SEBASTIAN STROME.*

Tuts is a story marked by very irregular power, but very powerfult throughout. Like the features of its hero, it is singularly uneven,. and at times out of keeping with itself. Mr. Hawthorne seems to have cared little to give anything like harmony to the different parts, so long as the whole produced the effect he intended ; while the last fragment of the story must have been rather annexed) to it by a process of sheer addition, than have formed part of the original conception. There are faults, too, in the local colour. Mr. Hawthorne is not even yet so familiar with English life as to understand all the differences of association, between "the vicar" and "the minister," between a " town- house " and a "city mansion ; " nor can he be right, we- imagine, in supposing that any amount of genuine diplomatic- work was done before Sebastopol, still less, so much as in th&closing scenes of this novel he imagines to have been done. there for many months together. The negotiations for peace, so far as they took place at all during the war, took place at Vienna, or Paris, or London, or St. Petersburg, or wherever. the civil authorities of the contending parties were. The Generals in, the field were none of them of the rank of statesmen, nor do. we remember that any one of the Sovereigns, or even of the. chiefs of the Foreign Offices, was present, unless it were for the briefest possible visit, at the head-quarters of any one of the' armies.

All such errors in local colour as these, however, are of slight importance. But the unmistakable, and indeed con- siderable genius of this rather powerful story, cannot altogether. blind us to more serious signs of haste and carelessness in the blending of its elements. The hero, Sebastian Strome, is above everything a man in whom good and evil contend fiercely for the mastery. He is what Mr. Hawthorne very forcibly de- scribes the expression of his face, namely, "intelligent, witty,. bold, sarcastic, and inscrutable." Nevertheless, his father,. who has the curious spiritual insight of perfect unworldliness,. supposes him to have grown up into a faith and life as lofty and serene as his own ; while even his mother, who, with more of human shrewdness, must have had the opportunity of studying. the unscrupulous ambition and audacity of the man in all the' stages of boyish immaturity, appears to be almost equally un- aware of the pent-up forces that are within him. Hence we arc conscious of no little feeling of unreality upon the first in- troduction of Sebastian to the reader, after we have heard

his parents talk about him. And there is a defect of the. same kind in Sebastian's relation to the heroine, Mary Dene. He is meant to have loved her from a boy, to have.

resolved not to declare it, and not to think of marriage ; to have' led into evil a poor girl who had been Mary Dene's lady's-maid,.

in the sinister craft of his unreal Jesuitism ; then, even while he' was living in secret with this poor thing, who loved him heartily,. to have offered to Mary Done from worldly views, and not be- cause of his love for her, and finally to have treated her very Coldly.

when they were engaged. Then comes the crisis of the story.. His sin comes out, and his remorse begins to prey upon him.

Mary Done, who is told all,—except that he has always really. loved her,— offers still to marry him, and to be a mother to his motherless child ; but he now rejects her, not only coldly, but declaring that he has never loved her, and without any expression of gratitude. When she, in her turn, has married one quite. unworthy of her, Sebastian and she meet again, and then be tries to reawaken in her heart the passion she has now no right to give. Altogether, he behaves towards Mary Done not only as badly as it is possible for a man to behave to a woman, but sometimes with a worldly calculation, and almost always with' an arbitrary caprice, quite inconsistent with the deep, under- lying passion for her we arc asked to believe in, until the turn. for the better in his own nature comes, and with it comes a

• Sebastian Strome. A Novel. In 3 vols. By Julian Hawthorne. London: Richard Bentley and Bone.

genuine tenderness for her. Now we find it impossible to con- ceive that even in the meantime a man of Sebastian's haughty and strongly moulded nature should have been willing to treat a woman whom he at bottom passionately loved, with so much com- plexity of meanness. He might, indeed, have resolved against marrying her, and against marriage altogether ; but while he was seducing her ladysmaid, and playing the hypocrite in study- ing for the Church, he would, at least, never have offered to her for her fortune and not for herself, while perfectly conscious how mean he woulcd, be in her eyes, if she could but see him as be was. Again, when lie, stood revealed to her in all his evil, he might, in- deed, in his pride, have rejected her generous self-sacrifice, and have tried to make her believe that he had never loved her,—if only to comfort himself with the feeling that there was strength left in him that would compare with hers. But having once lost her, even his pride would hardly have allowed him to attempt to

drag her down into his own degradation, when he had nothing in the world to offer her but a life of lawless love. On the whole, Sebastian Strome is made, both in his

evil and his subsequent good, altogether too much a creature of arbitrary caprice. He alters in the most sudden way, as if his character were a mere product of his will, instead of being, in great measure, independent of that will, and this even in the

finest parts of this powerful story. Thus, there runs through Sebastian Strome a vein of unreality, due not merely to the

strange want of mutual understanding between some of the different characters of the tale, but to the irregular and hardly intelligible changes in the predominant features of the principal character portrayed.

