NO FATHERLAND.*
LET no one suppose that Madame Von Oppen has written a touching story of a homeless outcast, or a dashing one of a citizen of the world. Her book is—or, at least, reads like—the shallow gossip of a sharp but coarse and unscrupulous holder-on to the skirts of foreign Courts ; and there is little thread of connection running through it, except that which is supplied by the bitter apirit of hatred for the Romish Church. It is an imposing work enough, consisting of 420 large pages of small print, introducing us to Czars, Emperors, and Princes, and devoted to talk of prin- ciples, politics, and religion. Nevertheless it is unworthy of notice, were it not as well to warn the innocent public that the taking title is a delusion, and the high-sounding name of the authoress a snare ; and were it not right to say once more that this bitter and unmeasured abuse of the Roman Catholic Church, and of the order of the Jesuits especially, savours of malice, and of -cowardice also, since it shelters itself behind the safe medium of fiction. And it is as well to point out the absence of any intrinsic value in the book itself, as a clever and powerful story might be aome prima facie ground for reliance on the opinions of its author. It consists, in fact, of three stories, used as pegs on which to hang hasty and crude opinions on all questions, from the character of Christ to the iniquity of adulterations and carrot - marmalade. These stories are entirely independent of each other, and excuse their claim to be considered one by the plea, we suppose, that the son of the heroine of the first is the -hero of the second, and the daughter of the hero of the second is the heroine of the third. We are treated to the same complete change of scene, in the first being dragged about from Spain to St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Mexico ; and in the second to South Carolina, Kentucky ; Germany and England in the third. The same love of variety displays itself in the language, for besides English, German, and French—of the latter we have page upon page consecutively—we have an English. Germanhotch-potch, which, we learn in the preface, Madame Von Oppen considers expressive, and which she thinks it would be impertinent to translate to us, whence we gather that the book is written for cultivated people only. Whether the cultivated people will admire numerous passages like the follow- ing we are scarcely in doubt ; but the words are put into the mouth of one of them, a German prince, and he must indeed have been cultivated to think in English, even though it be only German dog-English :— "Dann wird's los in every little wirthschaft, Prince Hector was so trivolous, and so ungrateful, although he knows that he is fed with taxes paid regularly. Yes, I will do just like other people. I will eat at the table d'hfite to-morrow : no, to-morrow I follow these Americana to the Ahr Valley, but iiber morgen will I at the table d'hOte speisen and with the yolk behaglich plandern. I can speak of the grain and the harvest, the potatoes and corn, at ctetera : only I must mich in Acht nehmen and -the officers and Borussen-Corps-Studenten avoid, for they know me already probably."
The book commences with the robbery of a child born to wealthy Greek parents during a tour in Spain. The Roman Catholic doctor, nurse, and priest are, of course, parties to it ; the mother dies, and the distressed father never discovers a trace of his child. In due time, when the priests are sure of the faith of their ward, they tell her who she is, and desire her to recover her patrimony for the Church, but to succeed she will have to pretend to be a Protestant. This she refuses, so they turn her out, and endeavour to reduce her to terms by distress. To facilitate matters, a -wealthy, high-born, worthy old lady is suborned to meet her 4‘ by accident on purpose," as school-boys say—and to befriend her ; having gained her heart, she is to horrify her by showing her the wickedness of the world, in order to drive her back to the 'Church, and to obedience to the Church's orders ; and we are -expected to believe that a Superior of the order of Jesuits, and a iady, refined, cultivated, and religious, are not only guilty of the cruelty and deceit embodied in the following scheme, but are • No Fatherland. By Madame Ton Oppen. London : Samuel Tinsley.
