The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-19 00:00:00

LITAATURE.

Charles Dickens's Serial Story.

Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens.
No. XVII. Chapman and Hall.

Another instalment of " Our Mutual Friend," and
we shall have occasion to look forward to the appear-
ance of no more than the double number bringing
the work to its conclusion. Conscious of this, we
are more than ever disposed to linger over our
piecemeal enjoyment of the work as it is now appear-
ing, or in other words to make the serial issue of it
as much as is possible of a " lengthened sweetness
long drawn out." Quite apart from the numeral on
the left-hand top corner of the familiar green leaf,
there are unmistakeable evidences, now very clearly
discernable, in the tale itself of its rapidly drawing
towards its completion Most significant of all
among these tokens of the work fast coming to an
end, being, of course, the dropping away, the
dying off, it should be said, first of one and then
of another among the motley characters introduced.
It is not only now poor little Johnny that is
sorrowfully remembered as having faded out of exis-
tence. It is not simply that that mysterious drowned
voyager, whose demise (whether by accident or
assassination who yet shall decide ?) was noti-
fied at the very outset of the narrative, has long
since been followed, as the victim of a precisely
similar catastrophe, by that doubtful fisher in foul
waters, Gaffer Hexam ! Hexam, whose repudiated
partner, once upon a time, in those equivocal water-
side avocations, was so very nearly meeting with
the same identical fate, through having been
run down by a " busted B'low Bridge steamer, "
meaning thereby our old acquaintance, Rogue
Riderhood, now of Plashwater Weir Mill Lock
Nor yet even is it that we have left to us, now, no
more than the simple memory of dear old Betty
Higden, instead of the good old soul herself ! A
memory sweet as the breath from a bunch of rose-
mary—the memory, that is, of the true heart beating
so long under the poor cotton boddice of that lowly
Mangler and Minder, who, besides befriending poor
long-limbed Sloppy, had buried her own dead (with
money drawn from her own individual thrift)
down even to the last and youngest of the
third generation, little Johnny, to wit—sleeping her
last sleep in the end in no pauper's coffin brimmed
to the lid with sawdust, but in her own grave, under
the green turf and the daisies, the grave purchased
with the last proceeds of her own honest industry.
Besides these, beyond these—far, immeasurably be-
yond them all in our estimation—there lies prostrate,
now, at the close of this present number, yet another
of the forms already so familiar to us as among the
creations of Charles Dickens in this new world of
his called " Our Mutual Friend"—to our fancy,
while, no doubt, in one sense by no means the best,
beyond all doubt the brightest, the delightfullest
among them all—that ridiculous fellow, as Mortimer
Lightwood calls him—that new exemplar of the
homme blase, the young barrister whose mother-
tongue, according to Riderhood, is cheek, and no-
thing but cheek, the nonchalant promoter of what
our Gallic friends have at length come not only to
know but very effectively to practise as Le Sport,
" with a hey ho chivey" (as he himself puts it so
absurdly), " and also," if he may be allowed the
expression, " with a hark-forward, hark-forward
tantivy !"—light-hearted, easy-going, blithe-eyed,
gentle-mannered Eugene Wrayburn ! Alas 1 for
Eugene ! the race for him, we very much fear, is
already run. For, the skulking scoundrel, so long
known to have been dogging his heels, has fallen
upon him covertly at last—has struck him
down with a dastard blow in the twilight,
when his back is turned, when he is least pre-
pared for an assailant ! And " mashing his life"
with blows that " fall heavily and cruelly on
the quiet of the night," the murderer-schoolmaster
—this other Aram, whose victim is Eugene—crashes,
blinds, paralyses poor Wrayburn with strokes dealt
upon his head with a bludgeon or a bar, as though he
had been stricken down by lightning; afterwards
hurling the mutilated body into the river hard by,
from which it is rescued before life is extinct by the
true heroine of the tale, Lizzie Hexam, the ideal
Grace Darling ! How all this is described it boots
not us to relate—the author's narrative telling of
itself, indeed, with a wonderfully- vivid effect, elo-
quently, passionately, enthrallingly. It is an error of
