BOOKS.
SHOOTING- THE RAPIDS.* EVERY now and then there comes an end, by general consent, 'expressed in some occult way, not to be explained, but effective, to the use in works of fiction, of certain incidents or complications which have had a sufficiently long run to exhaust human patience. The heroine of a novel must not now be rescued, either by the hero or by any other person, from drowning, or from being " gored " by a mad bull, (did any one ever see one, out of Old Smithfield ?) and two horsemen, of whom one is " stalwart " and the other of lesser stature, must never more be seen to take their way together, at break of day, or eventide, in any direction what- ever, except that of the Ride. Even Miss Braddon would hardly again venture on bigamy as a leading incident, and in short, there has been a great moving of the old landmarks. Murder bolds its place steadily. It is wonderfully popular,—we wish some scientific person would explain, on philosophical prin- ciples, why ? Almost everybody, especially everybody of the numerous world who read novels, would rather not see a murder committed, or be mixed up with the concomitants of murder, and yet it "draws," as a stage house on fire -draws the patrons of modern drama. The attraction of the gorgeous school is weak in comparison with it. Mrs. Henry Wood's murderers would require a whole chamber of horrors to themselves, and one can only hope she finds them as easy to forget as the rules of English grammar. We suspect if she were to slacken her supply of murderers people would not read her books. It is curious to observe how much murder there is in the goody' school of novels. People seem to think that though, of course, it is shocking, still, somehow, it is moral ; and that the object of Mr. Podanap's solid- tade, " the cheek of the young person," is exempted from the -dreaded blush on the score of homicide. Are not the public a little tired of the literature of swindling? Would they not like to pronounce the taboo against the style of adventurer of whom Montague Tigg was the prototype, who was magnified, elevated in position, and padded out as "Davenport Dunn," and who has prevailed, with manifold additions and vari-
* .Shooting the Rapids. By Alexander lanes Shand, Author of " Against Time," .1te. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1872. ations, from that time, especially since the panic ? Limited liability, its prizes, pains, and penalties, has been twisted into as many shapes by the mate novelists of the last score of years as the debateable ground of love and marriage, and the delicate dilemmas of ladies with a husband or gentlemen with a wife over and above the canonical allowance, by the female writers of fiction. Next in number and severity to the tender complications which render Mr. Trollope's heroes so many Captain Macheaths without the felony, come the pecuniary difficulties in which they involve themselves, and the indefatigable novelist has produced almost as many varieties of the " friend in the city" as of the male flirt. In this respect he has several imitators. Mr. Shand is one of them. He has not had patience and discretion to keep to the tone which rendered his first novel, Against Time, very agreeable reading ; but by adding violent energy, exaggerated description, perpetual conflict of emotions, and a flavour of crime and bullying to the doings of an adventurer who has not originally any real excuse for adventuring, he produces an unpleasant impression, which there is nothing in the story or the minor characters sufficiently interesting to relieve. There is no more hopeless endeavour for a novelist than the combination in one individual of romance and rascality, of sentiment and swindling, of that base love partly of gain and partly of excitement which makes a man do such things as Ralph Dacre does in the process of shooting the rapids. Meanness is a large element in such a combination, and meanness is the antithesis to all that creates a romantic interest. Such an interest may exist with faults as great, with even crimes, if their motive be passion, not calculation, but with this particular fault, it cannot exist. A man who tells lies about and for money cannot be made heroic, and a man whose chief object in life is to extract money from the pockets of other people, who do not suspect that his own are nearly empty, must be perpetually tell- ing lies of the smallest and most contemptible kind. This is an error for which no smartness can atone.
Mr. Shand's hero is a very poor creature, one whose faults claim no pity, whose fate excites no sympathy, and whose career has nothing to evoke even the perverted admiration we feel, in spite of ourselves, for a thorough-going scoundrel, for instance as Mr. Lever's Grog Davis, who was absolutely fear- less, and who loved one human being, his daughter, with love which proved itself by self-sacrifice. But Ralph Dacre is a cur, though he makes his first appearance as a volunteer in the service of the Republic at Rome in 1849, and his final exit takes place in a skirmish at Monte Rotondo, on the occasion of the last Garibaldi= expedition. He is always shrinking from difficulties, always bullied by his confederates, always putting up with insult and menace, always losing his opportunities and shirking the truth. A more contemptible person could not be encountered either in fact or in fiction, and the superlatives, in which his actions are narrated, when he is not revealing the secrets of his Foreign- Office secretaryship in order to rig the market, or betraying his trust and speculating away his sister's fortune, are quite ineffectual. In vain the author asserts that "with all his thought and his scheming prudence, there was a strong dash in his veins of the blood of the hare-brained adventurer. He has something of the type of the men who swept the gold-freighted galleons from the Spanish Main, and burst their way to the treasure-vaults of El Dorado, daring, covetous, and calculating by nature." Ralph Dacre is merely a modern swindler, in whom we trace no resemblance to the Con- quistadores; and as a lover he is even more contemptible than in the other capacities whose duties he betrays. The author is singularly unfortunate in his love-scenes. Perhaps he is conscious of this, for he makes them mercifully few, and assigns to the other great motive-power, money, the larger place in the story of several remarkably worthless people.
