MR. SALA'S "DUTCH" STUDIES.*
Tit= sketches, being Mr. Sala's, are of course striking and realistic. Yet, though the public are in some sense gainers, we doubt if Mr. Sala's literary reputation will be increased by their collection and publication. For, while they prove that Mr. Sala has gained much m freedom of manner and in general strength, since he contributed these sketches to Mr. Dickens's Household Words, many of which are stamped with the weakly mannerism of the parasitic school which Dickens drew round him, they also show that he has fallen more and more in love with ugly subjects as his thought has grown inde- pendent and his imagination more mature. Here he sketches im- partially all that he sees—the good with the evil, the comely with the uncomely—taking, for instance, the kind little culinary "Saint Zita" with the severe professed cooks, and the "pretty old lady" with the hard oppressive old housekeepers. But in the Maturest of his works, "The Seven Sons of Mammon," the shadows have encroached rapidly on the lights; all is repulsive, and most is hideous; in short, we find Mr. Sala his very "earthly creed re- touching here and there and deepening every line," till all the pleasanter features have become coarse, if not revolting, and all the meaner ones stand out grimmer and harder than ever. These Dutch pictures, therefore, while they certainly serve to mark Mr. Sala's growth in power since he produced them, mark also the rapid growth of his apparently fierce literary thirst for monstrous subjects. There are unpleasant studies in this book, but nothing that approaches in ugliness the chief figures in "The Seven Sons of Mammon," or even many of the side-characters, as for example, the picture of the boarding-house in Bergen-op-Zoom Terrace, presided over by the loathsome Mrs. Cmsar Donkin, compared with which " Todgers's" in "Martin Chuzzlewit" appears an abode of angels. In the present volume, Mr. Sala has anxiously followed Mr. Dickens's uniform habit of relieving the uglier realities of life either by humour or by contrast. But the manner was either too foreign to his uncouth genius, or has worn off with the growth of different tendencies ; and hence there seems in these early essays a kind of false promise of geniality of which his later writings give no glimpse. Yet even in these sketches Mr. Sala's imagination seems strong almost in inverse proportion to the beauty of the object which fascinates it. There is a faint and gleamy atmosphere of borrowed sunshine about his worship for the "pretty old lady," but there is a genuine air of homespun earnestness about Such a picture as the following, which, though it might have been written by Dickens, has more in it of Mr. Sala's personal bias : " A S HOUSEKEEPER to a Single or Invalid Gentleman, a Single „M._ Person of experience. Can be highly recommended. Address, Alpha, at Mr. mutts, 72, 1i:inmate-street, Holborn.
" Attached relatives and friends of Sir Dian Lines, Bart.—who, beyond occa- sional aberrations and delusions respecting his head being is beehive, and himself heir to the throne of Great Britain, is a harmless, helpless, paralytic, bedridden old gentleman enough—may be safely assured that Alpha is the housekeeper for him—Alpha, otherwise represented by Miss Rudd. " Mr. Mutts, trunkmaker, of Kingsgate-street, Holborn, knows Miss Budd. Does he noir Ugh ! Who but a meek, quiet, little, widowed trunkmaker, with three daughters (grown up, and all inclined to a redness at the nose), would know that terrible female half as long as he has done? She lodges with him in the frequent intervals between her situations. Hang her, she do,' says Mutts to himself, as he is busy at work. . . . " Miss Rudd—she is tall, lanky, and bony I She has some jet ornaments, in heavy links, about her neck ; but, resembling the fetters over the gate of the Old Bailey, they have not a decorative effect. She wears a faded black merino dress, the retlexions from which are red and rust. Her feet are long and narrow, like canoes. Her hands, when she has those hideous black mittens on, always remind me of nnboiled lobsters. . . .
