A SCREW LOOSE.*
IT is, to a certain extent, difficult to know what to say of this story. That it indicates unquestionable power in its author, and that of a double kind, power of conceiving and delineating character, and power of humorous caricature, there can be no doubt ; and yet that the novel is as a whole inartistic, ill propor- tioned, and ill executed, with glaring faults of detail, there can be little doubt either. The most striking and even monstrous of its defects is the apparent inability of the author to discriminate the specific incoherences of mind of class and class. He makes silly and prejudiced women of the highest rank and the highest county society talk with almost precisely the same idioms and involutions as Mrs. Nickleby, and with touches even of Mrs. Gamp. That such women might adopt idioms and involutions of their own indicating the same fundamental incoherence of mind is certain; but it is no less certain that the specific expression of that incoherence would be utterly distinct from that proper to Mrs. Nickleby, than that it would be found to have its root in ex- ceedingly similar confusions of idea. Had Mr. Lancaster attempted to produce both a Mrs. Nickleby and a Mrs. Gamp he would, if we may judge from what he has done in this novel, have made their irrelevancies of speech, their abject submission to the laws of association governing a vagrant mind, as like each other in form as one pea to another. Miss Barbara and Miss Amelia Aston are sisters of a peer who is the lord-lieutenant of his county, but they are made to talk without any sign of the manner and dialect proper to the station to which they belong, and just in the same way as the women of the same grades of imbecility in the least polished social circles talk. Take the following, for example :— * A Screw Loom. A Novel. By William P. Lancaster, M. A. 3 vols. London I Bentley. "' Mrs. Shanter was going to tell me them,' returned Miss Barbara, with great dignity and a horrified expression; ' but I stopped her at once. "Mrs. Shanter," I said, "an unmarried lady like myself, ten- derly nurtured all my life and most carefully brought up "—as you remember, my dear, we had a French governess for accomplishment and an English one for morals, as foreigners were not to be trusted in this respect—" Mrs. Shanter," I said, "though I have lived in an environ- ment to which such coarse details are unknown—and really up to the age of sixteen only Bowdler's Shakespeare, and Walter Scott, and every- thing else kept from us—I yet feel it my painful duty, as one of the family, however distasteful to myself, to hear the full account from you, that I may be able to set right at once any erroneous current versions of this most dreadful business."' 'Do I carry about lies?' retorted Miss Barbara, fiercely. 'Mrs. Shouter knows the very shop in Whin- bury in which the girl stood behind the counter, and has spoken to her scores of times ; not knowing anything about it, of course, which is very dreadful that a lady like Mrs. Shouter should have spoken to that class of person even by mistake ; and I assure you she feels it, my dear, as she told me, and, of course wouldn't think of noticing her now ; quite out of the question.'—' Does the girl keep a shop as well as dance on the tight rope ?' asked Mrs. Butler ; and how very odd that her name should be Westbury, and she should live in Whinbury.'—' You really try the patience of a saint, Flavia, with your stupid questions ; I said the girl's name was Weston, and I suppose shops don't usually keep open all night ; so I can't see why I must be called a liar about her rope-dancing.'"
We submit that Mr. Lancaster has here confused two quite dis- tinct species of the same mental genus, and so palpably missed his mark. There is just the same blunder in other cases. In his vulgar country attorney, he palpably and even grossly overpaints the vulgarity of his speech, making him talk in a way which would have quite shut him out from the kind of business he had gained for himself, and which would indeed be quite inconsistent with his general shrewdness of mind,—a very small quantity of which would have sufficed to teach such a man his own defects of education and the necessity of either remedying or hiding them so far as to entitle him to the standing of a decently educated man. Indeed, even the familiarity with law books which he is supposed to have acquired, would be sufficient to throw his speech into forms less atrociously underbred than the following, for instance :—
" 'Now, look you here, Mr. Dant, you're a pleasant gentleman' (he didn't look it), ' and I'am so, too, in my own way, and at a humble dis- tance arter you, being an individual who has always took his pride in doing the unpleasantest jobs in the pleasantest manner compatible with- out deteriorating from the execution of their solid business. Conse- quently, if I, in putting a letter into your hand from my employer, should occasion any rumpus between you and relatives, present and to be, you bear in mind this 'ore metaphysical distinction, which will be found uncommon soothing if angry feelings should afterwards arise,— that it's my business, and not me, that's the occasion of 'em.' " That any country attorney who had done a good deal of ordinary conveyancing business and aspired to a county connection,—and who is described, too, as clever enough to assume at pleasure the language and air of a popular parson,—should talk after this fashion, is atrociously unnatural. There is a slighter fault of the same kind in the delineation of a character admirably conceived and in many parts very ably executed,—old King Butler, the hard, cunning, cruel, stupid, obstinate, gullable country squire. In certain scenes he is perfectly drawn,—the last, for instance, where he puts an end to himself altogether by dashing into a pond on a winter morning, in order to show a wretched old labourer how much better he himself (the squire) can clear it of weeds than the poor old hind. It is likely enough that such a man as the squire, at once cunning, grasping, and narrow-minded, might be induced by a cunning rogue to invest his money speculatively and lose it. But he is not the sort of man whom a hare-brained theorist like Mr. Dent would have made a victim of, and still less likely is it that he would have ever put his money into societies with such names as "The General Hair Cutting by Machinery (Limited)" and the " Baby Clothes Supply Company." To make the squire invest in such schemes is not only caricature in the sense of being unnatural, but it is not even exaggeration of what might fairly be supposed to be the squire's weak side. Instead of being a slight extension of a weak characteristic,—the proper sphere of caricature, if it has a proper sphere in works of this class at all,—it is a piece of false drawing, for it exaggerates a special kind of credulousness which would not have existed at all in such a character as the squire's.
