(Westminster Review, October 1856)
AT LENGTH we have Mrs Stowe’s new novel, and for the last three weeks there have been men, women, and children reading it with rapt attention – laughing and sobbing over it – lingering with delight over its exquisite landscapes, its scenes of humour, and tenderness, and rude heroism – and glowing with indignation at its terrible representation of chartered barbarities. Such a book is an uncontrollable power, and critics who follow it with their objections and reservations – who complain that Mrs Stowe’s plot is defective, that she has repeated herself, that her book is too long and too full of hymns and religious dialogue, and that it creates an unfair bias – are something like men pursuing a prairie fire with desultory watering-cans. In the meantime, Dred will be devoured by the million, who carry no critical talisman against the enchantments of genius. We confess ourselves to be among the million, and quite unfit to rank with the sage minority of Fadladeens.1 We have been too much moved by Dred to determine with precision how far it is inferior to Uncle Tom,2 too much impressed by what Mrs Stowe has done to be quite sure that we can tell her what she ought to have done. Our admiration of the book is quite distinct from any opinions or hesitations we may have as to the terribly difficult problems of Slavery and Abolition – problems which belong to quite other than ‘polite literature’. Even admitting Mrs Stowe to be mistaken in her views, and partial or exaggerated in her representations, Dred remains not the less a novel inspired by a rare genius – rare both in intensity and in range of power.
Looking at the matter simply from an artistic point of view, we see no reason to regret that Mrs Stowe should keep to her original ground of negro and planter life, any more than that Scott should have introduced Highland life into Rob Roy and The Fair Maid of Perth, when he had already written Waverley. Mrs Stowe has invented the Negro novel, and it is a novel not only fresh in its scenery and its manners, but possessing that conflict of races which Augustin Thierry3 has pointed out as the great source of romantic interest – witness Ivanhoe. Inventions in literature are not as plentiful as inventions in the paletot and waterproof department, and it is rather amusing that we reviewers, who have, for the most part, to read nothing but imitations of imitations, should put on airs of tolerance towards Mrs Stowe because she has written a second Negro novel, and make excuses for her on the ground that she perhaps would not succeed in any other kind of fiction. Probably she would not; for her genius seems to be of a very special character: her Sunny Memories were as feeble as her novels are powerful. But whatever else she may write, or may not write, Uncle Tom and Dred will assure her a place in that highest rank of novelists who can give us a national life in all its phases – popular and aristocratic, humorous and tragic, political and religious.
But Mrs Stowe’s novels have not only that grand element – conflict of races; they have another element equally grand, which she also shares with Scott, and in which she has, in some respects, surpassed him. This is the exhibition of a people to whom what we may call Hebraic Christianity is still a reality, still an animating belief, and by whom the theocratic conceptions of the Old Testament are literally applied to their daily life. Where has Scott done anything finer than the character of Balfour of Burley, the battles of Drumelog and Bothwell Brigg, and the trial of Ephraim Mac-Briar? And the character of Dred, the death scenes in the Swamp, and the Camp Meeting of Presbyterians and Methodists, will bear comparison – if we except the fighting – with the best parts of Old Mortality. The strength of Mrs Stowe’s own religious feeling is a great artistic advantage to her here; she never makes you feel that she is coldly calculating an effect, but you see that she is all a-glow for the moment with the wild enthusiasm, the unreasoning faith, and the steady martyr-spirit of Dred, of Tiff, or of Father Dickson. But with this, she has the keen sense of humour which preserves her from extravagance and monotony; and though she paints her religious negroes en beau, they are always specifically negroes – she never loses hold of her characters, and lets dramatic dialogue merge into vague oratory. Indeed, here is her strongest point: her dramatic instinct is always awake; and whether it is the grotesque Old Tiff or the aërial Nina, the bluff sophist Father Bonim or the gentlemanly sophist Frank Russell, her characters are always like themselves; a quality which is all the more remarkable in novels animated by a vehement polemical purpose.
The objection which is patent to every one who looks at Mrs Stowe’s novels in an argumentative light, is also, we think, one of their artistic defects; namely, the absence of any proportionate exhibition of the negro character in its less amiable phases. Judging from her pictures, one would conclude that the negro race was vastly superior to the mass of whites, even in other than slave countries – a state of the case which would singularly defeat Mrs Stowe’s sarcasms on the cant of those who call slavery a ‘Christianizing Institution’. If the negroes are really so very good, slavery has answered as moral discipline. But apart from the argumentative suicide involved in this one-sidedness, Mrs Stowe loses by it the most terribly tragic element in the relation of the two races – the Nemesis lurking in the vices of the oppressed. She alludes to demoralization among the slaves, but she does not depict it; and yet why should she shrink from this, since she does not shrink from giving us a full-length portrait of a Legree or a Tom Gordon?
