The Sun.
London, England, 1866-11-28 00:00:00

so shamefully and iniquitously put upon him
before his character could be vindicated upon inves-
tigation, has been, as we have seen, most cruelly
and most wrongfully dismissed from the service of
his Sovereign. Instead of an apology being offered
to him—as it might have been not so very extra-
vagantly—his sword has been virtually broken
over his head ! Instead of his traducers being
compelled to bite the duit before him, the spur
has been shorn from his heel ! Estimating the
probabilities from the course recently pur-
sued towards his assailants by the author of
" Griffith Gaunt," we should feel very much in-
clined to conjecture that, supposing hint to hive
stood in the position of the gallant officer but just
now alluded to, his assailant, whether he had been
Commander-in-Chief or Sutler of the army in In-
dia, would have run at his hands, a pretty con-
siderable risk of receiving, sooner or later, a
good sound horse-whipping on parade. As it is
--a horse-whipping has virtually been adminis-
tered by him to the Transatlantic mud-
pelters of the English work of art now
before us, this newly completed tlirc-voluined
novel of "G.iditii Gaunt, or Jealousy." So
far from the story itself having any taint what-
ever of indelicacy about it, it is to our thinking re-
markable for the boldness with which its broad
current sweeps—unsullied, though ru flied at times
to absolute turmoil—through an epoch, through
scenes and through incidents that, to a less pure
imagination, might very possibly have been sugges-
tive of impurity. The time of the novel is the
time of " Tom Jones," the time of Henry Fielding.
The hero of the tale is a Bigamist--nowadays, surely
a circumstance in itself not so very surprising.
" Jealousy," remember, is the second title of the
narrative ! The rival heroines of it are—th e one a
Catholic the other a Puritan—the former, that is
the Catholic, being the daughter of a country
gentleman—the latter, that is the Puritan, being
the daughter of a road-side tavern-keeper. Griffith
Gaunt himself is a hot-blooded, impetuous, boozing,
strong-armed, fox-hunting young Squire of a hun-
dred years ago. Conspicuous aiuoug the other
dramatis persona are a half-witted half-brother of
Griffith Gaunt's—a designing Abigail of his wife's,
one Caroline Rider—Sir George Neville, a neigh-
bouring baronet of most accommodating tempera-
ment, Gaunt's rival first of all in the affections of
Catherine Peyton (who really becomes the wife of
Griffith) aud, eventually, the chosen spouse of Gaunt's
bigamous second wife, Mary Vint of the roadside
tavern. Besides these, there are two priests—
Chaplains at Hernshaw Castle—Father Francis and
Brother Leonard—both of whom the reader of the
book learns before its close to recognise and to revere
as pure-souled and gentle-hearted, nay as wholely
unsmirched by sin, notwithstanding their passing
through all the turbulent fluctuations of the
story, and in spite of all the warm-blooded
passions of the more worldly personages of
the narrative, with whose lives and fortunes
their own are more or less intimately as-
sociated or interwoven. There is one pecu-
liarity, indeed, which is eminently noticeable
in regard to the genius of our novelist, effec-
tually securing him, as it does to our thinking, from
the hazard of ever allowing his narrative to
degenerate into a mere series of impure or
lascivious delineations. He is too manly
in his nature for that—too bold, out-spoken,
vigorous, and masculine. If anything is
alien to him—it is surely effeminacy. If there
is any one species of adornment he would
disdain more than another as a writer—it would
most certainly be the meretricious. His previous
works, in truth, attest all this—proving what we
are here insisting upon, to absolute demonstration.
Whatever other faults they may have, at least those
works have not that one—they have not the one
damning fault of impurity or of impure suggestive-
ness. Take them and see whether it is with them as
we are insisting ! Take them and, scrutinise them,
so to speak, under the lens of a sort of moral
oxy-hydrogen microscope, for the revelation
thereby, if there sitould chance to be there latent
anything whatever admitting of being so revealed
in the way of the smallest atom of impure sug-
gestiveness ! " Hard Cash," say,— " Christie
Johnstone"—" Never Too Late to Mend !" And
so on with the rest of them. Faults he has,
but not that one. Of him at least Thackeray
could never have said, as he says of Sterne, that
after the antic tumbles on his bit of carpet in the
street, he sneaks up to you and from behind his hand
whispers a dirty story in your ear. He is too
masculine in nature for any such degeneracy of taste
or oven of inclination. And, unsullied hitherto in
this way, he has certainly not allowed himself
to become tainted after such a fashion, while
delineating the incidents of this last fictitious nar-
rative of his about Griffith Gaunt. In some re-
spects it is, as he himself deems it to be, his
masterpiece. It is so by right of his, the artist's
claim upon our admiration for the easy sweep of
every seemingly chance and careless line in the
pencilling of this beautiful and varied picture, in
the limning of these mobile races, in the grouping
of these all but living and breathing fellow-crea-
tures, in the delineation of their familiar haunts,
whether in-doors or out of doors, and of the widen-
ing expanse, beyond, of all the surrounding land-
scape. It is the ease with which all this is ac-
complished that proclaims the writer's mastery
over his art. Altogether, perhaps, we should scarcely
feel disposed to instance our novelist as a master
of style qualified in any way to be implicitly followed
or imitated. Even though he has written, time
and again, passages of unrivalled excellence
and often of great brilliancy in their way as
isolated descriptions such passages, let us
say, as those in " Hard Cash," in which he
des:ribes the incidents of the sea-fight with the
Pirates—than which Fenimore Cooper, or Basil
Hall, or Michael Scott, never wrote anything finer
of their kind, as nautical descriptions. Or take,
again, from the same novel, that wonderfully graphic
sketch of the boat-race up the river Thames —as
fine as any sporting sketch ever dashed off in one
of his happier moments by "Nimrod," meaning
thereby Charles Apperley. Always excepting, of
course, inimitable passages such as these, Charles
Reade would hardly, we repeat, be instanced
by us as a veritable master of style—his manner
very often being to our notion of it, curiously
jerky or spasmodic. Less apparent, however,
than anywhere else is that same peculiarity of
manner with him in " Griffith Gaunt," than in
any of Griffith " Gaunt's" predecessors. He is
therein at his ease. He is in the vein. He is less
than ordinarily self-conscious. At starting, his reader
is, side by side with him, in tho saddle, careering
helter-skelter, with the hero and the heroine, over
hedge and over ditch, in the hunting field. And
here at once, by the way, comes one of his won-
derfully graphic little fragmentary descriptions :

