HERMANN AGHA.*

THERE are at present two prevailing types of novels, the reflective and the colloquial. At the one extreme is .21fidd1emarc1, in which George Eliot's elaborate analysis plays the part of chorus to a number of obtrusively insular and provincial characters, which nothing short of her genius could Make interesting ; at the other, the numberless light stories of modern society, good, bad, or indif- ferent, with which the circulating libraries swarm. It is a rare pleasure to find a narrative which transports us to a wholly new region, which is straightforward, passionate, romantic in the best sense of the word, and whose language has such beauty and power as few professed writers of fiction can command. Mr. Gifford Palgrave's Eastern tale is all this, and he must ere now have earned the thanks of many readers for some delightful hours. It is well to say this at once, and to say it emphatically. For it would be quite possible to deceive oneself on a first hasty inspection of these volumes. The opening chapters suggest an alarm, which soon turns out to be wholly unfounded, and of having entertained which even for a moment we openly repent, of useful knowledge strung on a slender thread of fiction, a kind of Oriental counterpart to Becker's Charicles. The frequent Arabic words in the text ex- plained by foot-notes, and still more the severely conscientious transcription both of these and of the proper names, are calculated to arouse suspicion. The unfamilar dots and commas distract the eye and puzzle the phonetic imagination. In a scientific work it is proper, we grant, to strain the resources of Roman type to the utmost. But in a novel it is hardly fair to those readers, and doubtless they are many, to whom the distinction between dental and cerebral letters has not become a second nature. And our insular pride is wounded when we stumble on names bearing on the printed face of them notice that no European can expect to pro- nounce them. Bat as we read on, the impetus of the story rapidly overcomes the friction produced for a time by this impediment. The strange and distant fascination of the East comes home to us in living, glowing reality ; the fetters of our complex Western society fall off, a magic breath sweeps over us from the pure desert air, and the blood stirs with sympathy for ancestral impulses, here dormant through centuries of half-consciousness, there still young and vigorous.

We are painfully sensible that such evidence as we can give in detail may seem inadequate to justify our general impression. It is not this or that passage in the book that affects the imagination : one must feel it as a whole ; it is to be read through or not at all.

The date of the story is laid almost exactly a century ago : the adventures are recounted by the chief actor in them—a German kidnapped in early youth, sold for a slave at Constantinople, and now a good Muslim and a free soldier of fortune, still in his prime, though weighed down by the lass which is the burden of his tale— to a trusted friend considerably older than himself both in years and in mind. This companion is an Egyptian Arab, of a certain satirical and sceptical humour less uncommon in those regions than in ours : from time to time he interrupts with comments and questions. Fiction conducted by machinery of this kind is gener- ally wearisome, but in this case it is wholly justified by a definite artistic purpose. By means of the contact of these two minds, the Orientalized European and the somewhat cosmopolitan Asiatic, Mr. Palgrave is enabled to oscillate at will and without any abrupt

• 111171147111 Agha: an Eastern Narrative. By W. Gifford Palgrave. London : Henry S. King and Co. 1872.

transitions through the whole range between a positively Eastern and a positively Western point of view. The listener's remarks are generally short, and temper the enthusiasm of the younger varrator with a strain of not unpleasant subdued satire ; now and then, however, he becomes eloquent in speculation : we transcribe one passage, on the faith of its being a true and unalloyed specimen of Arab philosophy, though in any case the eloquence is the same

hold, then, that these conditions whether of person or of circum- stance, of will, passion, choke, country, associates, and the rest, are nothing else than the pro-defined and necessary results of that which has gone before ; and that they and all besides them enter into and centre in the eternal, self-developing existence of the universe. It is all one, spirit be it or matter : spirit is the cause, the life ; matter, the form, the manifestation ; each under unnumbered modifications, and the whole uniting in the measureless general life and existence which

- always have been and will always be Not an aimless world,' lie went on, with more animation than usual in his manner, as Hermann remained listening and silent ; not trcentreless circle, an eyeless socket, a hopeless "it is, and so must be," without above or beneath, behind or before, without purpose, direction, or goal; no, nor a not less aimless Deity, creating or destroying, protecting or ruining, feeding or letting starve, life-giving or slaying, by the mere caprice of "I can, and I choose to do so" . . . nor an autocrat God, occupied with himself only No, none of those ; but an intelligent and all-pervading Life, Thought, Act, under countless modes and forms, working on everywhere to higher existence and enjoyment ; and perfecting, while it pervades them, the manifestations which it assumes and the matter which it vivifies ;not as things separate or distinct from itself, but ultimately One, One only with it in the great All of Being.'"

