BOOKS.
MY NOVEL, BY PISISTRATIIS CAXTON; OR VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.* Mn. CANTON junior has, he informs us, written his novel with the twofold purpose of making up the deficit in his annual income caused by the repeal of the Corn-laws, and of doing his part to counteract the effect of incendiary publications, by exhibiting the rural aristocracy, and generally: the richer classes, in a truer and kindlier light than that which is thrown upon them by the dark lantern of Socialist, Radical, or Free-trade Diogenes. The second title of the work implies even a broader and more philosophic purpose. For while every English novel must represent varieties of English life, that which assumes to do this in a special sense must be intended to display the relations of one part of our social fabric to another, and to trace a wise design, a unity of aim, a complex harmony, in the whole made up of these varieties. The first of Mr. Caxton's objects has doubtless been obtained ; the other has not been accomplished either in its wider or its narrower sense. Mr. Caxton does not specify the dangerous works to which his own is designed to be an antidote ; and he remarks in the course of it that it is easier to live down than to write down inflammatory class appeals. We are rejoiced to agree with him, that a kind-hearted sensible squire and a good parson are likely to do more in the reconcilement of classes than any books which he can write; and the more, because he seems not to have master- ed the first element of success in his undertaking—a knowledge of the mischief to be encountered, and of the causes which have pro- duced it. It is not generally supposed that Socialist schemes or democratic rhetoric have found their way very extensively to the intellect and passions of the agricultural poor in England ; nor, so far as landowners and parsons have been the objects of invective, has want of kindliness and benevolence been the vice attributed to them. Cordial good-nature and a frank dignity are the popular at- tributes of the "good old English gentleman"; and had such qualities been sufficient to prevent what is called, by a rhetorical exaggeration, in this country at least, "the war of classes," that war would never have broken out. But, unfortunately, these very country gentlemen—" our territorialaristocracy," as thelate Chancel- lor of the Exchequer is fond of calling them—with all their virtues, had a natural tendency to high rents ; and being in possession at one time of paramount legislative power, they passed laws which gave them artificially high rents at the expense of the rest of the com- munity. This is the origin of what was certainly a combat be- tween classes ; but that is over now. How far English land- owners have forgotten that property has its duties as well as its rights and enjoyments, is quite another question ; and if Mr_ Cax- ton wishes to go into it, he will find that fancy-portraits of a model squire and a model parson are but dust in the balance against the facts represented by the words rural pauperism, rural ignorance, and rural brutality. If he wants to know—as he seems to have rather a Pall Mall notion of country life—what these words mean let him consult Sidney Godolphin Osborne and Charles Kingsley, who are both gentlemen and parsons working among the agricultural poor.
Granted that a goodnatured squire, with eight thousand acres of land, arable and pasture, and not a mortgage on it, aided by a parson with a decent income—or even one who can give to the " res angusta demi" the dignity that high character, good man- ners, and intellectual accomplishments will bestow—may do great things for a parish. The sagacious iirs. Glasse prefaces her re- ceipt for hare-soup by the pithy direction, first catch your hare. So, we say, first put your unencumbered well-meaning squire and your phoenix parson in every parish in England, or in the majority of parishes, and then will be time enough to discuss what good may be got out of them. It is the burdened estates preventing improvement, and the parsons careless, sauntering, often with little more intellectual cultivation and much less practical knowledge and good sense than their farmers—these are the things that con- stitute the circumstances with which we have to deal in too many of our country parishes, and which have borne fruit in the fearful triad the consideration of which we recommended to Mr. Caxton's notice.
But our novelist does not seem to know what to do with his squire and parson when he has found or invented them. A con- siderable vagueness as to the daily life, business, enjoyments, and manners of an English village must have come over the mind of Pisistratus while he was in Australia making the fortune which he, not prescient of Free-trade iniquities, was rash enough to invest in Uncle Roland's acres ; or, with the object he announces, he would certainlylave given us some more definite picture of our sweet country life, with its immemorial charms, and of the duties and pleasures of a great proprietor and a country rector, than is to be found in My Novel. We always thought it spoilt the energetic moral of The Cartons, that Pisistratus should rush back to the old country the moment he had made a few thousand pounds. He ought to have become an Australian " gentleman "• that would have had significance. But now that all his agricultural experi- ence has not enabled him to invent a more novel or more useful function for a squire and his benevolence and his capital, than to set him employing labour during a hard season unproductively, in dig- ging a fish-pond that he didn't want, we begin to suspect Pisistratus of being a charlatan, and that he neither knows nor cares much in
• My Novel, by Pisistratus Caxton ; or Varieties in English Life. In four volumes. Published by Blackwood and Sons.