"But, when they came near the brook, lo ! it was 20 feet
wide, and running fast and brown. Boma riders skirted it,
looking for a narrow part. Two horses, being spurred at
it, came to the bank, and then went rearing round on their
heels, depositing one hat and another rider in tho current.
One gallant steed planted his feet like a tower, and snorted
down at the water. One flopped grayely in and had to
swim, and be dragged out. Another leaped, and landed
with his foot on the other bank, his haunches in the water,
and his rider curled round his neck and glaring out be-
tween his retroverted ears."

Generally speaking, however, here, in " Griffith
Gaunt," he runs into no such minuteness of delinea-
tion. A touch is enough. Here, for example, is a
gleam of human nature at a glance ! Griffith upon
one occasion is painfully alive to some fancied
reprehension. And what says our author? "We go
and fancy," quoth he, "that everybody is thinking
of us. But he is not : he is like us; he is thinking
of himself." It is, for all the world, like a thought
of Xavier de Alaistre, of La Bruyere, or of Roche-
foucauld. The simplest words are enough for him—
no matter what the risk run while so employing
them of laying himself open to the charge of pla-
giarism. " The gentle bosom heaved and heaved,"
he says, speaking of Catherine Peyton, " and tears
began to run." Though Dryden had sung, " and
tears began to flow," more than a century and a half
since in his Ode to St. Cecilia ! No matter—
the words are apt—the thought is his own, and he
says it. His writing, again, throughout, has about
it in a really surprising manner the charm of in-
genuousness. An ingenuousness so outspoken as