BOOKS.

REUBEN MEDI1COTT.* Ma. SAVAGE has probably published no book with so much (though very discontinuous) literary power, but he has also, we fear, published none so deficient in that current of interest, from whatever source it may be derived, which makes readers anxious to go on with it. The idea of the book is discouraging, and its humour though considerable in glimpses is not sufficiently constant or equally distributed throughout it to tempt us on from oasis to oasis. To trace bow an amiable unstable character without any strength of aim or purpose goes gradually to pieces, in spite of versatility and even popular talent, is not the kind of leading idea which without keen subsidiary interests, or else very even and marvellous power of delineation, would fascinate the attention. The degeneration of a rather pleasant though loosely hung mind is in itself a repulsive subject, and needs something of compensating concentration of feeling in the writer, something of visible tension of feeling in those with whom he is connected, something of the pervading sense that we are looking upon an almost tragic spectacle, to make it fascinate at all. Now Mr. Savage has not given us this thread of feeling till the very con- clusion. His hero, named Reuben,—with visible reference to the fluid character given to the original Reuben, Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,"—goes to pieces gently without any one, not even himself till the very last, being deeply interested and pained by the catastrophe. There is no highly strung nerve in the story as a foil to the relaxel nerve of Reuben's character.

* Reuben Medlieott ; or, the Coming Man. By M. W. Savage, Rag., Author of " The

Bachelor of the Albany," " The Fawn Family," Londou Chapman and HAIL

The author indeed almost makes himself merry over his hero's wasting powers,—like a clinical lecturer criticizing from day to day the process of " fatty degeneration" in a hospital patient with more sense of scientific enjoyment than humane pain. All the literary sketches of the book aro in fact "in the air" and not in the story, and the end is visible from- the be- ginning, so that it has, in spite of two or three touchrs of reel pathos, a relaxed and heartless tone, while visibly requiring a central thread tightly strung in order to give the full expression as well as interest to the growing litnpuess and rapidly unravelling texture of the main character. But no one who is put forward in the book is in fact bound up with Reuben at all, except his mother, who is too weak and foolish to discover the nature of his backward progress. His career is coldly dis- sected without visible pain and suffering to any one.

Nay more, we very much doubt if the character itself, great as are the pains Mr. Savage has spent on it, is entirely conceivable or consistent. There is a fundamental hesitation in the mind of the author whether he shall assign real intellectual power spoiled by moral feebleness and uncertainty to his hero, or whether he shall only give him the talents of a " windbag," an empty, wordy, rhetorical facility. The admiration and affection Reuben excites amongst really able men, at least at the outset, and the success of his occasional literary efforts incline to the former supposition ; the utter imbecility, not only of his purposes but of his views, and his intellectual crotchets in the latter part of his career in- cline to the latter. But there is a real difference between them. A man with a good memory and fluent speech but no true in- tellectual insight could not have been the Reuben Modlicott of the first half of the book ; a man of true intellectual insight, however much paralyzed by feebleness of purpose, could not have been the Reuben Mallicott of the latter half. Mr. Savage in one place compares the cloudy beauty and unclear meta- physical speculations of his hero's talk to the monologues of Coleridge, and we suspect that, at first, Coleridge's type of mind, brilliant, large, wanting in steadiness and sometimes in lucidity, but full of great apergas on almost all subjects, was his model. If so nothing can be more absurd than to let him degenerate into the half-witted crotcheteer ho becomes at the end. Mr.

Savage has too little conception of the constraining power of a really great intellect, with however helpless and inferior a

character it may be bound up, if be supposes that a man of large mind could ever fall a prey, not on one side of his character only but on all, to the dreams of essentially ignorant and narrow-minded empirics. Shakespeare taught us better when he pictured the irresolutely-awaying feeble-willed Hamlet as having the shrewdest and most piercing insight into the practical humbug of the world around him. Mr. Savage never clearly makes up his own mind whether Reuben Medlicott should have only the feebleness of a man who does not act upon Iris thoughts, or also the feebleness of a man who does not really think, but deals almost exclusively with words, and not with genuine thoughts at all.

