BOOKS.
THE GOLDSWORTHY FAMILY.* THE great charm of Mr. Gilbert's books will probably be found in the extraordinary contrast they present to the ruling school of modem novelists. It is not, as some of the many encomiasts whom his publisher extracts at the end of these volumes in praise of his last work, " Shirley Hall Asylum," intimate, that Mr. Gilbert is more of a realist than the masters of the prevailing school of fiction, for both the taste and the art of the day are essentially realist, and who, indeed, could be more absolutely real- ist in art than either Thackeray or Mr. Trollope ? The great critic who leads off the long list of favourable (but not unduly favour- able) notices of the stories of monomania, says very unfortunately, and quite missing his aim, "the discovery of a modern story where some attempt has been made to study truthfulness and nature, is a surprise as great as Crusoe's footprint in the sand," —a criticism which would, we submit, be truer if the word " not " were inserted in the sentence, so that it should read
" where some attempt has not been made to study truthfulness and nature." The fact is that almost all the modern novelistso however poor, make the attempt nowadays,—the worst trash of' the circulating libraries being generally made up of vulgar unsuccessful attempts to photograph the naked realities of vulgar life, and failing only from the dull senses and bad taste of the writers. Nor can it be said, as we have already remarked, that where our• modern novelists are great at all, they are not great especially in this way. Thackerary gained his great name as a satirist entirely from the terrible realism with which he probed the hideous sores of aristocratic meanness and the universal trickeries of self- love. Mr. Trollope paints the surface of society with a light and graceful touch, it is true, but a minuter realist, in his own subject- matter, never took upon himself to detail the encounter of rival wits. It is the same with the women novelists. If the author of the "Mill on the Floss" is not a realist to the uttermost where shall we find one ? Miss Yonge, clever as she is, wearies and oppresses us with the minute and petty realism of her church and schoolroom incident. Mrs. Gaskell's chef d'oeuvre " Cranford," is a piece of unrivalled detail, and so we might go on for another half-hour. No criticism could be more utterly wide of the mark than to say that Mr. Gilbert differs from the other successful novelists of the present day by a greater study of " truthfulness and nature."
But he does no doubt stand very widely apart from the suc- cessful novelists of the day,—much farther than almost any of them stand from each other,—reminding us strongly, as many critics have observed, of the school of De Foe, and we may add also of Crabbe. But certainly it is not in superior realism that his unique power consists. He is far less attracted by mere reality, as such, than many of the greater writers of modern fiction. He has little interest, if any, in the delineation of mere character, and however successfully he may manage to engrave the impression of a man or woman upon us, it never seems that a portrait has been painted, or even considered, but only that a par- ticular line of idea or purpose having suggested itself to the author, • The Goldsworthy Fouts,; or, the Country Attorney. By William Gilbert, author of t',Flitirlay Hall Asylum." Two role. Loudon: William Freeman.
he has tracked it to earth with the patient unerring tenacity of a slow-hound. The vice-like imaginative grip which he fastens upon his main conceptions admits of none of that freedom and range of drawing to which our modern masters of fiction hive accustomed us. Mr. Gilbert does not paint society and manners ; he gets on the track of an individual purpose or passion, and runs it down without ever caring to give a more general view of the character he is dealing with than is involved in this detective ardour in pursuing its winding course from its source to its issues. What gives Mr. Gilbert so much the air of Crabbe and of De Foe is a certain preference he has for earthiness in the subject-matter of his art. Instead of selecting the wider-travelling moods of mind, the glancing and allusive thought of the modern culture, to work in, he prefers to follow the track of a practical pur- pose or plot, with his nose, as it were, close to the earth, 'and never to rise above the level of those heavy clays where the scent lies thickest. The modern style or manner is elastic, and fetches its analogies and its associations from afar ; - the style of Defoe and Crabbe was one of inelastic, sodden effort, one that seems to reflect the painstaking fidelity of a hand-to-mouth life weighed down by heavy loads of small care. Defoe, whether he draws the career of a sailor or a thief, always gives the samo sense of utter absorption in the individual transactions in which he engages them. If Colonel Jack steals a purse we have the exact value of the money and even the sort of coins of which it is made up carefully noted, and the expenditure totted up penny by penny. Even Robinson Crusoe is a slow oppressed sort of man, who toils away at making his desert island habitable in an atmo- sphere of care as minute and petty as if he were trying to sup- port a large family of children in an agricultural county. Mr. Gilbert is not quite so limited to this particular kind of care-worn, industrial imagination as Defoe, though of course it is not likely that where he does strongly resemble Defoehe will equal that great genius in fertility and power; but he belongs notably to that school. His imagination seems, like a slow oven, to warm up for a practical end, and to keep all its heat exclusively for that end,—the thorough baking of a particular enterprise and purpose. Nothing is too minute for him which bears on the mode in which that one purpose or enterprise carves out its own channel, the obstacles it meets with, the minute difficulties which fret and turn it aside, every petty feature in the mental bed it forms for itself as it cuts deeper and deeper into the substance of the mind, —a!f interest him, and therefore the reader, intensely. This re- markable power no doubt it is which suggested to him to write stories of monomania,—but it is clear from this book that in the tales of •' Shirley Hall Asylum" he had not adequate space and amplitude of opportunity for that minute detail, that slow effectiveness in the repetition of small strokes all of the same kind, and tending to deepen one and the same effect, for which mainly his genius qualifies him. If" Shirley Hall Asylum" were, as we thought it, a remarkable book, the Goldsworthy Family is much more so, and even there you do not feel the full effect of Mr. Gilbert's method till you are well into the second volume. Then, as the passion of craft he is painting cuts deeper and deeper into the character, and encroaches so match on its general power as almost to shatter its balance, we feel we are dealing with a real work of genius.