And yet, find what fault with the story we may, and it is un- questionably a story of very fitful and uneven power, there is a force of passion and genius in the book which it is impossible to ignore. The irregularity of Sebastian's features is not nearly

so great as the irregularity in Sebastian's character. But this, though it amounts sometimes almost to a solution of con- tinuity, is so finely contrasted with the deep spiritual humility of his father, and the keen sweetness of his mother's faith aud resignation, that one cannot wholly reject the hypothesis that this strange being may have been a sort of sinister Lucifer, born to two such saints for the very purpose of being subdued to a humbler and purer spirit by the spell they cast upon him. And it is impossible to deny that the spiritual crisis of the book, the story of Sebastian's struggle and new birth to a higher life, is told with wonderful force aud vividuess,—a force and vivid- ness of which we cannot here give more than the most passing glimpse. Here is the report of a missionary sermon, as it is Conveyed to Sebastian Strome by his former enemy and present Companion, the poor fellow who had honestly loved the woman Sebastian had ruined :—

" Strome made no direct rejoinder ; but presently he said, 'Sup- pose we try going to church, some day, with the other folks P'— ' Takin' the little kid along too, in course 'r—' Certainly.'—' Well, I'm game for it, if you arc; 114 there any church in pertiokler you want to go to P'—' I don't know of any.'—, If your father was alive now !— but it ain't every one can do the trick the way he could. If you'd been his kind, sir, we'd not 'a' needed to go 'untin' after a church,

would we 1' But talkin' o' that, there was a chap what was on a plumbin' job alongith last t

w--- me - week, and he was tellin"bout one o' those 'ere missionary coves, what spouted every Sunday over there nigh to Seven Dials. And ho was that took with it, this chap was, that he'd got religion, and knocked off damnin' and drinkin', and carried round a calf-skin in his breeches' pocket, not to take his heath on, d'yor see, but to road in, like it was the P'liee News, or a story-book.'—' What was the missionary's name r —` Well, I dunno what his name was ; and he wa'n't ono o' them Chureh of England Coves; he was on the loose, that's to say ; Dissenters they calls 'em. He wa'n't poor, neither ; got lots o' tin, 'this-pal 0, mine said, and did his preachin' just cos he liked it, and wanted to do good to other chaps. It seemed to be a rum thing, take it all round. And he was a rum-lookin' one, tide missionary was—short and stumpy like, with specs ; and as fur his voice—well ! that was a little bit the queerest voice ever 1 heerd. But no matter ! when he got to goin', he could

just put things so as it done Yer good But look here, Prout ! Then you went to hear him yourself Well, so I did, Mr. Strome,

