JOHN VALE'S GUARDIAN.*

MR. CHRISTIE MURRAY has certainly more power and genius for the delineation of English rustic life than any half-dozen of our surviving novelists put together. Aunt Rachel is a gem of its kind. And Aunt Rachel, though a delightful study of rustic manners, has not in it either the breadth of interest or the force

of imagination which is to be found in John Yale's Guardian. Indeed, the new story has hardly any weak point in it, except the relation between Isaiah Winter and his master, Robert Snelling ; for Isaiah's distrust of him, arising as it did in his native shrewdness, could hardly have been consistent with service so long and so loyal, and if it had been, would certainly not have been so easily laid to rest, or even dissipated, as it was when once he had left his service. But barring that somewhat unnatural and occasionally rather melodramatic character of Isaiah Winter, we do not find anything in the book that is not as strong as it is vividly delineated. It has been Mr. Christie Murray's object to paint rustic England in all its slowness and steadiness and fixity of type, and for this purpose he contrasts two or three of the rural yeomen of the Midlands, varying the individual characteristics in order to let us see the same type, as shown in very different moral natures, with two or three Southern French characters as unlike as possible to the bovine Englishman. This is a very happy device of Mr. Christie Murray's for bringing out the Midland yeoman in all his John Bullism. One might put into the mouth of Mr. Christie Murray the sentence which he puts into the mouth of his French artist from Arles, M.

Jousserau :—" I want to paint John Bull. I find John Bull. I paint heem." Isaiah, the rather melodramatic serving-man, of whom we have spoken, praises the French artist for his discrimination. " He's got an eye for things," said Isaiah ; "I never noticed it particuler till I see your picture ; but I've thought it since, and said it to the missis many a time ; a John Bull-er lookin' sort of man I never looked at than he's drawed you out to be. It's as like as one new sixpence is like another, and it's John Bull all over." But Mr. Christie Murray was not content with drawing one John Bull. He has drawn two of totally different moral stamps, and a replica, which was perhaps a little superfluous, of one of them. His harmless and worthy John Bull is very good ; but his evil and malignant John Bull is very much better, and he is the real subject of this striking book. Mr. Robert Snelling is a study of the kind of John Bull in whom self-importance and self-worship grow into a destructive passion, a passion that cannot tolerate the existence of any obstacle to the realisation of the dream of commonplace authority, wealth, and power which seems all but within his grasp. And in his case, but for his ward's life, it would be quite within his grasp. In Shorthouse we have the limitation and ignorance and the perverse self-will of the British yeoman.

without any admixture of true evil. In Robert Snelling we have almost all the same limitations, but all aggravated by a greedy conviction of his own claims to supremacy over all the other figures in his little world, which makes the man abso- lutely intolerant of any duty, or any claim, however natural, which interferes with his gross and absorbing ambition. Mr.

Christie Murray speaks of his evil hero, if hero he should be called, almost as if he were as dull and narrowly grooved a man as Farmer Shorthouse or Farmer Gregg. And so far as regards his incompetence to understand or believe in different types of character and power from any of those familiar to him, he is as dull as they. But it is impossible to call a man stupid who has such keen, and sometimes even subtle instincts as to the best mode of blinding other people to his own evil designs, as Robert Snelling. The scenes in which he avails himself of his reputation for uprightness and straightforwardness to throw dust in the eyes of others as to his own design, are scenes which no merely stupid man could have conceived or enacted. That, for instance, in the Congregational Sunday-school, where he anticipates the evil rumours spread as to his ill-designs upon his ward, by going straight to the schoolmaster who

• .Tohn Vole's GoorObia. By D. Christie Murray. 3 vols. London : Macmillan and Co.

had been one of his instruments for ruining the boy's health and brightness, and appealing to him whether he had ever plotted with him " to drive the soft lad softer," could not have been brought about by a merely stupid man, could not have been brought about by any one without a clear conception of the effect of presence of mind and authority of manner on men a little beneath him in standing and reputation. Stupid a man cannot be called who has so very clear an idea of what he can do to impress other people, and who never attempts anything beyond his own powers, though he has altogether an exaggerated idea of what those powers are in relation to that large remainder of the world for any insight into which he is quite incompetent. Narrow in the extreme Snelling is, no doubt ; but his narrow- ness, which he does not recognise as narrowness, but only as fitness for his own sphere, is truly conceived by himself as a sort of power, a sort of capacity to impress others equally narrow, which it really is ; and he so uses it as to extend the sphere of his influence and to hide the malice of his heart. Very vigorous especially is Mr. Christie Murray's sketch of Snelling's feeling for freehold property in land

He had had undisputed control of his nephew's property since the death of John Vale the elder; and since John Vale the younger had run away, the land and the money he held in trust had grown into him, and become such a part of him as no honest belongings of his own could ever have been. There was nothing in the world a thousandth part so desirable to his mind as the ownership of land. Mere money wealth, the next thing in sweet- ness to it, was far and far behind it in its capacity for yielding pleasure. He had been gathering landed property in a small way all his life, and a half-ownership was a great sweet mixed with an incredible bitter. A mortgage was a loathing to him until he had cleared it away. A peppercorn quit-rent would have galled him. The only poetic fancy that had ever stirred his depths of com- monplace came with the reflection that his ownership ran in an absolute solid wedge to the earth's centre. He bought lands with the mines and minerals thereunder, or would not buy at all, and the hidden uncomeatable parts of his purchase fed his heart better than the productive paying surface. There was something so prodigiously solid in the fancy of the dark, unmeasured, un- measurable distances, unsunned, unseen, but covered every inch by his ownership, and sealed as it were for his, whenever his foot touched the surface, if it were but of a bare bald cottage-building plot twenty yards by twelve ! "

