The Sun.
London, England, 1861-12-16 00:00:00

AY MUMS NEWT WORK.

Norman Sinclair.

By W. Edmonstoune Aytoun,

D.C.L. 3 vols.

Blackwood and Sons:

A poet turned novelist is no unusual spectacle.
Yet, accustomed though the reading public has
been to this spectacle, from the instance of the great
Sir Walter downwards,
,it is always interesting to
contemplate it. It always has a freshness of its own
that piques the curiosity of the most jaded critics.
We don't know any literary novelty in its way, for
example, more likely to compete in mere attractive-
ness with—let us say—supposing we could possibly
imagine such an occurrence—A novel by Alfred
Tennyson. Instead, however, of loitering to muse
thus over any such eccentric improbability—here
is a substantial "ease in point"—precisely the very
phenomenon we are now alluding to as always in-
vested in our regard with a very peculiar allure-
ment, as invariably commanding our attention and
enlisting our sympathies upon the instant. Profes-
sor Aytoun has long been honourably known to the
reading public in many capacities as one among the
more rarely gifted contributors to our contemporary
literature. His popularity is not by this time mat-
ter of uncertainty. It is ripened and assured. As
a poet he enjoys, and deservedly enjoys, a very
high reputation. We speak not here of his
" Bothwell"—but refer more particularly to his
poetic masterpiece, "The Lays of the Scottish Ca-
valiers." The brilliant success achieved by which
has stamped upon its very title-page the timbre of
public approbation—" Thirteenth Edition" appear-
ing there upon the last issue of " The Lays" as evi-
dence that the writer of them has secured to him-
self a somewhat higher repute than that appertain-
ing to merely an accomplished versifier. Everyone
who knows anything at all about the volume—
knows some of it, we would almost wager, by heart.
The musical cadence, the rythmic swing, the
verve, the passion, at times the very rapture
of the verse in Aytoun's Scottish Cavaliers, 'waken
in the reader's heart a responsive enthusiasm—he
turns the pages unconsciously from the Table of
Contents to the Finis—and by the time the book is
fairly closed upon even a first perusal of it,
there are passages (unless the reader be some-
what of a dunce) that come chiming back like
echoes in his memory. Hence —" Thirteenth
Edition." Hence—by reason of this one par-
ticular effusion—the fact that Professor Aytoun's
name approaches us always—secure of its wel-
come. Besides the poetical reputation, however,
gained for himself almost entirely by that one
book, the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers"—not
the least atom in the world, to our mind, by his
more elaborated poem of " Bothwell"—Professor
Aytoun has won his sours long ago in the lists of
letters as a Critic, and in a double sense also as a
Humorist, almost equally, that is to say, as a prose
and as a poetic Humorist. His contributions to
Blackwood's Magazine have been so numerous, so
various, almost always so distinguished for their al-
ternate and sometimes combined vigour and vivacity,
that among the public at large he has long been re-
garded by many as sitting in the chair of Christo-
pher North, as occasionally wielding the crutch still
(in his grip) so much the dread of Noodledom. Who
has not laughed over the annals of the Glenmutchkin
Railway—A.l. among the "Tales from Blackwood?"
Who, again, has forgotten our author's " How I
Stood for the Dreepdaily Burghs ?" Then there is
that delightful half-reputation—not by any means,
however, in the idiomatic meaning of the phrase
a " half - and - half " reputation won by
Edmonstoune Aytoun and Theodore Martin
together (after the Orestes and Pylades fashion of
Beaumont and Fletcher, or Johnson and Garrick)
under the bizarre nom de plume of the :redoubtable
BON GUALTIER ! A personage, by the way,
whom we can hardly think of without
laughter. Here, again, what is it we read
significantly upon the title-page ? " Seventh Edi-
tion." We only wonder, however, that it has not
long since come to be the Seventeenth—" The
Book of Ballads" abounds so with exquisite and
irresistible drolleries—being a veritable companion
(as one may say, a genuine boon companion) to the
famous " Rejected Address." Then have we not a
delicious recollection of the instance in which Pro-
fessor Aytoun (apart altogether from Mr. Theodore
Martin) once upon a time did
" Our Young England's penny trumpet blow I"

