ever looked at that, nor do we believe they knew they were not going straight. Whenever the lulling music of the hounds seemed to prelude a stop, a view of the varmint set all ecstatic again. Many who had looked at their watches, with a keen eye to "pudding time," were thus inveigled again and again. Even "Head-and-shoulders," and the jumpers who despised all hunting that didn't involve good leaping, stayed for the chance of a spin at the end. Dicky too, had looked at his ticker, thinking he had done enough, and more than enough for any humbugging holiday field, and seeing by the failing scent and diminishing pace of the pack, that they had no chance either of catching the fox or making him flag, so wonderfully endowed is the varmint, was determining to pave the way for a stop, by halloaing" Fresh fox!" at the next view, when a death of another sort ensued. Our Tom's horse, who had given him as many hints as would have served anything short of a wooden man, at length gave a series of convulsive staggering flounders, and fell, bearing Tom standing like a second Colossus of Rhodes astride him. "Get clear of him!" cried a dozen voices, thinking he might roll and damage our fat friend, but the warning was vain-a horse will never hurt a man if he can help it-and the poor glassy-eyed brute stretched out its lifeless neck on the spot where he fell, a cutting reproof to his stupid pig-headed, mutton-fisted master. AGATHA'S HUSBAND AND BASIL. JEFFREY, when persuading Thomas Moore to become a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, dwells upon the prospective pleasure to be derived from working out certain principles of criticism into their practical application. But the novels of the present day bid defiance to all adopted principles. We acknowledge to ours being of a very simple kind—a firm, inflexible belief that nature alone is truth-that all art should be more or less subject to this primary consideration-and that the novel, busying itself with "human" nature, can attain excellence only in proportion to the truth as well as the vividness of its portraiture. Robert Bell has said something of the kind when he intimates "that a novel is a picture of real life, and the test of its merit is the fidelity of its likeness." But when we assign the whole field of nature to art, making human nature the mainspring in the movement of fiction, we give a far greater scope to the re-active powers than as they are limited by our tasteful contemporary. Writers of the German, or socalled Esthetic school, are better prepared than either of us to meet all kinds of monstrous productions for they have a pseudo-philosophical and very elastic theory of the beautiful; the great fault of which is, that every critic twists and tortures it into his own way of thinking, or to suit his own prejudices. So long as a critic can give even a single quotation or philosophical proof, by illustration, of the truth of his statements that shall be evident even to the superficial reader, such a criticism cannot but be founded on truth; and the novel, to have deserved such, must have violated the simplicity of nature. This is what the first class of critics can do-the second very seldom; for they are always so involved in the machinery of their criticism, that they never let the moving power be apparent; and the reader has neither sympathy nor confidence in their elaborate and confused lucubrations. In the midst of these existing differences of opinion on the elements of criticism, the novel itself is manifestly undergoing a great-a very marked change. It was once a picture of life-historical, fashionable, domestic: no matter whatstill, it was a narrative illustrative of character, more or less fruitful in incident, and more or less adorned by the graces of description. The novel now-and we have this month two striking examples before us, Agatha's Husband"* and "Basil"-aims at something higher than this in art. It gathers its strength, like the folds of a mantle, round one, or at most two, figures it limits character and incident to one or two great traits, and it works at these, and moulds them, and reproduces them under various phases, till, having fairly agonised the reader with suspense, it condescends to relieve him by a conclusion anticipated from the very commencement. Such a work is, to the ordinary novel, what "Manfred" or "Werner" would be in prose, or a Michael Angelo or Salvator Rosa to a Wilkie. "Basil" has, for example, only one theme-that theme is a repulsive one-but the love, and the ruin, and desolation of heart that attends upon that misplaced affection, is a great picture, well worthy of a master-hand. "Agatha's