The Sun.
London, England, 1847-12-22 00:00:00

IirARR-6-i';-STICIEW- IV. ORK.

W AND THEN. By Samuel :Varren.
Among the writers of fiction there are son- e
Whose imaginations are as prolific as their language is
voluble. Stories pour from their portfolios with a
ra,pidity that has in it something ot the marvellous.
they write a Christmas book while you are eating
your breakfast ; and a romance in three volumes
Octavo while you are taking your constitutional walk
before dinner. They are as miraculous in supplying
Copy to the printer, page after page, chapter after
chapter, book after book, :as Theodon used to be in
conjuring herbs, flowers, rabbits, fowls, gloves, and
Jewellery out of a gentleman's hat. They are as in-
exhaustible as the purse of Fortunatus; they could
with their own pens compose a circulating library ;
they might, at a pinch, undertake to tell a succession
of tales as prolonged as those which the Vizier's
daughter related to the Sultan during One Thousand
and One Nights. England has a novelist like this--
France has a novelist like this : George Prince
Regent James is the one ; the other is Alexandre
Dumas, the Marquis de Pailleterie. Men who write so
much necessarily write a great deal that is frivo-
kus : upon the same principle that men who
are given much to talking ate pretty sure to
talk a great deal of nonsense. The consolation is,
however, that this class, like every other, has its anti-
thesis. There are those who have acquired celebrity
by penning only a single work. Such an one was
Beckford, the Epicurean, whose solitary volume—
" Vathek"—(originally composed by him in the
French tongue)—has been called by Mr. Weber a
" sublime tale," and has induced Lord Byron to re-
mark, that not only must " Rasselas" " bow before
it," but that " for correctness of costume, beauty of
description, and power of imagination, it far sur-
passes all European imitations." Boswell, again,
wrote only one biography—but such a biography
—the perfection of that kind of literature !—a book
which, in spite of the reviewer's contempt for the
author as the most egregious toadeater on record,
has compelled even Mr. Macaulay to express his
gratitude, and that, too, with all the emphasis of con-
scientious criticism. Gresset, if we mistake not, is in
like manner known only by his " Parrot"—a conceit
of inimitable drollery, and of exquisite originality.
Mr. Warren, however, is neither a mere manufac-
turer of volumes like Dumas or James, nor an author
of one isolated and attenuated effusion, like Gresset
or Beckford. His intellect has as little affinity for the.
shrub which throws out freshblossoms every hour, as it
has for the American aloe—blooming but once in a
hundred years. He has not frittered his genius away
with the prodigality of a feuilltonist, nor has he stul-
tified the auguries of his youth by the barrenness of
his invention. Whatever he has written, he has
written well. Without in any manner deteriorating
his reputation as a lawyer, he has acquired for him-
self a very wide fame in the world of imaginative
composition. He has burnt the lamp of research in
the labours of a very learned profession ; he has ob-
tained no little distinction in the discharge of his
duties as a barrister of the Inner Temple ; he has ren-
dered himself more than noticeable as a student in
jurisprudence, and has become a legal authority of
no inconsiderable eminence. And yet, with all this,
he has found leisure to distinguish himself in a re-
markable manner among his literary contemporaries.
There are noble examples to be found in the career of
our author, as well as noble precepts in his writings.
As far as it is comprehensible through his public
achievements, both as a legal writer and as a writer
of fiction, his life constitutes a fine illustra-
tion to the preface of Sir Bulwer Lytton's
" Lucretia"—that superb preface which inculcates
the great truth that labour is happiness. Mr. Warren
has evidently cultivated his abilities in literature out
of a pure and spontaneous love for it. He has nar-
rated the imaginary vicissitudes and struggles of
imaginary persons, not so much because of his
ambition to figure in capital letters upon a title-page,
as from a pleasure in embodying his ou n reveries and
disseminating those loftier sentiments of morality
which are felt by him to be the presiding principles of
existence. This is sufficiently manifest in his two
celebrated works, " The Diary of a Late Physician"
and " Ten Thousand a Year." In the forn:er how
many bewitching lessons of virtue are contained !
and how attractive the manner in which those lessons
are imparted! Who can ever lose a recollection of
that most touching, because most natural, portraiture
of womanly fortitude given in the story of " The
Cancer ?" Who, again, can ever forget the long-
suffering, and the resignation, and the longanimity,
an I the moral valour of Charles Aubrey, the hero of
" Ten Thousand a Year?" It is in this com-
bination of purpose and interest that the true
merit of Mr. Warren's fictions, to our think-
ing, consists. They have all the dignity of
homilies, and all the fascinations of romance.
Without ever venturing into the labyrinth of po-
lemics, or presuming to meddle with the holier doc-
trines of theology, Mr. Warren, nevertheless, infuses
more religion into a single chapter than the contro-
versial novelists could do into a score of volumes.

