The Golden Shaft. By G. Christopher Davies. (Richard Bentley and
Son.)—A novel which dwells upon the details of unlawful love-making, which publishes the wiles of a very immodest flirt, and pictures the abandonment of an otherwise pure-minded girl to her passion, and tells of her voluntary and unconditional surrender, and describes all the exciting allurements and temptations which make the man's struggle with sensual passion all but hopeless, though without the stimulus or excuse of honest love, does anything but good service to morality, though professing to do so by recording a victory contrary to all the probabilities gathered from the history of the man's weak and impressionable nature.
Such pictures can do nothing but harm to the class to whom the book is addressed,—young men who like to read about rounds with the gloves, yachting cruises, wine-parties, flirtings, and the like. It requires a mach abler pen than our author's, to supply, in pictures of true remorse of high principle and of real greatness, antidotes to the poison administered in scenes of passion. Apart from this, the book is poor. The young ladies, of whom there are plenty, are all alike and very common-place, and four of them fall in love with the hero, who seems to us anything but a gentleman, betraying, in fact, the grossest vulgarity. Save the hero, the young men scarcely figure in the story at all, and the seniors are stage fathers and mothers. There are sundry very improbable incidents—the Abergele Railway accident does duty as the cause of one, on which occasion the Chester and Holyhead Railway has to bear the indignity of being a single line—and a disgusting episode of the transactions of a wicked old man, and his felonious wife, and a vile attorney. The hero—whose delicacy and incipient heart-disease the author has quite forgotten before the end, though the delicate women all die with streams of blood issuing from their mouths—writes novels which are most favourably reviewed by the "Monday ;" is great with the boxing-gloves, wherewith he punishes all evil-doers with remark- able success ; rescues a child at the risk of his life ; saves a yacht and its living freight in a storm ; is impoverished by the philanthropic expenditure of a guinea one day, and builds a yacht the next ; tumbles over a precipice on Cader Idris in a fit of romantie melancholy; falls fainting before his lady-love, winner by twelve inches in the mile race,—in fact, is great in everything, but especially in winning hearts, of young and old, indeed of all ages and of both sexes. The only redeeming feature in Mr. Davies's book is its descriptions of sountry, and scenery, and weather, and of animal and vegetable life. Mr. Davies is evidently a thorough out-of-door man, and if he would confine himself to field sports and country life, and avoid people aml character, he would give his readers pure and unmixed pleasure. He is at home alike in storm and sunshine, on the mountain or on the sea, or in the gammas woods, or by the river, or on the shore.
Previous page