art we cannot but think, and so thinking we venture
to intimate here quite frankly—[though our so doing
seems, according to the old paganism, to be nothing
less than ungrateful on our part, for " the goods
the Gods have given us" in this great writer, taking
him precisely as he is, with whatever fault or man-
nerism there may be in the grain of his genius]—it ap-
pears to us an error of art, the allowing the murder
to be done, so to speak, within sight of the reader !
The allowing the cruel blows to be dealt visibly and
audibly, as it were, within the range of our own
sight and hearing ! In " Martin Chuzzlewit" the
deed is done, it may be remembered, quite other-
wise. It is there done, in truth, completely in
accordance with the old Greek tradition as to what
the tragic writers of old, an EschYlus or a
Sophocles, deemed to be the most strictly con-
sonant with the true sublime of Horror and of
Pathos—that is to say, it is done out of view—it is
done off the stage ! Jonas Chuzzlewit disappears
into the wood, bludgeon in hand,--disappears into
that wood, into the green sylvan perspectives of
which Montague Tigg has previously passed out of
sight among the level sunbeams and deepening
shadows of the cool of the evening. After an in-
terval, th 4 shedder of blood emerges from the wood,
within the gloom of which the deed of infamy has
in the meantime been perpetrated ! In " Our
Mutual Friend" the murder done is done as visibly,
and as audibly, and as brutally, be it said, as that
other murder that was done by Bill Sykes in the great
tragedy of the London Streets, the story of the little
Parish Boy " Oliver Twist." Only—the ruffianism
of the murder, there committed, may be described
as having been very horribly in keeping, throughout,
in every minute particular ! Not so, here, in regard
to this later murder on the banks of the Thames--
even though an infuriated demon of selfishness like
Bradley Headstone, the schoolmaster, is the perpe-
trator of it ! Poor Nancy, the street-walker, blud-
geoned, blinded, having her life " mashed out" under
the pitiless blows dealt by the ruffianly Sykes, one can
imagine—everything there seems, somehow (repeat-
ing our phrase) to be hideously in keeping ! But
Eugene Wrayburn, dear, careless, good for nothing,
delightful Eugene Wrayburn, to hear of his being so
dealt with, the imagination revolts from the notion
altogether—recoils from it with a shudder ! And,
so looking back to it, as it is here described, we
cannot but repeat what has but just now been said of
it, that we are disposed to regard the imagined perpe-
tration of the murder, thus, as little less than an error
of art. Still, for all that, the manner in which the
deed is delineated is a perfect marvel of powerful
and pathetic writing. The whole chapter devoted to
the record of it as the catastrophe of the narrative,
is a masterpiece of tearful eloquence. " A cry for
Help" it is called. The place, the hour, the
sounds, the sights, as they are here depicted in
the opening sentences of this chapter realise
to us with an astonishing vividness a lovely
summer landscape as seen from the river-side when
the evening deepens into night. Every minutest
touch, even there, at the outset, having its powerful
significance, as it appears to us, in the way of affect-
ing preparation. Nevertheless, even here—by no
means incongruously, if only by reason of the whim-
sicality of Eugene's temperament, we have, as it
were par parenthLge, the following wonderfully
humorous little vignette group of the village
dogs :
It was a Saturday evening,
and at sucha time the village
dogs,dos, always much more interested in the doings of hu-
manity than in the affairs of their own species, were
erepaartnid-
cularl) active. At the general shop, at butcher's,
at the public-house, they evincedi an inquiring spirit never
to be satiated. Their especial nterest in the public-house
would seem to imply some latent rakishness in the canine
character ; for little was eaten there, and they, having no
taste for beer or tobacco (Mrs.llubbard's dog is said to have
smoked, but proof is wanting), could only have been
Attracted sympathy with loose convivial habits. More-
over, most wretched fiddle played within ; a fiddle so
a
unutterably vile, that one lean long-bodied cur, with a
better ear than the rest. found himself under compulsion
at intervals to go round the corner and howl. Yet even he
returned to the public-house on each occasion with the
tenacity of a confirmed drunkard.

The Passion, the tears, the power, the pathos of