THE VALUE OF FOSTERSTOWN.*
THE Value of Fosterstown—as far as this work throws any light on so interesting a question,—seems to have been merely nominal ; that place of uneuphonious name having apparently been mortgaged up to the hilt ; but the question for us—and one much more difficult to answer is as to the value of The Value of Fosterstown. We are however, already becoming involved, and, unless we are careful, we shall run a risk of "going down very deep and coming up very muddy." If an ' average' novel represented a novel at ' par' we should have no difficulty in fixing the relative value of the one before us ; but unfortunately the average novel is much below par, and thus it happens that The Value of Fosterstown taken on its own merits, is, however paradoxical it may appear, much above the average, and yet below par. We say, taken on its own merits, for the true worth of a book sometimes depends more on what it promises than on what it is ; and it would greatly help us to judge correctly of a writer's powers, if he would kindly state on the title-page his age as a man and an author ; thus, " by G. P. R. Jones, aged sixty, his eighty-fifth work ; just issued from his improved tale-producing machine (patented) ; " or, "by Charlotte Brown, aged seventeen, her first attempt." The writer of this story—must we every time call it The Value of Fosterstown or may we be permitted to use the initials only, and speak of it as the " V. of F. ?"—has intimated to us, through the medium of the title-page, that she is a lady, and that it is not her first at- tempt, and we are proportionately obliged to her for this much in- formation ; still the authorship of Flora Adair is by no means evidence of an old hand, but rather the contrary. We have heard, indeed, of authoresses of seventy years of age wearing low dresses of white muslin in an evening, and such might, no doubt, choose " Flora Adair " as a sweet name for a novel ; nevertheless, we incline to the opinion that both Flora Adair and The Value of Fosterstown were written by a young lady and an unmarried one ; and if this be true, we think Miss Donelan—we will assume the Miss—has fair success before her, and the public a fair prospect of amusement and advantage in works from her pen. The evidences of youthfulness are abundant, but they show at the same time warm and generous feeling, enthusiastic adherence to principle, and some imagination and power of creating incident.
The introductory chapter scrambles over half a century in nineteen pages ; finding two brothers just entering on life, and leaving their grandchildren doing the same. It relates the marriages of the grand- fathers and fathers of the aforesaid second-cousins, and includes the second marriage and second widowerhood of our heroine's papa, and leaves us so confused that we have to keep our fingers between its leaves and revert to it frequently to discover whether we are read- ing of the first, second, or third generation, or of two at a time. so dealing with cousins once or twice removed. We would suggest a genealogical tree as a vignette where such intricate relationships are treated of ; or when, as in this case, a large one is required, it might be kept loose in a pocket of the binding, so that we could spread it out before us for perpetual reference. But "to resume the broken web," as our authoress somewhere expresses it, with a slight confusion of metaphor. Miss Donelan is an Irish Catholic,
• The Value of Fosterstown. By A. H. Donelan. London: Chapman and Hall. and the story is founded on the conformity to the Protestant religion, in his youth, of the grandfather of our heroine, in order to possess himself of what should really be the estates of his elder brother. The working of the curse of the
rightful and dispossessed owner furnishes the incidents of the story, of which the usual juvenile paraphernalia are all forthcoming.
There is the haunted tower, the rooms of which are kept locked ; the ghost ; the exceedingly curious and valuable cabinet,—given in this case to the family by good Queen Bess, —a secret drawer therein, and the paper, yellow with age, that peeps out from the crack behind it. There is also the line of wicked, clever Irish agents, managing the estates from father to son, and living hard by in the" new "house, as Miss Donaheu says it was, because it had only been built by the great-grandfather of the present agent, himself an elderly man, each succeeding agent drawing his principal deeper into debt and dishonour, and feathering his own nest thereby. These gentlemen are, of course, part of the curse, and very effectually they help to work it out. Of the conformist's three grandchildren, one is in love with the agent's daughter, and is pitched out of his carriage and killed on the spot as he carries to his lady-love his father's sanction of their union ; another refuses to ratify her engagement with an excellent and wealthy gentleman, and runs off with a young officer ; and the third is in love with her second-cousin,—the rightful heir,—but, through the machinations of the wicked agent, the letter containing his proposal never comes to hand. The father—his heart broken with family misfortune and debt —is sold up, and then dies, and the daughter is thus left on the world, and becomes a governess. Then the agent himself dies. This makes the thing very complete, and the ghost being thereby appeased, things take a turn. The wicked Protestant agent is succeeded by a chastened and saintly son, who finds the abstracted letter amongst his father's papers, sends it to the young gentle- man who wrote it, and takes priest's orders as a convert to Rome.