In one page he states what is probably as nearly his own con- ception of his own picture as he can realize it to himself. The Deno, Reuben's grandfather,—by far the beet picture in the book, and drawn with a masterly hand,—puts the problem of Reuben's life thus :—" Given a certain redundancy of the faculty of speech, certain considerable powers of memory, a known amount of self-conceit, a certain marked deficiency in resolution and perseverance, a wife and children, a seat in Parliament and no stake in the country, to determine what a man's place in the world will be at the expiration of a term of years." But that is a statement of the case fitting neither the earlier nor the later picture of Reuben, but a sort of mean between them. In the early portion of the book he has a keen eye for the true intellec- tual point of a discussion, and not a mere "memory " and " re- dundancy of the faculty of speech." Towards the conclusion, be- sides the bad qualities enumerated, he has lost all his educated memory, all hie memory of intellectual distinctions and compre- hensive thoughts, and become the mere wind-instrument of crotchets which are proper not so much to weak men as to ignorant, uneducated men, who have never heard of more than one narrow corner of human nature, and build on that as if it were the whole. However morally feeble Reuben Medli- cott may have been, we deny. that it is in any way conceivable that a man of his large education and wide intellectual reading should feel anything but contempt for quackeries like those which catch hold of him among his peace society, temperance society, and vegetarian society friends. A mind once accustomed to feed on a wide range of ideas could never get up genuine enthusiasm for

dry bones of that sort. On the whole, while there is much that is clever in the analysis of the disruption and evanescence of Reuben Medlicott's feeble character, we are sure that it is not made on the whole an interesting picture, and we do not think it is a true one.

Nor are most of the subordinate sketches of greater interest. There is a want of reticence about the ludicrous sketches, a deficiency of subtlety, and a slight effort, that make them, though seldom caricatured, heavy and hang fire. We are sick of Dr. Pigwidgeon, and Professor Chatterton, and Mr. Broad, almost before we have begun to be amused with them ;—they are not caricatures,—but they bore one as much as if they were really present iu the flesh instead of being mere moral essences distilled for our amusement. It is a great

art that of distilling the laughable part of tiresome people so as to make them perfectly entertaining on paper; and Mr. Savage has not in this book hit it. He gives us the gross corporeal atoms of absurdity which oppress us, not merely the intellectual outline of it sketched by a fine and nimble mind. To show what we mean by a contrast, Reuben Medlicott's father, the vicar, who is not absurd but only common-place, is yet not common-place in the picture. There is just that intellectual touch about the sketch which makes the character of an ordinary parson by no means ordinary reading. He is only one of the minor sketches, but he is quite the best of them.

The redeeming picture of the book, which strikes us as the most effective of all Mr. Savage's literary efforts, is Dean Wynd- ham, afterwards Bishop of Shrewsbury, the hero's grandfather.

From the first moment when ho shows his " broad pugnacious face, with an immense aquiline nose and an acre of well-shaven chin," all overshadowed by his shovel hat " with its particularly intolerant cock," over the vicar's hedge, to his last disappearance from the book, he is uniformly admirable, and will remain as

distinct in the memory as Archdeacon Grantly or Mr. Harding himself. There was evilently an idea, we think, in Mr. Savage's mind of putting him into some competition with Archdeacon Grantly, for there is a bedroom scene in which the bishop, in his bedroom, and with his nightcap on, converses with his wife, that cannot but call to mind Archdeacon Grantly's communings with his wife in the same sacred. precincts. There is, however, no sort of imitation; the whole

conception is different ; the man himself has a larger character than any of Mr. Trollope's Churchmen,—something of genuine power in it;—and the execution, though it is broader, and contains none of those admirable half-reserved, half-expressed touches in which Mr. Trollope excels so much, yet is quite as good.

