MR. BESANT'S LAST NOVEL.*
WHAT Dorothy Forster is to "the '45," Mr. Besant's new historical novel, For Faith and Freedom, is to the miserable and shameful episodes of Monmouth's Rebellion and the Bloody Assize. Again the author has chosen to tell the greater portion of his story by the lips of a woman, and again the lesser part in the narrative falls to the share of a true lover, who does not win the fair, high-souled conscience- ruled, courageous heroine, whose unhesitating convictions and artless narrow-mindedness lend to her self-portraiture the individuality and realism in which Mr. Besant is without a rival among modern novelists. The two young women differ widely, in rank, in surroundings, in person, in modes of thought and speech, in experience and in destiny ; but Mr. Besant is the equal and impartial interpreter of each, and he wraps them both around with such an atmosphere of purity and piety, that the cruelty and coarseness, the tyranny, hypocrisy, fanaticism, and crime, which contribute to the story of Dorothy Forster and the story of Alice • For Faith and Freedom. By Walter Besant. London: Chatto and Windue. Eykyn, leave the fair image of the one and the other all undimmed and spotless. Yet are they perfectly true ; their actions are consistent, their speech is living, they are beings of their time ; as art-products, they have the distinctness and solidity of a master-sculptor's work, and they possess that spark of human nature which is of no epoch, but of all the ages.
A strong point of distinction between Mr. Besant and other writers who have given us historical novels of late years, is that he works from the inside of his subject. While he is at the work, he is of the time ; he cuts himself adrift from the after-experience of the events he is narrating, he is never betrayed into a whisper of nineteenth-century knowledge, he never slips into a nineteenth-century mode of thought or aspiration, whether he be dealing with the higher or the lower order among those whom he is portraying. It is this Defoe-like directness and detachment which make his historical novels so stirring and fascinating ; he casts them all within the spirit and the possibility of their epochs, absolutely avoiding the attitude of comment and contrast. Even Mr. Charles Reade's fine story of The Cloister and the Hearth fails to convince as Dorothy Forster and For Faith and Freedom convince, because the reader feels all the time that, sound as the study is, the book is the outcome of long contemplation of a remote period by a modern mind impressed with the constant sense of con- trast. In Mr. Besant's case there is nothing of the kind ; whether he writes in the person of Alice Eykyn or Humphrey Challis, he is of the time. The hardships of the wayfaring of those days are not more matter of course and untouched by any prescience of modernity than is the record of the house- hold life of the minister's family, the stolidly narrated tale of the arbitrary administration and the brutal punishments of so-called justice, the record of that slavery in the planta- tions beyond seas into which the English prisoners of James H., like the Irish prisoners of Cromwell, were sold by the courtiers and Court ladies to whom they were given on the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion, and the raging enmity that reigned between the Church of England and Dissent. In reality, the story of Monmouth is much more ghastly and terrible than the story of the Scots' Lords ; but it is far less noble and pathetic, and it shows us no such figure as that of the gallant and pious Earl of Derwentwater. Mr. Besant could not make a hero out of Monmouth, and he has very wisely given him only one appearance in this heart-stirring story ; while he does not bring into sight at all the cruel and contemptible King who put his own kin to death with the avidity of a Tudor, and had not even the palliating quality of good manners. Monmouth's one appearance is very brilliant and thrilling ; the infatuation of the West-Country folk ; the elation of the Dissenting sects, who hailed him as their deliverer from Prelacy; the innocent fervour of the beautiful Alice Eykyn, as she is lifted up to stand on the Duke's boot—(as the glee-maiden in The Fair Maid of Perth stood on the wretched Rothsaf,$)—the fanaticism of Alice's father, which renders him as blind to the danger as he is indifferent to the hardships incurred by his wife and daughter ; the high hope and fatal miscalculation of Humphrey Challis (who, in his devotion to a doomed cause and a worthless leader, and in the minor key of his narrative, reminds us of Henry Esmond),—all form a picture full of living interest of the brief triumph of Monmouth ere he and his rabble marched away to the bloody rout of Sedgemoor. It is with the terrible fate of Monmouth's adherents that Mr. Besant deals, in a narrative which, were any such historical judgment in doubt, would do for James II. and Judge Jeffreys what Macaulay plumed himself upon having done for Barere.
