LOVE THE DEBT.*

BASIL " must be sharply admonished, for his waste of excellent materials. He has given us three volumes containing wit and wisdom, shrewd observation, and refined perception of character enough to furnish half-a-dozen readable novels, and he has so neglected the arrangement and orderly sequence of his story that our bewilderment is at least equal to our satisfaction, as we are invited now to laugh at clerical humours, now to be shocked by Australian customs, now to admire a self-possessed heroine as mistress of a national school, and then to find her blase at Rome, and drowning in the Bay of Genoa. The author needs the discipline of but moderate success at Mudie's, but if he be diligent and teachable, he has it in him to become a notable recorder of what he very keenly perceives to be modern blemishes and urgent problems of English society.

The Chronicles of Barchester, the foibles and the respectability of its clergy, are already out of date. A whole crop of quite new parsonic phenomena are springing up, in the atmosphere heated by Ritualism and cooled by pessimism,—that ecclesiastical atmosphere which is more and more thinned by the demand made on its elasticity, until it differs so little from external air that all manner of creatures which for eighteen centuries have been reckoned unclean may live and thrive in it. There is an infinite fund of pathos and humour in the accidents which occur as the old world of England changes to the new, and nowhere will there be sharper lights and shadows, nowhere will

• Love the Debt. By " Bull!' London : Smith, Elder, and Co. 1882.

the time of transition be more interesting, in its confusions of habit and tree feeling, than within the pale of English Con- formity. " Basil" has perceived how mach is being laid bare of the depths of our national life. He has got together a series of slightly connected sketches of the life of a West- Riding town. He did not trouble himself with the art of creation, as he strung his notes and anecdotes together. So his novel wants form, but it is not therefore void. Its central interest is one that will touch many an educated mind. The abandonment of faith—by the hero of the story, the Rev. George Knee- shaw—in the English Established Church as a dogmatic teacher, not his affection for the heroine, Miss Masters, not his wild life in Melbourne, is the key-note of the novel, but his position as a doubting curate in the manufacturing town of Welton. It is struck in the third chapter of the first volume, . it is repeated even more emphatically in the account of his friend, another and a far more interesting clergyman, Mr.

Archer Lawley, who tramples, with better success, but with more anguish of struggle, on his intellectual difficulties, by physical and moral self-sacrifice. We might multiply quota- tions that might better amuse our readers from a book that is bristling with good things, but the following description is becoming every day so increasingly apposite to many, that we give it as the motif which dominates all the rest of " Basil's " work :-

"Less than a year after Kneeshaw's ordination, he began to find that he had entered a haunted house, or rather a house with a haunted room in it. We cannot better express his position in the

Church. In most respects, it was a very pleasant position But this position he held on the terms of his acceptance of creeds, articles, and doctrines that seemed to him to conflict with each other, and with reason His intercourse with the Welton Clergy rather deepened than lightened his sense of responsibility, for no reasonable man could listen to their arguments without his faith being shaken. . . . . At first he faced and fought his doubts fiercely but they were not laid. When he seemed to have exorcised them, they returned sevenfold and irresistible, till he fled before them, and lived now, as we have said, in a house with a haunted room in it, whose door he shunned to open, and shuddered even to pass. He declined controversy, put aside apologies and aids to faith, where he found 'no light, but rather darkness visible,' which but manifested the difficulties they were meant to clear, and returned to his study of natural history, in which he delighted most, and found most distraction. Lock the haunted chamber as he would, however, he could not lock out the horror of it from his mind. It was always there,—latent or evident, and affected his whole life, in some respects, curiously enough, for good. Practically, scepticism wrought in him the zeal of a religion. It made him sometimes sour and cynical in speech, especially in his intercourse with his brother clergy, but in

act it seemed to &able his natural kindliness. His natural kindliness was raised by his scepticism into a religion, in part through his eagerness to atone for the heterodoxy of his life, and in part through the hope that his life might react upon his thoughts, to their reconversion."

His friend, the Rev. Archer Lawley, Vicar of Fenton, a Broad Churchman, with whom George Kneeshaw spent every spare hour, was,—

" By the accounts of his clerical brethren, hardly even a Church- man, not to say a Christian. They said that he once took a service without a surplice (the vestry key being lost), that he read the burial office over unbaptised adults and infants, that he had attended the funeral of a Unitarian minister, that he never read the Athanasian Creed, that he spoke of Apostolical Succession as an Irish pedigree, of the two Houses of Convocation as Pyramus and Thisbe played by Bottom and Co., and of Lord Penzance, of the Court of Arches, as Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder."