" Not only to Sir Dian Limes, but to Thomas Tallboys, Esq. (known, when in the House, from his taciturnity, as Mum' Tallboys), Miss Rudd would be an eligible retainer. That stiff, stern, melancholy, silent man would find a treasure in her. Trestles, the footman, who is more than half-brother to a mute, would have a grim and silent respect for her. Her lank canoe-like shoes would go noiselessly about the stairs • into Mr. Tallboys's ghastly dining-room, where there is a Turkey carpet, of which the faded colours seem to have sunk through the floor, like spectres ; into the study, where there are great bookcases of vellum- bound volumes, which seem to have turned pale with fright at the loneliness of their habitation, a view of the Street of Tombs at Pompeii, and a model of an ancient sarcophagus—the study where every morning she would find Mr. Tall- boys in a dressing-gown, like a tartan winding-abeet, with a bony paper-knife cutting the leaves of the Registrar-General's returns, which he will have sent to him weekly ; into the silent kitchen, where an imposing and gleaming batterie de • Death Pictures ; with some Skeichss is the Fiemiels Manner. By George Augustus Sala. (Tinsley Brothers.) cuisine (never used but twice a year) blinks lazily at the preparations for his daily chop ; into the mournful housekeeper's room, garnished with unused sweets and condiments; into the strange crypts and vaults of the silent cellar, would Miss Rudd roam noiselessly, gloomily. Mr. Tallboys will, after she has served him for a year, have the highest respect for her. She is a person,' he will write to his friend Colonel Vertebra, Judge Advocate of the colony of Kensalgrenia, of singular discretion and reticence.' When he dies he will leave her a considerable sum in the mortuary securities, South Sea annuities. Then, perhaps, she will espouse the grim Mr. Trestles, and conduct a dreary lodging-house in some dreary street adjoining an obsolete square; or, adhering to celibacy, retire to a neat sarco- phagus cottage in the Mile-end-road, or the vicinity of Dalstoa."
Mr. Sala's justification, as it may be called, of his artistic per- formances, is that he belongs to the Dutch school of artists; that is, we suppose, that he prefers homely life to ideal pictures—the common brown bread and cottage fiddler, to the brilliant feasts and minstrelsy of the castle. But if this be what he means, it is a very imperfect plea for his own school of art. He does not love what is homely, so far as we can see, at all; he does love what is uncouth and ugly even to the verge of the monstrous. It is not the poor man's but so much as the squalid wealth of the pawnbroker's shop that in- terests and delights him • not the common lot of the working man, so much as the wretchedness which scowls at poverty and slides into crime. Teuiers and Ostade, Mr. Sala's ideals, paint common life with a brilliant touch, but their literary disciple, if he be one, prefers to study the vulgar and ugly aspects of common life. Even when, in his later works, he tries to paint a mind intrinsically noble, he is not content without disfiguring it by a coarse body, coarse speech, or slovenly habits. If he describes a fair exterior, he puts the ugliness inside instead of out. In short, if he is of the Dutch school of paint- ing in literature at all, he must be taken as the literary analogue of such a painter as Deaner, who almost always selects repulsive sub- jects, and always paints the ugliness with the most anxious care, giving us every wrinkle in a weazened face without any of the wise experience or mellow charity of age ; nay, apparently seizing with de- light on every indication that Time has been stronger than either man or God, and has set his mark in the unmeaning care and worry of physical infirmity and vulgar decrepitude. We do not mean that Mr. Sala takes no wider sweep than such an artist as Denner ; this would be unjust to his manifest power and versatility; but only that he has the same inexplicable pleasure in depicting the various triumphs of matter over mind, in working in not merely common but vulgar materials, in preferring to paint slouching slipshod misery, and the foulest corners of life, to any delineation of excellence or order. He has told us very candidly in the preface to these republished sketches whither his genius tends :
" It is probable that, had I not drifted into authorship, I should have been a broker's man. I can even remember in early life once 'taking stock' in a theatrical wardrobe, and once making out the Christmas bills for a fashionable tailor; and I can recal the delight with which, in a neat round hand, I expatiated upon ' one demon's dress, complete,' 'six page's tunics and tights,' and again upon one best superfine Saxony broad-cloth frock-coat, with silk sleeve and skirt lining buttons and binding.' On that same art of inventory-making and stock-taking I still take my stand. Whatever success I have to be thankful for in a life of incessant and painful labour—never without censure, seldom relieved by en- couragement or praise—pursued in sickness and sorrow, in poverty and obscurity, has been due to the pen and inkhorn of the inventory-maker, to persistence m describing the things I have seen, and to a habit of setting down the common things I have thought about them: exactly as they have been presented to me, and exactly as they have occurred.".
