THE CRUST AND THE CAKE.*
A QUIET story, not without a quiet beauty, and some quiet power; power of the kind met with occasionally in some preacher who, in the very midst of uttering mere platitudes, drops hin voice as he touches some deeper string which vibrates in the hearts- of his audience because its first thrill is in his own. By the way, what is the secret of some people's liking for sermons? The ques- tion is apropos of our subject, for our story has a decidedly strong affinity with preaching. It is the fashion, we all know, to affect to despise sermons as we affect to despise stories with a moral, or- affect a very strong contempt for " common-place " people. "It is not affectation." Possibly not ; common-place people are apt to. be decidedly acid sermons, nine out of ten singularly meaning- less ; and the stories with a moral have often nothing else to re- commend them ; indeed, make that one fact, like charity, cover a huge number of sins. Yet, after all, it strikes us, an exceptionid class claims a monopoly of opinion in this matter, and that there- remains the far wider number who like to be preached to, from. a safe distance; that is, with anything approaching conscious individuality dropped ; and there is a subtle reason for this having its roots deeper than might at first appear, and which is the secret of the success and failure of more preaching than perhaps we are disposed to admit. It is that where the preacher is worthy of his work, he dares say what the most intimate friend, what even the dual inner self dare- scarcely venture ; can bring to the full light of day thoughts whose proportions have grown magnified in the darkness of the heart's inner recesses. Doubts which have gone well nigh to. drive their possessor mad are shorn at least of their terror when shared by another, and to utter is to show at least a capacity for- sharing them ; aspirations after light which are but gropings after God, which never get themselves told, are met as with the strong grasp of a friendly hand, by the revealings of an inner life, which has its human growth in the speaker's experience. "Common- place" people are not good at making other than common-place friendships, and we have known men, through the thick rind of whose apparent common-places it were impossible to penetrate, bearing a life-long load of dull agony, they never dreamt of getting a friend to lighten, saved week by week from a sense of inner loneliness by the mental sympathy they got all unconsciously on his part at the preacher's hands, from some man skilled to tell of conflict not won through without many a scar. This was and is the secret of the influence of men wide as the poles apart in intellectual power ; men like Robertson and Maurice, Thomas Aquinas, or Jeremy Taylor; of Madame de Guyon or Eugenie de Guerin. And in its lesser humbler degree, for we have not wandered as far as may seem from our mark, it is the secret of the possible success of books like the one before us. The students of Shakespeare—and their name is not legion, though his readers be many,—or the audience which appreciates " Romola," can well afford to pass by a little tale in which, nevertheless, they would not find wanting the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.
• The Cruse and the Cake. By Edward Garrett. 3 vols. London Tinsley. 1869, After saying this, we may seem, perhaps, in our further remarks, to be guilty of the most heinous of the sins of criticism, "damning with faint praise." It is not so. "Mr. Garrett" has not attained a literary success. Looked at artisti- cally, he may even be said to have failed ; he has found it necessary to label his every sketch ; and has preached unmercifully, in his determination that we should not miss the moral with which he would adorn his tale. But then his preaching is very good, his label sometimes worth more than his sketch, as for instance, in the first pages of the book, which set forth the history of one Sir Richard Benbow, who was not born Sir Richard, but was a nameless foundling adopted by a worthy Puritan couple, who lost their lives in the Great Plague. When at times the worthy Bridget is disposed to cheek the boy's miserly spirit by a reminder of how ill he might have fared with himself had his foster-father been of his mind, her husband stops her with the quiet hint, "I mind the parson said, we must plant good deeds wherever we can, and we must not pull them up to see how they grow, else we'll kill them altogether,"—a remark worthy of Mrs. Poyser. This boy grows rich by saving, and ultimately leaves his money to found himself a name. Sir Richard Benbow's bequest is from genera- tion to generation to furnish means every seven years to apprentice two lads in the parish of St. Aubyn, to be selected by the churchwardens, and the fortunes of two of the successful candidates for this bequest form part of this story ; it is a homely one, with hardly an unnatural or strained incident throughout, and it must needs touch somewhere all whose lives have touched life at many points. " Benbow Place" contains just about as much variety, as many memories, as varied individualities as we might meet in any " Benbow Place" anywhere. No more, but just such as we should be quite sure to find there ; and it is, we fancy, this touch of absolute truth which lends a charm to a tale almost too simple for analysis. There is a Mrs. Deane, the landlady of the boarding-house of the place, who, say- ing nothing absolutely false, yet leaves the listener sore and scarified, a woman who fills up the meagreness of her nature with the excitement of backbiting. And then Mrs. Forres, with her son John,—we have all seen Mrs. Forms some- where, the little kindly woman, one of those "who are said to bear things bravely, and look as if that capacity had been kept in constant practice." Throughout the three volumes it is rather what the author says about the people he has created than the people themselves that interest us. He describes Mrs. Forres and her friendship for the girl who claims her sympathy, and ends a scene between them by observing, "The girl had a sound and 'quick judgment of her own, sounder and quicker than her friend's; so a man may be stronger than his staff, yet his staff supports him." And, in the comment, we have a revelation of a character with which we are all familiar, and probably should, some of us, sorely miss ; but it is the comment, not the sketch, which reveals Mrs. Fosses to us. So, too, the secret source of the weariness of many a life is noted in the sentence, Alas ! for "those who must survey their own faded lives in the clear glass of monotonous leisure."
