The Sun.
London, England, 1850-01-28 00:00:00

LITE R ATITItE.

SILIVO OD. A Novel in Two Volumes. Bentley.
Always to us there is an iaf. xpressible charm in
tha perusal . f a " first work," a fascination in ob-
serving the earliest venture o'" ;a writer concealing a
meritorious timidity under th!: mask of the anony-
mous. Our pleasure in the. examination of these
volumes has been of this agreeable character. For it
would be impossible not to leecognise the ardour of
youth, and the eloquence of an unjaded ambition, in a
narrative like " Silwood," a nar-:ative which is, never-
thelesq, to a very remarkable degree, devoid of the
crudeness of unpractised or iumnature abilities, and of
the errors usually attendant upon literary inexpe-
rience. Whatever may be thought of the facilities of
composition, there are two diEculties encountered at
the outset of the labours of authorship, one or other
of which almost invariably precludes the passibility of
complete success at the couirm:ncement. And these
obstacles to the preliminary triumphs of the litera-
teur principally manifest their iirifluence in his style—
sometimes in the mode of th ought, sometimes in the
mode of expression, in nine hundred and ninety-nine
casesout of every thousand in be^t a together. With every
young writer, generally speakiLug, his mode of expres-
sion is marked either by its povi :rty or its turgescence; it
runs on the one hand into tl ie :ngzes of untutored
• fluency, or on the other becoi ens cramped into a hard
and scholastic distortion. His mode of thought, at
the same time, betrays a predi, lection either for exces-
sive particularity or excessiwe generalization ; it
leaves, on the one hand, notliing to the fancy of the
reader, or, on the other, abawlons everything to the
scope of his imagination. In this mariner the aspirant
for literary honours, in the majority of instances,
discovers only when such a diitcovery is altogether too
late, that his style has glided, into the school-bred
meanness reprobated by Arist atle, or into the school-
.

bred grandiloquence condernr.ied as emphatically by
the lips of Longinus. What. is of equal importance,
moreover, he hazards, in so ch d:ag, an exclusive appeal
either to the esoteric or the exoteric sympathies of
the population. Having read. " Silwood" as we recd
every work appearing under: similar auspices—the
first attempt of an invisible hand to cull some fruits
or blossoms in the garden of :Literature—having pe-
rused if, namely, with a scrupulous attention to
these initiatory requirements, we can most cordially

'elicitate the w author on ha7ing entirely escaped

from the commission of: faults al-most in-
evitably incidental to tI te first adventure in
the craft of penmanship. Throughout, the chap-
.

ters are written in a toile o.f sustained earnestness,
the descriptive passages breath ing the fervour of en-
thusiasm, and the reflective fruallies being conveyed in
language singularly terse a aid sententious. Occa-
sionally, indeed, the novelist ,carries his brevity of
expression even to quaintness,, as where, speaking f
the evil influence of a first st* p in crime, he says (1.,
41.), " once is a precedent;" or as where, in another
place, he designates the conte)nporary time " the an.
tiquity of posterity." Else wh sr e, borne along by the
en-rgy of his inspirations, his. voice rises into a prt.-
longed strain of real and unaffected eloquence, in

apo4rophies to fame, to love, ';o beauty, to death, and
to that heroic spirit which he rigards as the desired

vitality of this age of utilitari;tui m. Of these pane-
gyrics on the master-passions. of humanity, and on
the arch-destroyer of mankind., we shall have a more
fitting opportunity to speak, after having considered
the more immediate object of )u r criticism—we mean
the general merits or blernish.as of the whole compo-
sition._ Viewed es a mere irrative story, " Sil-
wood " possesses the excellence of exciting, a-
most from the opening pap •es, the interest of
the reader. The plot of tne story must be
pronounced to be most admirably ingenious. E
realises in a .very vivid net .nner that beautiful
picture which emanated, if we recollect rightly, from
the graceful hand of Mr. Frank Stone, and the en-
graved representation of which has been long popu-
lar, entitled "Cross Purpose 3." In evidence of
this we may remark, without:. in any way damaging
the interest of the novel by an urratimely eclaircissentent,
and thereby materially injuring its principal attrac-
tion, that the heroes and hero' iles of " Silwood" (no

less than six in number collectively) are entangledin
a web of misapprehension as to the love entertained
towards each other. It is from our sense of the adroit-
ness with which these equivt#l.tes of passion, as we
may term them perhaps not in appropriately, are con-
ceived and delineated, quite as much as from our
estimate of the author's force of thought and fluency
of expression, that we augur well for his subsequent
adventures along the pleasant and flowery paths of
Literature. In the complication of his plot-,
in the entanglement of an already intricate
series cf misunderstandings, and in the final
clearing up of all these Trumberless misappre-
hension=, towards the denouenzel it our author betrays
a capacity such as must, if properly cultivated and
sedulously developed, bring forth worthier fruits than
the clever and ingenious 'narrative of " Silwood."
We shall expect from his hfilais the fulfilment of our
prediction, awl in its fulfil!' tent we shall hail right
cordially the progress and enin alcement of his reputa-
tion. Among the different ci,aracters introduced to
our notice in the present effus on we must especially
particularise those of Silwood himself; of his friends
Ross and Gordon, and of ,the three charming
heroines, the intellectual beauty, Florence, the
lively and lovely Jessie, and hest beautiful of all
from the nobility of her self-sacrificing disposition,
the gentle, amiable, and right. womanly Julia Mait-
land. The last mentioned, in truth, we conceive to