Only it is not "one demon's dress complete," but a hundred of them, which Mr. Sala gives us in his works with the most minute and grimmest detail. Yet, after all, it is the demon's dress rather than the demon. Mr. Sala's most hideous characters remind us of those old mask-frontispieces to Terence and Plautus, in which we used to study with awe in our school days the engravings of the very ugly masks which were supposed to have been worn by the various actors of Terence's plays in the Roman theatre. Such masks Mr. Sala produces in great number out of the teeming stores of his imagina- tive lumber-room, and he takes great pleasure in completing the cos- tume, with the degree of slovenliness, or shabby-grotesque ornament which will best show off the unshapely grin or frown of the particular mask selected. But, as we said before, it is the external side of every one that he gives you, and only the external side. The charac- ters are appraised with as much minuteness as the furniture, and in the same kind of way. We know all the external marks of them with the most perfect and profound accuracy—their demeanour, but not generally themselves. Accordingly, with that class of cha- racters in which manner and habit are everything—in which, when you know the mould of daily purpose and occupation you know all—and these are the principal studies of the present book—Mr. Sala is very successful. But, whenever he attempts anything deeper and more individual, there goes with his description a kind of feeling that these are mere invoiced traits which the person him- self may only have assumed after all, and which he may throw of as easily as an actor does his theatrical costume. But this criticism scarcely applies to the present book. In it Mr. Sala adheres pretty closely to the sort of customary habits which belong to classes of men rather than to individuals ; and the externality of his descrip- tions is, therefore, less observable. Mr. Sala's power, and also his weakness as a literary artist, lies in the pleasure which he takes in accumulating, graphic accidental touches round the main centres of his picture. We all know the effect this has in a photograph—the pleased surprise with which we fix upon the trait of a brooch faithfully reproduced, or a protuberant pocket forcing itself unexpectedly on our notice. Mr. Sala copies the photograph in multiplying this kind of minute satisfactions. If he is describing one scene, he is sure to enhance our belief in it by deviating from the natural and expected characteristics to some stray feature which we had not looked for in that connexion, and which, therefore, gives so much the more the sense of a present reality since it is not described merely out of the imagination. For example, in the midst of the description of an old clothesman's depredations, we have the following parenthetic digression which we italicize, and which really adds a great deal more sense of reality than any detail more strictly appropriate to the matter in hand could have done : "There was likewise a blue satin handkerchief with a white spot—what is popularly, I believe, known as a bird's-evefogle—which was missing; and though, of course, I would not insinuate anything to the disadvantage of the carriers of the bag, the disappearance will be allowed to be strange. Mrs. Gomm, however, my friend's landlady (who has sheltered so many medical students steath her roof that she may almost be considered a member of the profession, and who reeds the Lancet on Sunday afternoons with rife n relish)—Mrs. Guam now stoutly avers that lie did annex them ; declaring, in addition, her firm belief that he appropriated at the same time, and stowed away in his bag, a feather-bed of considerable size, and a miniature portrait of the Otaheitan chief who was supposed to have eaten a portion of Captain Cook."
Mrs. Gumm's Sunday readings of The laacei bring home the whole picture with great €clat. It seems to us that in the accumu- lation of these little accidental and unexpected details lies Mr. Sala's main strength as a literary artist of the Dutch school, but also his main weakness. For it is the graphic effect of this expe- dient which induces him in his pictures of individual character to rely on such external touches rather than on a thorough conception of the character itself, and to make a succession of isolated scenes and sketches do the duty of a regular development of temper, purpose, and social relations. We must add, on leaving this book, that there is an unusually large number of mere printer's errors, which should be corrected in any future edition.
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