CASIMIR MAREMMA.

WE think, on the whole, that this is the ablest work we have had from the pen of the Author of Friends in Council since he

delighted literary epicures with that little volume. The story, as a story, has more life and movement in it, is less a mere peg on which to hang a political or social idea, than previous experience had given us any right to expect. It is true we are never left for a moment to doubt that the story is subordinated to the main object of the book, which is to propound an elaborate and carefully thought-out scheme of emigration ; but even then a free play of thought around that subject involves human interests, the calling-up before the eye and ear of the mind of domestic dramas, turned for the moment—sometimes for far longer than a moment — into 'tragedies ; and so it happens that when Sir Arthur Helps chooses emigration for his subject, he finds no difficulty in crowding his canvas with lifelike figures, instead of skeletons somewhat coldly draped with the insubstantial fabric of ideas. Of course the story commences with a conversation between the "Friends," who by this time are so well known to us, and equally, of course, that conversation is interesting for the amount of valuable suggestion and reflection contained in it ; though there is one point in which we think the author of Friends in Council fails signally, and that is in badinage. Why he ever attempts to wield a weapon so little suited to his genius passes our imagination. Lady Ellesmere is simply in- tolerable to us ; she is always brought in while we are listening to something of which we want to hear further, after this sort,—

" Yes, Leonard, do speak up for us, and show that we are not the wretches that this misanthrope would make us out to be. It is very mean and contemptible of him to say. as he always does, 'present com- pany excepted.' And my sister, too, who always thinks of what he likes for dinner, and studies him more than anybody else You need not be afraid, John : a bull in a china shop would be a much more reasonable, manageable, and harmless animal, than such a man as you in a nursery. We can manage the State, and we can manage the nursery, far better than you rude men. We are like elephants: we can bring under discipline the fiercest beasts of the forest, and we can pick

up a feather or a pin I knew this was coming. I wonder that John has been twenty-four hours in the house without telling the story he is now going to tell you. If he had not made an occasion for tolling it. I should ; for I have found out that it is one of the first duties of wives to introduce the good stories of their husbands, however tired they may be of them. This one is something against myself, and there- fore John has an especial pleasure in telling it." •

This is, of course, intended to be very piquant and pleasant, but in its transmission from the author's mind to ours it has somehow lost its flavour. Attention to the graver realities of life is not wont to kill the sense of humour in a strong mind. And our author could hardly have to draw on his imagination for happier illustrations of light conversational fencing than he has given us here. There is, however, no doubt, that the gravity of his subject is always present to his mind, as he tells us, in the person of Mr. Milverton,—

"I should never have written one line—to tell the truth, I do not care much for more literature, I mean for success in it—if I had not had some practical object in view. Something strikes me as a great evil, or as a sufficient remedy for some evil, and I must put that something forward. I choose the method of doing this which appears to me most likely to gain the greatest number of hearers, or readers."

These words are only a prelude to a very clever disquisition on the really great amount of intelligence everywhere diffused amongst" the people." One instance we take to be admirably true. Mr. Milvertou says :—" The truth is, we are much more

equal in intelligence than is generally supposed. We bother uneducated men with hard words and allusive statements, and then wonder they do not understand us." We believe this to be at the root of a very common error. The fact is, many men have arrived at a point in knowledge where they rather indistinctly re- member the first processes by which that point was attained, and in giving out the results they have attained, mistake on the part of their audience lack of information for lack of comprehension. Mr. Milverton very justly brings forward Tyndall and Huxley as specially avoiding mistakes of this nature, and being rewarded accordingly. But when be adds, "As for poets, I think it monstrous on their part if they cannot make their noblest ideas, which must be drawn from the commonest relations of life, intelligible to the meanest capacity," we see the hit at Mr. Browning, but think the author overshoots his mark. He has not talked of "meanest capacities" with reference to the audiences of Tyndall or Huxley, but of wide capacities

Casimir ifaremma. By the Author of "Friends in Council," "Bealmah," de. London: Bell and Daldy. 1873.

