BOOKS.
THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND.*
"Tins book shows originality, wealth of conception, genius, and not a little detailed knowledge of the world ; the outline of the tale is bold and flowing, and the individual figures are painted with considerable, though unequal skill ; some of the scenes are fall of force of a very unusual kind, and some are touched with a real delicacy and tenderness ; and yet it would be far truer to say that it has the stuff for half-a-dozen first-rate novels in it, than that it is a first-rate novel itself. It wants, in the first in- stance, movement, stream, current, narrative-flow, and secondly, something of ease and simplicity of style. We are late in -reviewing it, but, to say the truth, it is a novel which invites delay rather than prompts rapidity. In spite of its animation and its fullness of life, it is very slow reading, for more than one reason. There is an allusiveness and occasionally also an affectation of -affinent expressiveness about the manner of the author which are provoking, and induce one to throw the book aside for a time from vexation at its assumption. But this is not the principal reason for the manifold retardations with which the
'reader meets. These are mainly due to the diminishing instead of the increasing interest of the tale as it proceeds, and the want -of clear relation between the different parts of it. The enormous -expansion of the social finesse in the least interesting part, and, perhaps above all, the little sympathy we have with the hero of the -autobiography who is the connecting-thread of the whole, and who, instead of making us feel eager about his future, is -always giving us a foretaste of something uncomfortable -and embarrassing, destroy our interest in the development. .Nor is that strong disposition to postpone the next chapter, which is due to the hero's uncomfortable complexities of in- -consistent obligation, in any way overcome by the strength of the -sympathy one is made to feel for either of the two young ladies between whom he is so good as to divide his affection with per- plexing equality. One of them (Ottilia), indeed, is a beautiful picture, full of clear intellectual grace and tender intensity ; but -then she is a German princess, and so much is made of her posi- tion and of the disastrous character of the m6salliance she is willing to enter into, that ahe stands almost aloof from the story, -and you hardly know whether she herself does not wish for some imperious call of duty to break off the engagement ; certainly -there is no glimpse given us, during the long period of her lover's absence, of any feeling in her which tends to make the reader eager for a happy solution of the difficulties of the situa- tion. She descends from the clouds, as it were, whenever the hero is in some worse than usual trouble, to shed her benign affection -over him ; but the condescension is made so much of, and her 'retirement behind the veil of the royal caste is so complete while -it lasts, that one cannot catch the smallest possible impatience for the issue from the picture of her gracious tenderness and her --deep but perfectly self-restrained and almost self-condemned .devotedness; rather do we feel disposed to shrink the more from >the issue, feeling a distinct prevision of its uncomfortable charac- ter. As for the other young lady (Janet Ilchester), we never know her well enough to feel much interest in the development of what, in her too, presents itself, with less intelligible reason, as a curiously self-contained and sedate affection. There seems to be a real want of consistency too between the rather repulsive pic- ture of her as a child, a picture which makes her somewhat .sly and very selfish, and the picture of her perfect courage -and indomitable resolution as a woman ; we do not say that -the two pictures might not be reconciled, but only that they are not, —that the graduated shades between them are not supplied, and that her love for the hero is so very imperfectly painted, that it is hardly possible to feel any sym-
• The Adventures of Harry Richmond. By George Meredith. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. pathy with her till within a very few pages of the close. Thus Harry Richmond, the hero himself, being radically uninteresting, and his career full of moral awkwarduesses of that particular kind which slightly repel instead of exciting the wistful interest of the reader, and as the story of neither of the heroines with whom he falls in love supplies in any degree the predominant fascination in which he him- self is so deficient, we are left to the extraordinary cleverness of the conceptions of the tale itself to supply the want of current in the plot,—a very poor substitute, if only on this account, that these conceptions are full of complexity and finesse which rather exhaust the attention when made the principal interests, instead of the mere by-play, of a narrative otherwise full of forward movement and vivid interest.
