RALPH D.UNELL.*
RALPH DARNELL is not equal to Tara, for Colonel Taylor has not comprehended with the same thoroughness the nature and the limits of his own power. It is power, as any one who read Tara through would acknowledge, of a very remarkable, and in our day of an alnaost unique kind, but it is not strictly speaking the power of a novelist. The essence of that power is the capacity of repre- senting human hature, of creating any figure without life, which to all who see it shall seem to have life, and life of the vivid kind, and we are not sure that Colonel Taylor possesses this. He may, but it was not apparent in Tara, and is not apparent in Ralph Dar- nell. What he does possess is a faculty of an extremely rare and valuable though lower kind, that of painting certain figures of an exceptional though most interesting character which shall appear to be alive, and which the reader would rather see in motion than characters in themselves higher and-more generic. Matchless paint- ing of a dog is not higher art than ordinary painting of the human figure, but froin its scarcity it is much more valuable and more highly prized. No figure probably in all literature is so unreal to average Englishmen as that of a Hindoo girl in active movement, but Colonel Taylor in Tara created such a girl, and she was to all who looked at her perfectly real, capable of intense volition, of action as fall of purpose and as varied as that of any English- woman whatsoever. To the mass of Mr. Mudie's subscribers she was probably rather a bore, and a bore of a bad kind, the sort of bore whom the bored feel they ought to appreciate and don't. But to the few who could see under her Oriental veil, so wide and wilfully made so thick, how charming she was, how thoroughly natural and original, how completely a girl, and how utterly un- like any girl Englishmen ever saw or conceived. She was no more like a European maiden of her own kind than that black slave in Millais's sketch, the " Finding of Moses "—oh that he would but make it a picture !—is like anything our white-visaged kinsmen can appreciate, but only those who cannot see denied that she had a beauty of her own. There is genuine power in such a por- trait, power which we do not recognize in the first volume and a half of this novel. It is simply a sketch, after fifty other sketches, of life as it was in the middle of the last century, accurate enough, we dare say, in costume and appurtenances, • Ralph Darnell. By Colonel Meadows Taylor. Loudon : Blackwood. as a figure may be accurate in dress, but not specially accurate underneath the clothes. Nanny the faithful nurse might be of to-day, Sybil is but a faithful girl, Ralph Darnell a wild young man with good impulses. As to Roger Darnell, imagine Mr. Dombey an East India Director, and as for Mohocks, actresses, &c., they are properties, as the actors say, not people. Neither Colonel Taylor nor anybody else in our day, except perhaps Thackeray, and he did not do it, could explain what was in the inside of a " blood " of 1750, what impelled him, what redeemed him, what made him as indifferent to women's honour as no other generation of Englishmen has ever been, what elicited and what protected that reckless scorn alike of life and of propriety.
Ralph Daruell in England bores us, and he would bore us in India if he were not so completely subordinated to other figures, to Clive, for example, of whom Colonel Taylor has given us a most human sketch ; to Suraj ood Dowlah, the drunken despot of Bengal; to the Afghan leader Noor Khan, who has a prominence in one's mental recollection of these sketches which Colonel Taylor did not, we conceive, intend, a picture of the physical power latent in Eastern intrigues which we have never seen surpassed, and two native women, each of whom is real. There is life in every one, and in all but one something slightly unsatisfactory. Clive stands before us in Colonel Taylor's portrait as he stood in life—the soldier-statesman, but then he stood there also in Macaulay's picture, and we wanted of fiction something-more, the inner life of the man who could not fear a foe and who never betrayed a friend, but yet who betrayed his-enemies like a common swindler, and to the day when he died by his own hand feared something not in mnrtal array. Even in the Nawab —nay, we cannot carefully criticize the Nawab. There has been no such portrait painted in our time of the bad Eastern ruler, the utterly bad one, to whom Louis XL was a hero and a statesman, Louis XV. a saint, and George IV. a gentleman. The only characteristic of his external self which Colonel Taylor fails to give was a certain suavity as of high breeding, that air with which the great tiger in the Zoological turns in his walk, that perfection of feline aplomb visible in all native accounts of a man who from the fearful consequence of his crimes made an indelible impression on the native mind. Internally Colonel Taylor will perhaps one day sketch a similar man whom he has personally known, and externally we have him perfect; the coward, half daring, with his mad pride and madder sensuality, his tiger cruelty and animal grossness, gazing in asort of lustful scorn at a bur- lesqueon English habits, —which ColonelTaylor has discreetlytoned down, but which is to this hour acted in. Bengal, and