BOOKS.
SIR THOMAS BRANSTON., Tuis is as powerful as any of Mr. Gilbert's characteristic tales, indeed, we doubt whether he has ever before written a story of so continuous and intense an interest. At the same time, as a work of art, it seems to us deficient in one capital point,—a point so capital as to mar the effect and unity of the tale, and need- lessly to enhance its dreariness of impression. Mr. Gilbert has mada his tale turn on an incident suggested by some curious evidence he has obtained as to the occasional effect of a deadly attack of typhus in utterly transforming the character of the patient, changing it, in fact, from the finest and purest to the most deadly and malignant type. The village doctor of the tale, a man represented as of great shrewdness and wide experience, is made to give it as his opinion that the change produced by the fever in the heroine of the story was " brought about by some obscure influence for which at present neither science, law, nor divinity has a name " ; and the illustration more than once sug- gested,—though to this of course the medical practitioner does not commit himself, is more that of demoniacal possession, the release of the good spirit from the body and its repossession be- fore the bodily organization had been dissolved by an evil one, than any other conceivable transformation for which we have a name. Mr. Gilbert takes some pains, however, to hint at more shadowy explanations of the change. The orphan whose character is so finely drawn in the first volume, is a poor girl who had lost both father and mother, and who had been charitably fed and sheltered by a woman of very low character, living in one of the worst courts in London. There the child had found very bad companions, and had contracted some of their bad language and low habits of living. The woman who had sheltered her dies ; the husband turns the child out, as not being his own ; and she is saved from starvation and degradation by a charitable country schoolmistress, who on a visit to London finds her all but -swooning on the pavement of a London alley. From that time to the attack of typhus in her nineteenth year, the girl's character is represented as marvellously gentle and loving and grateful. When the typhus begins to rage in the village, she is one of the boldest and the most self-forgetful in helping the sufferers. And during all the first part of her own illness, till the moment when her death was expected, her character is the same as ever ; but on the night of the final crisis, the strength of her kind friend and mistress who is nursing her, gives way, and the doctor is obliged to find a nurse in the workhouse infirmary to take her place. There the only hand that can be spared is that of a casual inmate 'who professes herself used to nursing, but who happens to be one of the worst and most drunken of the old associates of the girl's infancy, whom the chances of a tramp's life have brought in this direction. This woman,—her patient being all the while perfectly insensible and unconscious of anything around her,—recognizes the girl by certain old scars upon her, and gives her more than the quantity of brandy ordered by the village doctor, while drinking herself dead drunk on the remainder. In the middle of the night, when the doctor returns, the nurse is found in a state of drunken stupefaction on the floor, whilst the patient's pulse is recovering, and from that time her bodily convalescence is steady ; but -whether it be the overdose of stimulant iu the weak condition of the nervous system, or whether it be a sort of mesmeric influence transmitted from the drunken associate of her infancy who happens to be present at the crisis, or whether it be the mere effect of the fever, the girl, when she recovers, has exchanged her good nature for one absolutely evil and especially marked by a craving for physical stimulants,—though the evil spirit is masked, as it were, in a body trained by the girl's previous life for the last five or six years to express only pure feelings, a placid temper, and .a confiding, grateful disposition.
We will make no objection, as we might perhaps fairly do, to this very curious and original turning-point of Mr. Gilbert's tale, though it hinges on a mystery so exceptional as well as painful that, even if the medical facts referred to really justify it, it seems hardly a -subject for a work of art, unless some sort of glimmer of light could be thrown across the gloom. To have a girl remarkable for her self-forgetfulness and self-devotion, who had indeed caught the typhus infection in the earnestness of her sympathy with others, struck down, by no agency of her own, nor by insanity in any -sense in which we use the word, (for her intelligence and memory appear to be as clear and powerful as ever, while all her affections a Mr Thomas Branslon. By William Gilbert, Author of "Shirley Hall Asylum," c. 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blacken, are clean gone, as much as if she never had had any, and all her love of good turned to love of evil), would be, if it ever really happened, a mystery profound enough and terrible enough to make even so violent an hypothesis as a metempsychosis, an exchange between the previous spiritual tenant of the body in question and some evil being hovering near at the moment of the fever's crisis, a relief to the imagination. But admitting Mr. Gilbert's right to make his tale turn on any actual psychological phenomenon of the kind, however strange, we cannot admit that he has treated it as so considerable an artist ought to have done. He has not, we will not say explained, the moral transformation in his heroine,—that, of course, he was not bound to do, and art would, indeed, be starved if it might not use profusely moral and mental phenomena which it cannot explain,—but he has not even made a psychological study at all of that transformation, he has not con- nected the two states of his heroine's character by any inward thread ;—and this we think that, as an artist, he was