putting it to his own lips exclusively—through the
mask of T. Percy Jones—and thereupon winding a
blast "most musical, most" just, exactly
the opposite of " melancholy " waking
everywhere, echoing and re-echoing bursts
of laughter to the tune of Firraillian !
Together with his twin-brother of the pen, Theodore
Martin, Professor Aytoun has more recently accom-
plished, in several instances with exquisite sue
cess (ex. gr., as we indicated at the time in their
wonderful version of the " Bride of Corinth")—
Professor Aytoun and Mr. Martin, we say, have
more recently accomplished in regard to the Poems
and Ballads of Goethe, what Sir Bulwer Lytton ac-
complished some years since in regard to the Poems
and Ballads of Schiller ! Giving them accurately,
that is, to the people of another tongue—in our own
resounding and melodious vernacular. Already we
have spoken of the high position attained by
Professor Aytoun among living Critics. His
Lectures upon Poetry, delivered several summers
back in Willis's Rooms, St. James's—we, viho at-
tended those lectures, sedulously commenting upon
them in these columns one by one as they were
given, can assert, from our own knowledge of the
fact, are still borne here in London circles in delight-
ful remembrance. Often though we remember to
havefound it impossible to do otherwise than dissent
toto ccelo from the conclusions arrived at by Pro-
fessor Aytoun in the course of his poetical criticisms,
we still listened with respect to the earnest avowal
of opinions that we could not at the same
moment but deem in our (of course we
are perpetually conscious of this) fallible judgment
altogether erroneous. And, as we listened with
the; liveliest sense of pleasure to those same Lectures
upon Poetry, while they were in the course of de-
livery, so after the lapse of eight or ten years, we
hold them still in most agreeable remembrance.
However, it is not as a Critic that we have now
occasion to regard Professor Aytoun anew—any
more than we have to scrutinise him in his various
characters as a Translator, as a Satirist, as a
Humorist both in Prose and Verse, above all, as a
Poet—fiege princeps among our living Northern
Lyrists. No—it is because he has added a new role
to his already long catalogue of parts that we have
occasion now to turn our regard upon him, to ex-
amine into his new evidence of audacity as an
enterprising man-of-letters. The Satirist and
Humorist, the Poet and Critic, has at length in
his own good time appeared upon the scene under
a wholly different aspect, in a wholly different
capacity—as a Novelist. And now that his new
work appears before us in its entirety, it does so in
the old approved fashion as a symmetrical 3 volumed
Novel, price I ls. 6d.—the old price—before Rail-
way Libraries for the Million had been dreamt of,
and before any Chancellor of the Exchequer had
ventured to lay his unhallowed hand upon the once
sacred impost levied upon the raw material of
literature ! Only, to account now for the main-
tenance of the old price, upon a work of this cha-
racter, in an age when the paper duty exists no
more, and when cheap editions along the civilised
track of our railroads are as " plentiful as black-
berries" used to be upon the hedgerows
skirting the old coach-traversed highways—the
publishers can issue their works with adornments
of paper binding and typography that contrast
rather strangely with the old:dingily bound 3 vols.
in boards, that were the ne plus ultra of the pub-
lishing world in the days of " Waverley." And
now that Aytoun is fairly before us as a Novelist—
how about the success or failure of his new venture
as a man of letters? During the piecemeal publi-
cation of "Norman Sinclair" as a monthly serial in
the pages of Blackwood's Magazine we have had a
sense that the writer of the story was labouring
the while under somewhat of a disadvantage. An
examination of the work as it now lies before us in
these three goodly volumes—all the scattered parts
ofit being at length thus massed together—only con-
firms us in this impression, insomuch that we would
venture to urge the author of "Norman Sinclair"—
should he again undertake to discourse to us in his
last developed capacity as a Novelist— we would cer-
tainly here venture to urge him so to do, not hereafter
in a serial form, but at once in a separate and corn
plete publication, as "Adam Bede" was publish( d, as
all the old talcs—before series were thought of—were
Wont to be published ofyore. Norman S:uclair, t here
can hardly be a doubt of it—Mr. Aytoun must him-
self be quite conscious of the fact—hung fire re
peatedly during the course of its piecemeal issue, as
the current serial in Blackwood. It did so, in one
point of view, quite unaccountably, now that we
can take an uninterrupted and comprehensive
view of the whole narrative. This—as we have said
—regarding it excusively from one point of view.
But there is another and a very essential one for a
serial—the one in which we look upon it, not in
regard to its intrinsic merits, but in regard to its
peculiar character as a serial. With its merits—
and they are numerous quad various, some of them,