qualified to instruct us, may be estimated from
those actions or words of his pet characters, which
he describes with sympathy or approval. .1 t
page 59 an amiable aultreatt riche, who is the
Cymon of the story, has nearly forgot himself so
far as to propose to an earl's daughter. For this
meditated breach of privilege he implores pardon
in the following abject letter :

My Lord,—Can you pardon me for the ignoble way in
which I have repaid your unbounded kindness to my un
worthy self? I first met your youngest daughter at the
Richmond fete, and found her so totally unlike the gene-
rality of young ladies to whcra I had had the honour of
being previously introduced, that I instantly felt subju-
gated by the sweetness and indescribable beauty of her
manner. Your lordship was gracious enough to admit me
as a frequent guest at your house, and there, in constant
intercourse with your attractive daughters, I had nourished
a sentiment which finally mastered my sense of right, and
I presumed to love her, and to tell her brother of my at-
absorbing admiration.
I had not yesterday the coveted opportunity of asking
Lady Emily Fitz• Douglas Lhis hand shook so whilst be
wrote the name that it was all but illegible] whether I
might venture to hope she would listen favourably to my
suit. and I promise your lordship I will not now seek to
do so.

Will your lordship kindly add to the number of your
favours that of believing in the gratitude and penitence of
your lordship's most obedient, humble servant,

rOLOYII

" Lord Clydesdale," we are told, " was delighted
" with this letter." If he was. he must have
been as pompons an old humbug as his would-be
son-in-law was a mean-spirited snob.—Another
of the characters is a Mrs. ('arleton. who is de-
scribed as the pink of perfection—tall and slim,
of aristocratic appearance, exquisite manners, &c.
—in tict„just the chaperon one would desire, to
form a young lady entering society. This charm-
ing person writes as follows to her friend and
protege

:-

The judge and several of the barristers are Bert, and
we have amongst the guests the very most delightful Jaen
1 ever met—sir Everard Hamilton. lam quite trembling
for my old heart ; I fear so mach I shall not be able to
pr vent its eight towards him, yet to be nonsensical amid
coquettish with him would be an impossibility. He i 3 so
wrapt up in his duties—so earnest, so truthful, so straight
forward, candid, and discriminating, he seems to read one
through and through ; it is like living in a glue case, in.
stead of having one a mind in a tenement of clay, as we
really have. He cannot open his lips without saying soma.
thing that is worth remembering. Yesterday, before
' dinner, we were &seaming religions novels. The moment

1072

TH

the sound of his clear, ringing, manly voice was heard, all
cased talking, and he was listened to with breathless
attention. I should like to have taken down in
shorthand what he said, but as I did not do that,
and cannot recall his eloquent words, I must give
you a summary of his opinion in my own hum-
drum way. He has studied Oriental languages and
metaphors till his speech is charmingly embellished by the
admarture of them with our own polyglot I:n96A. When I
looked at him I could almost have fancied St. Paul was
standlng before me, or rather I should say St. John, for I
believe St. John was much the finer man of the two, and Sir
Everard is, in my ideas, the perfection of manly beauty.
His head is remarkably classically shaped, and his eye is
magnificent. He has no great profusion of hair, but what
there is of it is of a beautiful silver grey ; he is neither tall
nor short-1 imagine about five feet ten, and rather stoutly
made

He was delightful on the subject of love and matrimony,
and drew such a picture of what a husband ought to be, 1
begged of him to desist, declaring it made my mouth water,
and it would almost induce me to put the chain on my
neck once more.

A person whose perception of humour is so
slight as to set down in sober earnest the passages
we have marked in italics, is clearly beyond the
reach of criticism. The book shows some liveli-
ness, and had it been a first attempt we should
have said less about the faults to which we have
drawn attention ; but as it appears from the title-
page that Miss Kennedy has perpetrated several
other works, we need not disguise our real opi-
nion. Our readers will by this time have had
enough of " Shreds and Patches."
It was a happy design of Messrs. Smith and
Elder to present the public with a series of
approved works, printed on is . paper, and
offered at a moderate price. T.e public has been
disgusted with the niass of literary rubbish carted
out from the paper-stores of low publishers, and
we are sure that people will readily pay half-a-
crown for really good books of fiction, worthy of
being placed in a bookcase, or circulated amongst
the various members of a family. "Jane Eyre,"
we are convinced, will always command a sale at
half-a-crown; and we are much pleased at seeing
this series of Fiction issued at a price which will
satisfy the general requirements of cheapness
combined with merit.
"Deerbrook," however, is a novel upon whose
readability opinion is divided. Some find it tame
and prosy ; others like it as natural and
_simple.
It was examined with interest at the time of its
first publication, but it did not then obtain a
striking success. Yet it found some circles of
admirers, and to the rising generation of novel-
readers it will be virtually a new work. It ex-
hibits some of the best features of Miss Mar-
tineau's mind. She has a strong and energetic,
rather than a deep and plastic intellect. There
is not one page in Deerbrook " which glows
with the fire of genius, but in nearly every
chapter there is seen the steady light of a clear
intellect, along with practised literary talent.
The style of Deerbrook " is smooth, equable.
and unaffected ; and the reflections contain no
odd views, no strange theories, no " queer"
crotchets, such as may be looked for in other
productions of the authoress. Miss Martineau
apparently intended in Deerbrook "to attempt
the application of Miss Austen's manner to a
portraiture of English country life, drawn from a
moral point of view. Much of Miss Austen's
mannerism is undoubtedly seen in " Deer-
brook " copied carefully with much ability, but
the mind of Miss Austen is not in it. That
authoress had a special faculty for dramatically
exhibiting dull and commonplace people, so that
persons whom one would not care to meet in
actual life seem so vivid and graphically drawn
in her pages that we forget their pettiness in our
admiration for the genius and vivacity of the
writer who describes them with such spirit. In
"Deerbrook " we cannot say that there is any
dramatic delineation of character. Nature is
imitated. but it is in a servile, bald, and literal
way. The dramatur persona arc wooden and
stiff, and we miss the vivacious dialogues with
which Miss Austen knew how to season the
every-day litc of the insipid
.people whom she
knew how to make interesting in her novels.

Another fault in " Deercrook" is that Miss
Martineau needlessly hampered herself by con-
fining the story within the raw- of a small circle
in a small country town. In Miss Austen's novel
there was a variety of classes: we were intro-
duced to the country squire, his proud wife, and
ambitious daughters, and to some of their poor
relations, to the professional people of the neigh-
bouring village, the vicar, the doctor, the attor-