THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON.*
Tnis is a book of broad and unquestionable genius, and there our contentment with it ends. The genius is employed in stifling us with evil flavours ; and the evil is never displayed in that active stage in -which men voluntarily embrace or conquer it, but always in that merely torpid and habitual phase in which it re- presents an atmosphere, a state, a condition, rather than a con- flict. The effect is very suffocating both in an artistic and moral point of view : artistic, because nothing ever happens throughout the story except at the beginning of the first volume and at the end of the third, while these reeking vapours, as of moral sulpha- retted hydrogen, are always making one wish for some defined crisis • The Seven Sons of Mammon: a Story. By George Augustus Sala. Three volts. Tinsley Brothers.
to clear the air and throw a discriminating central light upon the crowd of corrupt. and exhausted ruffians ; moral, because with so much stagnant vice brooding heavily over the book, without either coming to a head or dispersing, we find it hard to persuade ourselves that it is through the evil wills of men that such gloom as this is engendered, and not rather through some malignant fate which breathes it into the very fountains of nature, habit, and circumstance.
Mr. Sala, in a preface not remarkable for modesty or good taste, has challenged the critics to come on, with a loud promise to requite them blow for blow : " With respect to the reception this novel may meet with from professional critics, I am indifferent. Of course, for my publishers' sake, I should wish it to be landed to the skies; but so far as I am personally concerned, criti- cism, hostile.or amicable, is a matter of no moment whatever. Did I earn nay bread by writing novels, or did I look to booksellers for patronage, the praise or the condemnation of a new work might make or break me ;—were I young, or hopeful, or ambitious, I might be overjoyed or driven to de-. spair by eulogy or blame- But I have reviewed too many books in my time, and know too many reviewers, to care much about such things. I have found that slander has not diminished my income, and that the lies that have been told about me have not injured my digestion ; and although it is a very nice thing to be a popular author, and a very terrible one to be casti- gated as a dullard and an ignoramus by critics, I have come to be of the opinion of Candide mItiver son jardin,' and that, so long as a man goes on cultivating his cabbages in a quiet laborious manner, and earning hig daily bread by the sweat of his brow, and thanking God for it, he need not trouble himself in any great degree about the applause or censure of the world. Therefore, my intimate enemies, or my inimical friends, if you feel inclined for the attack, come on. Gentlemen of the Guard, fire first. I have, myself, a faculty for sound hearty abuse, and if you choose to brawl at me'over the hedge, I shall be very happy to look up from my spade- husbandry, and return half a dozen good set terms of invective for every' six you may be pleased to favour me with."
Criticism, we are well aware, can rarely, if ever, be of any real use to the author criticized, at least when he is a' man of true genius, for, then, his critic stands below him in this respect, utterly unable to mea- sure the creative processes of the mind which he professes to judge, and even by the most exhausting gymnastic on intellectual tiptoe will rarely be able to peep into the secret's of imaginative birth and growth. For this reason we sincerely respect authors who refuse to allow the petty acumen of inadequately clever critics to rankle for a moment in their breast. But Mr. Sala takes up a position that is humiliating for himself, and rather calumnious, we hope, to many of his critics. Jcle seems to imply that all which is painful to him will be said, not but of the inadequacy of critical sympathy, but out of personal vindictiveness; and he promises to descend to the level of such antagonists, and render thrust for thrust. This is scarcely worthy of any man of dignity. For ourselves, we do not propose to benefit Mr. Sala, but rather to clear up our own minds and those, we trust, of some others of his readers as to the characteristics of his strange and turbid genius. If in doing so we expose ourselves to Mr. Sala's invective, we shall only lament that he has wasted his own strength in such replies.
