16 JULY 1881, Page 15

BOOKS.

A ROMANCE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.* It is difficult to imagine that this book can have any effect that is not mischievous ; and to introduce it into ordinary drawing-rooms under the name of a novel, without any warning of the revolting nature of some of its contents, is an insult to ordinary readers. Moreover, its tone is not the tone it affects. There is to our ears a genuine vulgarity of feeling underlying the affected intensity of passion,—a true worship of the worse side of the world ingrained in the very essence of the religious sentiment it contains. And though we can quite conceive that a book of this nature might have been seriously planned for a religious purpose by a man with a very deep religious conviction to express, such a book as this—written with as much plainness of speech as if the sore to be healed needed the closest study, but not to express a very deep religious conviction, rather, indeed, the despair of attaining any such conviction—can hardly exert any influence that is not at once deteriorating and contaminating.

• A Romance of the Nioteteesth Century By W. 11. Mattock. Loudon: OUR* and Windun

No doubt this story does ponrtray the fearful chaos of a world of strong passions penetrated by no religious beliefs, though, to some extent, obstructed in its rush towards ruin by half-beliefs, and a keen desire for whole beliefs. But what will be its effect ? So far as we can see, it will have no effect beyond revolting the feelings of decent people, and deepening the despair excited by the spectacle of a moral chaos in those who read this book without any faith of their own, but in the hope of obtaining one. Certainly it will present a number of very odious pictures of depraved passions and helpless cravings for the religions power requisite to bind them, to those who read the book from any other motive. It is a book of considerable power, but the power is of a very morbid and unhealthy nature, and the tone is not pure. That any man should suppose, as the author evidently does suppose, that such a man as the hero of the tale, Mr. Vernon, has done almost all in his power to obtain light from Heaven, and that he has, more or less, the right to upbraid God,—supposing, as he says, that there is a God,—with not giving him more light, appears almost incredible to the reader. Here, for instance, is the description, elsewhere amplified, of his most intimate friend, a friend from whom he does not appear to have shrunk in the least for his gross vices, we suppose because of that very questionable "flavour of innocence" of which he speaks :—

" The friend he was thinking of was a very different man from himself. What had at first attracted the two was a certain delicate dilettanteiam, and an indifference to the games and sports by which so many men's leisure is occupied. Bnt deeper down in their char- acter this likeness ended. Whereas Vernon was restless and loved the world, Campbell was shy and restful and inclined to solitude ; and whereas Vernon had played with his affections, Campbell had kept his laid up in a napkin. There are passions, however, that lie near affection, although they are always ready to ruin it ; and to these Campbell had yielded with a quite sufficient openness. He had even treated the questions involved in them with a certain ruthless humour, which was as coarse as that of Rabelais, and had in part been borrowed from it. But there had been a flavour of innocence even about his vices. They had never approached his heart near enough to corrupt it ; and now that at last it was really touched and troubled, he had told the fact to his friend with a simplicity almost childish."

There is no such thing as innocence about deliberate moral evil of any kind, least of all where the choice between good and evil is presented strongly and openly to the mind, as it is here supposed to be presented, and the evil consciously chosen. In the future of the story, this "shy and restful" friend of the hero's announces his intention, if he should not succeed in the great hope and aspiration of his life, to plunge deliberately into profligacy ; and though it does not appear that he does so, though he turns out, if we read the tale aright, not so bad as he intended to be, this is the sort of man of whom Vernon, the thirster after God, the reproacher of God for not giving him more light, deliberately makes the most intimate friend of his heart. Worse still, if possible, Vernon openly re- presents himself as constantly fluttering, in society, after women whose characters he knows to be bad, and going half-way to meet their detestable tendernesses. And he allows two bad old men who lunch with him in his splendid villa on the Mediterranean, to talk as no gentlemen who had the smallest reverence for good- ness of any sort would talk, and yet evinces no sign of a gentle- man's disgust at the conversation. And yet just before this entertainment of his, he has been writing as follows in his private diary :—