The second-cousin—hastens to find the poor governess who has been true throughout to honour and the elder branch of the family, and they fall into each other's arms in the studio, where the young heir, despoiled alike of land and love, is seeking consolation in woo- ing Art, and pocketing large sums by his success in doing so.
The characters, like the plot, bear the marks of a young hand, and while, as we have seen, the latter displays a power of invention not unprolific of incident and dramatic situation, the former reveal some insight into more than one type of character, and the warmest sympathy with that type of which generous self-sacrifice and patient endurance are the distinguishing features. The serious earnestness of the one sister, and the thoughtless gaiety of the other—incapable of sus- tained effort or settled purpose—are nicely drawn ; and there are fairly good sketches of some of the young men, of whom there are six. Three of these are admirable specimens of the high-prin- cipled, self-controlled, and very self-satisfied young demi-gods whom we know so well, and who exert a magnificent sort of tyranny over those they love, yet are patterns of sons in the respect and obedience they show to their sad and patient mother. There is also a slight but clever portrait, of a less ordinary type, of a young count, half Irish, half French. Of him, however, we see very little indeed
He was short and slight ; frizzy black hair curled round his head in great profusion, and his small, dancing, brown eyes never seemed at rest. There was something in his appearance and manner which made one think of quicksilver; when he walked, however calm the day might be, his coat-tails always looked to be flying away from him; and when he talked, which he did with amazing volubility, not only his lips, but his nose, eyes, hands, and shoulders, all seemed to move with equal rapidity. He was clever, in a bright skimming way, and very amusing —a mixture, perhaps, of the Irish and French characters ; his father was an Edgeworth, and his mother a Crespigny."
But the great youthfulness of the story is what principally
impresses us. Besides the evidences of this to which we have already pointed, there are many slighter indications. There There is a fondness for Moore's verses, and there is a tendency to quote them and other picturesque lines of a touching description. The heroine is even made to burst into poetry in order to express the indignation which is roused within her by her sister's sudden defection from the religious faith of her family ; this faith, too, she affirms, with the undoubting positiveness of youth, to be the faith ; declaring " there are not two religions, as you
well know, there is but one." Indeed, did we not believe Miss Donelan to be young and enthusiastic, and therefore a warm partizan and thick-and-thin defender of her faith, many passages in this book,—little as we feel inclined to fling a stone at the much persecuted and maligned Roman Catholics,—would compel us to regard her as a most narrow and intolerable bigot. Our heroine's sister, who has married a Protestant, professes the follow- ing creed :—" I believe in the natural religion of the heart, and that we can worship God as truly in one form as in another, or without any form at all. To love God and our neighbour, and to snake those to whom we owe any duty happy, is surely the essence of all religion." We must say the frivolous sister has far the best of it, especially when we find that the zealous Catholic has to fall back, for argument in reply, on perhaps just, but very ill-advised animadversion on the somewhat light-minded but kind and faithful husband of her slater ; and in her subsequent desolation, we can scarcely pity her when she refuses a home with this cheerful and affectionate couple, because, " although Margaret was lonely and destitute, she could not go to her sister. She might live with the poor, the erring, or the wretched ; but the bleakest moor was not more desolate to the tender lamb than Annie's home was to her since she had become that lowest of all things human—an apostate from divine Truth and Love." Then, again, there is a rhapsody about " good old times," which is very young indeed, and in which we learn that " our forefathers were poets, artists, and true philosophers, for God was in all their thoughts ;" though elsewhere we find it recorded, with a simple- minded forgetfulness of the " good old times" theory, "that the days of oppression had passed."
The style is a little conceited—Italian and French are much quoted, and German words are put in large German type—and a little inflated, the people talk like a book ; for instance, our heroine says to her lover :—
" 'How exquisite is this hour at home on a calm evening like this, when the purple heath on Bray Head seems shot with gold even after the light has faded from all around, and the gentle beating of the waves against the great headland sounds like some plaintive chant singing the .day to rest! The going-down of the sun behind our Wicklow mountains is a grand sight ; but Somerville now is a sweet picture of peaceful loveliness. Ton, who are almost an artist, Reginald, do you not envy the power of a Claude Lorraine to paint such a scene as this?'"
In conclusion, Miss Donelan must pardon us if we doubt her inti- macy with Ireland. To say nothing of her English-Irish being very indifferently rendered, and her description of Dublin Sundays —the streets deserted and silent, and every one wearing a gloomy air—so unlike our own impressions of them after much acquaint- ance, Miss Donelan describes the Bay of Dublin as stretching from Bray Head to Dalkey Island ; a description which is true of Killiney Bay ; but Dalkey Island and the Hill of Howth, as every one who has sailed from Holyhead to Kingstown knows, are the .extremities of the Bay of Dublin. However, one may do much worse than read The Value of Fosterstown, and we believe that Miss Donelan will outgrow many of her faults as a writer of novels.
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