"PROBATION." *
Jr is not often that novelists give the cotton-mills a turn. Since Mary Barton, we do not remember any good novel in which the hands" have played the parts of heroes and heroines. But Mrs. Gaskell's mantle has fallen on the authoress of The First Violin, and very worthily indeed does she wear it. She feels thatthe giant mills, the teeming population, and the special characteristics of what are called "the manufacturing dis- tricts "—characteristics of a little nation within a nation, cut off from the refinements and gentler influences of a mixture of .classes—have a romantic character of their own, to the influence of which, the few rich and educated, scattered very thinly amongst them, are, by reason of their very fewness, peculiarly sensitive. It would be difficult to say whether the thoughtful mill-hand or the solitary gentleman feels with the more keen depression the absence of all the beauty of natural and social life,—the one, in the enforced society of rade and coarse-minded fellow-workers ; the other, in the enforced exclusion from any society whatever ; but to each, the spiritual solitude is the same, the sense of which feeds the melancholy which is a marked characteristic of the more thoughtful, as well as of the older denizens of this murky and unbeantiful, but serious and impressive land. Where the ameliorating influ- ence of the cultivated classes is most completely withdrawn—as it is when we get farthest from the metropolis of this ponderous district—we come instead, thank God, to another of his wonderful agencies for humanising and softening the hard will that self- interest without self-surrender engenders,—that grows out of an independent spirit unpruned by mental cultivation and nn- ennobled by any higher ideal than that of temporal comforts,— we reach the country. For the mills, as you stretch away from Manchester to the north and east, penetrate into the moun- tainous backbone of England, and in old times before steam, sought the numerous " becks " that come down from the moors 'of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and break up the lower lands into innumerable glens and valleys of still considerable beauty.
• Probalion, In 3 vols. By the Author of The First Violin." London: Illobard Bentley and Son. There are points where your feet stand upon ground made ugly and deformed in the service of the mills, and from which your
eyes can discern nothing but a vast plain, filled with towering masses or long lines of unlovely masonry, and canopied by an unbroken cloud of thick darkness, recruited by innumerable columns of still denser blackness; and yet on turning, you shall behold nothing of all this, except a thinner cloud; but instead the moors stretching away, hill beyond hill, as they rise to the dis- tant mountains, and in the autumn the tint of the glorious heather that clothes them in royal purple. And the mill-hands love
the heather and the hills ; and the sight of them, and the long- ing for them, and the hope to go there some day, supply the brighter ideal which they need to sustain them in the close room and the dull monotony of their daily life. Our authoress has wisely chosen a scene of this sort ; her town rims up and down the steep hill-sides, its streets mount the courses of the becks, and a little river—dirty, of course, like the children that paddle in its waters, but also, Ince them, noisy and cheerful— runs through its centre and past its single ornament—a beautiful town-hall, with a lofty, tapering spire. Moreover, the authoress has made the human as well as the natural elements of her story pleasant, and enlivened the some- what grave and sombre draniati.9 personce that we might have
expected, by the introduction of the half-dozen gentlemen and ladies who may be found amongst as many thousands of their humbler fellow-creatures. Nevertheless, our affections are early secured by Myles and Molly, and they never relinquish their hold, except to admit their master, Mr. Mallory, to a share in them.
Altogether, Probation is the most interesting novel we have read for some time, and we can give no better proof of this
than the paucity of our critical notes, conspicuous by their absence; for criticism is forgotten when the interest is real and sustained, and when the style and sentiments do not inter- rupt, by arousing a spirit of antagonism. We closed the book with very real regret, and a feeling of the truest admiration for the power which directed and the spirit which inspired the writer; and with determination, more- over, to make the acquaintance of her other stories. The sym- pathy with all classes, and with any indication they show of right feeling, is wide and impartial ; and yet there is no agreement with the ignorant leveller of ranks, nor with the exclusive spirit of the fastidious aristocrat. The author can see from the point of view of each, but is, as a true woman should be, much more on the side of the proud and independent workman, who, in his ignorance, thinks all the leisured class his enemy, than on that of the refined and cultivated woman, who shirks the duty of learning to know her "hands," and so remains in the belief that they are a vulgar and rebellious crew, whom it is necessary to avoid individually, and repress collectively. And she is equally appreciative of the eager, wealthy girl, who, in impatience of the useless idleness of her class, becomes a hot defender of women's rights, as of the clever and cultivated man who gets her to work, instead of raving; and finally modifies her opinions and subdues her antagonism, by the power of his love.