his heart about agriculture, and country gentlemen, and the rural poor. It was not on the Palatine that Virgil heard the hum of the bees, or smelt the sweet thyme, whose music and fragrance have been for nearly two thousand years wafting the country—all brightness, melody, and perfume—into close chambers, into walled. up cities, into crowded streets, and dismal alleys; and it is not in Pall Mall that one can learn those secrets of the country which if reproduced in a book would breathe from its pages May-bloom and new-mown hay, calm delights, unwearying occupations, robust and animated health—not even in the country, if one carried thither a Pall Mall mind and heart. There is about Mr. Caxton's picture of Hazeldean and its master of the same name—Hazeldean of Hazel- dean—the rhetorical vagueness and want of detail which betray the writer aiming at a generalization but having no knowledge or vivid sense of the particulars ; not that the sort of man is not well enough described—novels and London experience would serve for that—but there is no presentation of that country-gentleman life, with its aecessaries, which is necessary for the attainment of the
author's professed purpose. Imagine a picture of our rural life with no tenant farmers, and this too by a man who professes to exhibit that life with a practical aim ! But even the artist, were he of a high and conscientious intellect, could not omit so essential a feature of the moral rustic landscape. In fact, Mr. Hazeldean of Hazeldean is described; and his park and house, and wife and sister, and parish-stocks and parson and bailiff, are described too,—and as a picture of still-life we have no objec- tion to the descriptions ; what is wanting is action and dialogue bearing upon the main purpose of the book,—for of action and dia- logue of the ordinary novel sort there is plenty, and amusing enough. The mere existence of such folks as our best country gentlemen and their families may be a startling novelty to an American, or an Australian who has forgotten the old country ; and rural dis- content may seem to such a stranger at first sight unaccountable, though we are by no means sure that he would not fix upon that as its inevitable cause, with his colonial feelings about the relative value of independence and comfort. But one who pretends to be alive to the animosities of classes in England might know that he is contributing no novelty when he simply informs us of the ex- istence of a cordial, manly, somewhat irritable, middle-aged gen- tleman, who is proud of his eight thousand acres, considers the landed interest identical with the constitution, but with all his pride and irritability, and prejudice and narrowness, remembers that a Hazeldean of Hazeldean has duties, and does for "his poor" all that his limited conscience and feeble inventive faculties slagged to him. These general characteristics of the country gentleman, as statistical facts, we are all familiar with. But our author fails both in his aim as social physician, and in dramatic presentation of his subject, when he contents himself with a vague general con- ception, and labels his dramatis personm, instead of developing them in action. The Hazeldeans of Hazeldean have for hundreds of years influenced directly the villages in which they have lived and ruled, and have indirectly contributed peculiar elements to the national character, and no slight bias to the national policy. To present this general truth dramatically, would be to make it felt and appreciated more profoundly and by a wider circle, and is an aim worthy of an English gentleman and literary artist. But to do this, he must show his type of the class in action, as landlord, master, neighbour, sportsman, magistrate, a pater- nal despot in his village, a free and kindly man in his fa- mily, a gentleman and an aristocrat among his peers. For it is by action in all these and more capacities that the Hazel- deans of Hazeldean are what they are ; not by being dummies, with all these titles painted up underneath them. And what makes My Novel a more striking failure is, that an active life of this range and variety is more capable and easy of artistic treat- ment than that of most workers among us would be, in proportion as it is at once less special and mechanical than that of the profes- sional man, the merchant, the shopkeeper, and artificer, and less abstract than that of the statesman and politician. It deals on the one hand with natural objects and processes of production of vital importance to a nation, with agents, pheenomena, and scenery, delightful to the imagination as well as interesting to the under- standing ; while on the other hand, it has to do with the govern- ment of men, on such a scale as to admit of that individualized treat- ment which gives the direct human interest, so difficult to realize in those legislative or administrative processes in which the masses are dealt with on broad generalizations, and regarded not so much as individual men, but as the constituent elements of blue books and statistical tables. To show all this living on the canvass, would indeed have been to do something for the order to which our author belongs by birth, estate, and county-membership. It would have been still more to the purpose to show how these same Hazel- deans, worthy and loveable race though they are, are to develop into the landowners of a new Mira, and in increased knowledge, energy, and enterprise, are not to lose the old charm of frankness, kindness, and pride of gentlemen ; to make us feel how these coun- try gentlemen may still be, as they ought to be from their position and antecedents, the leaders of agricultural improvement, the true aristocracy of an industrial people. But for all this, practical knowledge, and, what is more, genuine earnestness, would have been needed ; and it was easier to write a novel of commonplace material dexterously constructed, and spiced with a proper amount of the old familiar sentiment and the new pseudo-Shandyism, which is the merest reflection from books.
