ALT CJESAR AIIT NIHIL.*
THE clever author of German Home Life has in Ant Ccesar ant Nihil given us a story which is powerful, ambitious, and inter- esting, but is yet, from the artistic point of view, amorphous, and in other respects unsatisfactory. Its length is portentous, to begin with. It consists of three volumes, and each of these in tarn contains as much matter as a volume and a half of ordinary fiction. Then the asides, and the digressions, and the comments on character are preposterously numerous, and in the end become almost as tedious as the critical chatter of an insipid girl in a picture-gallery. Finally, though there is, as there could not fail to be, smart writing in Aut Caesar ant Nihil, it is unequally distributed over the whole. There is as much of it in the first half of the first volume as there is in the remaining two volumes and a half. The truth would seem to be that the Countess von Balmer, in her anxiety to utilise for the purposes of fiction so tragic an event as the assassination of Alexander II., has written hurriedly, and in consequence spoiled what would otherwise have been an excellent historical romance. Were it not for the marks of haste that are painfully evident in the second and still more in the third volume, we should have infered from Ant Caesar ant Nihil that its author, while she can do justice to character in mass, class, or caste, has not the finer touch that is necessary for individual portraiture. As things are, we shall suspend our judgment on this point until she presents the public with another and, it may be hoped, a smaller and more carefully executed story.
What makes our disappointment with Ant Caesar aut Nihil all the keener, is that there is in it enough of boldness of con- ception alike of plot and of character to make the fortune of half-a-dozen works of the kind. The Countess von Bothmer presses into her service German and English, Greek and Russian, the anti-Jewish crusade and the frivolities of the Bursae], the amours and the assassination of Alexander II. She gives us cabinet portraits of Nihilism in all attitudes and all costumes, in all places and in all ranks,—patiently setting up revolutionary type in the slums of St. Peters- burg, waltzing in rouge and paste diamonds at an Imperial ball, talking scandal and making proselytes at a German watering-place. By far tho most powerfully drawn char- acter in the book—if only the Countess could have let him speak for himself, instead of doing most of the speaking for him —is the Baron Mellin, the inscrutable visionary and relentless disciple of Herzen and Bakounine, to whom everything of the character of human emotion and weakness comes as grist to the mill of "the cause,"—the personal devotion of impulsive Bianca Martello, the beauty and racial enthusiasm of Esther Rodostamos, Julie Kerezoff's thirst to avenge a dishonoured visitor, Helena Perowsky's determination to punish the Imperial lover who has deserted her. The author might, we think, have spared us the Perowsky episode. There is something singularly repulsive in the idea of a woman of an almost saintly character submitting to a mock marriage to a brutal and brain- less Tartar noble, and becoming the mistress of the Czar, even although she satisfies her conscience by trying to consider her role as 1 that of Egeria, consoling and sustaining the Imperialist Numa, worn-out with anxiety, and battling with rebellion in household, court, and nation. Nor can we conceive such a woman, simply because she is discarded for a younger sister, at once seeking the vulgar revenge of the murderess. Of the female characters that figure in Ant Ccesar out Nihil, we admire most the "three generations of fair Owens,"—Leonie, the sweet French Canadian, married to a shifty and coarse- grained Irish squire, who dabbles in speculation, and, like the Great Frederick, is not " superstitiously veracious ;" Hero, her daughter, sacrificed to an Italian scoundrel; and finally, her grand-daughter, poor, impulsive Bianca, who, with the blood of so many races coursing through her veins, is just the moth to be attracted to Mellin and his Nihilist candle. We may safely lay the flattering unction to our souls that the best of the Countess's male characters are English. Lord Dovedale, who will not take a final "No" from Esther Rodos- tames, is by no means a bad specimen of the modern English • ..4ut Geier nut N iA 7. By the Countess M. von Bothmer. 3 vols. London : Longman s, Green. awl Ce.'•1883.
aristocrat, healthy, stoical, and, it must be added, a trifle Dundroaryish and even dull. We must protest, however, against the spice of 'Arry which the Countess puts into the character of good-natured Reggie Hudson. Loquacious though he is, indolent though he has been, he is still an English gentleman, and we cannot believe that he would descend to the atrocious vulgarity of " Second-best Sunday-go-to-meeting toga, Lincoln and B., and patent-agonies." Gerald Fitzgerald, the male guardian angel of the Owens, who vacillates between Hero and her daughter, is, after Mellin, the best character in the book. He has the patience and self-control of a cultured Eng- lishman, and preserves them wonderfully, in spite of extraor- dinary provocation from a singularly shrewish and vituperative mother. As we have saic. there is so much that is good, yet so much also that is only the raw material of goodness, in Ant Caesar ant Nihil, that one cannot help wishing Mr. Hardy could have aided the Countess with her plot, and Mr. James could have given the finishing-touches to her portraits. There are not so many quotable passages in Aut Caesar aut Nihil, as in German Hor.;i1 Life. The Countess von Bothmer has not the English language and English ideas—at least, modern English ideas—altogether at her command. Other- wise she would not horrify us with talking, at this time of day, about " Will Shakspere," nor would she give us such strenuous satire, as " The mean ambitious, the vulgar aspirations, the coarse contempt, and uncultured ridicule of those a step, or it may be several steps, lower in the social scale, hardening their hearts, snubbing their noses, and widen- ing their months, from generation to generation of prosperous shop-keeping, gig-driving, face-grinding, and money-grubbing progenitors, present an aggregate of complacent and unlovely ignorance appalling to contemplate." The Countess, as is well known, has no slight power of saying "good things," which, however, we decline to consider epigrams. That risky pro- duct, an only child" is not bad, though it is spoiled by the variety of meanings borne now-a-days by "risky." "Those mystic instincts of self-devotion which make Christianity more especially the religion of maternity," is richer and truer. Daudet might have written this, which the Countess puts in the mouth of Julie Kerezoff, " There was nothing I did not do and would not have done for her. I. even lent her my false hair."
