CASIMIR MAREMMA.*
NOVELS such as the one before us are a sad puzzle to the critic. The author of Friends in Council has adopted a sort of wheel- within-wheel system of composition,—fathering his fictions on his own fictitious personages,—which puts to cruel straits a reviewer who would fain deal fairly by them. In reading such works, you know not what is substance and what is shadow. At one moment, you fancy you have to do with a flesh-and- blood writer ; the next, you must remember that an imaginary Milverton is all you have really before you, and that the problem you have to solve is not that of judging the book directly by any canons, ethical or msthetical, but by those canons as viewed through the Milverton medium. Like the men in that wonderful comparison of Plato's, chained in the cave with their backs to the light, you can only see the reality through the shadows which it casts ; it is only by realizing the latter that you can reach something of the nature of the former. But supposing the luckless critic to have fulfilled this most difficult condition, his pains will yet in the present instance have been, to a great extent, thrown away. What he has to say has been too often anticipated ; Sir John Ellesmere and Mr. Cranmer, Sir Arthur Godolphin and Mr. Mauleverer, have each in turn stood in his shoes and played his part. Of what avail would it be to suggest, it propos to the work before us, that the rapid development of "silly Maggie," the tattered and haggard East-Ender, into the all but perfect "Lady Usefulness "of Louden- ham Castle, is hard to believe in? Mr. Cranmer, in the closing conversation of the second volume, has already expressed that opinion. Does Casimir Maremma, with his apparent inability, when once he has conceived his emigration scheme, to view men and women otherwise than as tools for carrying it out, strike you as somewhat priggish ? Sir John Ellesmere, without mincing matters, has called him "a young brute of a pedant" for you beforehand. It is poor work gleaning after such reapers. The present anti; disgusted, forswears the job.
What, then, is Casimir Marenuna "1 A novel purporting to be written, like Realmah, by Mr. Milverton of Worth Aston, assisted by his private secretary "Sandy," or at full length, Alexander Johnson ; no longer this time carried on to completion under a • casimir marenzna. By the Author of "Friends in Council," "Bealmah," &c. 2 vols. London: Bell and Daldy. 1870. running fire of conversation among the " Friends in Council," but simply preceded by some fifty pages of conversational prologue, and wound up by a similar epilogue of near seventy. With com- mendable candour, "Sandy " admits that the former mode of proceeding "broke up the interest of the story" in Realmah, and certain it is that, full ninety-nine readers out of a hundred will find Casimir Maremma much more interesting than its pre- decessor; though, indeed, this is not solely owing to the continuousness of the narrative, but in great measure also to the more substantial character of that narrative in itself, as purport- ing to be drawn from contemporary life. It has a variety of personages, mostly connected together by a variety of love affairs, simultaneous or successive, only one of the four bachelor characters being satisfied with a single one throughout the book. Considering that there are only three younger ladies for the four gentlemen, it is evident that one must be disappointed ; but in fact only two matches are made up, and the gentlemen generally show a capacity for fixing their hearts on the wrong ladies, and the ladies for fixing theirs on the wrong gentlemen, which gives considerable zest to the account of their proceedings. When we add that the chief hero is a wonderful young foreign count of unspecified nationality, who has travelled nearly all over the world, speaks all manner of languages, can earn his livelihood as a turner whilst on the visiting-list of a Prime Minister, and defend himself with his fists against two English roughs at once ; that about half the personages introduced have handles to their names ; and that nobody dies from first to last, we are sure to have said enough to commend the book to our lady-readers. But further- more, we must add that the story drops on a balcony scene, in which the most perversely entangled love-plot of the whole is finally disentangled through the influence of good example, set by a less wayward couple below, which, so far as we know, is perfectly original as a wind-up to such matters. We commend also to all stupid young men the success of Charles Ashurst in winning—we must not say whom—through blue-books and précis-writing; and to all mankind in general grand old Lord Lochawe,—a perfectly real personage, we are bound to believe, for does not Sir John Ellesmere tell us, "I knew him well when I was a young man "? We are afraid, however, many will prefer his son, Lord Glenant ; and all the more so, poor fellow ! that after annotating "those pamphlets on the Irish Church question" and reading "the Strafford correspondence," he never won the prize of all his heroism, the incomparable —. In fact, the critic him- self can but say ditto on this head also to Sir John Ellesmere; "I don't object to Glenant."
So much for Casimir Marenana as a novel. But it cannot be only so viewed. "I should never have written one line," Milverton tells us, "if I had not some practical object in view In this tale I have sought to show how emigration should be carried on ;" his leading idea apparently being that "young men of wealth, influence, and energy, who abound in the present time," might lead out "a colony, including persons of various powers and various pursuits, into new lands," and so become the authors and contrivers "of a new state, under happier auspices, it may be, than those of any old state." Ile declares, moreover, that when be "sat down to write the adventures of Casimir Maremma, no- body was thinking particularly about emigration," which now is "almost the principal topic of the day" (which perhaps explains a good deal that is hasty and slurred over in the latter part of the work, e.g., Ruth Sumner's return from Russia). And he dwells with special fondness on the foundation of Maryland by the Lords Baltimore, father and son, and on the Maryland charters, in which he suspects Lord Bacon to have had a hand.