Husband" presents two themes. One, the jealousy of the husband; the second, a pecuniary mystery. Agatha is a rich and fair girl, who weds Nathanael Harper, the younger brother of her guardian, Major Frederick Harper. She does this without loving him, and the manner in which love-true, earnest love, buds and blooms in that strangely perverse bosom, is one of the descriptive features of the work. Alas! there are mysteries in human nature that even the novelist dare not approach, and there is a want of judgment shown in venturing upon such themes. Female authors will, however, invariably step boldly where men fear to trespass. Nathanael is no sooner married than he learns that his brother has lost all his ward's money by an investment in a Cornwall mine, and, what is infinitely worse, he is led by some foolish words, dropped by a foolish woman, to believe that his "wife" is secretly attached to his gay and profligate brother. From these two qui pro quos arise all the details of the drama. Nathanael, mainly out of regard to his brother's honour, does not divulge to his wife her penniless condition, and hence she cannot understand any act of life, why she cannot be charitable, why they live in a cottage, why Nathanael has to work for his bread. Agatha's husband is still more tenaciously secret concerning the deep-seated jealousy that, like a vulture, is perpetually gnawing at his heart. We feel that only one word is necessary, but that word is never spoken. If Agatha only inquires after Frederick's health, Nathanael covers his face in his hands and groans inwardly. Then, again, not knowing how offensive the allusion is to her husband, she is perpetually throwing it at him, with the practised skill of a Picador at a bull-fight. The simplicity of innocence is indeed carried so far, as at times to verge upon the ridiculous. It is needless to say that what between dear Aunt Valery and good Uncle Brian, a villanous lawyer, and other subordinates, truth is made manifest, and poetic justice is supposed to be done to all parties. But we do not coincide with its allotments. Major Harper did not deserve the inheritance of Kingcombe Holm, and had Agatha lost her husband by the burning of the Ardente, it would have been no more than she deserved; and we venture to say that three-fourths of the readers of " Agatha"-a picture of a woman penned by a woman-will agree with us in this judgment. Still, as a work of art-of feeling and passion-wrought up from small beginnings to a great and powerful climax, "Agatha's Husband" stands incomparably first of the novels that will usher in the new year in the boudoirs of the désennuyé. The author of "Antonina" has abandoned in his last work the classical for the real; and, in doing so, he has the credit of having gone into his subject with a scalpel rather than a pen. We have no sympathy with those dilettante novelists who profess to picture forth real life, and who nevertheless give to their characters all that false glare of purity and heroism which is nowhere found but in fiction. Every-day life is a very commonplace thing-yet, as Mr. Wilkie Collins has justly and poetically remarked, "Fancy and Imagination, Grace and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the work of art what scent and colour are to the flower, can only grow towards Heaven by taking root in Earth." It might be a question whether more agreeable, more homely pictures of real life would not afford Agatha's Husband. A Novel. By the Author of “ Olive,” “The Head of the Family," &c. 3 vols. Chapman and Hall. + Basil: A Story of Modern Life. By W. Wilkie Collins, Author of "Antonina," "Rambles beyond Railways," &c. 3 vols. Richard Bentley. as much of that noblest poetry of prose fiction which is the poetry of every-day life, as such an extreme case as the relations of Basil, Margaret, and Mannion; but this it is scarcely fair to argue here: the author has chosen his theme, and selected an orthodox mode of treatment. It is with that, therefore, we have now to do. Basil is the second son of a wealthy commoner, whose foible lies in attaching a most exaggerated importance to family descent and family connexions. His elder brother, Ralph, is a profligate of the French school; his sister Clara, just such a girl as all young and educated English ladies should aim to be. Young, rich, and trammelled by his father's invincible prejudices, Basil is foolish enough to fall desperately in love with a young woman he meets for the first time in an omnibus, and who turns out to be the daughter of a linendraper! And, as if this were not sufficient madness, he makes up to the young woman in the streets, declares his love, calls upon