It would be idle to tell anything about the story of a work which is, or soon will be, in all our readers’ hands; we only render our tribute to it as a great novel, leaving to others the task of weighing it in the political balance.
Close upon Dred we have read Mr Charles Reade’s novel – It is Never Too Late to Mend; also a remarkable fiction, and one that sets vibrating very deep chords in our nature, yet presenting a singular contrast with Dred, both in manner and in the essential qualities it indicates in the writer. Mr Reade’s novel opens with some of the true pathos to be found in English country life: the honest young farmer, George Fielding, unable to struggle against ‘bad times’ and an exhausted farm, is driven to Australia to seek the fortune that will enable him to marry Susan Merton, the woman he loves. It then carries us, with a certain Robinson, a clever thief, who has been rusticating as George Fielding’s lodger, to the gaol, and makes us shudder at the horrors of the separate and silent system, administered by an ignorant and brutal gaoler, while we follow with keen interest the struggle of the heroic chaplain against this stupid iniquity – thus bringing home the tragedy of Birmingham gaol to people whose sympathies are more easily roused by fiction than by bare fact. Then it takes us to Australia, and traces George Fielding’s fortunes and misfortunes – first through the vicissitudes of the Australian ‘sheep-run’, and then through the fierce drama of gold-digging – bringing him home at last with £4,000 in his pocket, in time to prevent his Susan from marrying his worst enemy.
In all the three ‘acts’ of this novel, so to speak, there are fine situations, fine touches of feeling, and much forcible writing; especially while the scene is in the gaol, the best companion who drops in you will probably regard as a bore, and will become earnest in inviting to remain only when you perceive he is determined to go. Again, honest George Fielding’s struggles, renewed at the antipodes, and lightened by the friendship of Carlo the dog – of the reformed thief, Robinson – and of the delightful ‘Jacky’, the Australian native – are a thread of interest which you pursue with eagerness to the dénouement. ‘Jacky’ is a thoroughly fresh character, entirely unlike any other savage frotté de civilisation,4 and drawn with exquisite yet sober humour. In the English scenes every one who has seen anything of life amongst our farmers will recognize many truthful, well-observed touches: the little ‘tiff’ between the brothers George and William Fielding, old Merton’s way of thinking, and many traits of manner in the heroine, Susan Merton. In short, It is Never Too Late to Mend is one of the exceptional novels to be read not merely by the idle and the half-educated, but by the busy and the thoroughly informed.
Nevertheless, Mr Reade’s novel does not rise above the level of cleverness: we feel throughout the presence of remarkable talent, which makes effective use of materials, but nowhere of the genius which absorbs material, and reproduces it as a living whole, in which you do not admire the ingenuity of the workman, but the vital energy of the producer. Doubtless there is a great deal of nonsense talked about genius and inspiration, as if genius did not and must not labour; but, after all, there remains the difference between the writer who thoroughly possesses you by his creation, and the writer who only awakens your curiosity and makes you recognize his ability; and this difference may as well be called ‘genius’ as anything else. Perhaps a truer statement of the difference is, that the one writer is himself thoroughly possessed by his creation – he lives in his characters; while the other remains outside them, and dresses them up. Here lies the fundamental contrast between Mrs Stowe’s novel and Mr Reade’s. Mrs Stowe seems for the moment to glow with all the passion, to quiver with all the fun, and to be inspired with all the trust that belongs to her different characters; she attains her finest dramatic effects by means of her energetic sympathy, and not by conscious artifice. Mr Reade, on the contrary, seems always self-conscious, always elaborating a character, after a certain type, and carrying his elaboration a little too far – always working up to situations, and over-doing them. The habit of writing for the stage misleads him into seeking after those exaggerated contrasts and effects which are accepted as a sort of rapid symbolism by a theatrical audience, but are utterly out of place in a fiction, where the time and means for attaining a result are less limited, and an impression of character or purpose may be given more nearly as it is in real life – by a sum of less concentrated particulars. In Mr Reade’s dialogue we are constantly imagining that we see a theatrical gentleman, well ‘made up’, delivering a repartee in an emphatic voice, with his eye fixed on the pit. To mention one brief example: – Hawes, the gaoler, tells Fry, the turnkey, after Mr Eden’s morning sermon on theft, that he approves of preaching at people. The same day there is an afternoon sermon on cruelty; whereupon Hawes remarks again to Fry, ‘I’ll teach him to preach at people from the pulpit.’ ‘Well,’ answers Fry, ‘that is what I say, Sir: but you said you liked him to preach at folk?’ ‘So I do,’ replied Hawes, angrily, ‘but not at me, ye fool!’ This would produce a roar on the stage, and would seem a real bit of human nature; but in a novel one has time to be sceptical as to this extreme naïveté which allows a man to make palpable epigrams on himself.
