UNCLE SILAS.*
Is the brief preface to this powerful and exciting but certainly (if that is of any account) very improbable tale, Mr. Le Fenn points out justly enough that even the quietest of Sir Walter If Scott's romances, even those which deal with contemporary man-1 ners and the scenes of common life, like The Antiquary and S. Ronan's Well, contain a very unquestionable and markedriens a;
* Uncle Silas. A Tale of Bartz= Haugh. By J. 8. Le Fans. 3 vols. 1.1 Bentley.
don element, and hence he protests with great justice against branding ill novels the story of which hinges on great crimes or scenes of great excitement, by a name which seems to exclude all the higher intellectual characteristics—' sensation tales.' There is, however, a wide distinction in type—of course we are not comparing the power of the execution—between Mr. Le Fanu's novels and even the most exciting of Sir Walter Scott's,—a dis- tinction which is, as a question of art, partly favourable to Mr. Le Fanu, and yet not the best omen for his books. So long as Sir Walter Scott writes about violent and unsettled times or historical drimes, describes the cruelty of Knights Templar in Front de Boauf, or ambitious passions like that which led to the murder of Amy Robsart in Kenilworth, no doubt he weaves the exciting element of the story into the very substance of his narrative, without giving us the impression of any unhealthy, or morbid, or feverish imagination. Those acts of violence were the natural outgrowth of the passions of the time ; and the men who were guilty of them, though bad men, often wicked men, were in some sense natural men, that is, men who yielded to the temp- tations besetting the age, not men who had private stores of iniquity all to themselves. Front de Bceuf, with all his horrid brutality and cruelty, was not, even when he proposed to put Isaac the Jew on the slow fire to extract money out of him, any- thing more than one of the worst specimens of brutality of a brutal period. Leicester, when he murdered his wife for the chance of a kingdom, was yielding to an evil ambition of course, but still to a motive which within greater or less limits was strongly marked in all the ablest men and most upright courtiers of the time. To gain influence over such a Queen as Elizabeth was a prize which dazzled the eyes of greater men than Leicester. But when Sir Walter Scott began to describe contemporary manners and the scenes of common life in novels like The Antiquary and St. Ronan's Well, no doubt he found a great difficulty in adequately leavening the shrewd observation, the broad humour, the minute realism of his pictures with the proper amount of excitement. He was describing, if not a tame age, yet an age in which the stronger passions were more or less ignored in the ordinary life of society, and it was evidently not easy for him so to mix the two elements as to prevent a certain incongruity in the tales,—like cakes in which the plums are all at one end and the plain bread all at another. In The Antiquary, for example, the vision in the tapestried chamber, the duel, the horrible secret, and the death of old Elspeth, always seem out of keeping with Monkbarns, and Hector M'Intyre, and the "phoca," and all the most healthy humour of the story. The genius of the author is shown in the homely part of the modern tale, and there is a sort of unreality in the leavening excitement. The same thing is true in a far higher degree of the melodramatic element in St. Ronan's Well. We read the tale for the admirable drawing of the old landlady and the peasant life generally. The romance is just a little "rubbishy," and though we are perhaps still children enough to be well pleased to have it, we yet feel a little ashamed of enjoying it. The crimes and tragedy with which Sir Walter Scott seasoned his modern stories were never fully incorporated with them. His great power was not in describing motives and feelings, but in .painting broadly and vividly the external scenery of the life, whether ancient or modern, with which he was dealing. When that external scenery contained few violent or exciting features, he felt an awkwardness in getting in the seasoning, because he had none of the modern " subjective " art of dealing with the inward world. Just as Dickens always fails with his exciting ingredients because his power is in observation, not in painting motive, Sir Walter Scott failed to a less degree. He dealt with the pictorial and surface aspects of character, and in modern times the passions need a different treatment from his to be em- bodied thoroughly in a tale characteristic of these times. In all his tales alike, the greatest povier of his imagination was spent on healthy subjects. So far as he had to deal with unhealthy subjects he dealt comparatively feebly. It was the normal, average, life of the age that he painted best and with most plea- sure.
