BOOKS.
AUSTIN ELLIOT.*
Ma. HENRY KINGSLEY'S novels have so much fulness of life in them, such a strong bounding pulse, that there are few books of the kind pleasanter to read. They give one for the time the sensation of a gallop on horseback,—motion, buoyancy, and breeze. He has humour, too, and a very quick eye, far too quick for meditative purposes, so that his first sketches of things and persons are deceptively good, and do not unfold afterwards as we wish to see them. This novel is, as usual with him, cheerful, vivid, and hasty ; enjoyable all through, and yet disappointing. The most sustained character in it by far is the dog Robin. But he is so well sustained because it is his nature to bolt out on inoffensive groups of birds, and cats of retiring character, and the style in which Mr. Henry Kingsley best excels—that of sudden intellectual or moral dashes at his im- aginary foes—exactly suits thedescription of Robin's feats. What, for instance, could be better described than the following canine pendant to the Trent affair ?
"It was time to call 'Robin ! Robin ! A marine-storekeeper's cat bad been over to visit a puffing grocer's cat opposite, and was picking her way homewards across the muddy street. Robin ran after her. She, like an idiot, ran away, and Robin, by the law of gravity, or some similar law, bolted after her. The cat, not being able to make her own port on the present tack, in consequence of the enemy being to wind- ward of her, put her helm down, altered her course four points, and made all sale for the nearest harbour to leeward, which was the pigeon- fancier's ; and Robin, disregarding the law of nations, made a perfect Wilkes of himself, and chased her right into the neutral harbour, over- turning a cage containing five-and-twenty blue rocks' in his career, and at last succeeded in forcing an engagement in the pigeon-fancier's back-parlour, under his table. Here he found himself under the guns of several neutral batteries, which opened fire on him and the cat, with perfect impartiality. The cat bolted up the chimney ; but Robin, as in duty bound, returned the lire of the neutral batteries—that is to say, setting our figure aside, that the pigeon-fancier and his wife (who were at dinner) tried to kick him out, and that he showed fight, and snapped at their legs. At this moment, when war seemed inevitable, diplomacy stepped in, in the person of Austin. Robin was rebuked. The affair was gone calmly into. Apologies were given on the one side, and frankly received on the other ; and the whole thing was comfortably settled."
But this turbulent, though healthy velocity of Mr. Henry Kingsley's mind, which makes his stories affect you something like the early course of a mountain stream, now swirling violently against rocks, now leaping suddenly over a shelf, and sometimes only, for a few quiet moments resting in a deep and silent pool,
• Austin Elliot. By Relay Kingsley. Two Tole. Macmillan. is not favourable to the art of the novelist. There is too much rush and motion in the mind of the writer to reflect clearly the outlines,much less the growth and gradual ripening, of any nature outside his own. Everything is picturesque and eager, and essentially noble in his books ; but calm continuity, distinct delineation, imaginative reach, there is none. Were it not that Sir Walter Scott has shown ui how entirely consistent intellec- tual motion and momentum may be with the most minute and complete grasp of at least the external features of character, we might be tempted to suppose that Mr. Kingsley's animation could not delight us, except at the expense of artistic faithfulness and thoroughness. Indeed, there is something of personal hurry about Mr. Henry Kingsley's animation which is wholly different from the animation of Sir Walter Scott. The move- ment in the greatest of all story-tellers is that of a man who enters thoroughly, indeed, into active life, but who enjoys the motion quite as much because it brings out new forms of life brooding in his imagination as on its own account. Read his account of Rob Roy's attack on the military party sent to capture him, or of Mary Stuart's escape from Lochleven, or of the battle of Bothwell Bridge, and though strong life and rapid motion is the most striking feature in all these pictures, you see that he chooses it because the motion fires his imagination, rather than from any mere enjoyment in it. He never loses him- self in the first impulse of imagination, but marshals and surveys the whole pageant before him with the eye of one to whom movement lends a new and powerful artistic instrument by heightening the colours and precipitating the crisis of interest. But you feel everywhere that Mr. Kingsley only breathes easily in a tumult. He does not paint tumults in order to give us a clearer insight int3 the power of life, but life for the sake of tumults. He delights in nothing so much as merely getting up a row, however little it may belong to his story, or help to illustrate it. If he touches on children's nursery life, it is to paint them oversettiug baths, floating shoes, biting footmen, rushing naked downstairs, and performing other feats requiring a good deal of overflowing energy even in children. Again in a convict prison he cannot breathe quietly till he gets up a great rebellion, and has knocked down the governor with a bit of an iron bedstead. But his greatest and most unnatural feat in this way is the propensity to physical violence which he attributes to an old family footman. To make a respectable footman (even though he be a little original) get up a regular " shindy' in Westminster Abbey is a piece of reckless audacity even in Mr. Henry Kingsley. We could scarcely be more astonished if we saw a figure vault out of a group on the artist's canvass amongst the picture-gazers at the Royal Academy, and, after tumbling head over heels, go back again to his picture, than we were at the delineation of the following scene apparently as a serious bit of portrait-painting :— " 'My darling bird,' whispered Austin—for they wore in a sacred edifice—' were you going to walk home alone in the dusk ?'