BOOK S.

OLIVER MADOX BROWN.*

ENGLISH readers have reason to be grateful to Mr. J. H. Ingram for his admirable edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and for his judicious editing of the series of brief biographies of "Eminent Women." Their debt is now increased by this inter- esting biography of a remarkable youth; whose performance, not less than his promise, justifies a more adequate memorial than the brief sketch which Mr. W. M. Rossetti and Mr. F. Hneffer prefixed to their collection of Oliver Madox Brown's Literary Remains. That sketch was very charmingly written, but, from its necessary brevity, it excited, rather than satisfied, curiosity ; and Mr. Ingram's fuller and more detailed record cannot be classed among literary works of supererogation. The biography of a boy who, dying before he had completed his twentieth year, left behind him such an imaginative legacy as Gabriel Denver and The Dwale Bluth, was, to say the least, well worth writing.

The mere incidents of the short life of Oliver Madox Brown, were not in themselves more noteworthy than similar incidents lathe lives of most lads brought up in refined English homes ; but many of them have acquired a deep interest, from the fact

• Oliver Madam Brown : o Biographiool Skoto5,1855-1874. By John H. Ingrain. London : Elliot Stock. that they served as realistic foundations for ideal superstruc-

tures which owed much of their power to the skill with which daringly imaginative situations were supplied with backgrounds closely studied from the life. The mistake of most young artists of genius is that they rely too much upon their creative and not enough upon their observing faculties, and it is to this temerity that we can trace much of the almost universal crudity of youthful imaginative work. Juvenile art is for the most part crude not because the artists lack the experience of maturity—for a little experience will go a long way—but because they disdain to use the experience that they have. Oliver Madox Brown had none of this unwise disdain ; his life and his work were not disjointed, but closely related each to each, and while the former enriched the latter, the latter reflects upon the former much of its own interest.

This gifted son of a gifted father, who still survives—Mr.

Ford Madox Brown, the distinguished painter—was born at Finchley on the 20th of January, 1855. That he was a sin- gularly precocious child seems certain, though no stress can be laid upon the stories of "significant anecdotes and re- marks related by his relatives in proof of his innate clever- ness." Every family has similar nursery traditions, while very few families produce a boy or girl of marked genius ; but there is an anecdote of how, at three years of age, he gave a "shrewd and critical" description of a landscape painted by his father, which certainly does seem to indicate an unusually early de- velopment of the powers of perception and expression. In the house of a painter, where painters were wont to congregate, it was natural that an imaginative lad should be drawn to pic- torial art; and though, when five years old, Oliver stubbornly refused to learn to read, he educated himself in his own way, by covering "the white marble mantel-shelves, and any other available spaces, with designs of hunts, battles, and subjects of that sort." So far, there was nothing extraordinary, but, under his father's guidance, Oliver's artistic aptitudes developed so rapidly, that at the age of eleven he produced a design in water- colour, "Queen Margaret and the Robbers," which, even allow- ing for the enthusiasm of the friendly critics by whom it has been described, seems to have been a work not merely of astonishing promise, but of actual performance. The next three years were years of rapid progress. In 1868, he being then thirteen, he began

a drawing of" Chiron Receiving the Infant Jason from the Slave," which was so mature that in the succeeding year it was found worthy of a place on the walls of the Dudley Gallery Exhibition. He exhibited again at the Dudley, and also at the New British Institution, at the South Kensington Exhibition, and at the rooms of the Society of French Artists, where, in 1872, appeared his last important design, a scene from Silas Hamer, a work which we remember well as impressively original in conception and

-colouring.

It was not, however, in the pictorial, but in the literary domain of art that Oliver Madox Brown was destined to win the most enduring distinction. It was during the year which brought -with it his fourteenth birthday—the year of his first Dudley success—that his family discovered in him a poet as well as a painter. He permitted his relatives to see six or seven sonnets -which he had written, and though the young versifier destroyed all but two, "in a fit of morbid irritability or bashfulness, caused by their being shown to a few friends," these two are sufficiently

-extraordinary productions for a lad who might naturally be supposed hardly to know what a sonnet was. One of the two has become fairly well known, as it has been published not only in the Literary Remains, but in the sonnet anthologies of Mr.

David M. Main and Mr. Hall Caine, and possibly elsewhere. We therefore quote the other, which was probably written before, certainly not long after, the completion of his fourteenth year :—

"Made indistinguishable 'mid the boughs, With saddened, weary, ever restless eyes, The weird chameleon of the past world lies, Like some, old, wretched man whom God allows To linger on : still joyless life endows His wasted frame, and memory never dies Within him, and his only sympathies Withered with his last comrade's last carouse. Methinks great Dante knew thee not of old, Else some fierce glutton all insatiate Compelled within some cage for food to wait He must have made thee, and his verse have told How thou in vain thy ravening tried'st to sate On flying souls of triflers overbold."