is not discreet, —and then running away at the first charge, the very man to order a friendly white man to be impaled simply to strike terror, or rip open a favourite mistress to see if she told truth as to her pregnancy. The worst side of him is not in Ralph Darnell, and could not be, but there is enough to suggest what he might have been, and what native accounts declare he was. Nor are we quite content with Noor ool Nissa. No one acquainted with native life, however hostile to natives, will, we believe, read that sweet sketch unmoved, or without an inner feeling that the highest life of India and of Mohammedanism is there expressed, but still it is only a sketch. It falls to Colonel Taylor, the friend of half-a-dozen native Courts, the trusted confident of harems, one of the very few men on earth who, himself gentleman to the backbone, knows the backbone of the native court life, to tell us what the real life of the native lady is. We mean the higher life, for there is a higher life amid all that abounding pollution, or the life on a national scale could not go on as it does go on, untouched by external influences. Nobody wants more of the harem life," technically so called, the life of which Lady Mary Montagu and Mrs. Beke give glimpses, and which we all fancy we know—par- ticularly when we know nothing at all,—but the higher life, the life which admits the possibility of women sending down their names for ages through whole kingdoms as the names of angels,—of this no European knows anything. If any one dared tell the whole life of one among many Eastern women who have risen from the dancing floor to the throne, who have danced as Herodias probably danced, clothed only in woven wind, and then have seized and governed and regenerated provinces, it would be the greatest contribution ever made to psychology,—and would deserve and obtain a prosecution, but there is a cleaner path possible, It is certain that English gentlemen of the highest class, we mean of the true highest, men who loved God and their country better than themselves, once married native wives and lived their lives thence- forward in utter content and peace. What manner of women were those wives? what manner of life was that life ? this Colonel Taylor can tell us, if we do not misunderstand his books and his career—the man is pretty nearly unknown except as author in England, but he was once placed as English Sultan in a big pro- vince, then in a condition of anarchy to which the condition of Greece or Naples is blessedness, and in twelve months a woman might have walked from end to end unescorted with a bag of silver on her head, and if she had carried Colonel Taylor's " chu- press " no-man would have ventured to inquire what she bore. That, however, is incidental, and has nothing to do with novels or novelists' power, but the hand which sketched Noor ool Nissa, a Mohammedan Ruth,—will nobody ever comment on that glorious Oriental idyl?—and then painted in Sozun the dancing girl, the Ranee of Jhansee lower down the ladder, harlot and patriot; demon and saint, could make us to understand the Mussulman lady —a being about as like an English lady as she is like the popular Light of the Harem,' and might even describe that lady as wife to an English lord, meek, devoted, loving, but capricious as a child, and at the bottom of her soul doubtful alike whether her own faith was true, whether any faith was true, whether all faiths were not true, and whether every kiss of her husband, every caress which recognized his equality with herself, did not imperil her soul.
Meanwhile skip the first volume and a half, or read the Vir- ginians instead, which will teach you just as much, and study the last volume and a half page by page, and ponder. When you have finished you will know more of the hidden side of Indian life than is known to many, and it is that which, we take it,. Colonel Taylor has endeavoured to reveal. There are people living who saw a native girl do something very like this, and it seems to us that when Lady Audley and her like interest all men one may look at the real thing with a little earnestness, at the woman who would do ten murders a day to attain an object, yet never hate th,e murdered, who would live a life of luxury to which Lady. Audley's is careless roughing, and next day enact this scene :— "Sozun, however, had quitted the room but as the old soldier was leading his men into the battery which Ralph Smithson had just left, a boyish figure, dressed in the blue tunic of his people, lightly armed, and with a rich handkerchief tied round the turban and mouth, overtook him, and, touching his arm, made a respectful salute ; then dropping beside him, took up the hoarse war-chorus which the men were singing, as they went on at a swinging trot. Ah ! it was like the dear old time when she was by her father ; and the girl's heart bounded within her with a sense of freedom and exultation to which she had long been a stranger. There and then, had they gone across that green plain into the mouths of the English cannon, So= would have led them in a delirium of excitement which she could not repress, as she leaped high to the burden of the rude war-song, and waved her sword and clashed her shield with her countrymen."
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