ANDREW DEVEREL.*
Tam book is worth reading by literary men principally because it is so different from the productions of literary men. The author tells us in his preface that he is "an entirely unlearned man, unaccustomed to literature ; but he has actually been in all the scenes he describes, and has taken part in the adventures." And this is certainly confirmed by the book, and yet the interest it excites is not due to the" scenes he describes," or to "the adventures in which he has taken part," which are not very remarkable, but to the mode in which he describes both them and his views, or fragments of views, upon life. Mr. Charles Beach is, if not an American, a man who has lived so much in America that he has caught the tone of the practical life there,—the peculiar sang froid and uniformity of manner, the self-sufficing tone, and that abstract inquisitiveness of conversation which treats the " stranger " rather as a new natural phenomenon to be inspected than as a character to be admired or disliked ; indeed his book reflects incidentally the cold, grey, restless vigilance of the whole social life. But this is not given intentionally at all, it only gleams accidentally through the curious scrappy details and odds and ends of remark which are interpolated in the adventures, and is as often to be inferred from the absence of all remark in places where it is confidently expected, where a literary man could not have helped some sort of disquisition, as from the positive comments. The interest of the book to us, which was not inconsiderable, consisted entirely in watching the dry, practical, and yet often original treatment of such elements of romance as it contained, the odd expression of moral convictions here and there, the still odder suddenness with which the moral convictions come to an end and make no kind of apology for coming to an end ; the scrappy side views of miscellaneous real life which have no coherence with the story except, no doubt, accidental associa- tion in the author's own memory ; and, in a word, all those many traits and symptoms by which the sharp sight of practi- cal life observing just so much as can be turned to swift account in affairs, distinguishes itself from the gaze of literary culture trying to assign to miscellaneous details their proper place and proportion in a picture of the life around. The adventure on the coast of New Guinea, to which Mr. Beach evidently assigns the Matra importance, because he believes New Guinea the • Andrew Deverel. -ts— History of an Adventurer in New Guinea. By Charles Beach. Two vols. Bentley.
in gold-fields as well as in spices,—is only an adventure of that kind of which every exploring voyage among barbarians con- tains plenty of specimens. There is no incident in the volumes which would possess real interest but for the sharp, unliterary style in which it is told. This permits us to see incidentally more of the genuine go-ahead practical Yankee, who is not unscrupulous by
any means, but far too restless to be very scrupulous, apparently without a Past, too impatient to possess a Present, and living
only in the immediate Future, than any more artistic workman- ship could give. We have no proof, indeed, that Mr. Beach is an American by birth, but all the local colour and absence of local colour is characteristically American, and characteristically, too, stamped with the practical, not the literary, aspect of the American character.
One of the first original touches in the narrative,—which is half tale, half travel,—is the mode in which the hero, Andrew Deverel, introduces himself to the young lady he intends eventually to marry. He appears in the tale in rags and, fortunately for him, saves amen of some wealth from drowning in the Erie Canal, in the State of New York. In return for this service, the merchant, Mr. Grey, offers him a start in life and tries to extri- cate him from his moody melancholy. Mr. Deverel confesses that it arises in part from a hopeless attachment to a young heiress in New Orleans, whom he has only seen but never spoken to, and who has never even seen him. Mr. Grey advises him to write at once to the young lady, declaring his attachment, and "commanding" her to wait for him till he has made for himself a position worthy of her, and to write at the same time to her father, communicating his intention to pay his addresses ulti- mately to his daughter, and, in the mean time, to write to her regularly, in order that she may become acquainted with hie- character, mind, and general views. "Unless she knows," says Mr. Grey, "of the honour you intend to confer on her, you can- not complain of her accepting another. You must also write to her aristocratic father, or he may think you are trying to get his daughter without his consent or knowledge. You must manage the business with propriety, or you will not deserve the girl, and ought not to get her." This advice Mr. Deverel com- plies with, and the letter to the young lady is decidedly an original one :—
" New York, July 12, 1850.