The main intention of the story is to sketch the influence of the hollow conceit of great descent on the mind of the hero's father, Roy Richmond (supposed to be the son of a Royal Duke who had married privately without acknowledging his marriage), a man full of tact and resource and social ambition (of the poorer kind), —a charlatan, in fact, of a large and skilful and loveable sort, with every gift except those which would make him ashamed of playing the actor all his life, and especially of playing the actor all his life for so trivial a prize as the reluctant recognition of his birth by society and the Government ;—and especially to sketch this unreal kind of genius for social magnificence, in direct contrast to the solid earthly character of a rich, positive, passionate, swearing old English squire,—the hero's grandfather, Squire Beltham, whose daughter Mr. Roy Richmond has married against the Squire's will. Between these contrasted personages, father and grand- father, an internecine war for the leading influence over the hero's body and soul goes on from the first page to the last of the book. We cannot say that so far as the stage of these con- tending influences is laid in the mind of young Harry Richmond we care very much for the issue,—at least, after the stage of boy- hood is past, a period during which the picture of the struggle is drawn with great power and effect. But the contrast between the airy, grandiose, strategic genius of the hare-brained, but half-love- able charlatan and castle-builder, with his magnificent belief in his own destiny, his really grand play of fancy, and his almost disinter- ested dreams of a great career for his son, and the coarse, warm- hearted, violent, narrow, successful old English squire, " oared up to his lips, con,solled up to his chin," and distinguished in his class by the real lucidity of his business mind, and therefore possessed with a double intensity of loathing for the hollow, scheming, and visionary pretensions of his son-in-law, is drawn from beginning to end with marvellous power. The two scenes in which their first and last battles are fought at the very opening of the first volume and towards the close of the third are scenes of strange vigour ; and if connected together by a plot half as good as are several of the links in it, they would have been re- membered amongst some of the best things in English literature. But, as we have intimated, young Harry Richmond, after he has passed the boyhood stage, is not drawn with any real power, while the vast detail in which his father's faculty for social intrigue and the construction of a grand plot is developed, though full of cleverness, becomes utterly wearisome before the close. If a little of the minuteness of study spent upon this no doubt very original, but still exhaustible conception, had been devoted to Janet Ilchester, the story might have been vastly improved, both by sub- traction and by addition—by taking away from the superfluity of an over-developed idea, and by remedying the deficiency of a figure very imperfectly conceived and drawn. Neither Mr. Richmond nor Squire Beltham,—unquestionably the great figures of the piece,— can be fairly illustrated by any extract we have space to give; but the mode in which the would-be royal charlatan first acquired his ascen- dancy over his son's mind is so finely painted, and that, too, within limits possible to a newspaper, that we will illustrate it by giving the young man's recollections of his father's method of ex- citing in him as a child intense interest in the gralder episodes of English literature and history :— " He was never away on the Sunday. Both of tut attired in our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my father led uie before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of British victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention. I un lorstood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and dropped his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce Nelson's name or some other great man's: and this recurred regularly. What are we for now?' he would ask me as we left our house. I had to decide whether we took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do with capricious resolution. We were one Sunday for Shakspeare ; another for Nelson or Pitt. Nelson, papa,' was my most frequent rejoinder, and he never dissented, but turned his steps towards Nelson's cathedral-dome, and uncovered his head there, and said : 'Nelson, then, to-day ;' and we went straight to his monument to perform the act of homage. I chose Nelson in preference to the others because, towards bed-time in the evening, my father told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor Shakspeare lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on the ice to make themselves interesting. I named them occasionally out of compassion, and to please my father, who said that they ought to have a turn. They were he told me, in the habit of paying him a visit, whenever I had particularly neglected them, to learn the grounds for my disregard of their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me, and imparted many of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them a chance on the following Sunday. 'Great Will,' my father called Shakspeare, and Slender Billy,' Pitt. The BC13110 where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put an ex- tinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of Inn and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but everybody in the park called him 'Father William ; ' and when he wanted to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in the blood of the deer ; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcass; Hamlet (I cannot say why, but the fact was impressed on me) offered him a three-legged stool ; and a number of kings and knights and ladies lit their torches from Bardolph ; and away they flew, distracting the keepers and leaving Will and his troop to the deer. That poor thing died from a different weapon at each recital, though always with a flow of blood and a successful dash of his antlers into Falstaff ; and to hear Falstaff bellow ! But it was mournful to hear how sorry Great Will was over the animal he had slain. He spoke like music. I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by Bardolph's nose. When I was just bursting out crying—for the deer's tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at his side ; he had little ones at home—Great Will remembered his engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase ; determined that no Jew should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he said the Jew would not see the difference ; Falstaff only got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick. My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air, and such liveliness—he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King Lear tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of Falstaff—that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them, which was better than understanding them. I required some help from him to see that Hamlet's offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment of the chase was laughable. He taught ma what to think of it by pitching Great Will's voice high, and Hamlet's very low. By degrees I got some unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakspeare. There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under eight or ten years old. He could gams on Saturday whether I should name William Pitt on the Sunday ; for on those occasions, Slender Billy,' as I hope I am not irre- verent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion. If I named him, my father would say, 'W. P., otherwise S. B., was born in the year so-and-so ; now,' and he went to the cupboard, 'in the name of Politics, take this and medi- tate upon him.' The shops being all shut on Sunday, he certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his repeating a couplet,
Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry-jam, When he heard they had taken Seringapatam.'