The only artistic objection we hrre to make to the book is that its hero, Mr. Goldsworthy, is too bad and grasping a man for the trusted solicitor of a country town. The man who even from the first would intentionally recommend bad securities to his clients for purposes of his own gain would never have held the positions of trust which opened the way for his iniquities. There is a real discrepancy between the respect- able position of Mr. Goldsworthy and the unscrupulousness of his dealings with the property of others. But when this diffi- culty is once confessed and surmounted by the reader, we know of few more striking pictures than that of the hold acquired by his successful fraud over Mr. Goldsworthy's imagination, the gradual absorption of all his life and nervous power into the same current of purpose, the gradual break-down of that nervous power owing only to its excessive concentration, and• the horror
which the first premonitory signs of that break-down excite in the mind of the plotter. The execution of the book is eo full and minute that it is impossible within any available limits to give a fair conception of its force. A hundred pages are spent in de- tailing the exact circumstances of the first approach of paralysis,
in illustrating the high nervous irritability of the patient, the dread with which the first failure of memory fills him, and the mode in which that dread increases the danger and hastens its approach,—and yet so far from being tedious, no part of the book is so profoundly interesting. Working, as we have said Mr.
• Gilbert prefers to do, in clay rather than in marble, the triumph appears to be so much the greater when the clay is made to ex- press a tragic situation with as much power as the marble ;—the coarseness of the material then becomes itself a secret of art ; the patty minutiae of corporeal life amidst which Mr. Goldsworthy moves so restlessly, striving to recover the coolness and com- posure of nerve which the highly-strung excitement of his own plots has driven away from him, heighten tenfold the moral effect of the Nemesis which threatens him; and, on the whole, we close the book with the feeling that a more striking picture of the curse which a man sows and reaps for himself was never painted than in the earthy solitude of the miserable old intriguer's soul —alone with his fraudulent and fruitless triumphs—when para- lysis has utterly cut off from bim every power of signifying his wishes to the world, but not yet deadened the expression of his piercing eye. A completer "poetic justice," orrather, we should say, divine retribution, and yet one more strictly fulfilling the simplest earthly laws of cause and effect, has never been invented by a novelist for the denouement of his plot. It satisfies the conscience of the reader, and yet is the natural issue and end of the whole story. The fraud of the hero is one long tension, and when it achieves its last success, the string cracks. No one could have been satisfied either without the success or the result of the sac- MSS.
We have said that Mr. Gilbert's genius is not for direct character-drawing, but rather for drawing single, deeply penetrat- ing currents of action and motive, which carve out a deep bed for themselves in the character, and grow by small accretions of tri- butary streams from day to day. There is, however, one cha- racter in this tale that is drawn with a light touch and a dry humour scarcely in the manner of the rest of the book. Miss Agnes Fearon, the governess, with her innocent plots against the curate's heart, their sublime discomfiture and yet complete success, is a delightful foil to the dark deep treachery of the country attorney. Nothing in its way can be better than the scene in which, having arranged to extract a declaration from the curate by the aid of a feigned headache, which should loin g him to see her lying on the safe in a delicately "got-up" white dress with pale blue sash, she is actually surprised in a dirty cottage with her dress taken up around her, her petticoats consequently exposed, with a naked little boy on her knees whom she is soap- ing well for ringworm, the mother being in bed at her side. The curate's spiritual vision, we suppose, sees more perfectly the exquisite getting-up of that white dress which needs no washtub through this prosaic aspect of Miss Fearon than it would have done through the other,—at all events it brings him to the point. The Goldsworthy Family is a really masterly novel, and in a school of art so long neglected, that we expect it will find no little favour with the English public.
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