UNDER WHICH LORD P* MIK LINTON has chosen a fine
subject, and found a good title for it., This, for any competent novelist, is already a good step towards success, and would augur well even for a beginner. But Mrs. Linton is anything but a beginner. She has mastered the arts of wording and phrasing; her ways of thought are methodical and clear ; she seems able to express accurately what is in her mind ; she has more wit than belongs to the average of her sex, and she possesses— what is of especial value to any but the merely humouristic writer—tenacity of purpose. There is a definite goal pro- posed in most of her books, and from the first page she makes towards it ; and though not seldom deficient in the matter of speed, she seldom errs in direction. Further- more, Mrs. Linton has apparently read a good deal, and if she has not thought very profoundly, she has at all events felt with .eonsiderable vehemence, and not without anxiety to make her vehemence felt. If she is unable to achieve any definite convic- tion, either in herself or in her readers, she certainly finds no difficulty in experiencing and creating aversion. Not to pursue the catalogue of her qualifications any further, here are enough good reasons for warranting us in expecting at her hands a • Under which Lord? A Naval. By N. Lynn Linton 8 Tole. London : Chau() and Windok
readable and entertaining discussion of what has become one of the burning questions of the day,—the question, namely, whether the priest or the husband is to occupy the superior position in English households.
Broadly speaking, such a theme may be treated in either one of two ivays,—in it partisan spirit, or as by a dispassionate observer. The first is the easier way, but hardly the safer.
Theological discussions are at best apt to become heated, and when the partisan argues throush the medium of fiction, he can hardly avoid bending his characters and his circumstances to favour his own predetermined. view. The reader, however, who must be supposed to have no bias one way or the other, is liable to take offence at what he considers unjust distortions of truth or probability ; and the more shrilly the partisan scolds and thumps his desk, the more suspiciously and unfavourably does his auditor regard his arguments. Thus the partisan, with the best will in the world to deny all truth and morality to his opponent, is sometimes the means of securing to the latter a larger measure of tolerance and favour than would have fallen to him, had he been less roundly abused. Of course, too, the partisan is nothing if not inartistic, and therefore—other considerations apart—he ought not, in our opinion, to select fiction as the vehicle of his diatribes. We enjoy being moved by a story, but then the movement should not .be of the nature of a violent shove or pull; it should have its orbit and its compensations, and its final result should always be to leave us with a wider, even if a sadder, outlook than we had before. The strength must be manifest rather in its effects than in its action, and then, the greater it is the better.
Either Mrs. Linton's views of what belongs to Art are differ- ent from those above indicated, or else she has written the present work not to instruct or to elevate others, but simply to relieve her own mind,—which would appear to have been in a very much over-charged and otherwise uncomfortable condition. In setting her scene, or, to use a better figure, in arranging her chess-board, she not only lets it be seen on which side her sympathies lie, but she deprives her unfortunate ad- versaries of all possibility of grace whatever. And when she proceeds to play her game, she adopts the somewhat novel method of sweeping the hated blacks clean ofl the board of moral and humane decency, and planting the whites trium- phantly and viciously in the place of superiority. With all respect for Mrs. Linton's earnestness and solemnity, which in this story are perhaps oppressively evident, it is difficult to avoid smiling at one-sidedness so naive and childlike. Had the book ap- peared anonymously, we should have taken its author to be 801110 voluble young girl very much under twenty years of age, whose doll had recently proved to be full of sawdust, and who had, in consequence, come to the tremendous conclusion that Professor Huxley was very nice, and Mr. Mackonochie perfectly horrid. For not only does Mrs. Linton make her Church-people all demons, and her free-thinkers all angelic, but she makes them so at the expense of some of the most elementary and familiar facts of human nature. In other words, we have been unable to find anything consistently life-like in the character or behaviour of any one of Mrs. Linton's dramatis yevsoncr. The Reverend and Honourable Launcelot Laseelles, otherwise the Arch Fiend Incarnate, is a specimen of the "woman's man "—by which we do not mean the lady's man, though he was doubtless that also —such as could not be easily exaggerated. Richard Fullerton, the agnostic, who is intended to be a sort of scientific Saint Sebastian, is a mixture of tallow, molasses and mournfulness really unworthy of Mrs. Linton's invention, especially as she persists in dangling the unhappy scarecrow before our eyes as a sort of heroic model of all manly virtues. Herndon° Fuller- ton, the pretty married woman of twenty years' standing, is introduced to us at the end of that period, and at eight- and-thirty years of age, as being just the same ignorant, impressible, vain, and romantic young girl that she was on her wedding-day ; and this, although she had been a mother during nineteen out of the twenty years, and had lived on terms of loving intimacy with her husband. This is, perhaps, the funniest betrayal of crudity in the book, and yet it is made the central fact upon which the story hinges. We will spare
Mrs. Linton an enumeration of her remaining characters, only one of whom, Lady Maine, the insolent, bullying aristocrat, is approximately real through several pages. Besides,. a novelist may be held in some degree excusable for a failure to understand character, or to portray it, because this is a special gift, and a very good story may be written without it. It is only when the story and the characters are alike impossible that we begin to wax restive, because the novelist who cannot construct a properly-balanced story has no right to exist,—construction being a thing which, in a reasonable degree, the least intelligent man or woman may learn to master.
Now, there is in every chapter of Mrs. Linton's novel an effort, painfully manifest, to be trenchant and powerful, and— what is even more painful—an evident conviction that the effort is successful. But reluctant though we are to speak harshly of - a writer so earnest and laborious as is Mrs. Linton, we must con- fess that the only power which is shown in her present work is power to be disagreeable. As we read on and on, we seem to hear the sound. of a strained, angry, monotonous voice, which tries hard not to tremble and crack and become hysterical, but which, as it proceeds in its monologue, becomes ever more shrill and ungovernable, and towards the end, breaks out in undisguised clamour of spite and scolding. All self-restraint, all dignity,— we had almost said all decency,—are abandoned. There is, in fact, a flavour of coarseness about much that Mrs. Linton has here written,—a kind, of spiritual impropriety, let Us say, though it occasionally comes to more than that,—which it would puzzle us to account for. What can bring such images into a writer's mind? or, supposing them there, why give them publicity P As a matter of fact, Mrs. Linton does not make the tamperings of the Reverend Launcelot with his female parishioners issue in any palpable infamy ; but the impression produced upon the reader could not be more dis- agreeable, and might be more wholesome, if such were the case. Probably, not more than two or three women, if so many, have ever lived who were capable of treating a situation of this kind with adequate delicacy and insight. Of this small number, Mrs. Linton is not one ; and he only injures herself, by stepping in where more gifted persons fear to tread.
Such being the tone of the story, it is only to be expected that its construction should be correspondingly vitiated. And, in truth, it appears to be less a living and self- subsistent organism than a mere mechanical series of events, beginning in improbability and ending in absurdity, and con- sistent only in its disregard of truth. There is no struggle in the" story, no sparkle, no flush of battle, no ringing trumpet- notes, no despair, and no reaction. It simply runs tamely and lugubriously away, like a little muddy rivulet- down a street- gutter, and ends in a puddle without au outlet. The clerical party always wins, the agnostics are always beaten, the women always yield. As for Mrs. Linton, she has missed a fine oppor- tunity. That may not be her fault; she may have done her best according to her lights ; but a failure so conspicuous as this, will do more to injure her reputation than many insignificant successes will to repair it.
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