ROMANCE FOR THE POOR.*
THERE is no doubt that when this story was first published in the pages of a cheap journal it interested many thousands of readers who move in the humbler walks of life. Whatever others may think of the strange characters which Mr. Egan has brought together, and the extraordinary acts he causes them to perform, the sympathies and belief of his audience were given to him in a degree which novelists of higher rank rarely receive. The readers of The London Journal and similar publications do not doubt their author. They do not put themselves upon an equality with him; he occupies an imaginary eminence almost as high above them as that of the peers and dukes whose wicked deeds he relates. He is a man who penetrates all kinds of society, who knows the secrets of the great, and is hand in glove with princes and states- men, holding a rod over the rich, well acquainted with burglars and detectives, knowing all things, and able to write pleasantly about love. A man must have a certain power to be able to instil into the minds of tens of thousands this impression of him. What- ever may be the extent of his acquaintance with the rich, he must well understand the poor to be able to please them thus. Also he does effectually what minds of a higher cast must needs fail in at- tempting. Mr. Trollope would certainly ruin The London Journal in a fortnight. The republication of Sir Walter Scott's novels in its pages some years ago would have ended it summarily, if Mr. Egan and men like him had not ousted Wauerley. Success of this kind may be held to justify the republication of such books as The Flower of the Flock, only that in appealing to a different class of readers Mr. Egan virtually expresses his willingness to be judged by a dif- ferent canon of criticism. A picture may look well enough in the servants' hall, while in the master's dining-room we should not be able to look at it without laughing. Now we have no desire to make laughter over Mr. Egan's book. We look upon it as a wonder- ful book in many respects, and we should be glad to describe it in such a way as not to cast ridicule upon the author. If a plain ac- • 7%e Flower of the Flock. By Pierce Egan. Three vols. London: W. S. Johnson and Co. count of it seems like the record of an adverse judgment, it will be solely owing to the fact that we are not looking at Mr. Egan's curious dramatis persona through the area railings.
What the readers of cheap serial novels look for from first to last is incident. Mr. Egan is a good hard worker for them in this respect. There are in this novel a forgery, two or three attempted murders, a suicide, more attempts at abduction than we have been able to count, some sudden deaths, a baby born at the wrong time, and a useful ruffian, always on the look out for a murdering job— not to mention such mild excitements as a house on fire and the heroine nearly burnt to death in it. What is very astonishing is that all the women are constantly on the borders of a moral catastrophe —the birds are always being nearly limed, and the reader hardly knows at the end of some chapters whether a particular heroine— for there are several—has made a serious slip or not. The rich men in the story are of course the fowlers. They are remarkable men in all ways, but the way they go about entrapping women is truly surprising. For example, Mr. Egan represents a nobleman to have seen a girl for the first time, and to have thought thus of her :— " To be smitten with the face of Lottie was to desire to obtain her. He viewed it as a question of time and money, and he made a memorandum in his note-book to that effect." So when another man is introduced to a young lady, he says to himself, "She shall be mine." The young women whom Mr. Egan writes for must believe that the eyes of the rich are thus constantly turned upon them, or they would recognize the unreality of the picture, and The London Journal would soon find that out. Moreover, it must be in some strange way an agreeable thought to them that the upper classes are inceisantly conspiring against their "honour " and "virtue," to use Mr. Egan's phrases. It is beautiful to see how well Mr. Egan adapts his story to this taste of his feminine readers. They like to read of a young woman "in trouble," only if possible there should be a marriage at some time or other. Now what Mr. Egan does is to give a young lady a baby—or "offspring," as he would say—and leave it doubtful through nearly two volumes- whether the mother is married. To a servant girl it is doubtless a genuine pleasure to take up a story like this in "the interval of business," and read of a young lady iu this predicament :— "'Look in my eyes, my child, she [the lady's servant] said, solemnly ; 'answer me truly, are you ignorant of your actual condition?'—' My — my condition !' feebly echoed Helen.—' Know you not, my poor girl,' exclaimed Mrs. Trnebody, in a deep and earnest tone, 'that era a few short months have passed over your head you will become a — Helen's face became instantly of a ghastly whiteness. She turned an affrighted glare upon Mrs. Truebody."