"Mass L.suas LORNBY,—Do not puzzle yourself with guessing which of your acquaintances has sent you this letter, for you have probably never seen me. I have seen you, and I love. From the first instant you first dawned upon my sight I resolved to win you for a wife. Nothing shall be left undone on my part to accomplish this, and you being one of the parties concerned, I write to acquaint you with the resolution I have, which henceforward shall be the foundation on which any soul shall work. You cannot, or should not, be offended at this communi- cation, for there is no harm in your knowing that for your sake there is one striving to be all that a man should be—that for you there is one who will resist every temptation to evil. Pardon ray egotism, for I am going to write some particulars concerning myself. I am twenty-two years of age, and above the average height of men. I do not think my face is handsome, but then I try to look good. My education has been of that kind which gives me more wisdom than learning, and I hope that it will ever continue so. I have never been spoiled by the kind- ness of friends, or rained by the prospect of wealth unearned in the future. Fortune has ever favoured me by making ray circumstances. such as make a man. I shall soon write to you again. It is neces- sary for me to do so in order that you may become acquainted with me. This is but an introductory epistle, and cannot be as interesting as I hope to make others, which you can read as you would the last number. of a lady's magazine, where you road what is written by those with whom yon are not acquainted ; and as long as my letters contain nothing offensive to a right-thinking girl I entreat the favour of having them read. Allow me to be your travelling correspondent, contributing articles for your instruction and amusement, and I will try to make my letters worthy of being road. I have ever been a wanderer on the earth, without friends or home. Man can never live as he should with- out some reason for doing so ; hitherto I have had none, but I have now. Since seeing you, I can understand that the war of life is not all vanity and folly, that there is something to be won in the strife, and that life has happier thoughts than seeking how to kill the present time. The sight of you has wrought as great a change in me as the sun in spring gives to earth after the winter. To me the world and life were once only worth three meals per day, and sometimes not that. I met with you, and now view the world as one vast field where man can earn happiness by pleasant toil. Life has become a gleam of heaven, and the world seems illuminated with hope—the hope of winning you."
The situation thus introduced might have been really admirable to a fertile literary imagination, bad the author taken the least pains to work out its opportunities. But it is obvious that its lite- rary opportunities never suggested themselves to him at all. It was a real expedient of which he had had some experience, and he thinks of it in no other light. The young lady's "special foreign correspondent" never prints another letter to her, though he mentions having written one or two more. No effort at all as made to paint the effect on her mind of the anonymous adventurer's love-letters, or the confluence between the ideal /over growing in her imagination out of this correspondence, and the real one when at last he presents himself. As a literary expedient the idea is utterly wasted. Mr. Beach never troubles himself with any one's inward life at all except so far as it determines the momentary action or adventure. To paint a character is no part of his attempt. The young lady is set at the end of a vista of practical adventures through which the hero hurries in order to make his fortune, and be able to ask for her ; and nothing can be more drily practical than the way the ro- mantic patch is woven into the story ;—not that it seems to be put there to colour and adorn it at all, but rather because it was, in fact, there ; because, in sober truth, that admirable matrimo- nial intent did stand in the hero's practical mind beyond the Californian speculations in Mexican grants and ranchos, and the partnerships in fruit cargoes from the Sandwich Islands, and the other shrewd forecasts by which he succeeded in making money. The curiously realistic way in which you get first a lot of dry sen- timent, then a lot of risky adventure, then a lot of shrewd trad- ing, and so forth, in this little book,, is one of the characteristics of it that is to our minds both instructive and amusing.
Then, as to the moral impressions, the curious feature is the evident feeling that morality, though valuable, must not be allowed to interfere too much with the exigencies of life. It seems to deal with actions rather than characters, and where morality leads to an unpractical amount of fastidiousness you must just stride over it as you best can ; hence, too, it only deals with the future, and need never interfere with the com- plete burial of the past, however uncomfortable, provided the future be respectable. Nothing of this is said or even con- ceived expressly ; but we glean it clearly from the whole tone of the book,—the morality of which is of a Defoeish kind,—a blunt sort-of shifty instrument for carving out your fortune which it is fatal to throw away, but which you may use more or less as oc- casion requires, and to grieve over the past neglect of which, when you wisely decide to resume it, is unpractical. For example, this is the dry practical mode in which the inevitable dishonesty of one of the best characters in the book is treated :— " The California was lying in the Bay of Panama, and the passengers had to go off in boats. When Andrew reached the ship, a boat-load of steerage passengers were going up its side, and while waiting for them to get on board he saw a youth of about seventeen, who did not take the usual way of boarding a ship, but, while the others were ascending the side by the proper means this youth managed to get up by the paddle-wheel, and steal forward unobserved by the officer stationed by the gangway to examine the passage-tickets as the passengers came on board. This manceuvre showed that the youth had no passage-ticket, and was trying at a very little expense to reach
—the land Where each bucket of sand Is into a dollar reducible.