In Mr. Lancaster's delineation of Mrs. Flim, the mad lodging- house-keeper, there is no doubt humour, though the most open and broad caricature. The woman who " never sees her lodgers 'cept in a thunderstorm, and a butcher only at the full moon," is a wild fancy up to even Dickens's freaks in this line ; but it is impossible to deny a certain element of mad humour to the conception of Mrs. Flim as delineated thus by her servant and worshipper, Tapscott :-
"' And then the only other thing you need be aware of '—here Tapscott gathered up her skirts, and rushing into the centre of the room,
stamped violently on the floor with her right foot, to James's extreme
dismay—' Ah !' she resumed, thought I get you afore you reached they drawers—is beetles.'—`I suppose they don't bite?' asked James, resignedly, after recovering from the effects of a species of war dance which Tapscott was executing over the remains of the intercepted beetle.—' They lick all the blacking off your boots in the nights, and they won't let you keep almost anything from them ; and they climbs everything and eats everything ; and when Mrs. Flim rings her bell in the middle of the night, it's a sign for me she hears them on the landing, and then I have to turn out for half an hour with a rushlight and catch as many as I can ; and in the morning she says to me, " What sport, Tapscott ?" and I says sometimes, " nothin` portickler, mom, being only seven poorish old and three young ones." Then says she, "I shan't get up or want any bath, for I ain't in the sporrits for it." Or some morning I says to her, " Cheer up, 'Missis Film, for I've took three dozen, and fine full-growod and juicy, not reckoning full as many small which is not worthy of your notice." Than she'll say, "This is a blessed day, and I wish my poor sister had surwived to see it. We shall stamp out the old dragon yet, so I'll wear my ermine tippet this morning, and you toll my organ-grinder, when ho comes, to tune up the Last Rose of Summer."' " And no one, again, can deny humour to one of the principal con- ceptions on which the story, such as it is, turns,—the panic of a feeble and doctrinaire member of Parliament lest there should be any discovery of his antecedents, — he having been in early life, and before he came in to his uncle's property, a wretched actor of pantomime, in which capacity he had on one occasion "come on without his head as third alligator in a Christmas pantomime." The poor young man's mother, a drunken old woman, had pawned the said alligator's head for
drink, and the young man had at the last moment crawled on to the stage in the alligator's scales, barring the proper head ; and this is the story which an unprincipled man, who has raked up the poor young fellow's past life, threatens to divulge to his constituents and the whole county, wherein Mr. Plumpton is now a respectable landed proprietor, unless he resigns his seat in his persecutor's favour. No one can deny that this is a sufficiently conceivable, if not a probable
situation, an exceedingly original one, and one which would give to any unprincipled man who had discovered the secret an awfully powerful leverage over the mind not merely of a feeble, but even of a moderately courageous man, who had been the hero of it.
There are, however, better things in the book than anything of which we have yet spoken. By far the best is the conception and delineation of the heroine, a country linendraper's daughter, not beautiful, not clever, not refined except in feeling, not any- thing very remarkable except in love and loveability, and even in these qualities not exceeding probably a good number of young women whom everybody knows. There is nothing more difficult than to make a character of this unheroic kind perfectly living and vivid, and this Mr. Lancaster has certainly done. A finer and, in its way, more poetical delineation of a by no means remarkable or even strongly defined character, it would not be very easy to find, out of the pages of a first-rate novelist, than the sketch of Mary Weston. She is all tenderness, and yet in manners a mere linendraper's daughter not even idealized. The scene in which she persuades her lover to take her to see his London lodging is worthy of a far higher and more perfect work of art than this novel can, on the whole, pretend to be. It has many other clever points,—the picture of the vulgar, flashy, and cruel young Mr.
Richards, for example, but none which seems to us so full of real promise and true power as the picture of this loving and loveable, but otherwise purely common-place girl. There are touches in that picture worthy of a true poet, and not a stroke which one could wish away. If all had been in keeping with it, the novel would be not only a promising one, but a great one. This, however, it is not. There are so many glaring faults of execution, there is such weakness in the plot, especially so far as it concerns Mr. Perceval, and the interest of the only really fine part of the story is so frittered away, that we cannot say the novel is, as a whole, even a good one. But it is undoubtedly one of great promise. And we think that if the author would not fill his canvass so full, but only sketch characters in which his own interest is deep enough to keep his imagination hot during the process of execution,—in many places his story gives us the impression of a mind cooled down and grown languid before it had transferred its notion to paper,—we believe that he might write a story of first-rate power.
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