HUMPHREY DYOT.•
Tins novel, like sundry newspaper articles, &c., which we have noticed during the past year, is recommended to us as having been written by the Author of A Night in a Workhouse. We must confess that, at first sight, we are inclined to resent the obtrusion of this claim. To use plain language, it seems as if Mr. Green- wood were trading upon the very deep and painful impression which he made upon our minds when he told the story of his sojourn in a casual ward. That adventure of his startled us all into a very genuine admiration ; we deemed it to be an act of the truly heroic sort. Nor were we far wrong. Nothing that we have since heard makes us estimate less highly the courage displayed by the " Amateur Casual," or the service that he rendered to the nation. And when we find his name used to advertise a news- paper or recommend a novel, there is no reason why we should cease to praise, though we cannot help pitching our praise to a lower note. We have only to perceive that he is primarily a littirateur rather than a philanthropist, and then all will be well ; then there will be nothing to jar upon our feelings in any use that he may see fit to make of his achievements. He is the represent- ative, and a singularly able representative, of a class of writers peculiar to these days, and not less necessary than peculiar, with- out which, in the present paralysis of all executive government, it would be hopeless to expect any social reforms. These gentlemen shrink from no kind of philanthropic adventure in the way of their business. Modern Dantes, they will descend into the lowest circles of hell to bring up materials for an Inferno which shall have a great literary success. That they should make the same use of this literary success which every other writer is accustomed to make, is a proceeding to which neither critic nor public can fairly object.
To the critic such an announcement simply means that he is
• Monphrey Dypt. A Novel. By James Greenwood, Author of "A Night in a Workhouse:. 3 role. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. 1867. furnished with the standard by which he is to judge. Now, A Night in a Workhouse and other papers on similar subjects which Mr. Greenwood has since written, seemed to possess a very con- siderable literary value. The style was clear and terse, free from effort and pretence, and attaining by sheer force of simplicity and truthfulness a great graphic power. It would be unfair to say that Mr. Greenwood's novel shows no trace of these qualities. Some- times his subject leads him to scenes where there is a fair oppor- tunity of displaying them, and then the opportunity is not lost. Here is a photographic picture of the children's infirmary in a workhouse :— "Ranged against the lime-washed wall on each side was a row of tiny bedsteads of the old-fashioned scissor' pattern, raised not more than eighteen inches from the ground, and each one furnished with a thin mattress of straw, and what possibly was at one time a white sheet and blanket. The bedsteads were ranged side by side and close together, each with a number painted white on a black board and hung on a•nail at the bed-head, along with a scrap of paper on which wore scrawled the doctor's directions as to the diet and physicking of the bed's sick occupant. Every child was attired in the regulation blue-check bed- gown, and grey calico night-cap ; and there they were higgledy-piggledy, all with dirty faces and hair unkempt, the very ill lying with their pinched features and their big baby eyes listlessly staring ; the merely poorly neither in nor out of bed, wailing and whining, to the disturbance of their helpless neighbours, or, in cases when they were old enough, doing vicious battle with the convalescent, biting and scratching and
hairpulling and squalling like little savages." p. 219.)
Mr. Greenwood has, of course, seen a workhouse infirmary, and what he has seen he can describe admirably, so long as it is a subject which comes within the scope of his powers, and which is limited enough and still enough for him to bring into focus. But let the reader compare with the dfilription just quoted the scene with which the book opens, the shipwreck of the Reaper. Mr. Greenwood may, very possibly, have seen a shipwreck. If not, it would be quite possible that he should describe it with a graphic power and a truthfulness to which ninety-nine out of every hundred eye-witnesses could not attain. Every man has oppor- tunities of observing the effects of a stormy sky and an angry sea ; there are countless narratives to supply him with the details for which he must go to the eye-witness ; but it is a rare gift to be able to combine these elements into a harmonious picture. We can see no signs of such a gift in such passages as these :— " Each moment the wrath of the elements increased, the wind shriek- ing havoc amongst the spars, and canvas, and cordage, and the waves thundering against the vessel's crazy hull as a creditor knooks impatient at a debtor's door, demanding admission instantly, and the settlement on the nail of an account long standing. Banging against her came a ponderous sea, causing her to shudder from stem to stern. Still raged the sea, and still shrieked the wind, rending and tearing amongst the rigging, and whisking off rejoicingly with the detached Hinders, as though such were its proper food and it had been long kept hungry. Stealthily and surely did the poor ship's other enemy sap its foundation, and there take such stout possession that now nothing could be hoped for but to keep the water low crouching in the richly stored hold, until the storm abated and gave leisure for its ousting. But the storm did not abate. Discovering how tenaciously the old ship clung to life, it grew ten times more furious, bruising and lashing her. Presently a great blast grasped the mainmast by the rags of sail that fluttered about it and broke it down to a splintered stump, to the top of which a man's hand might reach, while, at the same moment, the busy sappers below forced fresh seams, and came rippling in thick and fast, and a big inquisitive wave came curling over the deck, causing the panic-stricken men to snatch at ring-bolts and projecting posts and rails, holding on for their lives." (i., p. 4-G.) One touch only in all this seems to us to have the least vividness about it, "the splintered stump, to the top of which a onan's rand might reach." What could be more utterly wearisome and flat than all this false personification ? What possible good can it be to speak of waves as impatient creditors, or of winds as hungering after fragments of the rigging? Writers infected with what is one of Mr. Dickens' worst vices of style suppose, we imagine, this sort of writing to be picturesque and graphic. We should say that if it has any effect upon the reader's mind beyond fatiguing it, it must obscure and weaken his conceptions.
