AN OPTIMISTIC REALIST.* Ir is now some years since, in

criticizing a book of Mr. Gilbert's, we used as the aptest epithet to signalize certain salient charac- teristics of his work the term Defoe-like. This assuredly expressed better than any other phrase we could well have hit on his peculiarly graphic presentment of minute detail and his rare smack of unconscious humour, which, while it seemed to proceed on a patient enumeration of individual traits with a dry good-nature and somewhat wearisome impartiality, yet, at length, out of the whole disentangled the type by some sudden turn and touch, and set it before you with all the strange characteristic colourless dis- tinctness of the finest silhouette. But the term, having come into too general application, has in some degree lost its force ; and, in the very measure of Mr. Gilbert's individuality, we are apt to wrong him in the persistent use of it, by keeping in the back- ground other qualities which will scarcely come under the narrow cover of one epithet. We shall, therefore, take this opportunity of tracing out some of the points in which Mr. Gilbert differs from Defoe, rather than those in which he resembles him ; and we find a very good ground for doing so in this King George's Middy, which is a rare and beautiful work of art,—select, we had almost said sole, in its wise meanings and noble moral lessons, and the altogether individual manner in which these are set before us.

It is a remarkable fact, well worth noticing by the way, that here, where Mr. Gilbert, in all that pertains to mere theme and to inevitable instruinents, is thrown upon ground more nearly resembling Defoe's great field titan any hitherto entered on by him, he yet asserts more strongly than anywhere else time prime elements of his own individuality, giving us a work which is, if we may use the phrase, less Defoe-like than anything he has yet done. It was a signal trial of Mr. Gilbert's strength ; and though he has not come out of it completely victorious, he has attained a very remarkable degree of success. But just because the au- Defoe - like qualities are so powerful in him, King George's Middy distinctly fails iu its first purpose. It is scarcely a boy's book ; and has in it too much of the stir of ideas, as such, to secure the same kind of audience as its great prototype. Robinson Crusoe, we might almost say, has become immortal, simply because the line of adventure, so graphic, so natural, so circumstantial, is so little charged with any intention or inner meaning. It is thus the epic of boyhood, which, with its dash of hardness and un- sentimental cruelty, is well content to rest in the relief that comes of mere change of incident and of the point of view.

* King Georgis Middy. By William Gilbert. Illustrated. London: Bell and Daddy.

Unless we are prepared to admit a personal reference in the form of an autobiographic thread run through this won- derful web of incident, we find but little trace of conscious meaning or purpose. Now, King George's Middy is so charged with conscious meanings and intentions, that very often, in spite of the naked realism of the style, much must seem merely absurd and ridiculous unless the reader consciously catches some glim- merings of the underlying idea. A youth smitten with a passion for the sea, gets put aboard a man-of-war as midshipman, and sails on a long and distant cruise. All the incidents, up to the lauding on an enchanted island, are told with not a little of Defoe's graphic realism ; but from the first we have the promise of something very different, which is realized the moment that the youth steps on dry laud. We are then in a charmed world, where all the ordinary faculties and relations of life are inverted and become symbols, pregnant with purest moral purpose and suggestion. There is action, there is incident, sufficient to keep alive the interest of the young ; but there is more,—and it is in this that the real interest of Mr. Gilbert's realism lies. Defoe's realism is, after all, very much a realism of incident, of merely external traits and circumstances ; Mr. Gilbert's realism is more the realism of thought, and mood, and morbid conception. Defoe skilfully gathers up the coarse and ordinary feeling and way of thinking into one character, and throws it into an exceptional set of circumstances, which he traces out with the utmost care and the minutest exactness. Gilbert fixes on a peculiar and exceptional mental condition, and makes it a prism through which to reflect in a fantastic, yet wonderfully real and circumstantial manner, some special tendency of human life. The one is a quick and self-suffi- cient observer of men ; the other is a moralist and psychologist, par excellence. Defoe is external,—his chief concern being with man's action on the outside world merely ; Gilbert's tendency is inward, and his aim is to exhibit how, though luau's mind and will are powerful to modify to themselves the outside world and the circle of natural relations, they are yet inadequate to gain for him any compensating joy from the achievement in as far as it may make him singular and separate. The pivot on which Mr. Gilbert's moral system revolves—so far as he can be said to have a system—is the firm idea, by which he is possessed, that none of us is wholly and truly sane,—that some delusion cherished by us as to our true selves is the root at once of our comfort and enjoyment,—that if we knew more, or were in any iota made con- stitutionally different from what we are, our lot would be simply miserable ; because our very defects kiudlily unite us to others.