If, leaving these country folks with the general acknowledg- ment, that, so far as description can be a substitute for dialogue and action, they are well described, and nice points of character seized, and a pleasing impression of the Hazeldean family pro- duced, we trace the Impose of the author in the other characters of the book—extending through four volumes, but in quantity nearly equalling three ordinary novels—we confess ourselves ut- terly puzzled to detect any difference as regards aim and philo- sophic depth between this and any other novel by the same author, or indeed any "fashionable novel" of the day. We have in addi- tion to the Hazeldeans, father, son, wife, and sister, and the par- son and wife' a Cabinet Minister burdened with a secret remorse— his friend Lord Lestrange, all that is charming, good, and elevated, but crushed and repressed by a regret dating twenty years back— a scheming young gentleman, a relative of the Cabinet Minister, and the villain of the piece—a semi-Jew baron, ci-devant solici- tor, who lends money and lives in "the first society," and calls the Cabinet Minister "my dear fellow "—an Italian nobleman in exile, with his daughter—another Italian nobleman and his sister, plot- ting against the former—a peasant poet, who wins his way to eminence, and turns out to be the legitimate son of a great man— an uncle by the mother's side of the poet, who returns from Ame- rica with a fortune and becomes a manufacturer and finally a man of fashion and M.P. for a borough : all these we have, and a very complex and interesting story is made out of their combinations ; there are even scenes of great power, of the sort that Maeready on the stage could have given prodigious effect to : but the pur- pose of the book seems clean gone out of the writer's mind, and we can conceive any novel of the season doing just as much and just as little to knit closer the ties that bind class to class in England, or to make one class appreciate and look with truer and kindlier eye on the others.
Indeed, there are characters in My Novel, and there is a pervad- ing tone, which, so far from harmonizing men of different degrees and different occupations in our land, seem to us calculated, if they had any practical effect, to do just the opposite. Mr. Sprott the tinker, whose pleasure it is gratuitously to enlighten his rustic brethren on the question of their rights and the wrongs of the rich, is not a flattering specimen of the poor man political. But , let him pass as a sketch and a scarecrow. Mr. Richard Avenel, the maker of his own fortune, the manufacturer, and Radical borough M.P., may too be a portrait from life ; we do not doubt that worse men and vulgarer men have sat and are sitting in the House of Commons : but he is still an outrageous caricature, were he " liker than life," because he is presented here as the type of a class, and as the commercial analogue of the Hazeldeans of Hazel- dean. Ile is the prosperous middle-class man, as he appears to the horrified vision of May Fair and Almacks ; not even to those artificial eyes quite devoid of a certain rude strength and rough utility, but with all that, a singularly absurd, coarse, selfish, grasp- ing, tyrannical, title-hunting, and unpleasant " intrus." Nor, broad as is the canvass spread, and facile as is the master's hand, does that great "people," without which English " society " is a capital without a column, gain admission even to the back- ground of the picture, except as a group of undistinguishable gam- bling rustics in one corner, and a corrupt and equally undistin- guishable borough constituency in another. A deep and inbred contempt for the middle class would be the only interpretation of a picture of English society which ignored or only sarcastically noticed them, were it not to be explained by a defect in this author's genius and sympathies, alike fatal to him as philosophic politician or as philosophic artist.