"For the first ten days of the passage to San Francisco, Andrew saw this youth on the deck every day, and he became much interested in his appearance. His face wore a fixed, quiet, meditative expression. Be associated with none, and spoke only when addressed, and then in a low respectful tone. One day ho was standing near the rail crossing abaft the wheels which separated the steerage from the cabin passengers. Andrew drew near and began a conversation. You appear very anxious to reach California,' said he, after trying to awaken the youth to some animation by common-place remarks.—' Yes,' said the boy, but I don't know why you should think I am more anxious than others.'
I saw you when you came on board the ship,' said Andrew, and I formed that opinion from the manner by which you reached the deck.'— 'For God's sake do not tell of me !' said the youth. I had no money -to pay my passage, or I would not go in this way. I am obliged to go to California on very important business, and if I had delayed till I got the money it would have been too late.'—' I do not intend to expose you, for, from what I have seen of your conduct since we sailed, I have formed a very good opinion of you. Let your conduct be such as will enable me to retain that opinion, and I shall certainly not speak of what I have seen. You seem to be in much trouble and that is not the state of mind in which you should seek a land like California. I suppose you are homesick, and would like to see your friends again."
Indeed, the hero himself, when hungry, is guilty of a milder ferns of the same kind of inevitable dishonesty ; and when asked how long it is since he had food, he relates it in this humorous form : —"I had a very good dinner yesterday, and after eating it I told the landlord that I would pay him the next time I came that way if I had the money. He gave me an invitation never to come again, and directed me to a place where I could get warm." Bat the most curious example of the sangfroid with which im- morality, once past, is involuntarily treated in this book,—by no means, in its dry way, an unscrupulous one in tone as to any moral actions directly weighed in it,—is the calmness with which Mr. De- Terel makes a friend of a confessed pirate, an English gentleman, who, after falling into bad circumstances, bad for some period of his life given himself up to murder and robbery on the high seas, under the leadeibship of a jinn pirate captain, and finally I drifted in an open boat to New Guinea, where he married and lived for ten years among the natives. He is represented as heading the attack on Mr. Deverel's exploring ship, which he succeeds in boarding, and is carried away in it, after receiving a nearly mortal wound. This gentleman never appears to re- pent his crimes, or to understand that be has been guilty of crimes ; but be is persuaded by Mr. Deverel not to return to his barbarian life, but to go back to England, where, finding a fortune awaiting him, he decides to abandon his savage wife and family in New Guinea, marries an English lady (we conclude without mention of the forlorn lady in New Guinea), and re- tains apparently the respect and friendship of our hero, who regards himself as having " saved " the fonner pirate, plun- derer, and murderer from willing degradation to the level of barbarians. The little piratical episode appears to weigh no more with him than with the gentleman-pirate himself,— not because, to either, it seems right, but because it is fairly embedded in the inevitable past, and is no longer a practical matter at all. The man has fairly emerged from that unfortunate stratum of circumstances,—what use is there in thinking of it, any more than there would be in reproaching the earth with the inhospitable snows and ice which seem once, in the times of the antediluvian species, to have encompassed its whole surface ? This is not what Mr. Beach anywhere says, for his morality is nowhere generalized. -But this is the sort of effect which his frequently strict dry tone about the future when an alternative is really open, and the curious ease with which he ac- accepts the past however discreditable where there is no alterna- tive, never even glancing at anything so unpractical as remorse, produces on the reader. It is a shifty practical morality adapting itself to circumstances. On the whole, the book, utterly in- artistic, scrappy, and miscellaneous as it is, is interesting to literary men for the naivete of the original practical Yankee mind by which it seems to have been strung together.
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