A NILE NOVEL.*
Is spite of its unfortunate title, which is calculated to repel the dis- creet reader of fiction, this is a clever, and in some respects a re- markable book. We confess that we took it up with some fear that we should find ourselves once more the victims of the hackneyed device by which an unsaleable guide-book is surreptitiously in- sinuated into the circulating library. The trick is or ought to be well known by this time : a string of vapid descriptions of familiar scenes, as they may be Supposed to appear to the hardened eye of an experienced Cook's tourist, is interwoven with a still more vapid love-story, which only differs from other love-stories of a vulgar order in that the hero and heroine go through the con- ventional business assigned to them in the midst of some of those "marvels of Nature" which it is the furtive ambition of the author to depict. It would be a great injustice to Mr. Fleming to class his book among these worthless and deceptive performances. It abounds in descriptions of the Nile scenery, and in disquisitions of an informal kind on the relics of Egyptian antiquity ; but they are so plainly the work of a scholar and artist, and are, as a rule, so vividly coloured and so felicitously expressed, that they rarely come amiss, and taken as a whole, they constitute one of the most attractive features of the book. The plot is of the simplest, and the incidents are few and for the most part unexciting, and yet the reader is carried along from first to last by a gentle current of interest which, though it never absorbs and sometimes rather flags, is always sufficiently strong to give him a sense of movement and progress. The real secret of this lies in the thoroughly natural and con- sistent manner in which the author has drawn and developed most of the characters, and the unusual originality which marks his conception of one or two of them. Mr. Fleming, as we infer from internal evidence, belongs by birth to the United States ; and his book presents a curious illustration of the cosmopolitan spirit which is coming over that large and ever-increasing class of well-to-do, cultured Americans, who seek in European or Eastern travel the aesthetic gratifications which are denied to them at home. It used to be customary to represent the travelling Yankee as carrying about with him wherever he went, and ostentatiously proclaiming upon every opportunity, a proud conviction of the natural superiority of his own country and people and their boasted " institutions " to the effete civilisations of the old world ; and such a picture, though doubtless a caricature, had 01 lately enough truth in it to give it general currency. The Americans of Mr. Fleming's book are, on the contrary, singularly free not only from national pride of the more offensive kind, but even from those milder, less obtrusive forms of the spirit of ex- clusiveness which seem to be inseparable from a strongly-felt sense of nationality. They have passed their youth, made their money, perhaps loved their first-love in America ; but as soon as the preliminary stages of life were over, and they looked around them with an unfettered liberty of choice, they seem to have dissevered themselves without reluctance from their native land, and to have turned their faces Eastward by a natural and spon- taneous instinct. It is true that there is an occasional gleam of patriotic feeling when some story of the war slips into the con- versation, but the general tone of the American speakers is quite as serene, impartial, and disinterested, when their own country is under discussion, as when the subject is England or some still stranger land.
The story, as we have said, is of a very simple and some- what common-place kind, and whatever plot there is may be briefly indicated here, without in any way diminishing the in- terest of such of our readers as may be tempted by our re- commendation to try the book itself. Bell Hamlyn is the daugher of an American who, after many vicissitudes of fortune in the far West, has grown rich, and finds himself at fifty "for the first time at leisure to enjoy and in a position to indulge a craving for art, for travel, for literature, and for society, which had been but intensified by the deprivation of a lifetime." The circumstances of Bell's own early years reflected to some extent the chequered and shifting aspects of her father's career. "You can't imagine," she says to one of the characters, "what a funny kind of education I have had ! Six months at some fashion- able boarding-school in New York when papa's affairs went well, and then perhaps a couple of years in some Western village where there was hardly a soul to speak to, if some speculation failed and • A Nile Novel. By George Fleming. 2 vole. London: Macmillan Co. 1877.