and that's the truth ; though it slipped out accidental. I hadn't meant to lot on about it to you.'—' Why not r Oh, well, I know'd you wa'n't fond o' religion ; and you beitt' an eddicatod man, in course would know what was what better nor me.'—' You never made a greater mistake ! And so all that talk of yours about not going to any church, and taking the baby as your re' ligion, that was all humbug, and intended to draw me out—oh, Master Prout P I didn't know you wore BO deep. You thought you'd get religion, and leave me out in the cold l'—' Not a bit of it, sir—you rest easy. I had a bit of eneosity, that's all. Religion hadn't never seemed to me much good, 'copt a chap had money and swell togs. Them par- sons al'ays come down 'ot on priggin' and gottin' tight, and that : but the swells don't 'ave no call to do them things, only gettin' tight, and they can do that at 'ome on the quiet. And I'd thought the most of religion was to believe things a chap couldn't understand ; but this missionary cove, he said it warn't so ' • and he made it clear why not, too.'—' How did he do that r —' I denim as I can put it plain, as he did : but he reads something out o' the Bible, and then ho pulls off his specs, and says he, "Folks used to think, in the old times, that the sun rose and set, and the earth stood still, and that the sun made the day and night come just accordin' as he had a mind to; and leave this place light and that place dark, or t'other way, whichever he took a fancy. And sometimes he'd hide 'imself bo'ind the clouds, and not come out all day long; whilst in another place he'd be shinite down red-hot out of a clear sky. Well," says he, "that didn't seem the square thing ; it warn't right the sun should favour erre spot more'n another, and folks took to findin' fault, eoz he didn't give 'em all an eq'al chance, when one 'ad mebbe as good a right to it, as another. Well, so it went on, till one day a chap diskivered that the sun didn't move at all, but it was the earth turned itself away from him' and made its own darkness ; and . as fur the clouds, they was made by the earth too ; so the sun was a.shinin' all the time, and lettin' down light and 'eat the best he know'd how, and it warn't his fault if the earth didn't get the good of it. Well now," says he, "that's the way it is with God and man. God's the sun, and man he's the earth; and God keeps on loving and enlighteuin' every man that'll turn towards Him and let himself be- loved and enlightened ; but the mischief is, we turn ourselves away, and then cries out that God don't love us. We puts all our-faults on 13bn—that's what it is," this cove says. And says he, "I'll tell you- one thing you may learn from that. It ain't no use your sittin' stilt in your house and puttin' up the shutters and sayin' you believe the sun shines, and that you've no doubt he'll cocci and find you out and' shine on you. What you've got to do is to got up and open the winder and stir about, and do your host to keep where his light can get at you. And if any chap tells you not to open your shutters, cor. that would show a lack of faith, and a doubt that the sun could get at you, shutters or none—if a chap tolls you that, do you toll him to get thee behind me, Satan ! If you want the sun, you've got to open your shutters for yourself, The power to do that, or to keep'em shut., is Free Will," says he. "And don't you be afraid of interferin' with the merit of Christ. The merit of Christ is, not to get at you throtigh the closed shutters, but to put it into your head to want to- open' em ; and if you don't do it, so much the worse for you," says he. And he said a deal more, too ; but that's about all that sticks by me."

I think we'll go and boar that fellow,' said Sebastian, after a pause.

To-morrow is Sunday, and the baby's birthday too—counting by months, that is to say. We'll go in the morning, and after the ser- mon, he shall baptise her. It can't do any harm, and who knows but it may do some good F 1 rather like that idea about the shutters.'"

Hardly less powerful, and much more consistent with itself than the picture of Sebastian Strome, is the picture of Selim Fawley, his rival and antagonist. A more unpleasant, but at the same- time more vigorous—we do not say life-like —picture, than that of this plausible, smooth, and pliant Jew when attacked by epilepsy, and cowed by the fear of losing all control of his own mind, has seldom been painted. We do not regard it as really life- like, for there is too little of human nature in it, for that. But if not life-like, no one can deny the almost cruel force of the de- scription of smooth, complaisant, easy-going, good-humoured craft, and of the sudden pit of bottomless cowardice and impot- ence which opens beneath it, and into which whatever there is of Selim vanishes away before the reader's eyes. Selim Fawley is hardly a fair specimen of human nature, but as an ideal picture of what Mr. Carlyle would call the potency of human plausibility and falsehood, as it sinks into the abyss of its own unfathomable cowardice and cunning for want of anything like a solid basis of character at all, we have seldom met with anything more impressive.

We should give a very imperfect idea of this story if we did not tell our readers that evil and malign as are some of the scenes and some of the characters it depicts, the. moral background is one of most true and most impressive' spiritual character and faith. It is not easy to conceive any sketches finer and more subtly drawn than those of Mr. and Mrs, Strome, and. of Sebastian's friend Smillet,—the preacher of the sermon roughly reported in the extract we have given,

above. These three are not common pictures. They are painted' without the smallest straining after effect, but with the vivid- ness of real genius ; and this it is which makes a tale of very irregular power, and one composed of very dark and sometimes, indeed, revolting elements, produce on the whole a single effect on the mind—the effect of the delicate golden sunset seen after a combination of earthquake, dust-storm, and hurricane has passed., in succession over the laud.