It is impossible to mistake the earnestness of " Basil " when he touches his themes, and his familiarity with the pain and straggle of an honest mind under the pressure of dogmas which are enforced by an authority that is but chimerical and spectral, gives that sad colour to the background of his experiences on which his wit shines out the more brightly. It acquires here and there the true pathos which must underlie humour, and, more than any book that we have lately read, Love the Debt faces, without nostrnms, without cant or affectation, the gather- ing shadows of the English future. Humour makes the author tolerant of all, except, perhaps, of Ritualistic curates. It is pleasant to meet so natural an Irishman as the Barney McGrath, of Sugg Lane, half Sancho Panza, half Quixote. The

description of his successful word-fence with his priest goes to explain the attitude of the Land League to the Irish clergy, and of the Irish clergy to the League, keeping together in harness, but each trying to dodge the other in all civility. The number of dramatis penance would, indeed, require Fielding's skill to bring them into any sort of unity of composition. The variety is confusing, and we quite understand how in the third volume all "Basil's" puppets become quite unmanageable. Colonel Masters is a characteristic product of our day, quite a likely personage, yet we do not remember to have seen him before in fiction. He suffers from very disagreeable symptoms of the Agnostic disease. He belongs to the new Laputa, and only cares for his child as she exemplifies, in her fits of passion, Mr. Dar- win's theory of emotional expression. While she grows up to be a bright, if somewhat flippant heroine, he devotes himself to a pamphlet on " The CEOCUM in Man." A convenient palsy quenches him in good time, and it might have been better for the coherence of the story, if some others of its people, amusing as they are, could also have been decently stricken with paraplegia. But we would willingly have heard more of Miss Tubbs, the Napoleon of Wefton ecclesiasticism. A hearty, energetic, rich woman, she took to Ritualism because at a London. auction she had chanced to buy some highly ornamental vestments, for which she built a church, and secured a curate to match. " Basil," when he has a mind to draw people and things he does not like, must beware of caricature, and of multiplying anecdotes which we feel to be stock jests, and not traits of character. He makes shrewd remarks on the way in which poor folk use religion, that remind us of George Eliot, and give us curious glimpses of the British workman's theology. It is probably true that the secret of popular preaching among the poor is, if possible, to preach always funeral sermons ; but if that is not possible always, then to explain to them all the mysteries in each sermon. The poor like mysteries to be mysteriously explained. The episode of the crippled boy's illness, when he is on the look-out for stray pence, and earns a shilling by not crying during an operation, that he may keep up his subscription to a burial society which shall pay the expense of his sicknesses and of his funeral, which he looked on as "selfish luxuries he had no right to indulge in," is well given ; as is the death of Minnie, who was numb with terror of the "black box,'." but was pacified when Mabel explained to her that death was not a final relegation for her to " the black man's cellar, scolded to the last by a man in a white shirt." Mabel had to avoid all mention of God, " which Minnie heard daily from her father, and often from her mother, but always coupled inseparably with the name of hell, and with the ideas hell suggests."

We will not attempt to follow the ex-curate Kneeshaw to Melbourne, or Mabel to Italy. The interest of the book and its merits lie in its expression of the conflict of a good heart with the agony and discouragement of the modern struggle for existence. Lawley, the cynic with a passionately-loving heart, the pessimist who sacrifices himself even to the death, is " Basil's " ideal of the highest human life ; and there will be many to sympathise with his blind and unaided pursuit of what is ever the noblest end of man's action,—many to feel with him the desolate loneliness of an antagonism with evil which is not comforted and made sweet and reasonable by the sanctions of divine authority. Lawley is a vivid sketch of that inex- tinguishable hope and enthusiasm which, though revolted from

the old order and ancient dogma, still protest against the crushing facts of victorious evil, and hopeless because faithless struggle for good, in such centres as the Wefton of this book.

In the problems of Wefton life lie " Basil's" real interest, and in discussing them he has plenty to say worth hearing ; and, therefore, we forgive his introduction of a Wefton election, which has absolutely nothing to do with Kneeshaw's and Mabel's long list of disasters and recoveries; and we forgive him the more freely, for his witty explanation of how publicans may be made to see the benefits of social option, and how Yorkahiremen who might dislike Home-rule will agree to any amount of " justice to Ireland," if the Irish voters insist on it. We have not seldom met men such as Pickles, M.P., who "divides human

knowledge exhaustively into two categories worth knowing,—

things he knows, and things not worth knowing ; who shows that his hearers' opinion of them is worthless, if they talk to him of the first ; and if they talk of things he does not know, he

equally demonstrates that their knowledge is worthless." " Basil " has much to learn, if he would write a novel worthy of

his wit and humour, a novel which should be a work of art, and not an album full of pell-mell photographs ; but meantime, we thank him for sayings tersely pat, such as " The strength of love is as the strength of the man in love ;" or, " School is the one chance of the children of the poor, and our one chance with

them ;" or, the Irishman's view of the fitness of things, when be observes, " I'll be bound a cabbage thinks a rose low, because it can't be biled ;" or, best of all, the sentiment which is, indeed,

the motive of the whole book, "There is no life more heroic than to choose to be unheroic and obscure, for the sake of obscure and unheroic people."