SUCCESS, AND HOW HE WON IT.*
This is, in its peculiar way, a striking romance. No one will believe very implicitly in the possibility of the hero's character. A selfish, dissipated, and extravagant youth is not usually trans- formed at one stroke into a disinterested, morally self-restrained, and chastened manhood. Habits of organisation and rule cannot be extemporised by a lad who has never thought for any one but himself, on the very first exigency. It would have been in the highest degree unlikely that a man in Arthur Berkow's position, accustomed to waste and luxury, and encountering for the first time all the difficulties of a great strike in works of which he knew nothing, should have been able to enter sufficiently into the needs and wrongs of the men against whom he was fighting, to dis- criminate what was just in their demands from what was contrary • Success, and Soto He Won E. From the German of B. Werner. Translated by Christina Tyrrell. 8 role. London: Bentley and Bon.
to reason, and to concede the former, while resisting with iron resolution the exaction of the latter. The story, not merely in its personal incidents, is, strictly speaking, a romance, and not a tale of real life, though it deals with some of the most stirring details of real life. Still, judging it as a romance,—and it,is as a romance that we must judge it,—it is a tale of singular force and vivacity. From the first page to the last,—barring, perhaps, some curious German sentimentalism about " the spirit of the woods," which seems to us neither good- sense nor happy fancy, but only mawkish feeling,—one reads the book with the same intense interest in the mere story and its issues with which boys read Ivanhoe or Waverley for the first time. Arthur Berkow's difficulties and his heroic struggle with them, are precisely such as to excite to the utmost the romantic feelings of the reader. The scorn which his high-born and beautiful wife pours upon his undeserving head for the selfishness of the bargain made for her hand by his grasping father, without his own knowledge or con- sent ; the struggle in his mind between his unbending pride and his incipient passion for her ; the haughtiness with which he re- fuses a patent of nobility obtained for him solely on his wife's account, and not even offered to his father ; the sudden and violent -death of the latter at the most critical point in the history of the mine, when a universal strike was in course of organisation, and a feeling of hatred had long been growing up towards this par- ticular employer on the part of the miners in his service ; the firmness and courage with which Arthur Berkow seizes the helm, and in spite even of temporising advice to the contrary, utterly vetos every concession which takes the management of the works out of his own hands to put it into those of the operatives ; the double strain on him caused by his father-in-law's attempt to separate him from his wife, by obtaining one of those divorces which in Germany are so easily secured, at the very time when all the shock of the strike is coming upon him ; and the hurry and excitement of the last scenes of violence and dread,—all is so related as to make a genuine hero of the old ideal type of Arthur Berkow,—the type in which at the fitting moment the eye can :send forth the _most brilliant Hash, and the tongue can utter the admirably-timed sarcasms, end the mind can forecast the wisest policy,—and yet all this is done with variety, and novelty, and reality enough in the details of the particular dangers to which he is exposed to give freshness and vivacity to the character of this particular hero.
Then, again, there is a pendant to the character of this heroic young master among the mining operatives themselves, which is in some respects even a more spirited, though not so ideally noble a picture. Ulric Hartmann, the leader of the miners in this strike, who indulges so vehement and hopeless a passion for his superior's wife, and whose wild and savage love of power is made to serve as so effective a contrast to Arthur Berkow's cultivated and temperate firmness of will, is in many respects a mom real, though not a more interesting figure to the reader than Arthur Berkow himself. It is impossible not to see that certain economic prepossessions in the author's mind lie behind this contrast. There is really much leas reason why Ulric Hartmann should be headstrong, selfish, and unscrupulous, than why Arthur Berkow should have been so. Uric's father is a far better man than Arthur's. Ulric's education in honest and severely taxing tabour of a highly skilled order, is a far better education than Arthur's childhood and youth of unbounded and prodigal indul- gence. Nevertheless, while the latter springs up into a ready- made and perfect ruler and organiser, formed, as it were, on purpose to reduce an industrial anarchy of the most hopeless -complexity, the former falls gradually, and without any sufficient reason, into the fierce and reckless demagogue of an ignorant and brutal crowd. The motive is obvious enough. Herr Werner evidently holds that what are called co- operative -enterprises are dangerous and mischievous. He believes that the mental habits and training of the capitalist class are absolutely -essential to give the requisite unity and discipline to the artisans, and he is anxious to show how much the coolness, the courage, the self-confidence, the self-knowledge of the capitalist can do to control and utilise the energies of the artisans. And that might be all very well, if only he had chosen for his young capitalist a man in whom early training had prepared and brought out the qualities needful for his position, and if he had not denied to the representative of the artisans the qualities which might fairly be expected in one who had been a leader- and a hero among them. But in fact, be gives Arthur Berkow an industrial genius which is entirely independent of education and training, and which can be nothing but a gift of the most marvellous and undeserved good-luck ; while he weights Ulric Hartmann
with a furious self-will and an overweening ambition, which must have been almost as exceptional a stroke of malignant fortune to a man brought up as he had been, as Arthur Berkow's gifts were an exceptional stroke of beneficent fortune. In short, the economic lesson which Herr Werner makes his tale tell us is a lesson brought out, like so many of the lessons, of fiction (in the last generation at least), by handicapping, very unfairly indeed, the probable consequences of the early education bestowed upon master and man.
However, looked at simply as a romance, no one can deny that the story is, like its title, a " success," since it has the unanalysable quality of carrying the reader on with it, without for a moment getting tame or dull, from the beginning to the close. Many stories might be written embodying a far deeper insight into human character than this, and yet without one-half the interest. The incidents are skilfully woven together, the circumstances are vivid, the sympathies of the reader are never lost hold of, and there is no irritating shifting of the scenes and dropping of one thread to take up another. In fact, whatever the faults in the conception, Herr Werner knows how to narrate, and the freshness of his industrial subject,—which is not overloaded with any show of economic detail,—lends a new fascination to the story.
We have had no opportunity as yet of comparing the transla- tion with the original. The English, on the whole, is very good, though the title is a very bad rendering of the original German,— which indeed did not admit of a literal translation, and should have been simply exchanged for some other equivalent ; and there are evidently one or two other errors. Miss Tyrrell makes a very odd and frequent use of the word perdu (? verborgen) in the sense of latent' or hidden. Now, as far as we know, where the French word perdu is used in English, it is used of some one who is intentionally in hiding, and never to describe the latency of an unsuspected force. But when Miss Tyrrell uses perdu, as she does again and again, to describe the unsuspected stores of life and resource in the hero's nature, stores hidden away beneath the superficial crust of selfish and dissipated habit, she does not mean perdu' at all, but simply hidden or latent. In spite of one or two such errors, the story reads almost as freshly as an original.
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