"THICKER THAN WATER."*
Ma PAYN strikes us, in his character of novelist, as a cross between Wilkie Collins and Walter Besant. He has the love of the former for dark and grand mysteries and for persons of pre- ternatural cleverness, and the love of the latter for large- hearted generosity on a great scale. But then he has none of Wilkie Collins's marvellous—we might almost say mathemati- cal—power of constructing the intricate portions of his tale, and calculating their dimensions; and none of his skill in fitting and piecing them together so as to make a symmetrical whole, of won- derful unity and completeness. Nor do we detect, on the other hand, the ulterior motive of genuine patriotism and philanthropy, which turns the smile of amusement at the generous quixotism of Besant into a feeling of warm admiration. Mr. Payn's mysteries have nothing to excite the imagination or to defy the inquisitiveness of the reader, as Wilkie Collins's have ; and his millions are not so spent as to leave the world brighter, and happier, and purer, as Mr. Besant's are. For these very reasons, however, Mr. Payn's stories more nearly approach tales of real life than those of the purveyors of fiction to whom we have been comparing him. But though Mr. Payn, especially in his humorous tales, often gives a great charm to the real side of life, he has not succeeded, in the novel before us, in reaching the usual standard of his literary work.
Mr. Beryl Peyton is the hero of this novel—though younger men do the duty for him of falling in love and getting into and out of trouble—and we cannot at all echo the encomium upon him with which the author winds up his third volume:—" Of all the persons described in this little life-drama, Beryl Peyton will live longest in human remembrance, and, in my poor judg- ment, with all his faults, will deserve to live." In our poor judgment, his only claim to have lived at all was that, doubtless, like most men not utterly bad, he often wished to do right. But few-men, we should say, were ever painted who spent enormous wealth so extremely injudiciously, with so little regard to any one's jadgment except his own, such profound indifference to the wishes and pleadings of those nearest to him, such violent pre- judices, obstinate self-will, or vindictive and revengeful passions. His only redeeming point is a blind and most hasty and foolish im- pulse of generosity; a generosity which is purely selfish, as it costs him only money, of which he has infinitely more than he knows what to do with, and which is not accompanied by any denial of personal comfort, or any attempt to add that kindness of manner to his gift of money which is the soul of all true charity. Very luckily, the reader's feelings are not outraged by this brutal style of patronage, since the recipients of it are, almost without exception—thanks to Mr. Beryl Peyton's self-will and want of judgment—undeserving of any kindness whatever, and we can only rejoice in their successive downfalls. But first let as dis- pose of Mr. Peyton. At any rate, he is a wonderful man. He is old, and yet his strength is immense; he is the sort of man we meet with, not unfrequently, in romance, who with a touch of his thumb rolls strong fellows in the gutter; he has been all over the world and is master of everybody's secret, and recog- nises devoted admirers and deadly enemies in the most unex- * " Thickerthun Water." By James Payn. S role. London: Longman, Green, and Co.
petted places and with the same unmoved self-possession. He is followed by an assassin whose wicked schemes he has frus- trated, but a dumb friend is behind the assassin; and the latter finds himself first in a deep dock, whence there is no escape, and next lying huddled, a filthy mass, on the top of the dock wall, saved by the clemency of the grand old man. Mr. Beryl Peyton is eccentric, as well as strong and merciful. He dines alone at the annual dinner of his club, where the rule is that covers shall be laid for all the original members, whether alive or dead. Mr. Beryl Peyton takes the chair, proposes the toasts with solemn ceremony, and sees the festive mummery to the end in a ghastly silence and solitude. He fills his Hall in Devonshire with needy adventurers, who have flattered some or other of his weaknesses. He is courteous but terrible to his wife, and finally allows a vindictive hatred to the dead to lead him to do gross and most unnatural injustice to the innocent living. We cannot, therefore, endorse the author's estimate of his principal character. That he is often generous and some- times tender, is true, but these qualities are called out by impulse only, and exercised without principle.
Of the other characters in this story,—which may be said to have inaugurated Longman's new magazine,—none are favourites with us, and there is a want of the element of domestic interest, which we have so often enjoyed in Mr. Payn's stories. Here is no home,—neither in the Great Devonshire Hall, crowded with adventurous sycophants, nor in the rich, three-times-married Mrs. Beckett's Park-Lane reception-rooms, nor in Mrs. Tidman's boarding establishment, nor in the Widow Sotheran's melancholy cottage. There is much able and amusing caricature, but little nature ; Charlie Sotheran alone strikes us as at once pleasant and natural, and he does not play a very conspicuous part. Mrs. Beryl and Mrs. Sotheran are too feebly amiable to gain our interest or respect; Mrs. Beckett too vulgar—not to say worse—though her passion for young Dornay, and her schemes for gratifying it, are sketched with force and some humour; and of the Dornays, the elder is too thoroughly, and the younger too feebly, bad. There remain Mr. and Mrs. Tidman and the occupants of their boarding- house, and, if we did not know our Dickens so well, we should be even more amused than we are with Mrs. Tidman's reminis- cences of the higher life from which she has sunk, of the customs of Slopton Manor-house, and especially of the gloves which her aunt, Lady Theresa Blenkinhouse, always wore, even at breakfast and in hot weather—and of the five hundred slaves which her grandfather had owned—" not in livery, it is true, far from it—but all devoted to his sovereign will." Her airs and graces, her snubbings of any guests who contradict her, and the very cheerful and contented but abject bondage in which she keeps her useful husband, remind us very pleasantly of many of Dickens's very silly but very amusing women. Miss Julia—one of her lodgers—is even more than amusing,—pathetic in her feeble- ness and in her fear of her elder sister, who sternly represses her aspiration to be a poet. But our heroine is the lodger of most interest, and we wish we could feel as deep a devotion to her as we like to do to heroines of fiction. Unfortunately, the passion of her heart does not at all approve itself either to our taste or judgment, and perhaps prejudices us against her; and her vigorous independence of action and introduction of the type-writing machine, by which she is to earn a livelihood, quench the little remnant of chivalric interest which, in the outset, we are inclined to feel in her fate. We see that she is more able to take care of herself than she is to fascinate and subdue us. As in all Mr. Payn's books, there is humour, and power, and some originality, in Thicker than Water; but its plot is far-fetched, its dramatis persona3 unusually wanting in in- dividual interest and in some instances sketched with grotesque extravagance, and its d6nouement only saved by an accident from shocking deeply our sense of justice.
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