unabashed contrivers of the indecent details by which it is to be carried out :—
" • She mast see and hear much of card-playing, illicit liaisons, inde- cent dramatic performances, and all such things, and as she has very little experience of the world out of the convent, and as she has an instinctive horror of sensuality and of dishonourable conduct in any form, she will believe that this sort of thing is the style of life every- where, only that in Madrid it is milder than in London, Paris, or Peters- burg, and then she will not be able to see any refuge from intoxicating vice except in the convent, and ones there, I'll attend to her case; you may leave the rest to me. But in the meantime, what I want you to do is to keep an eye upon her. We are now going to send her adrift, and when she is gone, she will very likely apply for some sort of a situation in some domestic or menial position, if she can't get into the corps de ballet of the theatre ; but she knows already that the theatre is not a very chaste locality, and she will very likely not trouble the theatre- director until she has failed to get a situation somewhere else. She will try to get a place in some shop, to sell ribbons or cakes over the counter, but most of the shop-keepers will be warned against her ; see that she gets a bad name to start with ; I will say she has been turned out of the convent for having attempted to seduce me; she has been following the advice of Potiphar's wife, who tried to seduce Joseph; and when the shop-keepers hear of it, they will have nothing to do with her; and while she is mourning about bewildered, and not able to understand this esprit de corps on the silent system against her, she must accidentally meet the Senora de Bayo, who will be surprised to find her, and who must really do as if she believed the girl to be culpable ; but a friendly hand reached out to a fallen sister, at meters, and the good influence of a liberal Catholic will bring the girl to the convent as the only place to find security. I believe I am not misunderstood ? '
Ah no! 'said the nice old lady, 'I understand, and with God's help I will do my sacred duty: "
And this good old lady does what she is told, charges the girl with the indecent conduct specified, and introduces her to bad society in her own house filling it with leaders of evil lives, male and female, to confound the unfortunate girl. Happily the old lady's son comes to the rescue, falls in love with and marries her, and the tale abruptly closes with the announcement that after the old lady's death they "returned to Lisbon, where they lived till he became a widower in 1815, and then he went to England, where he died in 1825, leaving his only child, Luis de Bap, fifteen years old, under the guardianship of his old friend, Dr. Maynard." The book deals largely in these would-be business-like brief state- ments of details, to give an air of biography to the fiction. In the second story, for instance, we have a long account of an American gentleman who went to see Frederick the Great ; and Madame Von Oppen is so delighted with her own ingenuity in making "Father" have three wives and twenty-seven children, that the details of his family are spread before us several times. We learn "that his eldest son by the first wife was sixty-seven years old when he did the honours at his father's funeral ; the eldest grand- son was forty-two ; and the eldest great grandson was already twenty-one, and was married and had a little child already six mouths old at the funeral, where four generations of living people stood around the coffin of the old family patriarch." It is pleasant, by the way, to know that the people who stood round the coffin were living ; as the alternative seems to have been open to them, and the patriarch himself might have judged the compliment greater if those who had previously passed away, and with whom he could in future associate, had given him the countenance of their presence and the cheering support of their welcome. Seventy pages further on, our authoress again rides her hobby about "Father." "Father is a singular character : he is now between eighty and ninety years old, and has been married three times ; all his wives are dead now." We thought, perhaps, two at least were, but it is well to be certain ;—the names and nationalities of the three wives follow, and the dates when they first made
" Father " happy in marriage.
The second story begins with introducing " Father's " youngest daughter, Bella, at a ball at St. Petersburg, where she falls at once in love with a son of the Czar, who shows his reciprocation of her affection in a very singular manner, by making so long a speech that they must have "sat out" during all the dances to accom- plish it ; it was on Russian, Polish, and general international questions, political and social, and was made partly in French and partly in English. The Prince arranges future clandestine meetings for the future amplification of his boyish views, and all is going on well when Papa Czar discovers all, and prefers to kiss the young lady himself, by way of softening his disapproval, and explains, with sufficient openness, to Bella's brother and guardian, that be con- cludes she does not wish to remain as his son's mistress. Brother takes the remark with a wise, but rather unusual friendliness, and they withdraw to Berlin, where brother finds a stranger in bed at the inn, and tells him all about his sister's little trouble. The stranger is Luis de Bayo, who undertakes to console her; she assures him she can never love again, and then this story pulls up suddenly like the last, and in a similarly tragic strain. "He followed her to America, where six months afterwards he married her, and abont a year after they were married Bella died very suddenly in child-birth, leaving poor De Bayo a widower with twins, a boy and a girl, that he brought up in Mexico, where he bought a handsome villa, and lived like an eccentric Oriental prince."