the astute vulgar shopkeeper, and actually agrees to marry the fair, vain, and heartless Margaret secretly, and at the same time enter into an agreement that he shall not meet his wife, except in the presence of a third person, for a whole year. All this is told almost as quickly as we tell it. Mr. Collins has deemed it necessary to apologise for having placed the love-meeting of the hero and heroine of the book in an omnibus, the last place, and under the very last circumstances, which the artifices of sentimental writing would sanction. But it is this very violation of the conventionalities of sentimental fiction that delights us. They met where, in real life, hundreds of other lovers have first seen each other, and nowhere would such a foolish, reckless career, so nearly allied to madness, be so hastily and so thoughtlessly entered upon, as follows upon this first interview with the fascinating draperess, except in real life. Fiction does not invent in these matters anything half so absurd, so utterly incomprehensible, as occurs in daily life. The more virtuous and unsophisticated the youth, just as in Basil's case, the more is the first outburst to be apprehended. All have witnessed the pride which the innocent novel reader takes in detecting the character and fate of the different personages from hints purposely dropped by the artist in the course of his narrative; but the uninitiated little know the skill required to arouse the sense of danger round a person, and yet not betray, at once, the whole extent of his villanous propensities. It is for the reader's own sake necessary that the mind should be gradually prepared for evil, for the worst of all effects would be produced were any writer to be so extremely ambitious of novelty as to make his good personages turn out villains, and his reprobates virtuous and happy. Nothing could be more damaging to the novel than such an attempt. Mr. Collins has introduced his béte noire Mannion with elaborate skill and great judgment; the reader is made to feel that there is something wrong, but he cannot divine what-albeit he may have a previous suspicion of an anterior attachment between the pale-faced confidential clerk and the pretty shopkeeper's daughter. If there is a blemish, it is the Byronic painting of the man-his "unreal" firmness and immobility-his Satanic depth of resolve, and his Mephistophelian proportions in execution. Suffice it that Mannion has for excuse that he had by the persecution of his father (to the extent of hanging), by Basil's haughty parent, inherited a kind of prescriptive right to be the enemy of every member of Basil's house. The conclusion is not the strong part of Basil-that is interwoven into the events of one marked year-a year in which fancy, feeling, passion, and retribution enough for a whole life are concentrated-a year worthy of description by a clever and ambitious writer. We only wish the same writer could also be induced to try his pinions in regions not quite so gloomy-not quite so forbidding. There are love and fancy, and poetry, too, in the more pleasing aspects of reality, and of social and domestic life. THE LATER DRAMAS OF SHERIDAN KNOWLES. ENTHUSIASTIC in his love of poetry and his homage to woman, it must have been with delight that Mr. Sheridan Knowles once heard himself thus addressed by a living poetess: Master of feeling and of thought! None! Thine should be a double wreath Success in life-fame after death.* Those there are, or have been, to whose sanguine judgment "Virginius" and the "Hunchback" promised a revival of the Elizabethan drama, in its richness, fulness, and popularity. Mr. Knowles pleased rather than discouraged them by his direct imitation of the Elizabethan style-or rather, perhaps, the style of Massinger and his contemporaries. This imitation was unfortunately suggestive of uncomplimentary comparisons among critics of a school clearer to discern and harder to please.† Yet there is much to be said on behalf of those modern playwrights who mould their style on that of the old Titans in question. In fact, it is almost an insuperable difficulty to write a successful tragedy, or poetical melodrama, that is not so moulded. "It is hard," says an eloquent writer, "not to chime with the voice of our Eldern Stage poets ever sounding in our ears; to them, as to divinities, we feel the origin of dramatic language is due, and none save the inexperienced or the vain will think discovery of another possible. . . . Each new play adds a proof that there is one style of our mother-tongue peculiar to dramatic composition, and that every other is unsuitable; if the author has adopted the modern style, his play