This interestiug young lady's father, at a later period, when there- is no longer Cie slightest doubt as to the nature of her complaint, exhorts her to mend her fault by marrying a rich peer, " whatever may have happened." That was a delicate, if not a strictly parental way of putting the matter. The concession to the sempstresses is ren- dered by the author making out, in the oddest way, that the young lady was married all the time, though neither she nor her lover knew anything about it. It would be very difficult to convince the class who read these novels that people who are well off do not live in this fashion; but, on the other hand, it would be absurd to blame Mr. Egan for the excessive ignorance and folly which induce his readers to take his books as accurate pictures of life. No one has a right to condemn him. These people will have garbage, and if they cannot find it at Mr. Egan's shop they are sure to get it some- where else. Indeed, Mr. Egan deals with the embarrassing subject of love in a very creditable manner. What can be finer than this reflection concerning love at first sight ?—
" Here, where we take impressions with a qualification, it is considered almost apocryphal that a man or woman should fall in love with one of the opposite sex the moment they cast eyes upon each other. Yet it is not deemed wonderful that persons seeing an article which, at the first glance, strikes them as being beautiful, should conceive instantly a desire to possess it and call it their own. Why should there be a difference between the emotions raised by the inanimate and the animate 2"
Why, indeed ? Mr. Egan asks such difficult questions. We prefer his style when he puts his sentiments in the form of an apopthegm thus,—" Love 'of offspring is the prominent element of maternity." Now to get such ideas and such language as that for a penny a week must be a real blessing to the poor, and a triumph of cheap literature. The practical application of these teuder senti- ments is exhibited in such passages as the following :—
"She was faint and full of tears' so the arm remained where it had been placed; and, somehow, her head rested upon his breast, while largo glittering drops fell from her eyes to the ground. Oh, the bliss of that moment! Never before in her life had she experienced any emotion equalling that exquisite felicity."
This may look rather highly-toned when printed in the pages of The Spectator, but it is very mild meat to readers of The London
Journal. They demand to be kept in the full whirl of excitement and mystery. To say that Mr. Egan's book is a little full- flavoured is therefore to say no more than that he skilfully adapts his wares to his audience. Everything is made warm, but the audience are acclimatized to the heat, and it agrees with them. The amount of influence exerted by any books, good or bad, is vastly overrated, and it would be prudish to accuse these cheap novels of doing much harm. We do not .blame Mr. Egan. On the contrary, we admire his style. He knows what he is about, and it is undeniably a great thing to be able to write as he does about love, and virtue, and the like. It must be owned that his characters are excited and turbulent beyond description —except Mr. Egan's own description. We never read of such people before. "The old man's knees trembled, and his under-jaw quivered ;" "His eyeballs contracted into small glittering circles ;" "His breast was as a seething cauldron ;" "An expression of ineffable disdain passed over the lady's features ;" "The nether jaw of Jukes slightly dropped." All this is very striking. How can a man keep it up, and what must be his feelings while he writes? Do they resemble those which he ascribes to a character in the book, " He felt his flesh crawl and creep over his bones and his marrow vibrate ?" Mr. Egan's marrow must have vibrated at some time or other at one of his own horrors, or how could he have discovered that such a sensation was possible ? We confess we like to read of such people. They constantly give each other "looks of inef- fable scorn," they call upon "the avenging Heaven," their "throats swell," their "eyes glitter," and they have "vulture-like hands." All these are Mr. Egan's words, and intensely graphic they are. Then, too, the author's account of his noblemen is perfect in its way. Thus we read of one, "He was dressed elegantly. The jewellery he wore, though spare in quantity, was superb in material and super- eminentlycostly." And another man was so irresistible to the weaker vessel that "where he listed he found the citadel not difficult to carry by a coup de main." And in the way of sentiment here is something in the best style :—" Alas ! too, like many others of his sex, as far as woman was concerned, his heart greatly resembled a garden-grown cabbage, luxuriant in leaf, but without the solid centre which was necessary to make it of value to the possessor." No simile could be better adapted to reach the understandings of Mr. Egan's readers, for they would all feel what an immeasurable " sell " it would be to take home for their Sunday dinner a cabbage with- out a "solid centre." Their emotions would be similar to those attributed to a maiden in the story—" A thought rushed through her brain, and a flash of crimson spread itself over her fair face and neck, and then it subsided and left her deadly pale." How these people support themselves in so many trying emergencies we can- not explain, but they go their several ways to suicide, murder, or forgery—some finding a premature grave and some a premature family—with great regularity. As we have said, numbers of hard- working people, who have to face the cruellest realities of life daily and hourly, take extreme pleasure in these stories, and find in them a genuine sweetener of their toil. Explain it how we will, the fact is so, and if it does not harmonize with all the glorification that we hear about "progress," and enlightenment, and the spread of knowledge, the fault is not Mr. Egan's. After all, his tales do not reflect so discreditably on popular taste as the success of the "Essays" of a certain gentleman with numerous initials, who has dribbled weak sentimentality about the town until the spirit longs to see him included somehow in the metropolitan system of drain- age, and swept clean away to be deodorized and turned into some- thing useful.
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