In the third story, Luis de Bayo, and an elderly sister-in-law, another of "Father's" twenty-seven children, and a German tutor, expound their views in long speeches to each other, and to Miss Nina on every conceivable subject, from strictures on Christianity and the Bible, and vulgar, flippant views of the French, to eloquence on quackery and puffing. Luis himself has the strongest lungs, and speaks in one place for thirty-five immense pages "on end," giving his hearer, amongst other things, an epitome of the history and constitution (?) of the Order of Jesuits. The young lady indulges her inherited gift in greater moderation, being contented with not more than thirteen pages at a time, and varying her style with poetry and prose, and English, German and Latin, besides giving us a sermon of twenty pages about Christ, the Prince of Prussia, Luther and the Volunteers ; a sermon which she informs us she would herself have preached to the Berliners had she had the opportunity. At the end of one of these speeches, Luis, having, we fear, ex- hausted his constitution by too much talking, abruptly dies. "The yellow fever was there, and on the following morning De Bayo was dead." We should perhaps warn sensitive readers against this book, which is divided into parts, each ending in a solemn way with a sudden death for which we have not been duly prepared. The young people then leave Mexico for the States, and observe, amidst fresh scenes and new people, the old custom of propounding their views ; but after this the story becomes such a hopeless and unintelligible jumble that we are unable to say what it is, only we do know that the next part ends in conformity with the rule we have explained, and Nina receives a telegram concerning her brother, Luis, junior,—" Luis de Bayo is dead. He has been assassinated. I am on my way by railroad with his corpse. —Robert Foster." We could have wished for a more romantic signature ; after Luis de Bayo, Robert Foster is a trifle common- place ; it is annoying ; a painful anti-climax to such a telegram. However, it is not a sensation novel, far from it, and nothing coma of the assassination except that Nina goes to Europe, and somehow, in consequence of one Goldenoff, a German prince, Hector comes on the scene. He catches the speaking epidemic as soon as he falls in love with Nina, and what is worse, it takes an unfortunate turn, in the way of the dog English-German, of which we have already quoted a specimen ; he dilates on the meter- city of Christ, on Bible stories, hell, immortality, &c., but she won't encourage him, warned probably by a knowledge of her mother's early love and broken heart. Nevertheless, after a break in the story of eighteen years, she writes the Prince a letter on her death-bed. It is dated the 22nd March, but it is probable that she did not finish it on that day, as we have estimated that it must have covered a hundred foolscap sheets. In it she glances at everything, but principally German and French affairs and char- acter, and we must forgive the dog-English which, in deference to her august correspondent, she indulges in freely, when we get hold of an intelligible sentence like the following,—"I have found such a good home and such true friends here in dear old England, whose faults are merely so many little drops of water in the ocean when compared with the hideous faults of her contempo- raries; for on all this earth, there is no land where we find the real genuine home as we find it here in England, where the people all help each other for England's weal." The letter concludes with a very long account of a dream, in which the Kaiser William of Germany and the God of Love have an intellectual tilt at each other, ending with a parody on "Auld Lang Syne," which they sing as a duet, to that air, for some reason or other on the soil of Canada. We need scarcely add that none of the personages has the slightest individuality. All are only the authoress, sometimes pleading, sometimes special pleading—by way of making- believe conversation—with more or less sense, but doing either the one or the other always in a style coarse, shallow, and self-confident.
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