In everything, Mr Reade seems to distrust the effect of moderation and simplicity. His picture of gaol life errs by excess, and he wearies our emotion by taxing it too repeatedly; the admirable inspiration which led him to find his hero and heroine among Berkshire homesteads, is counteracted by such puerile and incongruous efforts at the romantic and diabolical, as the introduction of the Jew, Isaac Levi, who is a mosaic character in more senses than one, and the far-seeing Machiavelianism of the top-booted Mr Meadows; and even when he is speaking in his own person, he lashes himself into fury at human wrongs, and calls on God and man to witness his indignation, apparently confounding the importance of the effect with the importance of the cause. But the most amazing foible in a writer of so much power as Mr Reade, is his reliance on the magic of typography. We had imagined that the notion of establishing a relation between magnitude of ideas and magnitude of type was confined to the literature of placards, but we find Mr Reade endeavouring to impress us with the Titanic character of modern events by suddenly bursting into capitals at the mention of ‘THIS GIGANTIC AGE!’ It seems ungrateful in us to notice these minor blemishes in a work which has given us so much pleasure, and roused in us so much healthy feeling as It is Never Too Late to Mend; but it is our very admiration of Mr Reade’s talent which makes these blemishes vexatious to us, and which induces us to appeal against their introduction in the many other books we hope to have from his pen.
The appearance of a new novel by Miss Bremer, revives the impressions often years ago, when all the novel-reading world was discussing the merits of The Neighbours, The President’s Daughters, The H— Family, and the rest of the ‘Swedish novels’, which about that time were creating a strong current in the literary and bookselling world. The discussion soon died out; and perhaps there is hardly another instance of fictions so eagerly read in England which have left so little trace in English literature as Miss Bremer’s. No one quotes them, no one alludes to them: and grave people who have entered on their fourth decade, remember their enthusiasm for the Swedish novels among those intellectual ‘wild oats’ to which their mature wisdom can afford to give a pitying smile. And yet, how is this? For Miss Bremer had not only the advantage of describing manners which were fresh to the English public; she also brought to the description unusual gifts – lively imagination, poetic feeling, wealth of language, a quick eye for details , and considerable humour, of that easy, domestic kind which throws a pleasant light on every-day things. The perusal of Hertha has confirmed in our minds the answer we should have previously given to our own question. One reason, we think, why Miss Bremer’s novels have not kept a high position among us is, that her luxuriant faculties are all over-run by a rank growth of sentimentality, which, like some faint-smelling creeper on the boughs of an American forest, oppresses us with the sense that the air is unhealthy. Nothing can be more curious than the combination in her novels of the vapourishly affected and unreal with the most solid Dutch sort of realism. In one page we have copious sausage sandwiches and beer posset, and on another rhapsodies or wildly improbable incidents that seem rather to belong to sylphs and salamanders, than to a race of creatures who are nourished by the very excellent provisions just mentioned. Another reason why Miss Bremer’s novels are not likely to take rank among the permanent creations of art, is the too confident tone of the religious philosophy which runs through them. When a novelist is quite sure that she has a theory which suffices to illustrate all the difficulties of our earthly existence, her novels are too likely to illustrate little else than her own theory.