Properly, therefore, Mr. Gilbert is, as we shall see, an optimist of a very peculiar type, working in the modes and with the instruments of the old-fashioned realists. He has, no doubt, got the hint for an instrument from Defoe, but be uses it to some- what of a different end from that master. Mr. Gilbert, however, has not realized such complete success in his wider sphere as the old pamphleteer did in his narrower one. He very often realizes his intention most imperfectly, whereas Defoe generally came very near to wholly realizing his. It is not that Mr. Gilbert is persecuted by the presence of a lofty literary ideal, but rather that a certain defect of artistic conception, combined with the pressure of a constantly maintained full-face view of life, has affected his style itself with a certain cast of optimistic practice. It is as though he said to himself, " The writing is not so fine as it might be, but it is truer than if it were better ; and certainly I could not recast and rewrite it without losing something that is special to the thing described ; so I shall let Well alone.' " Thus we often have a peculiar abruptness and want of that gliding freedom which would sometimes impart a still rarer sense of reality to Mr. Gilbert's progresses from the common every-day world, to the world of wonders and fancies where awful truths masquerade in guise of make-believes. In this King George's Middy, for instance, we are quite surprised, and feel almost as if we had been injured, when at the end of the book we are informed that the whole is to be taken as being simply a record of the wanderiugs of Miles Goppinger's mind during fever. The expedient is inadequate, looks like an after-thought to justify in a certain sense the out- ward extravagances of the book to children ; and besides, such a justification should, at least, have been vaguely hinted at in the opening, and not bluntly told us at the very end, when we were glad in the presence of noble illusions. Mr. Gilbert sometimes spoils his best impressions thus, simply by want of a very little more art. While he is certainly, in some degree, possessed by the medico-psychologic tendency of Holmes to find a ground for moral motifs in hard abnormal phenomena, and has a good deal of Haw- thorne's subtle sense of the compensating spiritual agencies that play unseen through life, strangely making all even, he is yet, to some extent, defective in power over the spiritual affinities and capabilities of language. His works thus lag somewhat behind his intentions ; and yet they evidence a peculiar thoroughness, and bear ou them evident marks of the author's satisfaction.

The great lesson of the present, as of several of Mr. Gilbert's former books, is simply this,—that we are better as we are than as we could possibly be else, even supposing all that we could desire were at once realized to us. The Wizard of the Mountain was a kind of Fate to those who had sought his aid, simply because he had the power of granting what was asked of him ; and "The Magic Mirror" was a skilful rendering of the same idea—an idea which plays with more or less force through most of Mr. Gilbert's works, and which has found in King George's Middy its most thorough, and as yet most successful, expression.

Mr. Gilbert's optimism, however, is not coloured by the peculiar shy mental suspense which marks Hawthorne. It was the inability to rest securely on auy one line of thought or of belief, the wist- ful doubtfulness as to the moral bearing and result of any possible course, and a subtly casuistic manner of dealing with all ideals whatever, which so paralyzed Hawthorne's active power, as at once to render him so far unequal to face the practical demands of life, and unable to lay a sufficiently positive human ground- work for his fictions as to render them truly popular. Mr. Gilbert's optimism springs rather from a capacity to rest in the contemplation of almost any line of thought, by dint of seeing many elements of meaning and practical helpfulness in it ; and a power to adapt himself readily to many conditions of life, and to profit by them in the measure that they are fit to be used as rough ready-made symbols. Hence, a certain want of artistic selectness ; and hence also, if we may judge from his books, he is unlike Defoe in this too, that he is not hasty and discontented, and could not carry into any political strife the terrible personal heat of the other.

The optimism of our author is thus very much the optimism of English common sense, which recognizes the folly of hankering after that which lies outside the sphere of the immediate, the near, the inevitable. Mr. Gilbert is not persecuted by any high-flown ideal of life ; yet he has the thoroughly English notion of the imperative character of duty ; and never fails to exhibit the misery that must follow on any deflection from it. His "Middy," because of having failed to fulfil a certain require- ment, even though unreasonable in itself, is condemned to spend the night in his boat, and drifts away from all relation to the world of duty into a world of enchantment, where the immediate gratification of one's wishes is the very source of one's misery. Now this should have been quite sufficient. The whole motif of the work discloses itself plainly enough here ; and the rest should have been treated from first to last as being severely real and true.