Perhaps because this sonnet is so much more ambitious than its beautiful companion, which was painted on the frame of Miss

Spartali's picture, it seems to us less artistically satisfying ; but that such a conception should be rendered at all in the verse of a lad of thirteen or fourteen is in itself so astonishing, that a suggestion of anything like want of perfect adequacy in the rendering seems almost impertinent. Though he had destroyed his little batch of sonnets, the young poet could not but feel that he had gained a certain assured command of the vehicle of verse, and when at the age of fifteen he worked out the plot of the marvellous story by which he will be longest remembered, it was with the intention of giving it the form of a poem. The intention was abandoned, and instead of the projected poem, Oliver Madox Brown, in the winter of 1871-2, produced the prose romance which, in its original form, was called The Black Swan, but which was afterwards rewritten, and published as Gabriel Denver. In the earlier version, Gabriel Denver, an Australian colonist, sails for England, with his unloved and un- loving wife, on board the ship The Black Swan.' The only other passenger is a young and beautiful girl, Laura Conway, and the moment Gabriel sees her, he feels that he loves for the first time. At last he makes his love known to the object of it, and finds that it is returned. The wife discovers the lovers' secret, and, with the mad jealousy which thinks of nothing but revenge, seta fire to the vessel. The Black Swan' burns to the water's edge, and all that is left of her is an open boat, in which are Gabriel, the girl he loves, and their would-be murderer. For four days and nights the three suffer the torments of gnawing hunger and raging thirst, until the neglected woman, after drink- ing deep of the maddening sea-water, dies a raving maniac. The two survivors are picked up by a passing vessel, but the terrible ordeal has been too severe for Laura's delicate frame, and she dies on board the ship that has rescued them. Night falls, and the crew are discussing the burial of the dead girl, when they are startled by seeing, poised high upon the dark outline of the bulwark, "a strange, black silhouette appear, and pause for a moment, a man carrying a dead woman. Her head and neck hang back passively, and long hair, bright with the moonlight, streams from it in the wind, while her hands fall dangling helplessly ; this is all seen plainly against the sky, the next instant it is gone."

Such was the weird, imaginative conception which formed the groundwork of the boy's romance. Remarkable as the mere skeleton is in itself, the flesh-and-blood embodiment is more remarkable still. In the finished work there are no tentative touches, but each line has the decisiveness which characterises the work of a master of the craft, and every detail has been firmly grasped by the imagination, both separately and in its relation to the whole. In terrible consistency of sustained horror, it is not too much to say that it is Worthy of a place beside Titus Andronicus and Wuthering Heights; and nothing is more noteworthy than the manner in which, while every element of pure tragedy is emphasised and accentuated, the effect of the moral unpleasantness of the motive is reduced to a minimum, by an austerity of treatment which is scientific, rather than ascetic. The unpleasantness was there, however, and when submitted to a publisher and editor, with a view to its appearance either as a magazine serial or in a volume, the author was told that its acceptance depended upon his willingness to make certain important structural alterations. Oliver Madox Brown reluctantly commuted, and in Gabriel Denver—the title of the small volume published by Messrs. Smith and Elder—the aggrieved wife becomes a cousin, to whom Denver is betrothed, but not actually married; and instead of the fateful anouement, Laura recovers from her prostration, rescues Denver as, in the madness of brain-fever, he is about to plunge into the sea, and after storm come rest and peace, and the joy of blameless wedded love.

Mr. Ingram expresses deep grief for what he considers the mutilation of the story, and high anger with the critics to whose suggestion it was due. We confess that we cannot share either emotion: Mr. Ingram seems to hold the opinion, which we should call extraordinary, were it not unfortunately so prevalent, that a work of art loses power and value by the excision of anything which revolts or offends the moral sense of the ordinary reader. There may, of course, be cases in which this is so. An immoral situation may have an interest which would vanish were the immorality removed, but it is an interest of a low and unhealthy kind; and to say of any author that he can only impress us when he gets outside the range of the Decalogna seems to us a very poor compliment. In the case under consideration, the psychological interest seems to us quite unimpaired by the alteration which takes the wedding-ring from Deborah's finger,

and presents her as a jealous woman, though not a jealous wife. It may even be said that the story gains in consistency by the change, for in both versions Laura is invested with a stainless purity which becomes unrealisable when she is presented to us as accepting without protest the love of another woman's husband. In Gabriel Denver, the barrier between Gabriel and

Laura, though real, is not so impassable, and there is therefore less to detract from her satisfying charm. Concerning the other

alteration, there is more room for difference of opinion. We confess to an old-fashioned love for stories which, as the phrase goes, "end happily ;" but there are undoubtedly instances—the play of Hamlet, for example—in which a happy ending would

violate what we feel to be an abiding law of art. This may be one of them; at any rate, we will not quarrel with Mr. Ingram for thinking it such.

Gabriel Denver was followed by The Dwale Bluth—a Devon shire name for the deadly nightshade—which, if less impressive in some ways than its predecessor, perhaps leaves behind it a more confident assurance of what in the language of the Turf is called "staying power." Two or three other curiously interest- ing contributions to imaginative romance are included in the volume of Literary Remains ; but it is as the author of the two stories we have mentioned that Oliver Madox Brown will keep

his place in the history of English literature. He died on the 5th of November, 1874, of blood-poisoning following upon rheumatic fever, his twentieth year lacking two months of com- pletion. He was, indeed, "a marvellous boy ;" and there seems much evidence that the quality of his mind was matched by the attractiveness of his personality. Mr. Richard Garnett, not a reckless or extravagant writer, has said of him :—

"The wonderful precocity of his genius may be set forth, but the peculiar charm of his character, its sweetness and manliness, its alliance of the most daring originality to the most exquisite in- genuousness, can never be adequately represented, even by those who knew him most intimately. It was something unique and in- describable, and the objective and purely imaginary character of his writings renders them very inadequate exponents of his mind and heart. I should despair of communicating any just conception of him to one who never knew him, and can only say that I should ex- pect anything sooner than to meet with another Oliver Madox Brown."

We can only add that the interest of Mr. Ingram's fascinating biography is increased by a portrait, which gives one an impres- sion of life-likeness ; by autotype reproductions of several of Oliver Madox Brown's designs ; and by some memorial sonnets, written by Mr. D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. P. B. Marston, and Mr. Ford Madox Brown.