Beyond this, Mr. Warren unites in himself many of
the rarest qualifications of his art. Ile has a keen
perception of the ludicrous ; witness his delineations
of Tittlebat Titmouse and the Tagrags an
extraordinary and, in many respects, unequalledn
skill in the complication and unravelinent of a plot,
as is shown in the different schemes undertaken for
the acquisition of Yatton. lie has a singular capa-
city for sketching scenery—for literally painting it
in language—as may be seen in his description of
that same estate, tne prize of Titmouse and the pro-
perty of Aubrey, " dear old Yatton." In the delinea-
tions of character, moreover, Mr. Warren has a mar-
vellous ability. Oily Gammon is as complete, as
substantial, as consistent, as minutely drawn, and as
actual in identity as the Sir William Bran-
don of Sir Bulger Lytton, or as the Seth
Pecksniff of Mr. Dickens. In addition to these
numerous advantages, the two former productions of
our author display with peculiar vividness both the
excellences and the blemishes of his style and man-
ner. They evidence at once his rigidity, or rather
his formality, in grammatical construction, and the
strength and purity of his good old Saxon diction—a
diction which, in character, seems, as Lord Morpeth
said recently of the character of Caxton, to be " racy
of the soil of the wolds of Kent." In manner, how-
ever, Mr. Warren has not merely proved himself to
be capable of appreciating the grotesque and hu-
morous, he has evinced the utmost grace and refine-
ment of fancy (witness his Kate Aubrey, " beautiful
Kate Aubrey"), the most powerful and passionate con-
ception of the horrible (witness his appalling tale of
the "Man about Town"), and the subtlest knowledge
of the sensibilities of the heart, even when on the
verge of death and in the agonies of despair (witness
the little incident which precedes the s suicide of
Gammon, when the cat rubs against his boot). That
Mr. Warren's writings are anything but devoid of
pathos will be admitted by all those who have read
and wept over his most simple and most traiching
story of "Consumption," or who have even perused
nothing of his beyond the paper entitled " A Slight
Cold." That his heart can beat with emotions of ten-
derness, is certain, from his narrative of " The Mother
and Son," and from that exu,uisite apostrophe in the
moonlight at Yatton, closing with the words—
" Sleep on, sweet Kate, sleep on, dreaming not of
dark days before thee, oh, that thou could sleep on
till the brightness returned !" If this sympathy for
what is most gentle and affectionate in humanity
were betrayed by nothing else in Mr. Warren's books
it would be by the beautiful dedications of " Ten
Thousand a Year," and of the work just published
Now and Then"—to his children. There is s,.me-
thing attractive in the simplicity of the arrangements
• of the volume now lying before us for consideration
—a single volume, without preface, without any in-
troductory notice, without any table of contents
whatever, divided into nine chapters, and yet
extending over 527 pages ! The title-page is
itself an evidence of this almost punctilious
simplicity. " Now AND THEN.—Through a glass
darkly." Without reading the book through, the
meaning of this is enigmatical. But when read
through, the sense of those few words becomes trans.
,
parent, and the very sound or them beautiful. " Now
AND THEN—Through a glass darkly." And the
interest of the work—beginning with the beginning,
and only ending with " the end "—originates in a cir-
, cumstance as simple as the title-page. Adam
Aylifle, the younger, a day-labourer in the village of
• Milverstoke, is seized under circumstances of extra-
• ordinary suspicion, having been observed near the
murdered body of Lord Alkmond in the wood of
Milverstoke Castle, and chased to his cottage, where
he is captured with a bloody stick in his possession,
and one of his sleeves bedabbled with gore. He is
- tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the wilful
murder of the nobteman, and the interest of the story
arises from the consciousness on the mind of the
reader that Ayliffe is altogether innocent of the crime
imputed to him, although the facts are so black
against him as to justify the verdict of
k 4 the jury and the concurrence of the Lard Chief' Jus-
tice in the correctness of that verdict. The at-
tention is rivetted to the narrative from an
awful uncertainty as to the fate of. Adam Ayliffe,
and from a supreme solicitude for something or other
to transpire which shall demonstrate beyond all doubt
his guilt or innocence. In effect, the idea of the plot
is merely the extension and elaboration of that coin-
.
prised in a contribution written by the author 'three
or four years ago in Blackwood's Magazine, and en-
titled, "Who was the Murderer ?" It is a notion,
however, so admirably calculated to display the pecu-
liar abilities of Mr. Warren—his ingenuity and sa-
gacity as a lawyer, and his dramatic powers as a
• novelist—that we are scarcely surprised to find him a
second time employing the same materials and the
same machinery, though, this time, be it observed, in
a more daring manner, and with a loftier intention.
At all times we are indisposed to mar the effect of a
story by giving a dry epitome of its incidents, and
thereby dissipating its influence over the imagination of