Jacking information. The meanest capacities will certainly not understand Professor Tyndall any better than Mr. Browning : but remembering that it is often with the complex as well as common relations of life the poet is called to deal, we dare to say that an intelligent artisan, to whom reading may be in itself an effort, and who is compelled by that apparent drawback to read

Browning very slowly, will probably understand him better than many men of culture, the one condition wanting in either case being not cultivation, but patience (often on the side of the un- cultivated), and a corresponding thought waiting to be made

articulate. But we have lingered too long over the prelude to the story before us, which turns principally on the necessity for an extensive scheme of emigration as the real remedy for the greatest evils existing amongst us, and since it is scarcely possible for any one to come into very close contact with the squalor, poverty, and misery which result from overcrowding in our large towns without being tempted to that conclusion, we may be sure so able an author makes out a pretty fair case for his project. His hero, Casimir Maremma, the son of Count Marennua, was born "in one of those provinces in the East which may be considered debateable land." His nationality, consequently, is not very distinct. His mother, an Englishwoman, died when Casimir was only ten, and after her death his father never quitted his estate, that is, not till years after our tale commences. Casimir's boy- hood having been passed in the closest intimacy with his father and tutor, men whose days were mostly occupied with dreamy studies, he had early formed his own conclusions on many sub- jects which do not often materially trouble the brains of young men of fortune under five-and-twenty. The result of his medi- tations landed him in England, where for a time he lived "a dual life," part of his time being passed in the highest circles of London life, to which be belonged of right as the representative of an old and honourable name, and as the cousin, on his mother's side, of the Earl of Lochawe, a leading statesman. The other half of his days he was a journeyman turner in an upper room of an overcrowded house in one of the meanest suburbs of London, in which locality he earned for himself the sobriquet of "Gentle- man George." But it is not our intention to go much into the details of the story. It will suffice to observe that those who read the book for the sake of the tale will find it sufficiently interesting. The old Earl of Lochawe is admirably drawn. The old man had missed some things in life, but disappointment had not hardened him, only made business the one great pleasure of his life. Per- haps some of our ablest practical men have been made in the same way. His son, the young Lord Glenaut, was not the least among those disappointments, the too bitter thought of which was so care- fully repressed by the ever busy earl. The following extract will give the reader a pretty clear idea of the order of mind to which Lord Glenant belonged, and the chances for his future regenera- tion :—

" There is a very disagreeable kind of young English gentleman to be found occasionally in certain classes of the present day. Disrespect- ful to his superiors, supercilious to his equals. and insolently indifferent to the feelings of his inferiors, he endeavours to compensate for his want of knowledge and experience by an outward bearing which seems to claim superiority without having anything to baek it. To a superficial observer, Lord Glenant might have seemed to be one of this class of young Englishmen, but in reality his character was quite apart from theirs. He was extremely good-natured. His indifference to effort of every kind did not proceed from a contempt of other men, but from a conviction that the objects they aimed at Were very little worth obtaining. He was totally without ambition of any kind. Had be been in a lower sphere of life, and obliged to earn his bread, he would have earned it, but at the same time he would have been indifferent to the prizes to be obtained in any walk of life which ho should have chosen. He respected other people, admired their industry. admired their per- severance, but did not share their hopes or their aspirations. He admired his father, but thought that the laborious old earl wasted his time and his life in efforts that would lead to nothing, and in work which other people might do quite as well. Lord Glenant had travelled largely, and had mingled in the society of many capitals. A greater eontrast could not well be found than that which existed between him and his foreign cousin, Count Casimir ; but the Viscount appreciated the Count, and did not view with any jealousy the manifest interest which the Earl took in Casimir. Lord Glenant thought that when the young Count should be older, he wonld he wiser (by the way, Lord Glenant was the younger of the two), and would discover that there was not much to be found out, or much to be done, that was new upon this earth."

Ruth strikes us as the great mistake of the book. She is the heroine of the story, and the author's favourite, an orphan relative of the Lochawes, living with them, and acting very much as secre- tary to the earl. She is supposed to be unattractive in person, but to possess a singularly clear and able brain, a large and loving nature, and to be Casimir's great help in carrying out his main

idea. Ruth's love takes always the form of self-sacrifice, and thinking that upon the whole it will be better for Casimir, to

whom she is very much attached, and of whose love for herself she is well aware, that he should marry her cousin, the Lady Alice,

she sees no way to kill his love for herself,—the first step towards accomplishing her project,—but by making herself odious in his sight, even to the point of trying to make him believe that he has been wholly deceived as to her character, and that she is really both mean and mercenary. This is as unnatural as it is ridiculous.