There is no variety of theme in King George's Middy ; all the various incidents and stories cluster round one leading idea and illustrate it ; though certainly vast skill and resource are shown in the mode of development and illustration. The enchanted island is a world of beauty and riches ; yet it is hated by those who, because of their own unwise desires, are prisoned in it and cannot escape ; nay, cannot even so much as move when impelled by the promptings of their human affections. What depth and delicacy of satire and of moral meaning there are in the story of the assistant-surgeon who, in answer to his wish, had the power of telescopes given to his eyes, and who consequently could see nothing near at hand, and had to go two or three miles away in order to look at the face of his love, or at the tongue of the ailing child ; while the naturalist, even in the very midst of his sympathy for the assistant-surgeon, has his eyes turned into microscopes, so that to enjoy peace he has to keep them shut ; and, though longing to go to see his friend, is doomed to isolation because, not being able to see distances, he is certain to lose himself or to get severely injured ; just as is the assistant-surgeon, because he could not se anything close at hand, and ran up against trees, and walls, and conveyances ! Surely the manner in which we severally stumble in seeking after that which is beyond our own desert or capa- bility, losing in every step more and more of our power for good in social union and self-sacrifice, is very powerfully symbolized here. Perhaps nothing in all the hook is more masterly, or has a deeper grain of human nature looking through the strange breaks in its surface grotesquerie, than this :-

"As I was on the point of leaving the house, my friend the surgeon said he would accompany me as far as the spot on the road at which I

had turned off the day before .When, after a good walk, we had arrivedviewa at t the of e a us small country royr around nfrom d us ,wIhttca turned nwe we could ul d c o mole nt to top of

ask a question, I found him kissing his hand repeatedly, but to whom I

could not tell. So violent were his apparently purposeless gesticulations, that the idea of insanity crossed my mind for a moment. It vanished, however, the next, for I remembered the unhappy affliction under which he was labouring. I looked in the direction he had turned his face, but could see nothing. At last, getting somewhat impatient, I asked him -what he saw. I was looking at Alice and her brothers and sisters,' he replied, who are standing at the cottage-door, kissing their hands to me. I never saw a happier-looking group in my life.'—'Bnt how do they know you have arrived here ? ' I inquired. 'That you are able to see them I can easily imagine, but, as they are not endowed with the same powers of vision as yourself, you must be as invisible to them as they are to me. How do they know you are here and looking at them ?'

— ' ! that has been all arranged between us beforehand. They know perfectly well—or at any rate within a quarter of an hour—how long it takes me to arrive at this spot, and then they stand outside the door that I may indulge myself with a view of their dear faces for some minutes.'—' You surely do not mean to say,' I remarked, that they stand at the cottage door for a quarter of an hour kissing their hands to you. without being certain of the exact moment you arolooking at them ?' - Yes, that is the time agreed upon between us,' he replied. 'Let us

wait for a few minutes longer, in fact till they have left off, for it does my heart good to see them. There ! Alice is holding up the little boy to me ; not, I am happy to say, that there is anything the matter with him now, for he is quite well, but she knows I am very fond of him, as, indeed, I am of all the family.' From the length of time we had to remain stationary—the surgeon the while continuing to kiss his hand with great vehemence, and smile and nod in the most absurd manner— we must have arrived at tho top of the knoll something within the average ; for it was more than ten minutes before the surgeon proposed we should continue our walk."

The book is literally replete with such touches ; there is not a page but some glimpse like this, quite unconscious in its dry directness, comes upon you with all the greater effect from its unexpectedness.

No sooner, for example, has the young middy set foot upon the enchanted island, where he could have everything he wished, than he begins to see himself in the most uncomfortable lights,—to be a victim, indeed, to every kind of dividedness and self-analysis, which led him on like a helpless victim to his desire, the capital of the island, from which he is only saved, at last, by the consideration and self-denial of others. But the underlying thought, in its sane gravity and consecutive closeness, is far too weighty to be con- sistently supported on the random thread of fevered dream— consciousness ; and hence a certain disharmony and opposi- tion. Because of this, there is little or no chance of any

boy ever enjoying what are really the most truly enjoyable elements in King George's Middy. Its fun, its drollery, its quaint

incident, he will perceive and delight in ; but its depth of thought and meaning, its unaffected insight, clothing and sometimes hiding

itself in odd paradoxes, and a parade of the most matter-of-fact details, should make it pre-eminently a story-book fi»r students, and

combine to give it a place beside the Utopias of the masters, to correct their affectations and extravagances, just as a tonic corrects and braces the physical system. Nor should we forget to refer to the little characteristic woodcuts, which, for character and expres- sion, are wonderfully well fitted for their place. Several of them have all the minuteness and skill and quaint life of Hogarth's.