THE SON OF HIS FATHER.* THIS is a powerful story,
though by no means one of the most interesting Mrs. Oliphant has written. The circumstances implied in the plot are so peculiar as almost to be outside the range of art, and the skill displayed in describing the people is therefore partly thrown away. The hero, John May, is the son of a ne'er.do.well, who had culture, brains, and a heart of a kind, bat a proclivity towards evil. At the commencement of the story the father is convicted of forgery and sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, leaving John to the care of his mother, a woman of severe rectitude, loathing her husband for his character and his crimes, and always dreading that her son will turn out like him. To preserve him, she sends him away to her father's in the country, and there John is brought up in ignorance of his history, never seeing his mother, and always hearing her discussed as " Emily " till she becomes to him the alarming and slightly repulsive figure she has always been to her own household. The grandfather, a weak creature with domineering habits, and the grandmother, a feeble but loving old lady, are finely painted ; and John grows up, under their care and that of friendly neigh- bours, a capable lad, worried by internal doubts as to how he came there, and dislike of the mother who, on the death of the old people, transfers him to London. He falls in love as a lad, almost of course ; and, quite of course, he is at last discovered by his father, the secret becomes known, and John, by this time an ambitions engineer on his way to fortune, thinks his life hopelessly ruined.. He is rescued in a cleverly devised, natural way, withont killing the father ; but it would not be fair to reveal the method.
There is little in a plot so exceptional as this to excite keen interest; too few of us are sons of convicts, or have mothers made distruetful in that way ; but still, the book is strong. John's mother, with her severe sense of duty, her tolerance of John's dislike, and her clear reasonableness, is a genuine, though a rare figure ; and Mrs. Oliphant has shown great skill in keeping down the element of the tragic in her. She is never histrionic or artificial, but goes on her strange coarse as naturally as possible, as the only businesslike course to be pursued under the horrible circumstances. John himself, too, with his involun- tary dislike of his mother, is exceedingly good, though he would perhaps in real life have taken things as they came with less effort to understand them. The most original figure in the book, however, is the convict, an evil-doing man who is not all evil, who, you feel, if perpetually prosperous, would indeed do little evil. His nature rather inclines him to a half-cynical, half. reflective indolence, daring which he muses on the uncertainty • Ti, son of Ma Father. By Mrs. Oliphant. L,ndon Hurst and Blackest.
of everything, and excuses himself by that for always taking the wrong path
"He had a quickly working mind, readily moved by any suggestion, taking up a cue and miming on from it in lines of thought which amused him sometimes with a certain appearance of originality, enough to impose upon any chance listener, and always upon himself.'
He" had long practice in thinking everything over, and blurring out to his own satisfaction the lines of right and wrong." His son has employed him, in ignorance of the relationship, to copy out the specifications of a grand engineering scheme, and the convict steals them to sell to a rival firm :—
" John's amanuensis, whom he had so rashly trusted, had carried away his copy of John's scheme with, in reality, little or no idea of cheating, and none at all of injuring John. His faculties were con- fused by long courses of meditative sophistry, such as had been his amusement in the years when he had no other, and by the criminal atmosphere in whioh he had lived, in which the deception or spoiling of your neighbour was the most natural matter, the beat sign of talent and originality, at once the excitement and the amusement of the perverted mind. The man who called himself March had a more than usual share of that confusion which no often accompanies breaches of the moral law. Ile had gone through far more than usual of those mental exercises by which all but the most stupid and degraded attempt to prove themselves right, or at least not Bo far wrong, in those offences which to the rest of the world are beyond excuse. And his mental ingenuity was such that he (maid make a wonderful plea to himself in favour of any course which fancy or temptation suggested. In the present case the effort bad not been at all a difficult one. He had really meant no harm to John. He in- tended, in faot, to recommend John warmly, to put a good thing in his way. In all probability the young man would not prove a good advocate for himself. He might be shy of pushing his own interests r most inventors were shy and retiring, easily discouraged : and what he meant to secure would not in reality be more than a percentage on the trouble he would take in recommending John. A percentage— that was what in reality it would be—and well earned : for had he not been at the trouble of copying, and indeed adding something or his own to the young man's dry plans and calculations, besides the service be would do him in carrying his goods as it were to market. and securing a sale for them, and a profitable job for their inventor. Nothing could be more self-evident than this. At the end he came to be quite sure that he was doing his young benefactor a real ser- vice, and that nothing in his conduct wanted excusing at all."
The eon offers to provide for him, but no :— " There is no saying who might turn up,' he said I 'at the last, everything gets known; and perhaps a parson's house would be too. much for me,' he had added, with a twinkle in his eyes. 'I don't know that I'm good enough for that. I might fall into temptation, don't you know ! And I couldn't live with a blunderbuss always at my head, which would be the case if I were with that son of mine—if be is my son. And Susie would be worse, with her eyes. I remember her eyes long ago—they were harder to meet than all her mother's talk. They're all very good, Mr. Cattley. A man might be very happy among them ; but not my kind.'"
That is an original scoundrel, surely, and a possible one ; and to have produced even one original person in a novel is nowadays good work.
We have said nothing of the minor personages, for, with one exception, they are very ordinary. The exception, however, is a character whom, we think, only Mrs. Oliphant could have invented, and then partially thrown away. This is a curate, learned, laborious, and in his way able, who is devoted to a. woman of forty-five, his rector's sister, whom he is perfectly aware he shall never marry :—
"Mrs. Egerton wane woman of forty.five, bright-eyed and comely, and full of interest in everything; but without any pretence at youth r and the curate had ten years less of age and no experience whatever of the world, so that the difference between them was rather emphasised than lessened. There was, however, one thing which reduced this difference, which was that Mr. Cattley had a great air of gravity, and took an elderly kind of view in the simplicity of his heart, whereas she was full of vivacity and spirit, and sided always with the young rather than the old. The curate had for this middle- aged woman a sort of quiet worship which was beyond all reason all that she said was admirable and excellent to him; what she did was beyond criticism. Whatever she was occupied in he would have had her to do that ever, like the young lover of poetry : yet bailed every new manifestation of the variety of mind which seemed to him inexhaustible, as if it were a new revelation. He was sometimes foolish in his worship, it may be allowed, and the elderly object of that devotion laughed at it not a little. But in her heart she liked it well enough, as what woman would not do ? Her heart was soft to. the man who adored her. But that she should adore him in turn, or that anything should come of their intercourse save peaceful con- tinuance, was not only out of the question, but was altogether beyond the possibility of being taken into question, which is more conclusive still."
Mr. Cattley always acts up to himself, as shown in that little sketch ; but Mrs. Oliphant coolly lays him aside, takes little trouble to describe his relation to Mrs. Egerton, and at last uses him up as a husband for a gentle sister of John's, for whom she cannot otherwise easily provide the fitting amount of happi- ness. That is waste ; as is also her shadowy account of the
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