"0 my God, holiest and mightiest, most pitiful and yet most just, what I pine for is to speak to thee. Let me write thy name—let me brand it in writing, not think it only in faint and fleeting thoughts. Let me rouse my ears with the sound of my own voice, crying to thee. 0 God, what I long for is to lay bare my soul—to open it, to disrobe it, to expose it naked before thee ; and to cry to thee to have pity, to have pity, and to look upon me ! And yet, bow dare I, impure and faithless, loving nothing—so they tell me—and nobody ? For thou art pure and holy ; and my very friend has told me that I am viler than most men. Am I so ? Oh, teach mo to know myself ; humble my pride, enlighten me. My God, I am not mocking thee. What I ask of thee is what my heart is crying for. Teach me to know myself. And yet if indeed thou hearest me, I must seem like one mocking ; for thou knowest how faith has failed me, and how bewildered and dark my mind is. Even whilst I am crying to thee, whilst I am trying to open to thee all my secret being, I know not, I am not sure, if you have any existence—you, the God I am crying to. Perhaps you are only a dream—an idea—a passing phenomenon in man's mental history. And yet surely, if thou existest, thou wilt not, even for this cause, turn away from me, quenching the smoking flax. May it not be that thou art revealing thyself to me, through my wretched sense of thy absence ? But from me why art thou absent ? Is it through my sins, through my own loveless nature ? Have I nothing in my soul fit to offer thee ? And for this cause hut thou put me far away from thee ? I may be evil now ; I may be in outer darkness ; but I know that I was not always. I was once near thee ; I was once ever with thee. That was when I was a little child. 0 my God, I will confess to thee through my childhood. I was no saint, thou knowest ; I was a little, worldly child, yet I will maintain even to thy face that as a child I loved thee, and with a child's frankness I was always in secret turning to thee. I thought of thee in my play ; I thought of thee in riding my pony. Hardly an hour passed in which, without kneeling, I did not say some word. to thee. Nor did this end with my childhood ; for as I grew older, and as my thoughts multiplied, more and more in secret did they fasten upon thee. And I grew very greatly to fear thee, and yet I was not afraid to love thee ; for my own sins were small, and I washed, them out with nightly penitence. Often hest thou heard my child- like lips confessing them. But as I thought upon thy perfections,. and as I looked round upon the world, a new sense grew in me. It was a sense of the world's sin, and of how then west being grieved and blasphemed everywhere. Of men's sorrow, and want, and poverty, I had not heard much. What touched me was the misery of the sin that they lay wallowing in. The thought of this was never quite absent from me. It haunted me day and night through all my later boyhood. It very often subdued me in my gayest moments. Thou knowest bow, for this reason, a great city was hateful to me.. In the same way, although I could see my schoolfellows unhappy, and be little moved by it, yet many a time when I have seen some young soul corrupting itself, I have said, I would die, if he might be saved from sinning.' 0 God, thou heat heard me, if thou hearest anything. Thou knowest, too, how my pillow has been damp with tears from my thinking on these things 0 my God, if thou art, why for me art thou not ? Why art thou thus withdrawn from me ? Is it because I have sinned ? Can that be the reason ? Surely this thou knowest, that it was not what men call sin that made- my eyes dim to see thee. It was not the lust of the flesh, nor the pride of life' although both of these assailed me. And if since then evil things have had hold on me, I have sinned because I first lost thee; I have not lost thee through sinning. There is no man or woman that for thy sake I could not renounce easily, reserving ne more care for them than to work for their souls indifferently. No— what I have lost thee by is not sin ; it is rather the very things. whereby I resisted sin ; it is my reason, my intellect, and my longing, for what is true. I have lost thee, my God, through my earnest search to find thee."

Can any man honestly say that he has sinned, wherever he has sinned,because he has lost God, and not lost God through sinning, who can deliberately tolerate what is foul in thought and purpose,. and keep a face of compliment for those who steep themselves in it? What is God, if righteousness is not of His very essence ?'

