GRACE AGUILAR'S HOME INFLUENCE.
MISS AGUILAR is known as a clever contributor of tales to annuals, and as the authoress of several popular books on subjects connected with the Hebrew religion ; to which creed she belongs. In Home Influence she has ventured upon a difficult if not a higher theme, and attempted a di- dactic fiction in which the working of parental conduct upon the young mind is made to affect the after career, in spite of more beneficial influ- ences.
Miss Aguilar fails in her direct object, and to some extent mars the effect of her book as a fiction, by the fault we have so often recurred to —the selection or rather the manufacture of an extreme case, in which
every detail is twisted and tortured to carry on a preconceived theory. In Home Influence we must admit a goad deal before we can admit any action. We must grant a very peculiar character in the mother of the juvenile hero and heroine, Edward and Ellen Fortescne—all the faults of the heartless and unprincipled coquette, with strong feelings and a ten- dency towards good. We must then concede a very peculiar education, and circumstances not at all likely in noble and fashionable life ; throw- ing in the elopement of a selfish beauty of rank and fashion with a young officer on Indian duty. We must then travel all the way to India ; assume two children, differing in form and constitution; fancy the girl neglected and the boy petted by the mother and the household ; besides a long train of contrivances, physically possible but that is about all. Even this does not suffice : the father must meet a violent death under circumstances against the custom of the military service; Mrs. Fortes- cne, returning home, must be taken ill in a remote village, after the usual fashion in romances ; she must die after she is reconciled with her sister, and, having misgivings about the fate of her spoiled Edward, get her little girl Ellen to make a solemn "promise to shield and save him from harshness, whenever it is in her power." Upon this promise the whole story tarns. Ellen and Edward, on their mother's death, are carried to the pattern family of their uncle Hamilton. Here Ellen is constantly made to bear the brunt of Edward's faults ; till she gets a character for deceit, and her natural reserve being aggra-', vated by the necessity of concealment, she appears artful. When her selfish though seemingly open good-natured brother goes to sea, he gets into bad company and gambling ; drains Ellen of her pocket-money ; and at last, distracted by a letter threatening suicide, she appropriates some money which she finds, and sends it to her brother. Detection follows ; but as she will not betray Edward's secret, she is about to be sent away. At this crisis Edward returns, and at last confesses his various false- hoods ; when instead of being punished for his long career of selfish du- plicity, he becomes a sort of hero and saves his uncle's life at sea, in a
manner which strongly resembles playhouse system of navigation.
Extremes like this cannot point a moral, or answer any purpose; and every minor detail is forced and contorted. The little incidents are no doubt contrived with cleverness and coherence ; but it is the cunning of a got-up case, when the person is as the proverb says "his own law- yer." There is an unpleasant and even a repulsive feeling about the whole of these selfish displays of Edward, and the weakness passing into obdurate folly of Ellen. Nor is it likely but that such penetrating per- sons as the Ilamiltons are described, must have read more truly the real character of Edward and guessed more accurately the state of the case. The other parts of the book are truthful and interesting : when Miss Aguilar is describing the natural weaknesses of some of the Hamiltons, she really succeeds better in pointing a moral than when hammering at her own theories. The distress is perhaps made too much of, unless the writer intends to intimate that the troubles of the young are as impor- tant as those of older and grander people. The execution is good, ex- cept in some of the dialogues designed to exhibit character. The style is graceful and animated ; the scenes are contrived with skill and painted with force : "but what can form avail, without better matter P"
Of the manner here is a specimen, in the only passage we can spare room for—a view of the Hamiltonian system of education.
"Mrs. Hamilton earnestly longing to implant a love of nature, and all its fresh pure associations, in the minds of her children while yet young, knowing that once obtained, the pleasures of the world would be far less likely to obtain too powerful dominion. That which the world often terms romance, she felt to be a high pare sense of poetry in the universe and in man, which she was quite as anxious to instil as many mothers to root out. She did not believe that to cultivate the spiritual needed the banishment of the matter of fact; but she believed that to infuse the latter with the former would be their best and surest preventive against all that was low and mean—their best help in the realization of a constant unfailing piety. For the same reason, she cultivated a taste for the beautiful, not only in her girls, but in her boys,—and beauty not in arts and nature alone, but in character. She did not allude to beauty of merely the high and striking kind, but to the lowly virtues, struggles, faith, and heroism in the poor—their forbear- ance and kindness to one another—marking something to admire, even lathe most- rugged and surly, that at first sight would seem so little worthy of notice. It was gradually, and almost unconsciously, to accustom her daughters to such a train of thought and sentiment, that she so particularly laid aside one part of the day to have them with her alone: ostensibly, it was to give part of their day to working for the many poor, to whom gifts of ready-made clothing are sometimes mach more valuable than money; but the education of that one hour she knew might, for the right cultivation of the heart, do more than the mere teaching of five or six."
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