LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD.*
Mn. BODKIN, who dedicates his novel to Mr. Gladstone, as "the best English friend Ireland ever had," appears to have been inspired to undertake the work by a remark of Lord Byron's. "What a noble fellow," says he, "was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and what a romantic and singular history his was ! If it were not too near our own time, it would make the finest subject in the world for an historical novel." But we hardly know for what reason it is, that there is no novel in the world so difficult to write. Esmond was the first and greatest of successes in that way, if we leave out of the record the Homeric work of Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas, which are the romances of the world, written by men full of invention and impregnated with the spirit of the time they wrote of. Dramatists by instinct, they treated their broad subjects from the dramatic point of view, and leave us free from any sense of artistic effort on their part. To this day their works remain the most popular among novels with the subscribers to public libraries ; and so dear are adventure and historical romance to the heart of the public that Balwer Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth still figure prominently in the same quarters among the attractive names. With all his failings, the former of these had a great power of conjuring up the past before us ; and if the enduring success of Ainsworth must be admittedly unintelligible from any critical point of view, it at least tells of the unchanging nature of the broader tendencies of mankind. Studies of character up to date and morbid inquisitions into the moral anatomies are fleeting fashions with the few after all.
• Lord Edward Pitserald OR Historical Romano.. By M. MoD. Bodkin, Q.O. With Linstrations by Leonard Linedell. London: Chapman and Hall. 1596.
Esmond was the type of another kind of historical romance from these. It was not the outcome of Thackeray's natural bent of mind, for he was fond of historical study from the literary and critical standpoint, not from the adventurous. It was like George Eliot's Rom°la, a tour de force, but it suc- ceeded where the other failed, in spite of the disagreeable nature of the hero's marriage with Lady Castlewood,—a curious instance of the cynicism which it is the fashion to disclaim for Thackeray, as if cynicism were only the companion and the outcome of black hair and beetling brows, and a kind of synonym for melodramatic villainy. Mr. Besant achieved a considerable success with the critics on the strength of his Dorothy Forster, but it did not penetrate to the heart of the world, and others of less gift have followed in his footsteps even more in vain. No more curious proof of Dickens's exceptional gifts in authorship is to be found than in the success achieved both in Barnaby Budge and the Tale of Two Cities, works so entirely out of his familiar line, yet both so eminently and permanently readable for many to whom Esmond and the historical romance in general are quite impossible. The curious and delightful manner in which the inevitable Dickens types, like Miss Miggs and her fellows in the former book, stand out against the sombre backgrounds of the Gordon riots or the French Revolution, and seem to blend without being contradictory, is a thing not to be easily forgotten of men.
In taking Lord Edward Fitzgerald as his hero and subject for a new incursion into the realm of historical romance, Mr. Bodkin has succumbed to an obvious temptation, which we fear will prove to have been more strong than satisfying. The figure of Lord Edward has been consecrated by time into a. kind of sacred memory ; but the records and encyclopmdias of the day, even allowing for their natural partiality and innate meagreness, fail to suggest to us anything really very attractive in his life or his career. His connection with Pamela, and the unsolved question if she was really the daughter of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Geniis or no, seem to have been precisely of a nature to interest the world more than his own feats of fighting and patriotism. The story of the end of his life reads like that of a rather disreputable squabble of the kind which is apt to figure in the police-courts, than as that which it is popularly sup- posed to have been. But Mr. Bodkin disappoints us very much by not giving us the end at all. His last chapter simply represents Pamela and Lord Edward as giving the pretty Norah happily away in marriage, and the tune of the wedding-bells is the pleasant bat inappropriate finish of the book. It is true that the villain of the story intends to shoot the bridegroom on his way from the church, and bides behind the tombstones for the purpose. But he is prevented by a good Irish robber of the name of Weeny, whose grey wig falls off till his hair blazes red against the green ground—a genuine study for a Whistler—while the veins of the would-be murderer stand out on his forehead like a ship's cordage. And so Mark Blake is shot, and lies dead amongst the flowers while the happy couple sweep through Maynooth to the stately portals af the Carton demesne, to be heartily met by Lord Edward and Pamela, with a very pretty picture to bear description out, carrying a baby in her arms. And the book ends with Lord Edward laughing out cheerfully as he disclaims all idea of armed rebellion. "There is no danger of fighting or dying, you silly little Mother Hubbard," he said, "patting his wife's cheek with playful tenderness. We are all going to live happy for ever and ever, like the good folk in the nursery tales." It was, we think, Marion Crawford who lately apologised with grave force for " ending " a novel in the usual way, on the ground that there is no real end but death to any story of a life that can be told. Certainly, in the case of Lord Edward, a book that ends as this does cannot fail to leave a sense of incompleteness which almost suggests a sequel,—a plan which Mr. Bodkin does not anywhere announce as part of his intention. It is really by his marriage and his death that Lord Edward is known. He figures in the graceful illustrations which adorn the story as a good-looking and attractive boy, not too well fitted for the fighting part which he plays throughout these pages, which we cannot help feeling to be somewhat monotonous in tone. "The main incidents of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's marvellous career, as herein set down, his stirring adventures in the American War of Independence, even his adoption into the Indian tribe of the Great Bear, are absolutely true." So Mr. Bodkin prefaces; but the very fact that they are true stands in the way of their fitness for a novel, which must be a consecutive story if it is to be anything. In a historical novel the historical scenes should be the episodes through which the reader may follow the fortunes of his fictitious personages. In that way pictures may be produced which may live like Thackeray's wonderful "Waterloo," which, with the chapters on Brussels and the doings of Becky Sharp, make the great battle more vivid to us even now than many a professed history. Thackeray's great historical novel was Esmond; but his greatest achievement in historical romance, equal, as the mighty novelist's ought to be, to any effort ever made in that way, is the Waterloo chapter in Vanity Fair.
With Pamela, in Mr. Bodkin's novel, we have unluckily very little to do; and the record of names and fights and feastings, of plots and duellings, and all the rest, will be cal- culated to please a class of readers who love this kind of adventure for its own sake. In its nature there can be nothing very new in it; and Mr. Bodkin has rather complicated matters by the original plan of heading every chapter with a quotation from Shakespeare, drawing on nearly all the playa in turn. It is a good test of appropriateness, and supplies new evidence of the poet's universality, but it helps us not at all when we want to refresh our memory on some point of the story, in discovering to what chapter we ought to turn. A full page and a half of Shakespearian extracts is neither appro- priate nor helpful. One of the most entertaining bits of the volume is to be found in the account of a wonderful legal feat, of Curran's, when it had been conclusively proved in a case of bigamy that the first wife was living when the second was married. "Your lordship," said Curran, "forgets to take judicial cognisance of the fact that the earth goes round the sun." When it was twelve in Dublin it was only twenty minutes past seven in New York, and the first wife had died in the latter place, on the admitted evidence, at least three hours and forty minutes when the second was married in the former. So was made the name and fortune of Maurice Blake, the happy husband of the last chapter of the book, which will be pleasant reading enough for the lover of fighting and adventure, but does not appear to ourselves to be much more suggestive of Lord Edward Fitzgerald in particular, as we are wont to imagine him, than of many a Hotspur or many a Barry Lyndon.
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