" The hidden uncomeatable parts of his purchase fed his heart better than the productive paying surface." Is not that the imaginative secret of a good deal of the passion for property in land ? And does it not imply that there is a certain type of narrow and almost stupid character which is yet fed upon ideal elements, and exults more in imaginary rights which can never be used, than in the actual rights which can be and are

used ? Surely when Mr. Disraeli, who had a profound con- tempt for British landowners, " acred up to their lips, consolled up to their chins," talked of the English in his contemptuous

way as a profoundly imaginative people, he referred to this kind of imaginative power of revelling in rights of property

such as those over which Snelling gloated,—imaginative rights which were rights only in this sense, that the law gave to him by preference and in the abstract, qua landowner, down to the earth's centre, abstract rights which it has absolutely

no power to confer effectually on any one at all. Yet it is an imaginative life that revels in such abstract rights ; and if that kind of life is admirable, certainly John Bull has admirable -qualities. How vividly Mr. Christie Murray pictures the possession which covetousness has taken of this man's mind, a theme on which he never dwells too long, though it is the principal theme of his book, our readers will understand by the following passage describing his feelings after his ward had been lost sight of for a year, and, as he hoped, had been long since dead, when he hears news of his being alive and well :—

" He had been accustomed all his life to set his purposes ahead of him and to go straight towards them, and having once resolved, had very rarely troubled himself to look behind or to examine anew the motives which had started him. But the news of the afternoon had stirred and shaken him more than he cared to confess, and in the very midst of the assurance and resolve which he told himself he felt, there were all sorts of earthquakey tremors, and now and then a fear which might have been inspired by conscience. But the one thing which most animated his spirit was a settled glow of wrath against young John. It was no part -of Snelling's character to desire to understand his own emotions, and he did not pause for a second to inquire why he was angry with his ward. If he had made such an inquiry, the answer would have been simple and easy to find. Young John stood between him and his desire. He had a right to stand there, and Snelling had no right to the desire ; but that made no difference worth speaking of, unless some underlying latent sense of it lent fuel to the flame. What right had the young brute to have a right at all ? What right had anything or anybody to stand between that grasping Ego and his wish ? He had kept strict account between the estate and himself of every farthing, partly because of a rooted business instinct, but partly as a guard against a possible accusation. No neighbour should be able to tell him, at such or such an hour you began to think this property your own ; and if ever claim or investigation should arise, he was safe and clear. But almost from the moment of John's disappearance the houses and the land and the incomings therefrom had taken that sort of root in him which a man's own property is apt to take, and by this time it had grown to be a part of him, so that he felt it was no more easily separable than a living member of his body. Of the two, if the choice had been given him, he would rather have sacrificed a limb. It is imaginable that there are many people in the world who would do as much as that to retain their own, or even to become possessed of other people's property ; but there was an unusual grip in Snelling's character, and wealth was a passion with him. And now, on the top of security and ease, this abominable news of John's health and mental prosperity came with a sort of shock which seemed to justify any intensity of hate and 'anger. To get the boy back into his own hands was the first prime necessity, and beyond that he pretended to see nothing, though in the hidden recesses of his mind he kept one fixed and wicked purpose. He might as well have given it the whole daylight field of fancy to roam about in. If he had acknowledged to himself this villainous offspring of his greed, he might have encountered it less often, and have been less troubled by it; but forcing it to lurk and hide, he had to force himself to keep an eye upon it ; and it was the very centre of himself, and occupied him altogether with a torturing insistence. I am here,' said the black phantom—'here, ready and waiting for your bidding, and you know the purpose you mean to put me to.' Not to listen, not to see, not to admit to himself that the thing was there, was a constant grinding pre- occupation to him."

What adds greatly to the brightness of the story is Mr. Christie Murray's singular skill in depicting the incidental characters and scenes to which he introduces us. From the first fight between the schoolboys and the village boys, to the inquest scene with which the story closes, everything is made vividly present to the eye,—not only the lively French colony and the artistic skill of M. Jousserau in painting bovine England, both sub-human and human ; not only the wretched old idler and drunkard, Mr. Orme, who contributes so greatly to the development of the plot, and who is a striking portrait in himself ; not only the slow rural festivities, the scenes of suspense over the boring for coal, the burning of Snelling's house, the love-scenes, and the bright little vignettes in which the childish singer, Lydia Day, warbles her native wood-notes wild,—but the scenes of nightmare, of plotting, of spying, and of dread. Mr. Christie Murray writes with a sure hand, and with the one exception of Isaiah Winter, there is nothing in his story which strikes us as unreal and melodramatic.

Mr. Christie Murray's memory has failed him, or else he means to suggest that Farmer Shorthouse's memory had failed him, when the latter attributes the comparative degree "John Bull-er " to the Frenchman, M. Jousseran. It was a compara- tive degree which only a John Bull could have invented, and if the author will refer back to the passage in which that com- parative is coined, he will find that it was due, not to M. Jousserau, but to the shrewd intelligence of Isaiah Winter.