There is indisputable ability in this novel, as there was in Against Time, but it is even more wasted. To the curious in the intricacies of scheming, the career of the man who kept away from the fire after he had slightly burned his fingers, may possibly have been less attractive than the wholesale plunging of Ralph Dacre will prove, but the former is certainly better done, is a specimen of a better kind of art, though at the best not elevated. In Shooting the Rapids everybody who is not very bad is very stupid, and that is always a grave blemish in the artistic sense, as well as a suggestive error in morals. Alice Dacre, of whose fortune Ralph Dacre, her half-brother, is trustee, is a common- place young person, without any elevation of character, whose notion of the responsibilities of wealth limit themselves to a pleasant conviction that she may let her milliners' bills run up without troubling herself about their amount, and that she may give as many expensive knick-knacks to her friends as she chooses, and as they do not want. The episode of her love-affair with Mr. Bourke is profoundly uninteresting. It was perhaps a suspicion that the lovers, who kiss each other much too frequently, and have proportionately little to say, are decidedly dull, that induced Mr. Shand to introduce an inci- dent which should contribute a dash of modern chivalry to their flat and prosperous proceedings. Dragons being extinct and mad bulls forbidden, the handy and ubiquitous costermonger is summoned to insult hapless innocence, as it calmly sketches a sylvan scene from the top of a rustic stile; and, with a fine interpolation of popular politics, to declaim with the eloquent oaths of a low democrat against the order which the defenceless young woman of the upper classes represents on that occasion. Of course, Mr. Bourke is close by, and he fights the costermonger with Alice for the "ring." Of course, blood tells, and Mr. Bourke is victorious, though, we suspect, if in real life gentlemen ever do fight costermongers with their fists, the result is not so inevitably in their favour. The combat is elaborately described, but the same thing was very much better done by the author of Sword and Gown a long time ago, and the incident does not gain by repetition.
The praise generally accorded to his first work for vigour of style has, it seems to us, proved a snare to Mr. Shand, in the case of his second novel. It has led him to exaggerate vigour into violence, so to strain after point as to reach paradox, to overcrowd his scenes and over intensify his characters. His scoundrels, Dacre, Asgill, Gaboche, are great and busy scoundrels, but they get too many chances of scoundrelism, the chances are too big, and they go at them too vehemently. The sums which they extract from Dacre as chairman of the doomed bank are too large, and the securities deposited are too completely worthless. Dacre tells too many lies, and they are too big ; his assumption of wealth is too snobbish, his tricks are too numerous, he is kept playing throughout the story at too many games for it to be possi- ble he could cheat in them all, and all at once. There is a touch of Mr. Lever's exaggeration in this, but the touch lacks the light- ness of his. Mr. Shand has considerable powers of description, but he overtaxes them ; he is always wanting to produce some bizarre effect of language, and the effect interferes with the ease and therefore with the pleasure of the reader. He knocks his phrases down with a sledge-hammer, he pounds his superlatives with a paviour's rammer, and we cannot escape from the irritation of the noise, the sense of the exertion. We cannot help think- ing how, like the two LL.'s and Dr. Ginery Dunkle in Martin Chuzzlewit, he must "ache with the effort," when, after several pages of gush and rush, of rattle and battle, of picture and point, descriptive of the Roman revolution of '48, he winds up with a sentence that embodies the faults of his style,—" At the head of the men of action Giuseppe Garibaldi, lowering his grand fore- head like a bull for the rush, panting then, as later, to launch himself recklessly on the power of France, and court in a sublime anachronism the fate of an insane Curtius." A " reckless " launch is a novelty among operations, and Garibaldi might fairly com- plain of the partisanship which within one sentence compares him to a bull, a ship, and a mad patriot, like a word in the children's game, " What is my thought like?"
When Dacre begins to find there is danger of his being found out, and that he naturally does not like it, the author describes the situation thus :—"He had taken a lease of an orchard of Dead- Sea fruit, which had showed fair enough to the world, but had filled his mouth with dust, and his breast with gall and bitter- ness." And then, Ralph sighs, "as the disagreeable associations connected with the hollow mockery he had to play the chief part in came curdling up in his mind, like the thunder-turned cream to the surface of his tea." These are mild specimens of his emotions ; generally " the dash of the wild beast" rises in Ralph when he is vexed, and he gives to a confederate of whom he is afraid " a smile like winter sunbeams on the ice," and a presure of the hand which he " would have liked to have given to the other's windpipe." When he has an unsatisfactory interview with an usurer, he "grinds his teeth " and " tugs at his watch," while " a smile like a spring sunset in Spitzbergen "—a distant relative to the winter sunbeams on the ice, no doubt—" flickered on Mr. Barber's clean-shaved, hard-cut, tight-screwed features." Dacre does equally wonderful and spasmodic things when he goes to a ball, and at his desk during official hours he is really too terrible. In fact, the river of his life is all rapids, and he is perpetually shooting them.
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