WILFRID CUMBERMEDE.*
THIS is a really beautiful book, which will delight Mr. Mac- donald's great circle of admirers—we had almost said disciples— and by which those who profess a sterner and more definite reli- gious philosophy may come to understand the secret of his accept- ance as a popular teacher. As a pure work of art, the novel suffers from the kind of uncertainty of intention produced by his divided faculty. He has on one side a great love of the mysterious, the romantic, the ghostly, and on the other, a constant tendency to religious or rather spiritual speculation and exposition. The plot of Wilfrid Cumberinede is uncommonly good, and in the hands of Sir Walter Scott, or even of Harrison Ainsworth, would have been worked up into a strong embroidered tissue of semi-historical romance. This Mr. Macdonald could not quite make up his mind to do, and he diverges into all manner of tender poetical digres- sions in regard to the softening and widening of a hard Evangelical faith, and the love and pity of God even for the faithless suicide. Wilfrid grows up rather too dreamy to take advantage of the splendid opportunities opened to him in the first volume of becom- ing the hero of a stirring romance. He wants (and quite right too!) to become a converted Christian of the Broad-Church type, and so he refused to go to law for his rights, and make everybody uncomfortable !
Wilfrid Cumbermede was born at the Moat, and the years of his childhood fill nearly the whole of the first volume, and are delight- fully given. He begins with a quaint speculation which gives the key to his character and future career :—
"No wisest chicken, I presume, can linen the first moment when the chalk-oval surrounding it gave way, and instead of the cavern of lime- stone which its experience might have led it to expect, it found a world of air and movement and freedom and blue sky,—with kites in it. For my own part, I often wished, when a child, that I had watched while God was making me, so that I might have remembered how He did it. Now my wonder is whether, when I creep forth into 'that new world which is the old,' I shall be conscious of the birth, and enjoy the whole mighty surprise, or whether I shall become gradually aware that things are changed, and stare about me like the new-born baby. What will be the candle-flame that shall first attract my new-born sight? But I for- get that speculation about the new life is not writing the history of the old. I have often tried how far back my memory could go. I suspect there are awfully ancient shadows mingling with our memories ; but, as far as I can judge, the earliest definite memory I have is the discovery of how the wind is made; for I saw the process going on before my very eyes, and there could be, and there was, no doubt of the relation of cause and effect in the matter. There were the trees swaying themselves about after the wildest fashion, and there was the wind in consequence visiting my person somewhat too roughly. The trees were blowing in my face. They made the wind, and threw it at me. I used my natural eenses, and this was what they told me. The discovery impressed me • Wulf-kr CUMbennede. By George Macdonald, LLD. London: Hurst and Blackest. so deeply that even now I cannot look upon trees without a certain indescribable and, but for this remembrance, unaccountable awe. A grove was to me for many years a fountain of winds, and, in the stillest day, to look into a depth of gathered stems filled me with dismay; for the whole awful assembly might, writhing together in earnest and effec- tual contortion, at any moment begin their fearful task of churning the wind. There were no trees in the neighbourhood of the house where I was born. It stood in the midst of grass, and nothing but grass was to be seen for a long way on every aide of it. There was not a gravel path or a road near it. Its walls, old and nutty, rose immediately from the grass. Green blades and a few heads of daisies leaned trustingly against the brown stone, all the sharpness of whose fractures had long since vanished, worn away by the sun and rain, or filled up by the slow lichens which I used to think were young stones growing out of the wall. The ground was part of a very old dairy-farm, and my uncle, to whom it belonged, would not have a path about the place. But then the grass was well subdued by the cows, and, indeed, I think, would never have grown very long, for it was of that delicate sort which we see only. on downs and in parks and on old grazing farms. All about the house, as far, at least, as my lowly eyes could see, the ground was perfectly level, and this lake of greenery, out of which it rose like a solitary rock, was to me an unfailing mystery and delight. This will sound strange in the ears of those who consider a mountainous, or at least an undulating surface essential to beauty ; but nature is altogether independent of what is called fine scenery. There are other organs than the eyes even if grass and water and sky were not of the best and loveliest of nature's shows. The house, I have said, was of an ancient-looking stone, grey and green and yellow and brown. It looked very hard ; yet there were some attempts at carving about the heads of the narrow windows. The carving had, however, become so dull and shadowy that I could not dis- tinguish a single form or separable portion of design ; still some ancient thought seemed ever fliokering across them. The house, which was two stories in height, had a certain air of defence about it, ill to explain. It had no eaves, for the walls rose above the edge of the roof; but the hints at battlements were of the merest. The roof, covered with grey slates, rose very steep, and had narrow, tall dormer windows in it. The edges of the gables rose, not in a slope, but in a succession of notches, like stairs. Altogether, the shell to which, considered as a crustaceous animal, I belonged—for man is every animal according as you choose to contemplate him—had an old-world look about it—a look of the time when men had to fight in order to have peace, to kill in order to live. Being, however, a crustaceous animal, T., the heir of all the new impulses of the age, was born and reared in closest neighbourhood with strange relics of a vanished time. Humanity so far retains its chief charac- teristics that the new generations can always flourish in the old shell."