Still happier is Hero's comment, " It would have been so much pleasanter had there been no necessity either for the false hair or the free confidence." We like Countess von Bothmer beat, however—at least in Ant Caesar aut Nihil—in what special correspondents style " graphic " work. Here is a piece of de- scription which recalls that now forgotten writer, the author of Granby :—
" The road led by a gradual assent through an avenue of Spanish chestnuts which presently became a dense forest. Here and there a ranger wished them good-day ; now and again a woodcutter, driving a donkey that looked like a perambulatory faggot-stack, crossed their path, and, with a rough and ready greeting, disappeared down a sunlit glade. A fresh breeze was rippling the surface of the young wood ; the shining leaves seemed to be babbling and prattling in their joy that the winter was over and past, and the song of the turtle heard once more in the land. The driver asked if the Herrschaften would get out and walk, explaining that the footpath was nearer, easier, and pleasanter. Mr. Owen, scenting an attempt to evade the bargain, and crediting their clumsy Jehu with a desire to impose and cheat the unwary Briton, felt indisposed to move. The young men were glad to stretch their long limbs, cramped with the exiguity of a conveyance which not even the maddest cultus for courtesy-titles could classify as the conventional ` carriage.' Hero, folding up the frivolous sunshade, descended with alacrity. The earth beneath their feet ap- peared to giro way; they did not really touch the ground, but trod upon the dried leaves of immemorial autumns, elastic and springy, with a fine woodland odour, familiar (and dear) to all pedestrian lovers of sylvan scenery. The chequered shade lay in bright moving patches, flecking the ground with intermingled sunlight and shadow, like little tricksy translated cloudlets chasing each other over the ground in frolicsome pm-suit. Against the clear blue sky, the fresh young leaves of this season fluttered joyously in the light mountain breezes. Hero, walking bareheaded through the upland forest, in her simple white dress, attended by a knight and a squire of goodly thews and sinews, suggested Una with far more justice than the pink lined parasol had recalled Narcissa ; and something of the contrition be felt for having wronged her, though only by a passing thought, made itself apparent in the inflection of Fitz's voice. '
There are, too, power and promise, though marred by over- strenuousness, in this piece of dreamy characterisation :-
"Life, in Russia, is bounded by large horizons. Once outside St. Petersburg or Moscow, or any other town which the traveller may choose to recall or imagine, vast, limitless plains stretch away in level uniformity, monotonous, melancholy, immense. The solitary peasant, the lonely shepherd, gazes up at you from his sheepskins or his touloupe, and, in an accent pitched to a minor key, wishes you, in soft, pathetic inflections a wondering Good-day: Why should you put yourself to the expense and inconvenience of travel, expose your- self to the extortion of innkeepers, the heat of frowsy hostelries, cheating moujiks, and exorbitant charges ? And vaguely com- miserating you,—whom he reckons one of the great ones of the earth, in your pictured diffieulties,—the herdsman gazes in your face, prince or potentate though he dreams you to be, with the sympathy and pity of a gentle brotherly soul. In the villages you pass through, it may be that now and again some Russian Volkslierl falls upon the ear. Weeks afterwards you will find yourself haunted by its pathetic rhythm, by its yearning refrain, and you will wonder why this half-bar- baric song has the power to absorb you, and touch you by its appealing, plaintive melody. It is as though some unknown spirit of fraternity stretched its arms forth across the dreary miles of waste and wild, mur- muring: 'I, too, despite our widely-differing experiences, am thy brother. From the deep forests and silent plains, from Siberian mines and Tartar steppes, from the dim Caucasian peaks, from Aryan myths and empires of utmost Ind, shrouded in the mists of immemorial ages, I call to thee, across Time and Space, out of the depths of my unheeded century-old solitude!' In this vast, mysterious country, where all the Hussies, and each, has its qualifying adjective, where the styles and titles of Caesar read like the projected geographical course of a college term on an extended scale, the very impossibility of things suggests the possible. Rigorous icebound nature broods above more ardent aspirations than warm Italian skies ever ripened into an easy enthusiasm, and, beneath a winding-sheet of snow, men's blood burns in fierce revolt, frozen though for the nonce it be into seeming silence. Under gigantic conditions, to count the pigmy items is impossible. Temperate or torrid zones may reckon with fate, but the frigid must overleap half a world, and trust to chance or fate for the result. There is a point at which cold becomes heat ; and the frost-bitten sufferer seems to endure the torments of the fiery furnace. In such a condition was Russia at the time of our story. The snow-clad volcano might burst forth in destructive erup- tion at any moment, and those who knew how thin was the crust of the crater, were prepared to Rte the signal-flames, like those of some giant watch-fire on a mountain peak, shoot up into the midnight skies, the token ?midst surrounding silence, obscurity, and gloom, of a far-spreading conflagration. In old times, it took a hundred horses and seven days to travel from St. Petersburg to Moscow. To-day, the journey is performed by train in fifteen hours, and your fellow- travellers will probably be as mixed' as the company to be met in an American car.' "
Previous page