Few, probably, will differ from Milverton (or his creator), in urging organized emigration, taking more or less the form of colo- nization, as against the mere haphazard shovelling out of human creatures from one country into another. Organized emigration has been in great measure the secret of contemporary Mormonite success, quite apart from the test of Mormonism. Many in our own days have entertained such dreams as Casimir Maremma's. The writer of this article has known one, at least, who did—a man full of the most varied knowledge, of the most chivalrous self-devotion—a writer whose letters on his South American travel experiences were probably, consciously or unconsciously, in Milver- ton's mind when he made his hero write of the impression made on him by the vast plains of Paraguay, of its magnificent rivers, with the unguessed resources of their water-power ; but he perished through the boiling over of a pot of naphtha, instead of leading out a colony. Nor is it many years since a peer's younger son took out to New Zealand a number of English farmers and labourers to settle them there, remaining several years absent. Rajah Brooke's story,
again, is in every one's memory ; though that, indeed, is not a record of colonization properly so called, at least not of European colonization, but rather the repetition in modern times of one of those legends which haunt the cradle of almost all history,—of the stranger coming to the barbarous land, superior in wit and know- ledge to its inhabitants, and ruling them as a demi-god. Looking, however, to the example which the writer has himself specially pointed out, that of the foundation of Maryland, its historic value as an encouragement to imitators may well be doubted. The Roman Catholic Lords Baltimore were unquestionably before their time in establishing complete religious toleration. But of the results of organization proper, in any superiority which it induced we may look in vain in this instance. Maryland has always been not only one of the smaller States, but in spite of possessing the Federal capital in its midst, one of the second-rate ones, important only through the position of that capital, and as a source of danger to it. Virginia long ruled the Union ; South Carolina, herself small comparatively, led secession from it ; Massachusetts has been the corner-stone of freedom ; Pennsylvania generally determines the contest for the Presidency ; New York claims to be the "Empire" State ; with which of these,—nay, with which but the rawest yet of the rising States of the West can Maryland pretend to compare, for all the blue-blood of its first colonists, for all the wisdom, whether Baconian or not, of its charters ? Its very capital, instead of inheriting the refinement of its founders, whose name it bears, is chiefly notorious as one of the rowdiest' cities in the Union.
However, though history hardly favours the theory of aristocratic colonization, if the author of Friends in Council can by any one of his novels persuade one "young man of wealth, influence, and energy" to set his hand to so great a work, he will have done well. For wealth, influence, and energy, without an object to call out their powers, lose gradually all their worth ; a man may possess all three, and yet settle down at last into what Mr. Gladstone, in words destined to sink deep into the hearts of our people, spoke of lately as "that lounging class, unfortunately too abundant in this country who seem to have no object but to teach us how to multiply our wants and raise the standard of our luxuries, even when we have not yet solved the problem, or got to the heart of the secret, of how to relieve the destitution which is so rife among us." But let us not forget, that whilst Casimir Alarm= pleads for emigration on the ground of its com- parative easiness—since "so much has been done in the old countries that requires to be undone "—his very argument implies that that undoing of evil, which will have to be done nevertheless, sooner or later in every old country, will require even more genius, perseverance, self-sacrifice, than the simple doing of good in a new field.
And perhaps some who, with less ambition than the brilliant young Eastern count, have been content to spend obscurely their weary days, probably with scant success, in that difficult home- work of undoing, will find less refreshment over their toil in Milverton's embodied dreams than in the old familiar framework in which they are set, familiar in its type, and yet ever fresh in the details of its quaint carving. Sir John Ellesmere, thank God ! shows yet no signs of age, and was never more delightful than when he comes out as a Darwinian sui generis, unfolding the development, together with the virtues, of a kangaroo
A kangaroo is like a magnified rat ; in fact, a rat as big as a donkey, which has sat upon its hind-legs, considering schemes of intelligent benevolence, until its fore-legs have dwindled down into comparative insignificance, so that it has to rely upon its hind-legs as its principal means of locomotion. Its ears, like those of a bat, have been developed by listening perpetually to the dictates of an enlightened conscience. Then they have another great merit. When the little kangaroos make a terrible noise in the nursery and prevent their wretched father, who is underneath them, from writing sound legal opinions or reading good books, the mamma-kangaroo pockets the kangaroo brats, and there is no more noise heard. If I were to descend into the lower sphere of creation, I would be a kangaroo."
For the reasons why Sir John "declines to be an emu" the reader must be referred to the work itself.
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