FRANCIS CROFT..
This novel exhibits very considerable powers, neither uncultivated nor unadapted to fiction. The author has some knowledge of life ;
he has reflected on his own nature and the present condition of society ; he has considerable and apparently practised skill in lite- rary composition. Sufficient dramatic power to give animation to his persons he possesses ; his narration of single adventures
has often an enchaining interest. Francis Croft is not devoid of artistical skill, so far as regards the execution of parts, and its
author has the rare faculty of indicating much by a few marked traits. As a whole, however, the book fails in exciting the appro- bation of the reader, and falls short of realizing so good a fiction as the qualities of the writer would seem capable of producing. This seems to be mainly owing to want of judgment, rather than to want of art; unless by art is meant a pervading character, in- cluding the choice and arrangement of a subject as well as its treat- ment.
The story is crude and complicated ; dealing with everyday life it is yet wild and improbable, sometimes in a high degree. It: great portion of it, if not the whole, is engaged upon matters which are scarcely fit for serious if indeed they are for satiric fiction. Crime, and worse than crime, low profligacy, is too conspicuous in the tale, forming in fact its staple. Though not treated offensively, some of the scenes take the reader among haunts of vice ; while the general character of the writer's speculations runs too much upon the physical. Neither is there any particular purpose in all this, beyond the pretty obvious moral, that the consequences of crime pursue the criminal even when he wishes to reform, es- pecially if he has the ill luck to fall in with old confederates, masters of his secrets, who frighten him out of money by threatening to betray him. Francis Croft is a novel of adventure, and therefore to some ex- tent not amenable to strict criticism for the nature of its incidents and the conduct of its story. Still there must be a reference to the probabilities of life and the received principles of art, even in the romance of roguery ; and these have not been attended to, or, as we have intimated, are violated without a sufficient purpose. The hero is the son of a clerk who has been ruined by the forgery of a comrade. Francis Croft is thrown upon the world a penniless boy to seek his fortune; and after going through some improbable ad- ventures among the lowest life in London, meets the criminal fellow clerk of his father, who adopts him as he had previously adopted his sister. Marston alias Bennet has made a fortune in South America, and brought home a Brazilian beauty of untamed passions and un- scrupulous character. He wishes to take rank as a small country gentleman, but falls in with some of his old companions, now sunk into the lowest depth of crime, and they continually drain his purse and practise upon his fears. Scenes arising from such ele- ments are of necessity not of a high kind either in refinement or morals ; a brother and sister brought up together from child- hood to early manhood and womanhood without a knowledge of their relationship is not in good taste. George Ashburn, a dissi- pated young country gentleman, a Don Juan in a limited sphere, who tries to seduce Olympia Croft—the former employer of
• The Fortunes of Francis Croft : an Autobiography. In three volumes. Pub- lished by Chapman and Ball.
Marston, who pursues him with a monomaniac vengeance—some loves of Francis Croft himself, and his compassionate marriage to the orphan daughter of a friend—are matters not essentially at- tractive, and not all very new.
Many of the characters and scenes are delineated with great power. The coarse licentiousness which mingles with English male life in relaxation, often without tainting the character, is marked with great clearness in a dinner at old Mr. Ashburn's. The selfish sensual profligacy of young wild collegians, and some- times of studious collegians, is briefly but strikingly brought out during a ball at the same place. The difference between the untrained animal nature of a woman, however amiable and vir- tuous, and that of a well-educated woman who may be moved -or interested through her intellect, and not only through her affections, is painted with great skill in Croft's wife, Emily ; who, under adverse circumstances, is in danger of sinking from an attractive girl into a spiritless household drudge. The incidents when Croft and his friend Stirling go in pursuit of young Ashburn, who has carried off Croft's sister in conjunction with some of Marston's persecutors, have action and interest. Many other scenes argue power and reflection ; and though they are often of a hard and objectless kind, the writer seems to have had some critical or moral objects in view.
One characteristic of art is completeness in design. It is not enough that everything which is introduced into a picture or a story should have some business there ; it should have a begin- ning and an end. Such is very far from being the case in Francis Croft, for many persons are introduced and got rid of without any obvious purpose.
At a low lodging in London, in a boyish stage of his career, Francis Croft falls in with one Pratt, who wishes to corrupt him
for purposes of his own, and invites him to a party. The thing is caricatured in the story, but gives rise to one of those powerful passages of incident and commentary in which the book abounds. "Now that to a certain extent I can appreciate the motives of Mr. Pratt, I give him credit for high proficiency in the philosophy of villany. He knew or felt that vice is more contagious than cholera or plague ; that it fills the air like a pestilence, and corrupts the lungs that breathe it. Precepts of im- morality are generally as ineffectual as precepts of morality. A thousand sophisms may glide harmlessly over the mind. They leave no idea, no image to lure the senses and exasperate the appetites. But the artistic disorder of Phryne's robe may corrupt one who could read all Epicurus unmoved ; and an evening spent in the company of gamblers and drunkards and blasphemers must either definitively disgust or partially pollute. Such a scene before my residence in that accursed house would have appalled—it now only bewilder- ed and dazzled me. I felt my head warm by degrees, and remember that I watched, understood, and felt interested in the game that was played. With- out being aware of what I was doing, I drank, at first, indeed, prudently, but soon without caution. The scene assumed a certain grandeur in my eyes. The faded colours of the old morning-gown of the Colonel blazed into purple and gold ; Topps's stereotyped :execration flashed through my brain in the shape of a tremendous witticism, and drew from me acreama of laughter; the Irishman, with his hooked nose, took the figure of a vulture, and I thought I heard his beak tapping every now and then upon the table ; Saygrace waxed paler and paler, but, throwing aside his clerical air, clutched the money which he had won with ferocious and silent greediness. How like robbery is gambling! Pratt seemed least interested in the cards; and I could see every now and then his huge bush of hair rising above the bent heads of the players, and caught his keen black eyes gazing intently, on me with a sort of fiendish joy. I felt an occasional thrill of terror and penitence ; but the thing had got into my veins ; and at last—I now recollect better than I did next day—as I looked over the shoulder of the Colonel, who was losing, and calculated a system of play by which I thought I should infallibly win, Cupidity and Gin dictated to me these words—' Who will lend me five shillings ?
" D— my eyes!' exclaimed Topps, thinking to raise a laugh; but there was a dead silence. I am sure that the appearance of a wretched boy, with flushed and swollen cheeks, flashing eyes, disordered neckcloth, clutching at the cards with a feverish hand, and thus offering to become one of them, must have appalled for a moment even that hardened crew ; and perhaps each remembered some such critical scene in his own history. No doubt— for human nature, in its ordinary form, is incompatible with complete cor- ruption—there was not one of them but felt a momentary impulse to thrust. me back, however rudely, into innocence, if that were possible. But as there is joy, we are told, in heaven, when one sinner repents, so is there joy in hell when a man falls. Some one laughed at length—I think it was Pratt—all good thoughts vanished, and I was welcomed as one of them with congratu- lations not unadulterated with taunts. All refused, however, to lend me a penny ; and I turned moodily to a glass of gin-and-water which I had just filled. Fire in my brain—rage in my little heart—sickness—insensibility!"
Previous page