No good woman yet, specially with a clear head, ever thought her lover could be benefited by losing his faith in her good- ness. And that any woman would strive to make herself ap- pear despicable in the eyes of a man she loved we simply don't believe. Even Sir Arthur Helps finds it necessary to make such a scheme unsuccessful, which, if tried in earnest, especially

by a woman with a plain face and unattractive manner, it assuredly would not be. But after all defects, such as these are of minor importance in the consideration of such a book as that before us,

the main thought of which may be found in Casimir's letters to his father. In the first of these we have the writer passing in brief review a few of "the dreadful physical inequalities "existing between rich and poor in this country and generation, and coining to the conclusion that, "with the present dwelling-places of the poor, it is impossible to have high civilisation for the general body of mankind;" that this is an evil scarcely remediable in our

larger towns, except by the emigration of a considerable portion of our crowded population and 'the foundation of new States,"— by the organising of emigration in a way it has not been organised for more than two thousand years. By the way, did any one ever study carefully the effect of emigration wider elficiogt leaderdtip on the character of the Hebrews? We know Mr. Zincke has made

admirable observations on the subject in his work on Egypt, but we think there is room for a wider consideration of the subject. The difficulty of providing any large body of emigrants such as

could found a new State, with a sufficient complement of governing men, presents itself for the moment as an insoluble problem to our hero's mind, but in his next letter we find that he has made ac- quaintance with a friend, who materially aids him to clear his mind

of a good many crudities, while on the whole he helps the idea which is slowly resolving itself into a definite project. In this second letter we find Casimir has been diligently comparing and contrasting Roman with Anglo-Saxon colonisation, and further on in another epistle he discusses the huge obstacles in the way of carrying out any great project, presented by the dis- like of the British uncultivated intellect to anything like com- pulsory organisation. Of the crass ignorance of the same class of mind on more than one subject, on which it simply declines to be taught, as cooking, for instance, Casimir in a peevish mood observes

When I was working here as a workman iii —'s factory, I often had to cook my own dinner. By the way. you would hardly believe how thoroughly ignorant they are here, in all classes, of the art of cookery. We used to be taught, I remember, in our school-books that the ancient British lived on acorns. I am sure that if any great shake were to happen to this country—I mean if they met with any great political disaster, and the nation were to degenerate—they would gladly go hack to their raw acorns, and be delighted to get rid of the tiresome art, of roasting, baking, boiling. and stewing.. which have been impressed upon then, by their Roman and Norman conquerors."

Any one acquainted with the lives of factory workers, brickinakers, and navvies in England will know how common it is for the men or women who live at a distance from home to prefer the lump of fat and bread which they bring with them to any well-cooked dinner, procurable only with the necessity for sitting at one table, submitting to a certain amount of order, and paying a provider- general, even though the cast were less than that of their individual dinners. Casimir's fourth letter, in which he treats of many sub- jects connected with the position of this country socially and politically, and not with special reference to emigration, is the most interesting in the book. In it we have some of Sir Arthur Helps's valuable suggestions most clearly worked out,—in one pas- sage especially, where, after remarking that often, when some really great step has been taken, some definite thing accomplished, "the merits of the great thing are soon hedged in by routine precedent and conformity," so that the essential element of growth is in danger of being destroyed, be observes,—

" We always want improvers (not more critics, but improvers) as well as inventors, and upon these improvers rests a great part of the sure progress of the world. But we must not let the main element of progress go. What I moan is, we must not, because a thing, which is a great and good thing for the world,4oes through many ugly trans- formations, allow it, on that account, to slip f run, our arms. 1 dare say you do not know, any of you, what 1 hail in my thoughts. It is the beautiful Scottish ballad of 'Young Tandane. He has boon laid bold

• of by the fairies, and he asks his earthly lady-love, Janet, to rescue him on Hallowmas Eve, when the fairies and their captives go in pro- cession. I can recollect four or five of the verses:

• ‘" My right hand will be gloved, Janet.

My left hand will be bare; And these the tokens I gie thee; Nao doubt I will be there.

"' They'll turn me in your arms, Janet, An adder and a snake; Bat baud me fast, let me not pass, Gin ye wad by me maik.

• They'll turn me in your arms, Janet, A red-hot gad o' aim; But hand me fast, let me not pass, For I'll do you no harm.

"And, next, they'll shape me in your arms A tod. brit, and an eel;

But baud me fast, nor let me gang, As you do love me weel."

You will easily see how this ballad was made to apply."

We think we have sufficiently shown what is the character of the volume before us. We advise our readers to get the book if they have not already done so, and follow the hero's fortunes a little further ; and we may add, we hope a hint thrown out in the last chapter is equivalent to a promise that the author has not yet finished his subject.