These two characteristics of sentimentality and dogmatic confidence are very strongly marked in Hertha, while it has less of the attention to detail, less of the humorous realism, which was the ballast of Miss Bremer’s earlier novels. It has been written not simply from an artistic impulse, but with the object of advocating the liberation of women from those legal and educational restrictions which limit her opportunities of a position and a sphere of usefulness to the chance of matrimony; and we think there are few well-judging persons who will not admire the generous energy with which Miss Bremer, having long ago won fame and independence for herself, devotes the activity of her latter years to the cause of women who are less capable of mastering circumstance. Many wise and noble things she says in Hertha, but we cannot help regretting that she has not presented her views on a difficult and practical question in the ‘light of common day’, rather than in the pink haze of visions and romance. The story is very briefly this: –
Hertha, who has lost her mother in childhood, is, at the age of seven-and-twenty, becoming more and more embittered by her inactive bondage to a narrow-minded, avaricious father, who demands obedience to the pettiest exactions. Her elder sister, Alma, is slowly dying in consequence of the same tyranny, which has prevented her from marrying the man she loves. We meet our heroine, with her gloomy and bitter expression of face, first of all, at the rehearsal of a fancy ball, which is to take place in a few days in the good town of Kungsköping; and after being introduced to the various dramatis personœ – among the rest, to a young man named Yngve Nordin, who interests Hertha by his agreement in her opinions about women, we accompany her to her cheerless home, where she is roughly chid by her father, the rigid old Director, for being later than the regulation-hour of eight; and where, by the bedside of her sister Alma, she pours out all the bitterness of her soul, all her hatred and smothered rebellion towards her father for his injustice towards them. She and Alma have inherited a share in their mother’s fortune, but according to the Swedish law they are still minors, and unable to claim their property. This very night, however, a fire breaks out, and lays waste a large district of the town. The Director’s house is consumed, and he himself is only saved by the heroic exertions of Hertha, who rushes to his room, and carries his meagre, feeble body through the flames. This act of piety, and the death of Alma, who, in her last moments, extracts from her father a promise to give Hertha independence, win some ungracious concessions from the crabbed Director towards his daughter. He still withholds her property and a declaration of her majority; but she has power in the household, and greater freedom of action out of doors. A Ladies’ Society has been organized for relieving the sufferers from the fire, and Hertha is one of those whose department is the care of the sick and wounded. The patient who falls to her share is no other than Yngve Nordin, who has been severely hurt in his benevolent efforts on the fatal night, and is now lodged in the house of the good pastor, who is at the head of the Society. Here is an excellent opportunity for discovering that Yngve is just the friend she needs to soothe and invigorate her mind, by his sympathy and riper experience; and the feeling which is at first called friendship, is at last confessed to be love. After certain jealousies and suspicions, which are satisfactorily cleared up, Yngve asks the Director for Hertha’s hand, but is only accepted prospectively, on condition of his attaining an assured position. Yngve goes abroad, and for seven years Hertha submits to the procrastination of her marriage, rather than rebel against her father in his last years. It is only when Yngve is hopelessly ill that she sacrifices her scruples and marries him. In the mean time she has made her seven years of separation rich in active usefulness, by founding and superintending two schools – one in which girls are instructed in the ordinary elements of education, forming a sort of nursery-garden for the other, in which voluntary pupils are to be led to a higher order of thought and purpose by Hertha’s readings, conversation, and personal influence. Her schools are successful; but after Yngve’s death she begins to sink under her long trial, and follows him rapidly to the grave.
This bare outline of the story can only suggest and not fully explain the grounds of our objection to Hertha. Our objection is, that it surrounds questions, which can only be satisfactorily solved by the application of very definite ideas to specific facts, with a cloudy kind of eloquence and flighty romance. Take, for example, the question whether it will not be well for women to study and practise medicine. It can only tend to retard the admission that women may pursue such a career with success, for a distinguished authoress to imply that they may be suitably prepared for effective activity by lectures on such a very nebulous thesis as this – ‘The consciousness of thought ought to be a living observation and will’, or to associate the attendance of women by the sick-bed, not with the hard drudgery of real practice, but with the vicissitudes of a love-story. Women have not to prove that they can be emotional, and rhapsodic, and spiritualistic; every one believes that already. They have to prove that they are capable of accurate thought, severe study, and continuous self-command. But we say all this with reluctance, and should prefer noticing the many just and pathetic observations that Miss Bremer puts into the mouth of her heroine. We can only mention, and have not space to quote, a passage where Hertha complains of the ignorance in which women are left of Natural Science. ‘In my youth,’ she concludes, ‘I used to look at the rocks, the trees, the grass, and all objects of nature, with unspeakable longing, wishing to know something about their kinds, their life, and their purpose. But the want of knowledge, the want of opportunity to acquire it, has caused nature to be to me a sealed book, and still to this moment it is to me a tantalizing, enticing, and ever-retreating wave, rather than a life-giving fountain which I can enjoy, and enjoying, thank the Creator.’