25 SEPTEMBER 1869, Page 17

BOOKS.

MALBONE.*

Is not this Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson the same who com- manded a negro regiment during the Civil War, and whose narra- tives of his work and adventures in the Atlantic Monthly attracted general attention by their graphic humour and their picturesque and poetical descriptions? In any case, this bright novellette Malbone is worthy of him, if it is not his. It has much fresh- ness and grace of the kind that it is now perhaps somewhat of a mannerism to call idyllic, a true knowledge of character, great liveliness of delineation, and a very happy humour. As with many of the New England writers,—as with Hawthorne especially,—the reflectiveness and sentiment are a little in excess of the action and the practical interest, giving the tale a somewhat msthetic and reverieish flavour, as if life looked a somewhat far-off thing to the writer, and had been recorded on a retrospect of centuries, or observed from a shadowy and tranquil recess. How strong this peculiarity was in the case of Hawthorne every one has admitted. But it seems to us to belong, more or less, to all the New England literary men, to Lowell, to Holmes, to Longfellow, to Emerson, and to our present author. It is somewhat strange that the literary type of an eminently practical nation like the Yankees —a nation as yet excelling rather in practical detail than even in broad practical enterprise of the larger kind—should be "so clear, so calm, so still," so like the reflections of life as we see them in an unruffled lake. Yet so it seems to us to be. Except Mrs. Stowe, who has nothing of this peculiarity, we do not remember a single New England author of power and merit who does not produce on the mind the impression of surveying life from a calm speculative retirement, and of embodying more culture than passion, more reflection than fire or force in his style.

This novellette is certainly a remarkable instance of the same typllusiThe study of character in it is thoughtful and intellectual ; the descriptive passages are of the same clear and truthful beauty that we find in Longfellow and Hawthorne ; the principal character, from which the story is named, is marked by precisely that type of moral taint to which over-culture and over-refinement is most liable,—such, for instance, as that of which Hawthorne has given us a more elaborate study in the hero of his Scarlet Letter; and the humour which is chiefly expressed in the picture of one clever and * Alatbone: an Oldport Romance. By Thomas Wentworth Higginaon. London: Macmillan. 1869.

eccentric character, the old maiden aunt of the piece, is not the sparkling and overflowing fun of a mind full of the odd

paradoxes and contrasts of human life, but the subtler and more sifted humour of fantastic conception elaborated by a play- ful fancy. Like so many of the finer studies of the New England authors, this little story conveys the notion of a more perfectly refined, and cultivated, and thinner intellectual atmosphere than even the most refined of our English authors breathe. What the explanation of this phenomenon may be we hardly know ; but that Malbone is a new illustration of this finely and somewhat over delicately-wrought texture of the New England literature, there is no question. Take the character, for instance, of Philip Malbone, on the weakness and insincerity of which the little tale turns. His heart, says the author, was " multivalve,"—that is, could beat separately and sincerely for a dozen not very absorbing objects, and indulge a real tenderness with relation to each. " When he had once loved a woman, or even fancied that he loved her, he built for her a shrine that was never dismantled, and in which a very little faint incense would sometimes be found burning for years after ; he never quite ceased to feel a languid thrill at the mention of her name ; he would make even for a past love the most generous sacrifices of time, convenience, truth perhaps,—everything, in short, but the present love. To those who had given him all that an undivided heart can give, he would deny nothing but an undivided heart in return. The misfortune was that this was the only thing they cared to possess." And again :—" If it was sometimes forced upon him that all this ended in anguish to some of these various charmers, first or last, then there was always in reserve the pleasure of repentance. He was very winning and generous in these repentauces, and he enjoyed them so much that they were often repeated." The study of Philip Malbone is very subtle and skilful. Only, perhaps, the author yields too much to his dislike of this favourite aversion of his, and paints him just at the last (where he denies Malbone even the generosity to have taken upon himself the task of sheltering his victim from the disgrace he had brought upon her) worse than he is, or at least much worse than anything for which he has prepared the reader would warrant. That he is selfish enough when he can hide from himself the evil of what he is doing, when he has the plea of a tide of fate to excuse him, is evident ; but the impression conveyed is that of a character with sufficient generosity to make a real atonement, so far at least as any single act, as distinguished from the habitual self-denial of a life, could make it, for evil clearly and unquestionably of his doing. There is just a touch of over-painting in our author's last outburst against Philip Malbone, when he ridicules the notion that Malbone would have married Emilia, had she survived the iclaircissement with her husband, and been able to procure a divorce from him. If the author has painted this character truly before, he paints it too darkly there.