The fair Puritan, Alice Eykyn, is as finely drawn as Dorothy Forster, her opposite in many ways, but akin to her in purity, obedience, single-mindedness, and the courage that carries the fanatic's daughter through trials of a far sterner kind than Dorothy's, though not to so poignant an ending. Her mother, too, the devoted wife whose labours—whereby she feeds her husband, while the others, herself included, are at starvation- point—are not even noted by the fanatic for whom she lives, with whom she dies ; the father whose merciless godliness sends his only son adrift in early boyhood, and yet who holds the hearts of all belonging to him subject by strong bonds of love and confidence ; and Barnaby, the runaway son,—what friends have we here ! And Sir Christopher Challis, Humphrey's grand- uncle, and Mr. Boscorel, the time-serving, dilettante parson, whose son, Benjamin, is the villain of the book—what a repre- sentative group they help to compose ! "At the mere remembrance of Sir Christopher," writes Alice Eykyn, "I am fain to lay down my pen and to weep, as for one whose good- ness was unsurpassed, and whose end was undeserved. Good works, I know, are rags, and men cannot deserve the mercy of God by any merits of their own ; but a good man—a man whose heart is full of justice, mercy, virtue, and truth—is so rare a creature, that when there is found such a one, his salvation seems assured. Is it not wonderful that there are among us so many good Christians, but so few good men P" Alice's own experience gives her question great weight and pertinence, and she draws Sir Christopher with a fond, delicate, discerning hand. Robin Challis, who woos Alice Eykyn early, and weds her late in the story, is the least remarkable and impressive of the three " boys " who are Alice's companions in childhood. All three fall in love with her, and when the terrible trouble of the time swoops down on ball and cottage alike, the rivalry between Robin Challis and Benjamin Boscorel brings about a situation of the highest dramatic quality. We do not recall, in all the author's previous writings, any series of incidents, any scenes that come up to the agonising confidence between Robin's mother and Alice, when Benjamin comes, in all the exultant wickedness of his nature, to cheat the unhappy mother and the poor betrayed girl into the belief that only by Alice's marrying him then and there can he (Benjamin) be induced to exercise the power he possesses of saving Robin's life. Anything more pathetic than the heart-broken conviction of both women that never, never will the son and lover forgive them, has not, we think, been written in fiction, or anything more startling than the mar- riage, the revelation, Alice's escape from her husband, and her falling into the hands of the kidnapper, Penne, of Bristol,—a truly amazing scoundrel, in depicting whom Mr. Besant has given vent to the humour which is always sure to be found somewhere about in everything that he writes. The adven- tures of Penne's victims, winding up with the punishment of Penne after so comprehensive and characteristic a fashion as that which Barnaby devises, afford Mr. Besant an opportunity of describing the frightful oppression and barbarity of the "planters" in the West Indian Islands, with a fullness of detail and local colour which testifies to the thoroughness of his studies. The place and the period are reproduced with art-concealing art. The atmosphere of the book is necessarily one of violence and cruelty; the writer tempers it by the lofty sweetness of Alice's, and the pensive philosophy of Humphrey's character. The gaol and the stocks, the " cat " and the cart- tail, are ever-present, and the overseer's whip, which is the device on the cover of the book, is only a tropical variety of the instrument resorted to in England, in those bad old times, both in public and in private, with hideous ferocity and frequency.
The gem of the book is Alice Eykyn's brother. Barnaby is not a type ; he is an individual of a sort that Defoe, or Smollett, or Captain Marryat in a later day and at his best, might have drawn, an optimist somewhat after the fashion of Mr. Charles Reade's swashbuckler, whose familiar phrase of cheer is, "Courage, comrades ! the devil is dead !"—uttered especially on occasions when the devil seemed to be very much alive indeed. Barnaby is withal an entirely fresh, original, and living person, in his roughness, his animalism, his shrewdness, his unconscious heroism, his filial and fraternal devotion, manifested with supreme unconcern at the imminent risk of his life, his entire indifference to pain, danger, hardship, suffering of every kind, his readiness of resource, his rollicking humour, his absolutely irreverent mind, coarse appetites, forgiving, unscrupulous nature, readiness to kill, blunted conscience, and big, tender heart. Barnaby in the plantation at Barbadoes, and Barnaby dragging the cart, with his insensible father in it, into the recesses of the heath where the fugitives fmd shelter after the rout of Monmouth's army, are two pictures in which the discriminating and critical among Mr. Besant's readers will recognise achievements of note.
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