Mr. Garrett has chosen his characters and scenes amid the ordinary byways of life ; the two lads, Charlie Deane and Arthur Maynard, the recipients of old Sir Richard's charity, began life together, and the old miser's bequest is scarcely a blessing to either of them. The poverty of Charles's nature comes out every- where ; but we think, during his short engagement to the principal heroine of the story, it is characterized by a brutal selfishness, which, however true to his nature it might be to feel, he was the last man so openly to express. Maynard's life is warped by his dis- taste for the monotony of the office life to which he is bound. He had in him great capacities for good ; but yet, ere the end came, he was, to all appearance, as great a villain as any in the piece. He goes to sea as a common sailor, seeking forgetfulness in a life of maddest dissipation ; but his better nature is never utterly murdered, — in the hours of lowest revelry, remorse was alive :—
rnAnd cruellest of all, memories of himself, innocent and light-hearted, ull of the promise of noble qualities, which lay writhing within him still. Fer callous or cold natures, Satan takes easily, and leaves in com- parative peace, but your good hearts and your fine dispositions he can only destroy by slow tortures, so terrible, that this poor common sailor sometimes dared to think it would be a sort of fiendish relief to wake in hell, and find himself all devil!"
The finest character in the story—Magdalen King—is spoiled by her speeches being always too long. What she has to say is, indeed, good enough ; but we are alway conscious that in real life she would have stopped half-way, and never have got through all those long sentences, or if she had, would no longer have been the kind of woman she is here represented.
The interest of the story really centres in Amy Maynard, whom we cannot better describe than in Magdalen King's words as "tart before she ripened, like a young apple ;" and John Forres, the only son of a mother worse than widowed, whose absent husband is a perpetual drain on their slender resources ; we should do scant justice to this simple story if we did not give the scene which lets us into much of the family history. John has been earning eight shillings a week, giving his mother six, and now at the beginning of a new year the boy is indulging in a bright dream as to the possibility of joining a French class, and spending a carefully-saved ten shillings in the luxury of procuring a present for his mother, and one or two much coveted volumes for himself ; he returns home, warm with the inner heat of pleasurable thoughts :-
"He drank one cup of tea, and ate two slices of bread, before his mother spoke. Then she began= John,' and paused. Her voice was so low, and her face shaded by her hand, that her son was not sure she had spoken.—' Did you speak, mother?' he asked.—' Yes,' she replied, suddenly dropping her hand upon the papers, and raising her face and meeting his eyes, but only for a moment. John, dear, have you spent any of the money that you keep out of your salary ? No, mother, not yet. I have not wanted anything,' he answered, with a strange sinking of heart.—' Then will you lend me seven shillings, dear ? ' she
asked, with a sad I want it for the butcher's bill.' John took out his half-sovereign. He had only got the piece of gold that day, by giving change to the sub-editor of the City Tablet. Re laid it down before his mother, but he could not say a word. It was one of the supreme moments of his life—the first of those agonies in which a man learns the awful mysteries of his spiritual existence. As in the face of sudden death, one remembers the pattern of a mother's gown, or the torn leaf of a spelling-book, both long ago forgotten, so John felt the wild protest of vanishing dreams, which till then he did not know he had indulged. It was natural to think of the French class, and the salary; but why of Amy Maynard, and a grand wedding which he had sseetetningthoef weeklife b e()wf arse o? Long h a ngedg and evenvl eo nn gafterwards, thememory when the wh
ole pain was deadened and dim, he remembered the secret it disclosed to him."
It is just a homely story, this ; simple enough, over-sententious often, but with a something in it which defies analysis, but which will most surely commend it ; not to the surfeited novel-reader, nor to a fastidious literary taste, but to a class who are not what, in our arrogant ignorance we dub them, common-place.
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