we were out of money. We lived three years in Chicago once without making a single acquaintance in the place. We have become swells ' ourselves now-a-days," she adds, " but it was such weary work waiting." In consequence, perhaps, of these peculi- arities in her early training, there is something unconventional and independent in Bell's views of life, and as her young step- mother is more fit to be a confidante than a guide, she is left very much to herself to work out her theories in her own way. Some little time before the story opens she has become engaged at Ravenna without her father's knowledge to one George Ferris, a young American artist, but we are led to suspect from the first that she has rather yielded to the passion of her lover than shared it. At the beginning of the book we find her already embarked
with her father and step-mother in a Nile dahabeah on the usual voyage from Cairo up the river. They soon overtake a second boat, also occupied by American travellers, one of whom, Arthur
Livingstone, is the hero of the tale. This Arthur Livingstone is
a man of thirty-five, whose youth has been blighted by a tragic love-affair, which has apparently "exhausted whatever capacity for intense feeling he once might have had." But he is not the blasé
cynic, whose shape the disappointed lover of conventional fiction is usually made to wear. On the contrary, he shows from the first a real though somewhat languid interest in the affairs of his fellow-travellers, and the most powerful thing in the book is the way in which his calm, patronising, half-amused acquiescence in Bell's love for him, is changed by the discovery of her want of frankness, and the consequent rupture of their engagement, into a masterful and overpowering passion, which absorbs in itself all the latent forces of a reserved and seemingly exhausted nature. We need not tell in detail how, as they journeyed up the Nile, Bell was drawn to this man by an irresistible fascination, how, without being deliberately false to her absent lover, she succeeded in banishing the thought of him and his claims on her from her mind, how Livingstone spurned her when he found out what seemed to him her meditated treachery, and how at last all was arranged in that satisfactory fashion by which even the most adroit novelists are apt to take the edge off their catastrophes.
But the strong point of the novel is not its somewhat meagre plot; and the reader will be more struck with the drawing of two or three of the characters, and the artistic dexterity with which the background of temples and ruins, while never obtruded into undue prominence, is kept constantly in view, and serves to give additional effect to the natural tone and colour of the incidents. Mr. Hamlyn, the struggling, not over-scrupulous adventurer, who has never ceased to think, while he has been making his way and earning his fortune, of the pleasures of spending it, and the master motive of whose career has been an intense craving for luxury and refinement, is rather an American than an English type of character. Take this passage, for instance, as to his love of Byron :—
"Mr. Hamlyn could repeat whole pages of Byron by heart ; it was the only poetry he either cared for or understood. The calculated passion, the deliberate self-abandonment of his own nature found its supremest expression there. He had hardly ever opened a book,—had certainly never read a line of verse—until he had passed hie fortieth year,—and it was then, as a shrewd middle-aged man, that he had experienced the one strong mental emotion of his life. The strong voluptuous language, the triumphant music of Byron's verse, were to Mr. Hamlyn as the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. Another horizon opened out before him,—opened out on that very world of dazzling picturesque passions of luxurious gratified desire, to gain which he was struggling for wealth. The very fact that Byron was Lord Byron fascinated and satisfied his imagination. At forty he began writing verse ;—feeble verse ; artificial, rhetorical verse, without a trace in it of the rough nature, the rougher experience of his early life,—verse in whioh Spanish senoritas, Italian countesses, Greek princesses, and nondescript men, professing the loftiest sentiments to justify them in the most ignoble of actions, enacted impossible tragedies in various islands, vaguely indicated as existing somewhere in • the South.' His writing was one more concealment in the most secretive of lives. He had never spoken of it to any one. And his delight in Byron was the greater that it was the only book he had ever personally discovered for himself. Within the last few years he had become a diligent reader. Rigidly eschewing novels—which alone could please him—he had forced him- self to struggle through hundreds of scientific, literary, historical works. As a rule he always travelled with Buckle's History and a complete edition of Macaulay's Essays. Sober, rich-looking books they were, bound in leather ; his monogram and crest—both the creation of a famous London binder—emblazoned on their covers. His copy of Byron was a small shabby volume, worn and dim and pencil-marked at every page. He invariably carried it with him, locked away with his own manuscripts in his desk."