We have dwelt upon this point of descriptive power because we should have expected it to be Mr. Greenwood's forte. In fact, he possesses it in a but very limited degree. To use a familiar illus- tration, he can give us a good photograph, but he is nothing of an artist. He probably has seen more of the sort of life which he undertakes to describe than most of his critics, certainly more than the one who now writes. We can judge only by the im- pression made upon us, and we speak with diffidence accordingly. But certainly in power and.truthfulness of delineation, Humphrey Dyot seems vastly inferior to that series of novels to which No Church, and Mattie a Stray belong. We know nothing of the writer of these books, or of what advantages of experience he may have. But he seems to us, when we compare him with Mr. Greenwood, to have approached much more nearly to the people whom he de-
scribes, to have had a share in their life rather than to have looked into it, however closely, from without, and to be writing because he knows so much about it, rather than to have done his best to know something about it, in order that he might write.
When we consider the qualities which go to make up a good novel, we find in Humphrey Dyot very little that we can praise. It excels neither as a novel of incident nor as a novel of character. Incidents, indeed, there are in plenty, but they are loosely strung together, not woven into any sort of a plot. The villain of the book is perpetually attempting to steal something which the hero of the book carries about with him. We know very well from the beginning that he will not succeed, or that, if he does, he will be disappointed in what he gets. One or two of the various adventures may excite a certain interest, but the reader can never be in any sort of suspense or anxiety as to the result. Now and then he may feel a mild surprise, as, for instance, when the young woman, whOse child is generally supposed to be illegitimate, turns out to have been properly married, or when the shadowy husband of the said marriage is claimed as the hero's brother, but the more ingenious and experienced novel reader will probably miss even these sensations. The characters are feebly and coarsely drawn, though not, it is only fair to say, altogether without that shading which all but the least skilful class of writers have now discovered to be necessary. Humphrey Dyot himself is a profligate youth, who is converted by two months of solitude on a desert island into a religious enthusiast, half crazy with remorse. A novelist may fairly claim the right to deal with such a change of character as this, and it is certainly more legitimate to make it, as is here done, the basis of a tale rather than the means for bringing about a catastrophe. But the subject is one which moat men will do well to leave alone, because it must be treated with a certain fullness, and at the same time demands a supreme skill and delicacy of handling. Let Mr. Greenwood read his Robinson Crusoe again, and compare his own vapid and meagre sentences with what Defoe made of the same topic. In this solitude Humphrey makes a vow which, as far as we can make out, binds him to register his past evil deeds, and to read over the history every day. When we find him in England he is carrying about with jealous care a bag containing the volume in which this record has been made. He falls in the way of a certain quack doctor, Gurd by name, who is convinced that this bag contains a case of jewels which had been lost in the wreck of the Reaper. The three volumes are a dismal story of how Gard and his sister, a feeble image of Sally Brass, but shaded off with a • tendency to shed tears and a certain affection for her brother, endeavour to possess themselves of the imaginary prize. It is wearisome enough ; but we can say this for it, that if a story is to consist of a series of attempts to break one of the Command- ments, we had rather that that commandment should be the eighth than the seventh. Of the various minor characters which fill up the scene, one only, Teddy Blake, the genteel burglar, is drawn with any degree of power. His wild love for Mary Kettering, arising from the very fact of her being so unlike in her modesty and grace to the women among whom he lives, yet catching eagerly at every word of hers that might seem to lower her and render less hopeless the distance between them, is a trait that is sketched in with considerable skill.
Mr. Greenwood has attained a well deserved reputation. He has shown on more than one occasion a singular power of descrip- tion, and he possesses a faculty of wildly extravagant humour which has attraction for many. Whether the tale of modern life is a kind of literary work hitherto untried by him, we can- not tell ; but we certainly cannot give him any encouragement to attempt it again.
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