be by far the most successhelly delineated. The
mere notion of a temperament, like that of Julia
Maitland is one entitled to deep sznd delightful con-
templation ; but the power with which the ideal has
been sustained throughout, so as to render her every
word, though', and action consistent with so much
exalted excellence, is to the brow of the novelist at
once his plume'and his laurels. Silwood appears to
be a dreamy semblance of some illustrious lawyer, de-
scribed in his days of youthful vicissitude, and in the
earliest hours of his forensic celebrity. Ross we
cannot but imagine to be an indirect portraiture of
the gifted and versatile knigiat-representative of
the shire of Buckingham, kindred to him in his
showy abilities and volatile enthusiasm, and only
lacking resemblance where the fowler is spoken of as
a votary of the muses of poetry. Gordon, although
less artistically pencilled, is neve:theless a most
engaging and agreeable sketch, possessing many
noble qualities and blessed with a genial temperament.
Of the other fictitious personages little need be said,
seeing that we have no intention whatever of fore-
stalling the revelations of the narrative. Some, how-
ever, merit at our hands at least a passing allusion—
such, for example, as Harcourt, the voluptuary;
Farquhar, the unprincipled roue; Mr. Agendale, the
" fine old country gentleman ;" Mr. Maitland, the
father of Julia and guardian of Jessie; Mr. Fentum,
the uncle of Gordon; Mrs. Howard, the mother of
Florence ; and many others not here enumerated.
With the aid of these imaginary beings the writer
has penned a tale that may well engross the
attention of all who experience solace in for-
getting for a while real in fictitious sufferings,
and in enhancing actual, by forming acquaintance
with supposititious happiness. The current of the
story runs alternately, or rather intermittently, into
the sorrowful and the joyous, changing according to
the mood of the novelist, from the hues of pathos to
those of hilarity. Before the second volume has been
entirely conned the reader has not merely become
familiar with a world apart from, though similar to
his own, but can number up almost as many deaths
and marriages as come within the limits of his own
recollection. The frequent recurrence of the caLamitY
of dissolution in the record of the fortunes of Silvve.od
we take to be one of the most prominent features a
the effusion—investing it in several parts to our
thinking as with a sombre and lugubrious atmosphere.
Without reference to the successive chapters we could

..
readily number up twenty or thirty of the creatures
moving within the circle of the story who perish be-
fore its conclusion, from old age, from consumption,
from accident, from the debility and disease conse-
quent upon an abandoned and licentious career,
or from the last and most tragic catas-
trophe of all, sweeping off many together in a
single tempest. Of all these descriptions
of death, the most solemn, the most touching, the
most eloquent, and the most beautiful is that of
the young and angelic sister of Ross, wasted away
prematurely under the terrible influence of decline.
We cannot resist giving the following admirable pero-
ration of that description, perhaps one of the most
felicitous passages in the two volumes :
" The hour came at last !it was a calm andi tranquil
evening, the balmy breath of summer floated in through
the open lattice, perfumed with the iich odours of a
thousand fragrant flowers, and filled the room with in-
cense. In the chamber was visible the united loveliness
of life and death, so finely blended, so nearly commin-
gled, that the beholder was precluded from distinguish-
ing the departure of the one, or the advent of the other.
There were no final parting, and no firewell look, no
dying adjuration, and no last prayer; all was calm, all
was holy, as that twilight hour, as that summer eve.
She had been talking, no cf old of ' peace,' and while
the words yet echoed in the air, while the thrilling me-
lody of her voice 3t t lingered in the ears of her list-
eners, her Eprrit broke the last faint shackle of mor-
tality, and ascended to the realms where peace reigns
for ever.

Time passed as they gazed on that fair young crea-
ture, who had left the dominiors of time for ever. Sud-
denly Silwood rase, and drew back the curtain that par-
tially concealel her, and the rich flood of golden light
poured in upon the scene, suffusing :t with r.ll the splen-
dour of the setting sun, and the lust beams of day flung
a crowning halo over the dead, embalming her sanctified
loveliness. The change had taken place—what change?
What was it philosophet-? the end t f this fitful scene,
the closing act in He's vain drt am. What wa9 it ma-
terialist? the dissolution of the human fabric; ashes to
ashes; earth to earth; dust to dust.' What was it sen-
timentalist? the finality of grief, the Period of suffer-
ing, the catastrophe of trials. What was it Christian,
who speaks with the light of truth reveale,l, and thu
palge of salvation urfold,:d? It was a brighter and a
better work, the transfer cif the immortal to its indigen-
ous Leaven; the transit of the redeemed to its beatified