Emilia is a mere sketch, but a graphic one, but we can hardly say the same for the ideal heroine, Emilia's half-sister, and Philip Malbone's betrothed, Hope. This is one of those ideals which the Americans seem so fond of drawing, and in which, to our appre- hension, they always fail,—that character of rich, springy, out-door health, "born to tread upon the forest-floor," with an "inexhaustible freshness of physical organization" that "seemed to open the windows of her soul and make for her a new heaven and earth every day,"—a character with mental processes of "peculiar and almost embarrassing directness, as if truth had for the first time found a perfectly translucent medium." "Her girl- hood had in it a certain dignity as of a virgin priestess or sibyl," —and so forth. All that seems to us the vaguest abstraction, which brings no individual before the mind, but only one of those haunting ideals which possess strongly the American imagination, though destitute of all living detail. Such a form of words as that about Hope's girlhood having a certain dignity "as of a virgin priestess or sibyl," conveys no notion at all to us of any indivi- dual,—our acquaintance not having lain much among virgin priestesses and sibyls. And this is the main defect of the story, that the figure of Hope, which is an essential one to the lifelikeness of the whole, is left entirely in the vague abstraction of this favourite American ideal. Kate, the elegant and limited, the skilful in costumes, the darling of her old aunt, the easy, cheery, sensible, self-reliant, little-expecting Kate, is lifelikeness itself, compared with her ideal cousin ; but then her picture is not essential to the story, and that of the ideal cousin is.

Yet, after all, what is to our minds the best figure in this lively and graphic little tale is that of the said Aunt Jane, who is an embodiment of all the author's peculiarly playful and fantastic humour. Few sketches of character have pleased us more for a long time than this of the whimsical, sensible, life-enjoying invalid, who " kept house from an easy chair, ruled her dependents with severity tempered by wit, and by the very sweetest voice in which reproof was ever uttered." Her habit of never praising her servants, "but if they did anything particularly well, rebuking them retrospectively, and asking them why they had never done it well before," does not belong exclusively to her crisp, kindly, and humorous temperament. But her hatred of everything vague and irresolute, her dismay at small difficulties and pleasure in large ones, her decisive rejection of the temptation which had once pre- sented itself to her to become " monotonously " amiable,—her impatience of stupid people, and her fund of grotesque illustration, are traits which blend into a picture of almost unique freshness and pungency. What can be better than this outbreak against her little servant :— " I am never tired of anything,' said Aunt Jane, except my maid Ruth. And I should not be tired of her, if it had pleased Heaven to endow her with strength of mind to sew on a button. Life is very rich to me. There is always something new in every season ; though, to be sure, I cannot think what novelty there is, just now, except a choice variety of spiders. There is a theory that spiders kill flies. But I never miss a fly, and there does not seem any natural scourge divinely appointed to kill spiders, except Ruth. Even she does it so feebly that I see them come back and make faces at her. I suppose they are faces ; I do not understand their anatomy, but it must be a very unpleasant one."

For humour of the playful, fantastic sort, it would be difficult to match this speech, especially the final objection to the ordinary theory of the spider's mission, that the speaker herself never misses a fly ; and the picture of the spider making faces at the inefficient maid, a picture so quickly and conscientiously qualified by the honest confession of ignorance as to whether spiders have faces to make or not. It is impossible to conceive a sketch of more grace- ful and subtle humour of the grotesquely-meditative kind than that of Aunt Jane.

On the whole, this novellette, though imperfect through the vague ideality of the heroine, and not intense in the interest of its plot, certainly belongs to the higher regions of literature. The descriptions of nature are full of accurate observation and poetical feeling ; the characters are most of them real, though slight studies ; the purity of the tone is so keenly marked that it suggests throughout the sensation of mountain air ; and the humour which lights up the little story is genuine and original.