THE DAILYS OF SODDEN FEN.*
THE "Legend," or " Chronicle," which is "introductory " to this novel is not very happily worked out. " The feast-day of St. Elme " is a strange date for an event that happened "in the year A.D. 1650 " [sic], a time when there were no feast-days or saints in England ; nor can we suppose a seventeenth-century annalist to have so marvellously anticipated Dickens (not at his best by any means) as to write—" The muddy floor, inlaid with scanty gravestones, made the animal's hoofs ring, now sharply, as upon the dried bones of the dead, now with dull thuds, as upon down-trodden flesh and blood." The" Chronicle" tells us how a certain Dyggorie Dailie had reclaimed, to his own loss, the lands of Sodden Fen "for the use of the village of Slumsby as common ground," and how he was murdered by his ungrateful neighbours, Fen men who resented the change which had turned into pasture and arable the haunts of fish and water-fowl. Two centuries pass, and one James Daily, a labourer in Slumsby parish, is the representative of Dyggorie. A dim tradition of his ancestor's action is present in the man's mind. He is sure that those who hold Sodden Fen in possession, as land is com- monly held in England, are not within their rights. But from continual brooding over this wrong there has come a delusion which wholly possesses his mind. The common rights of the village are forgotten. He is convinced that the land is his, James Daily's, and he doggedly waits for the time when he can make good his claim. In course of time, there comes to Slumsby a new vicar, and with this vicar comes his sister, a wife deserted by an unworthy husband. This husband, it turns out, is the only son and heir of the owner of Sodden Fen ; and this inheritance, coming in course of time to her, is made over to the " use of the village of Slumsby," as the Dyggorie of two centuries before had purposed. In this work of restitution one Adam January Daily, son of James, in whom the old self-sacrificing spirit of the race has come out again, plays his part. In a way, he brings it about; and his life is sacrificed, as his ancestor's had been, in the very act of com- pleting it.
This, it will be seen, is a somewhat ambitious effort in fiction. The economical doctrine or heresy which it appears to commend to its readers may pass. Land held in common is a primitive arrangement to which it is scarcely desirable, or even possible, to revert. Where a partial survival of the custom is found, it is not found to be particularly conducive to the well-being of the locality. But the whole story is one that is qnite impossible to
• The Mays of Sodden Pen. By the Author of " Four Crotchets to a Bar," &e. 3 vole. London: Bentley and Bon. 1884. realise. The end which is reached and the means by which it is reached are equally remote from our experienbe, and so equally fail to interest us. Adam Daily's relation to the catas- trophe is, we think, particularly unreal. It has all the look of being invented to correspond artificially with the legend of Dyg- gorie. But the dramatis personce are, we think, far more happily conceived than the drama itself. The whole atmosphere, so to speak, of this Fen country—this region so depressing to the- spirits that the population deadens its sense of the gloom with- habitual opium,—is given with singular vividness. James Daily, the dreamer who has dreamed himself into monomania, while be seems to the casual looker-on as nothing more than an unusually surly peasant of the East-Anglian type, is a quite remarkable figure. The picture of the man as he sits at night on the roof of his cottage, looking, with set purpose in his eyes, at the land which he believes will come to him at the last, is one of the most striking that we have met with in fiction. Among the minor characters, too, James's wife is a study in which we may see the outcome of no small experience of the actual life of these Fen- country folk. The landscape, too, is drawn with a vigorous hand. Here is a little bit of foreground:— "A willow that had split at the bane, roots in air, bathed its limbs- in the stream ; its pale gray leaflets, coral-tipped for lack of earthy nourishment, splashed the water in its course, parting it into dew- drops as human fingers might have done. The tame ducks dived and rose to the surface between the broad smooth leaves of the water- lily ; all round the rushes stood sentry, bowing their feathery heads and clashing their long brown spears for arms ; nearer to the margin water-raninculus and blue forget-me-not sprang at their feet ; whilst gaudy-eyed insects and azure-winged dragonflies rose from their kingdom in the luscious grasses."
And here a bold defence of a country which few will be found to praise :—
" These wide-open spaces of the fen-lands bring a sense of freedom and emancipation all their own. The very nature of the country, lying as it does spread out at the feet, invites to perpetual and easily realisable progress. Vast ranges of the earth's surface viewed from some mountain-top may inflate a man's bosom with the imagination of greater achievements ; but the environment of these still, calm spaces has an elevating influence peculiarly its own. The manifold intersections of the fens break no sense of continuity ; the eye ranges at will from one slightly undulating distance to another, and midway between the extent of these almost perfect horizons assigns to the human spirit its place, neither on the mountain-tops nor in the valleys beneath, but midway between two infinities, the one before, the other behind. Even if his but be as cramped as was Daily's cottage, here a man may find his world as wide as his brain can picture it. The very monotony of the tranquil scenery soothes his mind, confined elsewhere in narrow or ill-adjusted surroundings. Hither come no jostling multitudes with agitating suggestions of change. Here comes no haste ; it has been left behind in the city."
But we cannot help thinking that from a literary point of view the best thing in these three volumes is an episode which might have been retrenched without interfering in the least with the completeness of the story,—the love of the Vicar of Slumsby for Aurea Chapel. In Aurea the author has done- what it is very difficult indeed to do,—drawn the picture of a woman who is shallow, and even false, and yet not contemptible. Aurea breaks off her engagement with one lover because she has learnt to despise him, flying from home on the very morn-
ing of her wedding day ; she uses another lover unscrupulously to effect her ends, and throws him over without compunction ; and she marries a third, whom it is impossible to believe that she ever respected. And yet we never cease to regard her with interest. She is indeed a strange mixture of falseness and frankness. The Vicar's finer nature is an atmosphere too rare
for her to breathe in happily ; and when she has broken with him she tells him so, with a candour and an insight into self that go some way to redeem her. She is the type of a number of people who do not elevate life, but who make it move more smoothly and easily.
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