Myles Heywood is the hot Radical who reads—as a friend of the present writer's once confessed to reading—to have his own views confirmed ; and who hates, without seeing him, the young mill-owner who is his master, and who has not yet come into residence from his University and his foreign travels Mr. Mallory conquers him, as he conquered the imperious young beauty who consented to be his wife, by the patient love which saw the goodness beneath the prejudices, and waited till the simple tools of common-sense and a sense of justice had had time to do their work. As we have said Myles and Molly Heywood are our favourites; the simplicity and independence of their northern character and manners are very captivating, and their sorrows and courage enlist our sympathies, while their tenderness and gentleness to each other and to their sick brother win our hearts. The -time chosen for the story is partly during the distress of 1862, and the difference in the views taken by the stern, proud brother and the sister—more simple, and faithful, and practical—as to the rightness of accepting relief is admirably described:—
" Bat you do not mean that he has forbidden yon—that he pre- vents—it is No !' said Mary, suddenly. Our Myles is not one of that sort, I can tell you, Mr. Mallory. He won't take a penny himself—why, I don't know. And I saw as it would go near to break his heart to see me and yen lad eating another man's bread, and him standing by idle. But he said to me, " Thou'll do what thon's a mind to, Molly ; it's a great distress, and we m—mini be g—great to meet it." Oh ! it were same as if he'd said, "There's nowt for't but to cut off my right hand; give me th' chopper, and let me do it !"—that it were !' She sobbed vehemently once or twice, and Sebastian read the passionate love and devotion she felt for that brother, whom, he began to think, he never could conquer. 'Au! that is more like him !' he said, warmly. I thought I was mistaken. And will nothing persuade you to accept this help ? It is such a small thing to refuse ; and I do not think it right in you to refuse it. You must think of this brother of yours. He cannot stand the hard- ships of this time as Myles, and even you, can ; and—'—' You are very good—reet-down kind, you are ?' said Mary, looking at him with gratitude. I'll say this. We'll hold out as long as we can. We mun do that, if we want to think well of ourselves. But I'll come to you when it gets too much. You're reet ; I can't see nowt to be ashamed of in it.'—' You promise ?'—' Ay, I promise.'"
Nor can anything be more touching, or true to life, than the tenderness and self-sacrifice of the brother when he consents to let Molly apply, and the utter wretchedness which he exper- iences when, at last, starvation itself forces him also to yield. We heartily wish we could give all the scenes at Myles's home, —his sharing his scanty meals with a neighbour's starving little girl; his nursing and reading to his dying brother ; the exquisite scenes between Molly and her lover ; the tea-drinking, when the young lady whom Myles secretly worships, calls to see what has become of him. But Mr. Mallory, in his way, is as well drawn as Myles. His eager and undisguised desire that his people shall love him, as well as obey him ; his chagrin and perplexity when he cannot subdue Myles's pre- judiced and obstinate aversion ; the patient cheerfulness with which he tries plan after plan to defeat him, and the magna- nimity of his final triumph ; his banter with Helena—the zealous young beauty, the defender of her sex—and his love for his young German ward, are all equally admirable. He is not absolutely perfect, however, for he fails unmistakably— but this is natural, too—in respect to his very trying, very irritating mother, who insults his people and his friends with her supercilious pride. Helena, again, and her simple mother, so out of her element amidst the grandeur and pomp of recently acquired wealth ; and Hugo, the young German musician, with his boyish enthusiasm, his devotion to his generous guardian, and his admiration of the young ladies who notice him kindly, are all admirably drawn pictures.
We have left Adrienne, the heroine proper, to the last ; not because we like her either the most or the least, but because our feeling about her is more vague. Nothing can be inure natural and fascinating than her first interview with Mr. Mallory, who is in love with her, on meeting after a long interval ; when the spell of the old, sweet days at Wets- lay, when the romance of their sympathy over Goethe's Lotte had been upon them, returned, and Adrienne half thought that she was in love with Mallory still. There is no mistake in Mallory's mind, and he had just been rehearsing those charmed days to the romantic Hugo, as he caught, again, the first sight of the long-lost Adrienne. And the first scene with her real love, Myles, is equally well done, if the subject is less fascinating ; but the scenes in which she in- structs and argues with Myles, and rallies him on his crude political and social theories—though quite as natural to a girl who feels the full advantage of her superior knowledge and edu- cation, and of the opportunities which travel and intercourse have given her for thought and experience—are not so attrac- tive; she is somewhat dictatorial and didactic. But we are becoming so ourselves, and will refrain ; and recommend our readers, instead, to form their own judgment of Adrienne, and every one else in this delightful novel. We cannot forbear from telling that poor Myles's long probation is rewarded at last; nor can we withhold an appropriate extract to close with, taken from the culminating hour of his grief :—
" It was a long and toilsome road that led from the town of Thans- hope, through some outlying suburbs, to a large manufacturing village, called Hamerton, which lay on the very skirts of Yorkshire, closed in on all sides by the great ridges of Blackrigg, and some neighbour- ing wild and desolate moors. He took the road along which Hugo and Sebastian had once driven, and the sun had set as he turned his face towards the hills with that strange sensation of oppressive apathy and indifference ever at his heart. The night was descending; the 'stars rushed out,' as he at length gained the complete solitude of the moors, and, turning aside from the road, plunged half knee-deep into the thick heather and ling, which was the only vegetation about there. He walked, for a very short time as it seemed to him—really, for hours—battling with the horrible sensations of a great, black, yawning, hideous blank, a huge emptiness, an ewiges Nichts, which completely overpowered him. He was unconscious how far he had gone, or where he was, or that he was even weary, when suddenly he found himself stumbling over the knolls of heather,
and looking up, found that it was dark. The summer night had closed in, and he, for aught he knew, might be twenty miles away, or thirty, from Thanshope. He thought he would sit down and rest a little, so he sank down upon the friendly heather, and found that it formed a soft and yielding bed, and that the air which played around his head and face was cool, and pure, and sweet. For a moment, he found a blessed sensation of rest and relief, and then all things seemed softly to swim and fade around him ; with sweeping wing, sleep came upon him, and laid her finger upon his eyelids, and bade the weary brain rest. He sank gradually down in the hollow of the heather, and a deep, dreamless slumber overcame him, and saved him. Never had sleep been a more beneficent visitant ; never had kindly nature taken to her soft arms a more weary, heart-sick child of hers, than she did that summer night, when she offered to Myles- Heywood rest upon her own broad bosom."
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