THE OGILVIES. * THERE are three kinds of fictions descriptive of
common contemporary life and manners. The first, where the materials are derived directly from observation, and the writer possesses experience enough to compre- hend the general character of the events of the life he attempts to de- scribe. The second class requires less specific observation, and probably less real knowledge of men and life, but greater art. The general subject and the particular matter may not be very new, but they are made to look so by the skill which exhibits them in new forms, and the wit, elo- quence or vivacity of style with which they are presented. The writers
of the elo-
quence, class have no comprehensive views of life as it is, or little of what is called knowledge of the world; nor have they those literary gifts which supply its place. It is not that they wholly take from former books, or that they always rvrite badly. Many of this class "draw from nature," as the phrase is ; but they are in the condition of bad or raw artists, and do not comprehend what they see : their representations are not true because not sufficiently large ' as a general picture, though they might be veracious as a matter- of-fact view if put forward simply as such. So far as mere diction is concerned, they may write clearly and even smartly; but there is no mind in their style. Of these three classes we should be inclined to adduce Cooper and Marryat as types of the first, in their sea and Red Indian tales. Bulwer Lytton is a very good representative of the second ; for if his works are rigidly analyzed, it will be found that the general ideas and much of the matter are derived from other writers, but made to look like his own by a few striking characters, the manner in which content- porary opinions and manners are engrafted upon the derived substance, and the eloquence or point of the style. To the third class belong the mass of second-rate (or still inferior) novelists, and the whole tribe of circulating library writers. Writers elaborately metaphysical and capable of pointing an important moral form a class by themselves : those fictions which, however narrowly and imperfectly, delineate some aspect of society, rather belong to the first category of writings : historical ro- mance is quite another walk of literature.
The Ogilnies belongs to the third school, but is entitled to a high place in the ranks, having more of art than this class of novels generally present. The art, however, is of a rather mechanical kind ; being limited to the literary knack of narrating a story and working up a scene. The writer wants the comprehension necessary to form a just judgment of the life which furnishes the substance of the tale, and to put it to the reader at its true rate. There is a mixture of the school-room and the coterie in the way in which we are called to attend to common incidents and common persons, with a dash of the old Minerva Press style in the mode in which a priggish kind of person is forced up into a Byronic sort of hero. There is the very common failing of common novelists—too much ado about little. The story is carried on by contrivances : love is encouraged by overhearing and misinterpreting a casual word ; love is crossed by the old and stale trick of a false report and an artful woman. This misappre- hension, conducted and cleared up in the way usual in novels, is one source of interest in the plot. The other is the girlish love of Katherine Ogilvie for the hero, Paul Lynedon; Katherine's marriage to her cousin Hugh Ogilvie; a subsequent meeting with Mr. Lynedon; an attachment that springs up between Katherine and Paul, carried to the melodramatic refusal to elope ; the death of the obtuse, goocluatured, sporting Hugh, by an accident in the field ; Katherine's final marriage with Lynedon; and her death in his arms on their return from church, struck by a toll- ing bell. It will be seen that there is no generic novelty in this ; and the growth and struggle of an adulterous passion is not a subject ap- proved in English fiction, or pleasing in itself. However, it is the want of generic novelty, with minute labour and length disproportioned to the matter, ,that places The Ogiluies in the common category of fictions. Had it been a newer "style of thing," the book would have interested the critical reader as much as it will now do the glutton of the circulating library; for it is not devoid of a certain kind of power in scenes of pas- sion, and of skill in conceiving and describing the influence of circum- stances upon the formation of character.
* The Ogilvles ; a Novel. In three volumes. Published by Chapman and Hall.
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