RUN TO EARTH.*
Run to Earth is an extraordinary specimen of sensational fiction. The author has, if possible, excelled herself, she has beaten all her rivals, she has for ever obscured the fame of those wonderful fiction- writers, beloved of errand-boys and shop-girls, who deal in revenge and murder, jealousy and hatred, who treat the wildest and most diabolical actions as ordinary occurrences, who convert men into ghouls and women into harpies, who can transform with a stroke of the pen a beggar into a princess and an English gentleman into a Thug. If the first object of the novelist be to excite a morbid curiosity, if blood and poisoning and intrigue, the most hateful passions, the vilest actions, form the best ingredients of fiction, then it must be owned that no one has mixed them together more skilfully than Miss Braddon. Her admirers, and they are many, will assuredly not be disappointed with this fiction. We can pro- mise them a murder, a seduction, a suicide, and the conversion of a street-singer into a fashionable young lady before they have read a hundred pages of the story. A little further on they will be introduced to a surgeon known as Victor Carrington, but who is in reality an exiled French nobleman, " a creature without a conscience, without a heart," who wears a mask of metal with glass eyes, accomplishes an outrageous plot and an incredible murder in the first volume, a plot still more outrageous and a murder only possible in fiction in the second volume, and very nearly commits another murder in the third. Then the readers of this marvellous novel will be taken to a mysterious gambling house at Fulham, with a secret room in which rouge-et-noir is played. The house is kept by Madame Durski, a lonely and beautiful woman, who lures fools to their destruction, is herself a slave to opium, and yet, strange to say, is one of the most respectable people in the narrative. This lady's affianced lover accuses her of endeavouring to poison him, whereupon Madame Durski, " luckless, hopeless, heartbroken," takes an overdose of her favourite " compound," and disappears from the scene. This is but one sensational incident among many. We have a sailor accusing his honest father-in-law of murder, a husband accusing his wife of adultery, the disappearance of a baby heiress who lives in a castle and is protected by a great iron door, the achievements of a London detective, and the ignominious failures of a husband hunter. Marvellous, too, are the adventures of the heroine, who sings in low publichouses • Run to Earth. A Novel. By the Author of Lady Audley's Scent. 3 vols. London Ward, Lock, and Tyler. 1868.
at Wapping, is said to be the child of a wretch whom she knows to be a murderer, is picked out of the gutter by a baronet worth £40,000 a year, is transferred to "a thoroughly aristocratic seminary, presided over by two maiden sisters" (whose vulgarity, by the way, as described in the novel, is wholly out of accordance with the position they occupy), marries the baronet, is made a widow in a few weeks through Carrington's devices, devotes her- self to purposes of revenge, and discovers at last that she is the stolen child of a lady of title and distantly connected with her husband's family.
We have but glanced at some of the more prominent incidents of the novel, which the author is no doubt justified in calling " a sensational story, pure and simple." She quotes also an observa- tion made by "one of the most accomplished reviewers of the day" (Mr. Lewes, we believe), to the effect that in criticizing stories there should be some discrimination of the kind of interest attempted, and that the critic should not demand from the writer qualities incompatible with or utterly disregarded by his method. The interest aimed at in Run to Earth is simply sensational, and we are ready to grant that in that aim the author has been successful. She has made up a tale utterly without probability, without characterization, without thought, without humour, pathos, or poetry, without one of the charms, in short, which delight us in the great masters of fiction, a tale which has no use in the world beyond that of stimulating an unwholesome curiosity, and supplying fitting aliment to a vulgar sort of mental dissipation. This is the kind of success achieved by the writers of sensational fiction, and the same kind of distinction may be justly awarded to the novel before us. It fulfils its purpose, but the critic may be permitted to ask whether such a purpose is worth fulfilling ?
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