Like most moderns of literary eminence, Mr. Sala understands thoroughly the scope of his own powers. He tells us in his "Dutch Pictures," that his literary skill is of the inventory-making sort, and has a specific bias to brokerage and old clothes. In some respects this misrepresents and distorts the real fact, which seems to us to be that Mr. Sala's power is far better suited to collect the physical traces and consequences of different- sets of habits than to explain any of the inward history of those habits. This is one of the prin- cipal reasons why his story, in spite of its power, hangs fire as it does, and why it lingers so exclusively among the evil, and generally even among the detestably evil. It hangs fire because the power of grasping and delineating with the most vivid pen the typical physique of men does not in any way include the power of delineating them in the moment of action. The latter demands a higher spring of imagination, which can only be compassed on condition of dissolving for a moment those servile bonds of habit in which Mr. Sala's genius delights. Even the serpent, in the moment of striking, so far forgets its nature as to rear its body from the ground ; and all men, whether good or evil, are at those creative moments in which they take a new step for ill or good, new creatures,—exempted for the instant from the gripe of mere circumstance and habit. Mr. Sala shows a singular inability for delineating these critical moments in men's careers. He loves to pass them over, to assume them as done, to jump the chasm between the chapters, when it really has to be jumped at all. With all his won- derful power of accumulating the external tokens of the various distinct habits of life, he has no insight into those formative attitudes of mind at which character is really made or marred. Hence his story, as an artistic work, hangs fire, since his wonderful sketches lead to no active result, and we never get from the statics to the dynamics of his tale. Partly for the same reason does it linger so painfully among the most vulgar and detestable forms of human character. These are the types in which a distinct set of physical characteristics most distinctly appear. Go a little higher in the moral anti intellectual scale, and you begin to lose the sharp features of a physical type in the ge- neral light of common human thought, feeling, and purpose. Here the creative imagination can act only by sympathy. But Mr. Sala does not create by sympathy at all, but by a wonderful faculty for multiplying to almost any extent the physical details which tend to produce a particular moral expression. He turns his kaleidoscope, as it were—not a pretty one, but one full of very ugly minute traits —and they fly into a new combination of exactly the same general aspect, yet with sufficient variety to increase the force of the impres- sion. But there is much less scope for this kind of genius at any point
above the disagreeable and strongly-marked types—the more dis- agreeable the more strongly marked—and with them, therefore, Mr. Sala chiefly concerns himself. For example, the principal character in this book, Mrs. Armytage- Mr. Sala's equivalent for Becky Sharp—is intellectually far above this level of a sharply defined type of character which can be ade- kpiately mirrored in its physique. And to us the picture seems, on the whole, a failure. We read of her crimes without realizing them for a moment. We should never be astonished if we were told that her crimes were imaginary or assumed. Even selfishness is not dis- tinctly branded upon her. Throughout, the external appearance and face of the woman are most distinctly visible—and that is all. We
never believe very firmly in her evil-beartedness. Certainly we could not easily be convinced of anything 'very good, but the whole moral
impression remains indefinite, vague, inadequate—something exceed- ingly different from that marvellous prototype of Mr. Thackeray's. One great reason of this neutral effect is that Mr. Sala never exhibits her but once—in the interview with Sir Jasper Goldthorpe at his country-house—in the crisis of action; and that once the picture is ineffective. We never see the growth of a single malignant motive or conception of a cold, selfish purpose. We see nothing but the pretty
playful feline exterior. On the other hand, when Mr. Sala sticks to a well-marked. physique—such -as "friendly George Gafferer," or
Mrs. Car Donkin, or any of her revolting circle, or Buffalmacco the Ruthless, or Reuben "the Yollerer,' or Ephraim Tigg the Rasper, or half a dozen others—his pictures, though apt to he a little loathsome, are always impressive. But for the very reason that these sketches are so perfect, the characters themselves are also absolutely stationary—have, in fact, nothing to do with the story except to appear there, and might all have been left out without in the least affecting the fate of the seven sons of Mammon.
Indeed, it is characteristic of the extreme unsuitability of Mr. Sala's genius for depicting the movement of life, and the collision of different characters and destinies, that there is no such thing as a unity in this book. Of the seven sons of Mammon only one is con- nected with the so-called story, and he is not delineated at all, while the other six are some of them sketched, but none of them prominent. Indeed, all the good pictures are accidental to the narrative, and' one or two, which are essential to the unsolved mystery of what may he called the plot, are not very good. 'We think this fact suggests the key to Mr. Sala's genius. It is not a moral genius, nor an immoral genius. He paints neither passion, nor action, but habit, custom, and pursuits. The so-called story is but a thread for bits.of observed life, and as his means of observation have lain in. many unpleasant regions, and as those regions are exactly those which are the most distinct and definite in outline, we have a great concentration of the fumes of evil life, which hang over his book like the "black wreath" of London over the metro- polis. Lady Goldthorpe is the one bright spot in. this book, and she is a little too like Lady Scatcherd in Mr. Trollope'S novel of "Dr. Thorne." 'We will not quarrel, however, with the one star that shines through this fog of human evil; still we must end with saying that it will be for the low characters, like Ephraim Tigg the Rasper, that the Seven Sons of Mammon will continue to be read. They are fruits of real genius, though they belong to the story much as a placard belongs to a blank wall, simply by virtue of the accidental cohesion.
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