Is not that an exquisite description ? Well, in an upper chamber of this Moat house, reached by a staircase which mounts behind a chimney, lives a wonderful old great-grandmother, so old that, though Wilfrid apparently writes in the present year of grace, she, Elizabeth, was married in the year 1748. Who was her husband ? Ah ! there is the secret. She is somewhat mentally enfeebled, and fancies Wilfrid is her own little son, of some eighty years before. She lived in a high, close easy-chair,— " Covered with some dark staff, against which her face, surrounded with its widow's cap, of ancient form, but dazzling whiteness, was strongly relieved. How shall I describe the shrunken, yet delicate, the gracious, if not graceful form, and the face from which extreme old age had not wasted half the loveliness ? Yet I always beheld it with an indescribable sensation, one of whose elements I can isolate and identify as a faint fear. Perhaps this arose partly from the fact that, in going up the stair, more than once my uncle had said to me, Yon must not mind what grannie Bays, Willie, for old people will often speak strange things that young people cannot understand. But you must love grannie, for she is a very good old lady.'" Now Grannie was always complaining that she was kept too long out of her grave, and she was always trying to tell Willie something which never got said. And she died at last without ever having said it. But before she died came the terrible night in which Willie churned up the wind, a mere episode, having nothing in particular to do with the tale, but just such an episode as Mr. Macdonald's poetical heart delights in. Willie churns up the wind by setting-going a mysterious pendulum, and the trees near the house get awfully excited, and help him with might and main ; and in the middle of the row up rides a horseman, whom Willie takes for the Prince of the Power of the Air, come to buy him and make bagpipes of his skin.
Willie grows older and is sent to school some miles away, and while there he one day takes a long excursion with his school- fellows and steals an apple, and finds himself close to a grand old castle, which was also half an old English country seat, and covered a rock with a huge square of buildings, from various parts of which rose towers, mostly square, also of different heights. The lord of the castle forgives him the apple, and the housekeeper gives him some tea and sends him back to school in a dogcart. As he is bowling along by the aide of the groom he gets a great surprise :—
" We went a different road from that which my companions had taken. It lay through trees all the way till we were out of the park. 'That's the land steward's house,' said James.—' Oh! is it?' I returned, not much interested. What great trees those are all about Yea; they're the finest elms in all the county, those,' he answered. Old Coningham knew what he was about when he got the last baronet to let him build his nest there. Here we are at the gate !' We came out upon a country road, which ran between the wall of the park and a
wooden fence along a field of grass. I offered James one of my apples, which he accepted. 'There, now !' he said, there's a field !—a right good bit o' grass that! Our people has wanted to throw it into the park for hundreds of years. But they won't part with it for love or money. It ought by rights to be ours, you see, by the lie of the country. Its all one grass with the park. But I suppose them as owns it ain't of the same mind. Cur'ous old box!' he added, pointing with his whip a long way off. 'You can just see the roof of it.' I looked in the direction he pointed. A rise in the ground hid all but an ancient, high-peaked roof. What was my astonishment to discover in it the roof of my own home. I was certain it could be no other. It caused a groat sensation, to come upon it thus from the outside, as it were, when I thought myself miles and miles away from it."
So his uncle had all his life kept from Wilfrid the very name and existence of Moldwarp Hall, though he might have seen it from the top of the Moat-house chimneys. Of course, with the old castle all Wilfrid's past and present history is bound up. There he meets his loves, both false and true, and there his greatest enemy. There all sorts of mysterious things (which never get fully cleared up) happen to him, and there he goes through an admirably told adventure, he and a mischievous little girl getting shut out on the huge roof by night. We will not go into the plot, but will just quote one passage of singular power. Wilfrid's dearest friend, the son of an Evangelical clergyman, commits suicide. The tender fellow cannot believe that his friend's soul is shut out from the love and presence of God, and so, says he :—
"I confess that, in the unthinking agony of grief after Charley's death, many a time when I woke in the middle of the night and could sleep no more, I sat up in bed and prayed him, if he heard me, to come to me and let me tell him the truth—for my sake to let me know, at least, that he lived, for then I should be sure that one day all would be well. But if there was any hearing, there was no answer. Charley did not come ; the prayer seemed to vanish in the darkness ; and my more self- possessed meditations never justified the hope of any each being heard. One night I was sitting in my granule's room, which, except my uncle's, was now the only one I could bear to enter. I had been reading for some time very quietly, but had leaned back in my chair, and let my thoughts go wandering whither they would, when all at once I was pos- sessed by the conviction that Charley was near me. I saw nothing, heard nothing ; of the recognized senses of humanity not one gave me a hint of a presence; and yet my whole body was aware—so, at least, it seemed —of the proximity of another I. It was as if some nervous region commensurate with my frame were now for the first time revealed by contact with an object suitable for its apprehension. Like Elipbaz, I felt the hair of my head stand up,—not from terror, but simply, as it seemed, from the presence and its strangeness. Like others also of whom I have read, who believed themselves in the presence of the dis- embodied, I could not speak. I tried, but as if the medium for sound had been withdrawn, and an empty gulf lay around me, no word followed, although my very soul was full of the cry—Charley! Charley ! And alas !in a few moments, like the faint vanishing of an unrealized thought, leaving only the assurance that something half-born from out the un- known had been there, the influence faded and died. It passed from me, like the shadow of a cloud, and once more I knew but my poor lonely self, returning to its candles, its open book, its burning fire."
Our space forbids us to go into the really beautiful love-story. We will only express our intense satisfaction at finding, in the last chapter, that when Wilfrid was waxing an old man, and had been dragged through the deepest waters of sorrow, a gleam of some- thing like sunshine brightened his lot at last.
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