A man who accuses God of deserting him, when he loves to play with evil that he clearly recognises as evil, uses language in an unreal sense. Even the Church towards which Mr. Mallock's hero always turns as the only true Church, if' there be a true Church, is express in her teaching that the most saintly minds are often deserted for long years together by the sustaining and sweetening power of religious feeling; indeed, that such religious feeling is in no sense the highest or truest sign of God's presence,—that the most barren and arid' sense of inward emptiness, when reigning in one who clings

devoutly to the will of God and the love of righteousness, though without any glimmer even of the joy of religion, is a

state of mind that may imply far greater nearness to God than the most passionate spiritual extasy and fervour of love. That a man who flutters about on the very edge of vice, sometimes, of course, falling into it, and sanctions its worst aspects with all the courtly latitude of the world, should not be afraid' to tell God that this is virtually His doing, for taking away from him the sense of His personal presence, is evidence that Mr. Vernon and the writer who conceived the character, know as

little of any true theology as the former affects to know much of it. The love of God implies, of course, profound love for a

righteous person, whether His presence be consciously realised by us, or temporarily concealed behind the veil of nature. But with- out a love of righteousness which revolts against evil of all kinds,. there can be no love of a righteous person ; and that a man who, is always toying with what is sensual and worse than sensual should venture to tell that righteous Being that if He had but made Himself always manifest, this toying with unrighteousness. could not have taken place, only proves that it was not the righteousness of God that he loved, but the accidental emotion of awe due to the overshadowing of a finite being by the infinite Being.

We dwell on this, because if this book had, as its author would probably maintain, a serious purpose, here is the very core of the weakness and nauseousness of the picture of life which it contains.. The book is one long description of the craving for a certain kind of intense excitement,which on the one side shows itself in pictures.

of violent and even hideous physical passions, and on the other side in passionate outcries for the sweetness and peace of satis- fying religions emotions. Now, surely Mr. Vernon might have learned, as the very alphabet of any sound religious . teaching, whether Catholic or Protestant, that there can be no. love of God, no reverence for God at all, without love and reverence for goodness, and that to talk of its being the fault of God that you fall into sin, only because He does not fortify your hatred of sin by making His presence known when you pray to discover it, is like complaining of an anonymous book written to expound some great truth for not having had a great name on the title-page to draw your attention more forcibly to the import- ance of the matter in it. No man will ever love God as God, who does not love goodness as goodness, even though he recog- nises no sign of the spiritual personality behind the goodness, and who does not also hate in.purity as impurity, even though he at the moment discerns no separate divine voi3e which echoes the condemnation of his own conscience on that impurity. This so-called Romance of the Nineteenth Century is one long invocation to God to make Himself known by the same kind of stormy emotion by which the most powerful and sometimes the most evil of the passions make themselves known, and to over- come those evil passions by doing so. That is an appeal which it is not reasonable to make. The man who does not worship good, where there is no other sign of God, will never worship God truly. The man who does not shrink from evil where there is no other sign of rebellion against God except the evil itself, will never worship God truly. Mr. Vernon, the hero of this disagreeable tale, seems to us to claim to have it always made clear to him that the Almighty is on the side of good. Yet, unless he could cling to good without proof of the Almighty power behind it,—which, be it said, he clearly does not do,—it is not God whom he loves, but—at best,—the awfulness of God.

We need not go into the very repulsive features of the tale before us. The picture of Cynthia Walters could only be justi- fied, if it could be justified at all, by an evidence of religious purpose far beyond any given us in this book. As we have said, there is not a little force in the tale, but the force is expended in drawing bad passions and in painting the helplessness of the religious yearnings which, in our own day, strive in vain to cope with these passions. Nor does even the daouentent portray any imaginative victory of faith over doubt, and of good over evil. The tragical death of Cynthia Walters in the effort to make the most disgraceful confession of her life, and of the hero in his raging desire to see the soul of the destroyer doomed to everlasting torture, the terrible irony of the text ignorantly placed over the former's torah, in a word, the final victory of evil passion, and the final paralysis of faith, are the spectacles on which the mind rests when the story is concluded ; unless, indeed, there be supposed to be any sort of moral satisfaction in the very slight delineation of a good priest, who is a bystander witnessing the course of the tragedy with- out understanding it, and who remains to bury and mourn the victims, without knowing anything whatever of their moral collapse, or being able to lend a helping hand to them in their spiritual agony. The book is, we are persuaded, whatever its in- tention, a mischievous and unworthy one, which we earnestly hope that Mr. Mallock will one day regret having given to the world.