—' Old James is with me, Austy dear,' said she. When Lord Edward is not with me, I always bring him.'—' He is not here now,' said Austin. wonder if he has gone to sleep. What a lark if he should be locked in.' —At this moment a terrible disturbance was hoard in the choir. Oh, Austin, whatever shall we do ?' said Eleanor.—' Stay here, my love,' said Austin ; and he ran back.—A verger was just locking the gate in the screen, and seemed inclined to dispute passage ; but Austin pushed past him ; and on entering saw a sight which turned him to stone. Old James had got hold of a verger by the hair, had dragged him down across a bench, and was beating him about the back of the head with Eleanor's best prayer-book. On benches around stood angelic, white- robed choristers in groups, who were saying; as loud as they dared, Crikey !'—' Brayvo, Roue!' and 'Evans, if you please, gentlemen!' and making other low-lived remarks, which prevailed among the youth of our metropolis in the year of grace 1845-1846. Austin garotted and pinioned James, and turned him round. James, thinking Austin to be another verger, who had taken him in the rear, made savage bites at him over his shoulders, until Austin put him down in a safe place, upon which James remarked,—' Well, you are a pretty sort of a friend ! If you had let me a gone on till begot stupid, I'd have shifted my hand and got the clasp-side of the book on the back of his head. Lord ! I'd have killed him in three minutes.'" With this spa,modic disposition it is easy to conceive that Mr. Henry Kingsley does not succeed in the patient element of novel- writing at all. The best picture in this book is the first sketch of Aunt Maria, which is exceedingly graphic, and ends with a touch of Mr. Kingsley's characteristic humour :— "She was a big, red-faced woman, with a Roman nose and a pro- truding chin. A woman of presence—of such powerful presence that when she entered the room at one end and you were at the other, with your back towards her, you knew it. Was it merely by the vibration of the air, one wonders, or is there, after all, such a thing as animal magnetism? She was a stern woman, with bangles and brooches and a shawl. She revolved in her orbit, surrounded by an atmosphere of
Patchouli, calculated, by people curious in astronomy, as being from eleven to twelve times greater than her own diameter."
But this promising beginning is but little expanded. We are told how the miser and scold in Aunt Maria grew into the lunatic at last, and we have just one or two intermediate scenes of violence that are clever, and partially link the character together. Still, on the whole, the mere physique of Aunt Maria is all that we intimately know, and if this he true of her, it is far more true of all the other characters. Austin Elliot and Lord Charles Barty are quite unreal and (except physically) indistinguishable. Eleanor is a mere enigma, who acts in the most absurdly un- natural way, and is meant to fascinate us by sitting passively with folded hands when she is in grief,—which she does not. The discontinuity of the book is far more remarkable even than in "Ravenshoe," though the spurts of racy observation are as amusing and more numerous than ever, and the conversation as agreeable a rattle of high-spirited nonsense and sagacity.
Again, the relation between son and father may be drawn from life, but, if it 'is, is not the less overdrawn on that account. If there be young men who write to their fathers in the following chaffing style, it is not the less a fault in art to paint them with- out justifying your picture by painting the whole minutim of the relation altogether more fully than Mr. Kingsley has done :—
AUSTIN ELLIOT TO HIS FATHER.
"My dear child,—If you don't take my advice about having your razors properly set by an expert,' the end of it will be that you will be carried off to Bow street, and charged with attempting self-destruction. The last time I came into your dressing-room, you had an open razor in your hand, and had hacked your chin so, that you were all in a gore of blood. Besides it does not look nice to go down to your office, with your face stuck all over with patches of hat nap. If you have no self- respect, think of me."
You could not draw a human foot or leg in a good picture with- out the body (though Mr. Millais apparently thinks otherwise, as he has, we think, painted part of a lady's knee in the picture of "My First Sermon"), and to paint so eccentric a bit of filial life as this without explaining at all how it came into this form, is one of those intellectual caprices in which Mr. Kingsley shows him- self much more of a humourist than an artist.
Criticism is a grumbling trade, and when we are criticizing we are always in danger of giving an underrating estimate of the enjoyment a book has given us. In painting snatches of life Mr. Kingsley is almost unequalled ; there is a pleasant sarcasm about his fun which generally gives it an intellectual cast, and a free- dom and flavour of its own in almost every sentence of the book.
Therefore, though it is one of the most imperfect novels we ever read from any man of unquestioned ability, it is also one of the most enjoyable of any below the highest class.
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