Mr. Le Fanu—in this respect like the great model to whom he appeals, Sir Walter Scott—deals with the spectacle of external character, not with feelings and motives. So far as he attempts the latter task he appears to fail, though he has done it so little that we can hardly judge. The heroine of the present tale, for instance, is a milk-and-water young lady from beginning to end, in whom it is difficult to feel the slightest interest, and she is \ the only character he attempts even to describe ab intra. But unlike Sir Walter Scott, though describing modern times in all
his tales he contrives to make the exciting part of his tale . the very essence of it, and never divorces the plain and homely elements from the central thread of crime and terror on which he strings them. The result of this certainly is on one side a. more artistic effect than we .find in those dualistic tales in which the stimulus is all concentrated in ode part of the story and the realism all in another. The glare of some terrible and hideous action begins to show itself in the very beginning of all his tales, and spreads and deepens till it swallows up the whole scenery of his picture. We never see behind the veil into the interior of the tragedy. We only see the lurid sort of glow which it sheds on the face of the actors, the glassy, "polarized" light—to borrow a bold scientific metaphor—which audacity and intellectual power give out after they have been deprived of all their moral properties by passing through a medium of crime. But while this gives a more artistic effect to Mr. Le Fanu's novels than any of which the dualistic novels are, so far as they are dualistic, capable,— he must him self be aware that it also gives a somewhat more unhealthy tone to them, and renders it less unjust to call them "sensation tales" than it would be to apply that name to the products of the essentially healthy genius of Sir Walter Scott. Not that we think Mr. Le Fanu's stories ought to be branded by that opprobrious epithet. We understand by a sensation tale a tale which relies entirely on suspense and horror for its interest, and is destitute otherwise of intellectual power, of true drawing, of healthy feeling, of moral interest. This would not be true of Mr. Le Farm's novels. The House by the Churchyard was full of strong and living sketches, of humour, of variety, of true perspective, though the lurid glare of crime was cast upon it all. In that tale there was somewhat more outlying every-day life than in either of its successors. Just at the edge of the picture, on the margin of the hideous central light, there were a few figures only just touched by it which showed the healthier side of Mr. Le Fanu's imagination. In 117ylder's Hand the interest was more strictly limited to the central channel of treachery and murder, and though there were not wanting one or two charming figures as foils to the gloomier characters, they seemed introduced rather to enhance the metallic sheen of guilt which was diffused over the tale than to relieve it. In Uncle Silas Mr. Le Fanu has gone a step further. The only really able picture of a pleasing kind, Lady Knollys, is insufficient for the purpose of giving, an air of reality to the current of crime which occupies the story. The maid servant t'Mary Quince), who ought to have been very carefully painted for this purpose, is a mere lay-figure. The clownish little cousin, Millicent Ituthyn, is much better, but is only a sketch, not exciting enough for our interest, and all the care of the novelist is expended on the two evil agencies of the plot,—Uncle Silas, and the French governess Madame de la Rou- gierre. The effect is so lurid as to render the author's protest against the imputation of being a sensation novelist by no*means a matter of form. Certainly it will be said, with more or less truth, that his imagination has dwelt with more force and more success on the evil excitements than on the genial and sunny effects of life. The moral guilt, too, of his plots is carried beyond the point at which we are competent to judge of its naturalness. The effects are certainly striking, but they are the exceptional and lurid effects of nature's caprices rather than of her ordinary laws even for the guilty. They are effects which strike the imagination, but rather as evil dreams 'often strike the imagination than the evil beings of the world we live in. And this is almost inevitable in a novelist who while painting, like Sir Walter Scott, ab extra, still aims at giving a real unity to all his materials. If he painted motive and emotion from the inside at all, he might be able to overcome our surprise by connecting the guilt with its roots in character. But he does not. He paints it from the outside, and still makes it the critical and central element of his plot. The result necessarily is something of a. nightmare effect, something lowering, unexplained, and inexpli- cable, which is yet intertwined with every detail of the story.
With these large reserves as to the character of the art, it can- not be denied that Uncle Silas is a powerful book. The mode in which our interest concerning him, raised from the first, is gradually heightened during the whole of the first volume, so that when, some little way on in the second, he first appears we feel as profound an interest in him as the heroine feels herself, is very artistic And then when he does appear, the vivid colours in which he is drawn, the" sweet, gentle, insuffarable voice," with a tone like that glass flute which "rendered people hysterical," the venerable, bloodless, fiery-eyed face of marble, with its long silver hair and yet still black eyebrows and wild opium-eating eyes, the elegant, artificial style of his conversation with its mix- ture of French illustrative poetry and its half assumed reli- gious pietism,—the white glare of the smile that made you feel " half insane,"—the compound of strong will and of the relaxing influence of opium in his manner, —are vivid ele- ments in a picture not easy to forget. Nor does the interest in the wicked but problematic old man fail to rise throughout the rest of the book. It is a morbid kind of interest that we feel in evil of which we cannot even see the roots, but still it takes a real hold of the imagination and grows towards the end. The old French woman, too, with her grimacing vanities, her thieving ways, and her admirably vulgar French-English, though completely unanalyzed, is on that account all the more vivid as a painting. On the other side of the picture, Lady Knollys, with her worldly savoir faire, her affectionate good-natured rattle, her avowal that she never thinks at all because "it is a very cowardly habit." and her shrewd impressions of character, is an admirable sketch, to which it is a pity that we have not more space devoted. These are the characters which dominate the tale, which as a mere story is improbable to a degree that one almost resents,—some of its greatest improbabilities springingfrom the infinite imbecility of the heroine, who plays almost deliberately and with her eyes open into the hands of her enemies. Still the tale is unquestionably a powerful one, and the climax managed with much skill. It is a great merit in a tale to be so carefully built up that the in- terest rises regularly to the culminating point ;—and this is cer- tainly true of Uncle Silas. We do not much believe in the old man, but we shall see him nevertheless for many a day. As a mere picture of evil he is more effective than either Dangerfield in The House by the Churchyard, or Francis Lake in IVylder's Hand.
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