bound to do, if he ventured to take up the subject at all. Admit the change to be what Mr. Gilbert suggests, a sort of moral insanity seizing on the patient,—still he was bound to give us his conception of that moral insanity so far as to show us how the girl herself regarded the early and virtuous period of her life,—how far she thought of her old self with any sense of personal identity, how she regarded her old dispositions in relation to her new ones, whether she was pos- sessed with any soot of delusion in regard to her old life, or, realizing it clearly, was simply filled with wonder and disgust at its tame- ness and insipidity,—in a word, he was bound to show us how the old and new thread were united in her own mind. Of this Mr. Gilbert does not even give us a hint, and consequently the most striking conception of the story seems to us quite inartisti- cally worked out. No one has made a more successful study of the freaks of insanity than Mr. Gilbert ; and however he conceives the subject of this tale, whether as purely moral, or both moral and mental insanity, he was clearly bound as an artist, having chosen the subject, to give his readers some picture of the moral transition from the inside. He should have given us something of the workings of Minnie's mind on her recovery from the fever,—some conception of the Lind of disgust towards her old mistress and friend which took possession of her and induced her to threaten her life,—of the nature of the longing which carried her away to her old dis- solute companions,—of the sort of memory with which under privation and want she looked back at the quiet of her youth, of the scheming impulses in her head which led her into new wickedness, and of the special motives (of which he does not even give us a hint), whether merely insane malignity, or any other, which led her to attempt the murder of her children. It seems to us clear that Mr. Gilbert, if undertaking so strange a subject as his figure of Minnie at all, should not have made her a mere riddle. In her later days of degradation he shows clearly enough the selfish motives, the uncontrollable thirst for stimulants, and the insatiable love of ease which actuate her ; but he slurs over the picture of the transition stage in her character with a mere narrative of outward circumstances, so that the reader has not even a glance or hint at the interior of this strange transformation scene. We must maintain that though Mr. Gilbert is fairly entitled as an artist to paint any well- ascertained phase of human nature without explaining its mysteries, he is not entitled to leave the very links on which the coherence and power of his picture depend absolutely in the dark, for every one to fill up after his own fancy.
This is the great central blot on a story which no one can deny to be very painful and very powerful after Mr. Gilbert's own peculiar fashion. If the central character were but presented in the only light in which it could have any sort of unity, i.e., from the inside, we should have no right to object to the external draw- ing, which is forcible enough. Nothing can be more striking than the picture of Minnie's artfully concealed malignity of vindictive- ness just before her marriage with the baronet. The incident of her resentment with the maid who discovered that she had been a sewing woman by the pricks on her needle-finger, and of the savage revenge taken by her, is in Mr. Gilbert's best style ; and so, too, is the picture of the arts by which she inveigled Sir Thomas Branston to marry her. But the crimes of which she was guilty towards her children are entirely unaccounted for, unless they be attributable to mere insane impulse, of which there is no hint. The last scene of her life, too, is told with marvellous power ; but we lay down the story with a thoroughly dissatisfied feeling, apart quite from its extreme dreariness,—a feeling that a mere riddle has been set us, instead of a coherent picture, however full of implicit riddles, as almost all true pictures are, presented.
There is no fault of the same kind to find with the other
characters in the book; but, after the first volume, which contains one very beautiful sketch besides that of Minnie's innocent youth, the picture of the good schoolmistress who saved and provided for her, there is far too little relief for the evil characters portrayed. Sir Thomas Branston himself is indeed made to change for the better, and some scenes in his life are powerfully executed. But there is absolutely no artistic justification for the hypocrisy of which Sir Thomas is guilty after the death of his first wife ; his is described as a character far too positive, dictatorial, and careless of the world, to assume grief without an adequate motive, and no such motive is given, except a conventional deference to what the world would expect, which is quite alien-to the nature attributed to him. Mr. Gilbert's picture of his demeanour seems at first intended to describe a villain who had killed his first wife and wished to disguise it, but we soon learn that for this there is no case at all ; and the arrogance and self-will of the man are entirely inconsistent with any mere affectation to feel what the world might expect him to feel. Mr. Gilbert seems to us to have wavered very con- siderably in different parts of his tale in his picture of Sir Thomas Branston. Captain Branston of the Indiaman, or Sir Thomas Branston in his dissolute and almost brutal life at Paris during his first wife's life, is a very different man from the hypocritical mourner of his widowhood, if not from the infatuated husband of Minnie. Taken as a whole, we cannot for a moment deny the singular power and fascination of the story—which exceeds in sheer interest any one of Mr. Gilbert's previous tales—but as a work of art it seems to us unquestionable that it is a failure,—that the very striking and original conception on which the whole tarns has not been vindicated as a subject for art at all.
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