And this is, that of the English world, which it is his vocation to paint and to influence, he knows and comprehends and cares for only the lightest froth dancing on the surface. We have seen that in his village he could conceive and describe his characters of squire and parson with their families ; below this he could not even go by description, and he fails to exhibit even them as actors in the real interests of their lives. It is the same when his scene is transferred to London. Dandies and fine ladies—men and women upon whom life forces no serious duties, and who are not great enough to impose them on themselves—dress, talk, flirt, and intrigue upon his stage. Even the political life which is bound up in Eng- land with fashionable life he touches with the vaguest, dreamiest pencil, and as if none of the substantive interests and manly vir- tues with which it is concerned had ever made themselves felt by him. He can understand it as an exciting personal game, more absorbing and more reputable than hazard, with great prizes for those who can win them, and draughts of Nepenthe for those whose youth has left behind it little but gnawing regrets. But as the highest form of business, or the serious passion of serious men, and the duty of those whose rank and fortune release them from the ordinary duties of the less wealthy and eminent,—we do not mean to say that he cannot form the conception or use the phrases, but it is not that view of political life with which he sym- pathises, or which his genius aspires to represent among the va- rieties of English life. Nor, indeed, apart from motives, does he dramatically represent the life of a political leader. Here again he can form the conception, describe the man; but his portrait wants details—that is, it wants knowledge, his statesman does no- thing as a statesman. It cannot be in this case that life has pre- sented no models to the writer. • His manhood must have been passed in the familiar society of political Englishmen of the higher rank. It must be that his genius is not receptive of this sort of experience ; that it presents to his imagination no beauty or in- terest; it is not available to him for purposes of art. Go even into a class with which he ought to be more familiar still, among the men of letters; we have in this book three distinct types from
this class,—Leonard, the poet; Henry Norreys, the man who fol- lows literature with the diligence and sobriety of a lawyer; and John Burley, the reckless dissipated man of genius who is always out at elbows, eloquently drunk, and dies of delirium tremens. The two latter are strongly marked types, and we know precisely the sort of men intended, if not the very men who sat for the por- traits. But this is knowledge we bring to the book, not knowledge we get from it. There is little dramatic power in the representa- tion; we easily fill up features so strongly marked, and we must not put down to the credit of the artist what belongs really to the subject and to our own familiarity with a class. Leonard, on the other hand, upon whom much more talk is lavished, remains in his poetical cha- "racter a mere nominis umbra; not a characteristic of his genius is made real and intelligible to us; he cannot have been as poet and man of letters clearly and distinctly before the author's eye. Thus even with those classes of society with which he must be familiar, he ' cannot deal dramatically : he has not the genius for presenting individual character, the primary dramatic faculty ; much less the faculty—requiring so much study, observation, and superiority to conventional prejudices, in addition to dramatic genius—of pre- senting class characters individualized, the distinctive features of the man moulded and coloured by the work he does, representative therefore of the social function and peculiarities of their class, true typal varieties of English life. It is needless to add, that of the working lives—and that means the serious portion of the lives—of the merchant, the manufacturer, the lawyer, and other "working classes," not the faintest representation is conveyed. Baron Levy and Randal Leslie, who plot together against the for- , tunes of their fellow "varieties," are the only "working men" really exhibited in that which is their business and function. In a word, it is only the amusements, the pleasures, and the passions of the idle members of English society, which Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton has ever succeeded in painting. He cannot paint the busy classes, even in their pleasures and their family life and their passions—not even those who belong to his "society "—because the serious occupations and interests of men and women affect their pleasures and their passions; and with these and the cha- racters they form he has no adequate acquaintance and sym- pathy. So, as we said, he paints the froth of society ; and very gay froth it is, and very pretty bubbles he can make of it : but this is not reconciling classes, or giving a philosophic repre- sentation in fiction of the great organic being we call the English nation ; and so far as My Novel pretends to be anything more than anybody else's novel, anything more than a well-wrought story, constructed out of the old Bulwer-Lytton materials, the pretence is fabulous and the performance does not answer to it. We have a novel neither better nor worse than its predecessors ; but we have not a great work of art reared on a basis so broad as a general sur- vey of English life in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.
Would such a work of art be possible P A mirror that should show to a nation of workers—to a nation whose family hearth is dear and sacred, to a nation that is earnest, practical, grave and religious—its own life, complex and multitudinous, as it might reflect itself upon the imagination of a great poet, who to mascu- line understanding trained by observation and study should add the large heart and the clear eye to which nothing human is unin- teresting or blank ? Homer did something of this sort for the Greece of his day ; Dante for the Italy of his ; Shakspere for the Europe of his. These men knew not such a word as com- monplace or low, except as applied to what is stupid and base. The broad field of human life was to them a field of beauty, richly clothed with food and flowers for the sustenance and nourishment of a vigorous imagination. Art can indeed harmonize classes when the artist is such as these,—when, on the one hand, the dig- nity and worth of the various callings that minister to the con- venience and promote the improvement of a nation, are illustrated by viewing them as harmonious parts of a great whole ; and on the other, when the men who pursue these callings are repre- sented with the interesting varieties impressed upon the common humanity by circumstances and education, but still as not having that common humanity obliterated and replaced by some ludicrous or mean features, characteristic, it may be, of their occupation, but not characteristic of men to whom an occupation should be a servant and not a master. Till art deals again as it did in its mighty youth with common life—with that which is the business of a busy struggling world—neither will art regain its strength and renew its youth, nor will common life reappear to us with the freshness and the sacredness which it had to the eye of those who first became self-conscious and burst into song. Dandy literature and superfine sensibilities are tokens and causes of a de- generate art and an emasculate morality ; and among offenders in this way none has sinned more, or is of higher mark for a gibbet, than the author of My Novel. Such books as his, when they appear in their true characters, are judged according to one. stand- ard; but when they come in the guise of profound meaning and lofty aims, and give themselves the airs of being grand concrete philosophies, the judge lonks at them in quite another light, tries them by a higher code, and condemns them accordingly, as well- dressed impostors.
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