The Dean is warm-hearted, learned, enterprising, dictatorial, sagacious, very violent by fits, but very soon convinced that his violence was all the wrong way, thundering against the Roman Catholic claims at the beginning of the story, ashamed of himself and anxious (not merely for worldly motives) to concede them, by the time they are granted,--a vigorous, restless, absolute old man. Here is an admirable picture of the Dean at breakfast :-

" The house being in such confusion, everything was done in the library, which was of course not much behind the other apartments in point of disorder. The books lay on the floor in heaps, for the shelves had been just painted, and the Dean eat at his breakfast amidst a chaos of classics and divinity, simultaneously eating and read- ing with equal voracity, now and then striding to the door to shout directions to the painters, and bellowing to Mrs. Reeves for hot water to shave. He always used his library or study as his dressing-room, wherever he resided. In the present state of his house his toilet was in perfect keeping with the general disorder of the establishment. He shaved himself in a little shattered looking-glass, which he set upon the mantle-piece, not even waiting until he had quite finished his meal, but travelling backwards and forwards between the breakfast-table and the hearth-stone, uttering all manner of strange noises and internal rum- ' blings, to the consternation of his gentle grandson, who had never seen • or heard so much of the private life of his maternal ancestor before. Mingled, however, with the inarticulate sounds elicited partly by the difficulty of eating and shaving at the same time, partly by the embar- rassment of seeing more chins than one in the mirror, came forth at intervals a multitude of sound, hard-headed maxims and receipts for success in life, intended for Reuben's use, and probably more likely to remain impressed on his own memory, delivered as they were, than if they had been imparted with more dignity in any portico or academic shade. 'Aim at being a great man ; there is something great in even failing to become great. Encourage the passions that lead to greatness ; there are three of them ; love of business, love of reputation, and love of power. But if you would bo a good man, which is better than being a great one, you must love two things besides ; you must love truth and you must love mankind. I put truth foremost; God forbid I should give man the precedence ; nine men out of ten are scoundrels, not that we ought not to love scoundrels, or try to love them, but it is a difficult thing to do,—the cutler who made this razor was an arrant scoundrel.' The Dean had prepared Reuben for this last remark by a series of grunts with which he had interpolated the latter part of his speech.

He gulped down some coffee, soaping the edge of the cup in doing so, and resumed in a new track of observation, while Reuben sat imbibing his counsels, and gazing almost with terror at the bloody harvest which the bad razor was reaping. 'Preserve due order among the objects of your respect and veneration. Place them in your mind as you do pounds, shillings, and pence in your arithmetic. Respect piety and virtue first, genius and learning in the second place, rank and autho- rity in the third when they are not disgraced in the persons of their possessors—they often are.' Here he finished his operations on one side of his face and refreshed himself with some coffee and toast before he proceeded to the other moiety."

We cannot find room for the very clever bedroom dialogue to which we have alluded; indeed it would not be intelligible with- out detailed explanations of the incidents to which it refers,— but we must quote one brief description of the bishop after his third wife has presented him with a son :— " We have lost sight of the Bishop for some time, indeed a little too long, for the fact that Mrs. Wyndham had astonished the world by presenting the venerable prelate with a son was important enough to have deserved an earlier notice. It engrossed his Lordship's thoughts, and swelled his pride and importance more than if he had been appointed to an additional see. At home or abroad, this marvellous infant was seldom out of the paternal sight for a moment, his extravagant anxieties making poor Blanche almost appear in the light of a stepmother to her baby. It was to be seen puling opposite to the Bishop in his coach as he drove to the House of Lords. It had already accompanied him to a visitation, and frequently, when clergymen waited on him in his library to transact ecclesiastical business their ears were saluted with little squeakings out of a corner, proceeding from the cot or the cradle where little Tom Wyndham was deposited."

If all the elements in the book were like that especially appro- priated to Dr. Wyndham, it would be a story of great power. As it is we cannot help thinking it Mr. Savage's ablest and yet probably his dullest work. It is not a readable book as a whole ; but the part devoted to the Dean is so good that the picture should be disinterred from the rest of the story, for it undoubtedly deserves to live. It is original, full of humour, and full of power.