At any rate, the rumour of his having done so at periods of strong exeitement led to the inexplicable display of fore sight on my father's part."
That is full of a humour that one regards as almost too great to be compatible with a mind so inflated with grandiose dreams as that of the would-be royal adventurer ; but it is one of the most delicate feats of ability in the book to make us feel how much of true humour and nobility there is combined with Mr. Roy Richmond's theatrical, pageant-loving character, and rather ignoble aims. It is impossible to think of him without his charlatanerie, and yet it is impossible to think of him as not possessing qualities both intellectual and emotional too good for his charlatan schemes, — and this, notwithstanding that he himself never seems to have the shadow of a distrust of his own aims from the beginning to the close of his ambitions career. So completely is the man a quasi-royal adven- turer, a patron who needs very substantial help, a Grand Seigneur who has to depend for his hopes on more solidly established Grande Seigneurs, a man whose every gift, whose elasticity, whose willing- ness to stoop in order to soar the better in future, are manufactured, u it were, to suit his dreams and hopes, that we are hardly able from the beginning to the end to conceive of any intellectual or moral nature in the man independently of the part he is acting. That he loves his son thoroughly, and the woman who renounced him for her sister's sake, is cleat; that he can see the absurd side of other people's littlenesses is clear also ; but that he could have any intellectual conviction, or moral conviction, or political conviction outside of the exigencies of his part in life, seems almost impossible. It need hardly be observed that the conception of such a character is very original, and that the insanity in which the author makes it terminate, when the bubble bursts, is most truly as well as finely conceived. Had but our author spared us half the detail!
Besides the great charlatan and the great English squire, there is much in the story to show the author's talent. There are even -delicate touches here and there,—like that which represents the
Princess Ottilia as recurring to the imperfect English of her childhood's first acquaintance with Harry Richmond, when she asks him, after his declaration of love, whether he can be patient, and adds, with tender humour, in the precise form of her former childish stiffness, "It is my question ; " and again, like that which makes the poor old pretender to royal blood recall, when all his schemes are in ruins, his promise to his old housekeeper that she- should have a memorial erected to her by his hand, and mutter to himself, " Waddy shall have her monument." These delicacies of delineation are not very common in the book, but the few there are are touches of real genius. Nor must we forget, in enumerating. the finer elements of the book, the exquisite episode of the child's runaway adventure with the gipay girl Kiomi,—a picture almost as faithful and as full of colour and humour as any to be found in modern literature.
On the other hand, as we have said, the book has great faults. There is a great exuberance of dull, protracted, social intrigue; and a terrible flatness about the hero himself. But worst of all is the want of simplicity of style and the frequently false and disagreeable turns given to expression, as when the child remembers of his schoolmaster's daughter to whom he had been talking of her young lover, "she laughed and mouthed me over with laughing kisses ;" or again, when he is falling in love with the Princess Ottilia, and in answer to a remark of hers he is moved to declare his passion, but does not, a state of feeling which he thus expresses ;—" Something moved my soul to lift wings, but the passion sank." There are plenty of illustrations of this love of affectation in the style, and still more of an apparently affected obscurity of manner, which tend to spoil a novel containing the evidence of really great powers.
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