'fhis seems to us to bring out by a sort of side-light the character described with admirable clearness and point, and the following about Livingstone is equally graphic, though in a different style :—
" Mentally he was par excellence an amateur. He had tastes and opinions,—the one as settled as the others were fluctuating,—bat his most intimate friend had never heard him give expression to a belief. It might be the result of a youth spent in uncertain, if not altogether aim- less, wandering among the oldest, most enriching art-cities of Europe ; it might be a part of that inevitable indifference to actual contemporary in- terests which possesses itself of every man living away from his own country ;—for one reason or another, there was a certain peculiar tinge of what, for want of a better word, I would call old-fashionedness, which dis- tinguished Livingfitone's manner ; a deliberate courtesy, a leisurely self- possession, too restrained and finely unobtrusive to excite remark, too potent to pass unrecognised. There was not a trace of self-assertion in his nature, nothing trenchant or aggressive in his manner, and yet, instinctively, one felt he was not a man to brook denial or opposition to his will.'
Some of the minor persons, and in especial a professional flirt, Gerty Campbell, are quite as well hit-off, and there are no traces anywhere of slovenliness either in the author's conception of his characters or in his drawing. But the real charm of the book, and the feature in it which encourages us to expect most from the author, is to be found in the thoroughly picturesque reproductions of Nile scenery with which it abounds, and which betray every- where the artist's eye and hand. We have not space for more than one extract, and we will select the description of the approach to Karnak, not because of its unusual excellence—for there are many other sketches in the book of equal power—but because it is complete in itself and can be understood without note or commentary :—
"The road from Luxor crosses a stretch of wheat-sown fields, past a few tall waving groups of palms, to a wide avenue, on either side of which a row of formless mutilated blocks of stone show where a pro- cession of sphinxes, half-a-mile in length, once led up to the stately propylon of the temple of Karnak. They dismounted in the shade of the first great arch and wandered on among the ruins, passing throngh halls filled with massive granite columns, fretted with hieroglyphs and beautiful with never-ending lines of ancient gods and goddesses ; clambering over fallen blocks and prostrate capitals, until they emerged on a wide uneven expanse of glaring white sand, across which a hundred narrow foot-tracks led to that farther temple where stands the famous Hall of Columns. A long triple row of gigantic pillars opens out, like the solemn aisle of a pins weed, on either side of the soft wet path, at the farther end of which obelisk after obelisk rises from amid what seem the ruins of a primscval world. Wide blocks of stone sixty or seventy feet in length bridge the spaces between the column overhead ; here one of these blocks has fallen to the ground, and lies all carved and painted on the water-soaked earth ; farther on two of the mighty piles have started from their place and lean irresolute against each other, as though waiting for some shock of sound to pierce the blue stillness of the sky and bid them end their fall. At the outer end of the hall a chaos of rough hewn stones lies heaped and piled about in monstrous confusion' reaching to where—far, far away—a small thin obelisk, grown small and delicate by distance, marks the boundary- line of that last mass of rains which shows the limit of Karnak's farthest temple."
We have dwelt almost entirely on the merits of this book, because it appears to us to stand, as compared with the ordinary three- volume novel, in a different and distinctly higher class. It is possible that to many readers the local colouring will seem exces- sive, and the incidents too slight a framework to support the burden of 500 pages of writing. It is not to be denied, too, that there are here and there faults of taste, arising, no doubt, partly from inexperience, and perhaps from the conscious adoption of a different standard from our English one, which seem to us to be blemishes. But we take leave of Mr. Fleming with regret, and if, as we infer from the silence of the title-page, this is his first book, we do not doubt that he will in time follow up this modest maiden effort with some more ambitious and not less artistic work.
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