infallibly turns out feeble and commonplace; if it evince any dramatic power, its style will as surely be artificial and antiquated." And the critic points to Mr. Knowles's tragedies as furnishing most conclusive examples of this doctrine-they being the nearest approaches to legitimate drama this age can vaunt, and their style declaring itself manifestly-mimic Elizabethan. Right or wrong, Mr. Knowles managed to win the public to his side. He had but to address them with his vos plaudite, and the plaudits made the welkin ring-if with an evanescent, yet with a hearty uproar. "Few men," says Mr. R. H. Horne, "ever had the sympathy of the public more completely in their power than Sheridan Knowles. Scarcely any imprudence or deficiency that he could be guilty of, in a new play, would cause * Mrs. Norton. † Mr. Carlyle, for instance, had a passing rap at our author, where he said, in contrasting (more suo) our own times with those of Queen Elizabeth, that "the people were then governed, not by a Castlereagh, but by a Burleigh; they had their Shakspeare and Philip Sidney, where we have our Sheridan Knowles and Beau Brummel."—Edinburgh Review, July, 1829. the audience to damn it, though they might not go again to see it."* Imprudences and deficiencies are certainly not lacking in his theatrical writings; but it must be owned that he has superior and saving tact in the construction of his works, and in their practical adaptation to the conditions of the stage-a quality wherein so many dramatists are wholly wanting. It was well for his renown as an author that he took to the boards as an actor; so becoming versed in the "whole duty of man" behind the green baize and proscenium, and, like Molière, turning his talents to purposes of utilitarian gain as well as glory. In one sense, therefore, it is flattering, though in another, and surely a higher sense, it is the reverse, to say that he is not a writer of closet plays. To effect even a steeple-chase of the most harum-scarum kind through his dramatic territory, in its integrity, being quite impracticable, we propose to take direct notice, in the present instance, only of his later dramas, beginning with the "Maid of Mariendorpt"--selecting this section of his plays partly as comprising those with which the public are least familiar, and partly as the ripest if not the worthiest productions of his genius. First, however, to enumerate his earlier theatrical essayings. In his twentieth year, the ardent Milesian perpetrated on paper a tragedy yclept "The Spanish Story," and four or five years afterwards he followed it up by a play called "Hersilia :" both are closet plays-by which we do not mean that they are for reading, but simply that they are not for acting. A little later he wrote "Leo; or, the Gipsy," which, with Kean for its chef, or bright particular star, met with decided success on the Waterford boards. This was followed by "Brian Boroihme" (revived in London in 1837), "Caius Gracchus," and "Virginius ”—of which the last elicited from Charles Lamb the flattering éloge, With wonder I Hear my old friend (turned Shakspeare) read a scene Only to his inferior in the clean Passes of pathos, with such fence-like art, Ere we can see the steel, 'tis in our heart. Then came "William Tell," "The Beggar of Bethnal Green," "Alfred the Great," and the "Hunchback." "The Wife; a Tale of Mantua," and "The Wrecker's Daughter," came next; and then "The Love Chase," and "Woman's Wit; or, Love's Disguises." He acted loyally on the principle, "Be the theme still dear woman!"—her charms, her caprices, her constancy, her passion, her devotion, her purity, her unselfishness-the varying aspects of her whole nature, from the mood of "uncertain, coy, and hard to please," to that of "ministering angel." The poetry in which he conveys his sentiment, though not sparkling, as "New Spirit of the Age." "Ce fut alors que Poquelin, sentant son génie, se résolut de s'y livrer tout entier, d'être à la fois comédien et auteur, et de tirer de ses talents de l'utilité et de la gloire."-VOLTAIRE: Vie de Molière. A writer in the Dublin University Magazine (Oct., 1852) remarks that in portraying female characters, Mr. Knowles's excellence is universally admitted-so truthful, exquisitely delicate, and tender is the genius displayed in his pictures of the purity of woman's heart. The following anecdote is characteristic. "I wish," said a lady to him on one occasion, "I could speak on behalf of my sex, and thank you as you deserve, for the way in which you have drawn us." What else could I have done, my dear madam?" said Knowles, in his own hearty way; "God bless you, I painted them as I found them." 66 |