The reader must not suppose that such digressions as this are frequent ; as a rule, the conversation has an immediate bearing on the main thread of the narrative, and is made to assist in develop- ing it, or rather in fully bringing out for the benefit of the writer's European audience collateral circumstances, passing allusions, and touches of local colour, which otherwise must have been left un- explained or overweighted with formal explanation. The story itself is indeed not of a kind to require unravelling. Hermann Agha's autobiography is as far as possible removed from the doubtful casuistry of cross-purposes in which modern fiction is accustomed to entangle us. It tells of one love, pure, faithful, and constant on both aides, east down by adverse fate, but never wholly losing hope. The lovers are parted ; Hermann Agha knows not what has become of Zahra, nor if he shall ever see her again, and the abrupt and somewhat mysterious ending of his recital adds in some measure to the fascination of the book. The adventures he goes through are various and strange : pictures of the city and of the desert, of the Pasha's sumptuous retinue, the Bedouins' perilous ambush, or the solitary horseman's flight, with every man's hand against him, pass before us in rapid succession. A current of subtle reflection accompanies the flow of action and passion, and is never quite out of sight. Both sides of the writer's power come out well when Hermann is leaving the city of Mardeen. He is escorted by two chance companions who know nothing of his imminent danger, and whose civility is burdensome to him :—

" Like one in a dream I heard their voices, as though from a distance, talking of this and that, asking questions, giving news. Like one in a dream, too, I answered the voices; and while I did so, my own voice also sounded to me like one belonging to some one else, and, with them, to come from a distance. Yet I can even at this day remember that my replies were all steadily to the purpose. I had even coolness and reflec- tion enough at the time to wonder at my own self, divided, it seemed, into two distinct persons, one of whom was talking with and listening to my fellow-riders, the other, lost in thoughts of anxiety and pain, far sway. I might have added to these a third person namely, my own conscious and individual self, commenting on the Other two, and in- terested in, I had almost said amused by, their performance. By field and stone, over brook and causeway, we rode on. The sun, already far declined in the sky when we started from Mardeen, and latterly hidden behind the dingy cloud-piles of a gathering heat-storm, now broke suddenly out through a cleft of molten gold not far above the horizon, flooding rock and tree, bill and dale, with yellow dazzling light. It shone full in our eyes ; we could scarcely see twenty yards before or around us. Well for me that it was so. For, exactly at that moment of sun-burst, a party of seven horsemen, armed some with guns, others with spears, came towards us at scarcely bow-shot distance along another path, parallel with ours, and which for a short space opened out by a cross gully on the valley in which we were. Their faces were set

for Mardeen Whom they sought and what they purposed needed no telling, at least to me But in that deluge of un-

earthly glitter then streaming down the valley, my death-hunters had, it seemed, distinguished nothing; intent only on what they deemed before, and which was in reality already behind them, they moved rapidly onwards, and in a minute more a winding of the road had hid them from our sight, and us from theirs, behind the screen of an inter- vening rock."

Another fine passage of description, perhaps the best in the book, occurs in relating the silent march of a Bedouin party by night in the desert ; this is ascribed not only to precaution, but in some degree to unconscious sympathy with the silence of nature around :—

"Silent overhead, the bright stars, moving on, moving upwards from the east, constellation after constellation, the Twins and the Pleiads, Aideboran and Orion, the Spread and the Perching Eagle LLyra, the Balance, the once-worshipped Dog-Star, and beautiful Canopus. I look

at them till they waver before my fixed gaze till the spaces between them show preternatarally dark ; and on the horizon below a false eye-begotten shimmer gives a delusive semblance of dawn; then

vanishes Silent everywhere. A dark line stretches athwart before us ; you might take it for a ledge, a trench, a precipice, what you will. It is none of these ; it is only a broad streak of brown withered herb, drawn across the faintly gleaming flat. Far off on the dim right rises something like a black giant wall. It is not that: it is a thick-planted grove of palms ; silent they also, and motionless in the night. On the left glimmers a range of white, ghost-like shapes ; they are the rapid slopes of medulla shelving off into the plain ; no life is there silent we go on Our horses' pace never varies; no new object breaks the monotonous gloom of our narrow horizon ; the night seems as though it had no end ; we all grow drowsy, and go on as if in an evil dream."

The spell is broken in a manner not peculiar to the East, one indeed which will command the sympathy of all tobacco-consuming mankind ; to wit, by some one taking out a pipe and striking sociable fire. These extracts, which, much to our regret, space does not allow us to set forth in their proper continuity, may serve even in this mutilated form to convey such a notion of the charac- teristic merits of Mr. Palgrave's tale as will provoke the reader to a more intimate acquaintance with it. We would fain have dwelt on the exquisitely pure and tender love-scenes, and the representa- tion, in stirring contrast to these, of the nocturnal raid and the hotly contested skirmish in the desert. This last, we may say, seems to confirm on the whole the accuracy of an author now scarcely esteemed according to his deserts in a chapter which is an old favourite of ours; we mean the meeting of the Christian and the Saracen cavalier which opens Sir Walter Scott's Talisman. Moreover, the character of Moharib the Bedouin, Hermann Agha's devoted brother in counsel and in arms, is a feature in the book that cannot be passed over, though we can do no more than say it is there. The highly wrought poetical element which is so prominent in Arab life is represented first and beat by its reflec- tion, so vivid that one sees it must be faithful, in the poetical tone of the whole narrative ; but it also comes out in verses aptly in- troduced on several occasions. These are always graceful and true in feeling, they often express genuine passion, and sometimes with considerable power ; but we have come to the conclusion that it would not be fair to detach any of these lines from the context which leads up to them. And so, commending Hermann Agha to all honest lovers of romance, we dismiss it for the present from our discourse, but not from our remembrance.