DAVID ARMSTRONG.*

READERS of reviews of novels like to be told the subject of the story under consideration, and therefore we set out on what we have to say about David Armstrong with a rough sketch of the plot. We wish, however, to preface it by mentioning that the subjoined bald outline is not to be taken as giving any adequate idea of the forcible, interesting, and original work before us, whose merit lies not so much in its plot, as in its representation of human nature.

David Armstrong is a young carpInter with a genius for in-

* David Armstrong ; or, Afore tho Dawn. London : W. Blackwood and Bons.

vention, who is engaged in a shipbuilding yard in Oldboro'. There is also in the same town a half-cousin of his, who had run away from her home with an actor. His mother, moved by a sense of duty—for, "I wouldn't have the poor lass die of hunger, though she was the first to bring the name of Armstrong into the dirt "—writes and asks him to seek out this girl, lest she may be dying of hunger,—" not that I ever wish to hear of her again, but blood's thicker than water, after all." He at last finds the poor cousin, lying dead with a baby girl by her side ; and this baby, Per- dita—or " Deeta," as she is always called—he takes home to his mother, supports, watches o er, falls in love with, and finally surrenders to the young violinist who wins the girl's heart.

The most striking character in the book is that of the hero.

Whether he is a study from life or not, we do not pretend to say, but, at all events, he seems to be a study from human nature ; though he may never have really existed, yet there is no reason that he might not have done so. The genius in humble life has frequently been represented in fiction, but we think he has never been treated more satisfactorily than in the present instance. The hero is no ethereal being, with hectic cheeks and soul too big or brain too busy for the body which it wears out ; he is, on the contrary, a giant in body as in mind, tall, handsome, and strong.

Brave, tender-hearted, honest, clever, never appearing in the faintest degree conscious of his own superiority to other men,

he goes straight on his way, inventing and working at models in the intervals of his regular occupation, not out of vanity, or—

until the last—out of any very definite desire to benefit his fellow-men, but merely because, when an idea comes to him and takes hold of him, he cannot help trying to carry it out. There may be an occasional passing thought in his mind of the com- forts which the success of his inventions would procure for him, and those dear to him ; but it is not the lust of money that makes him work. Had he been rolling in riches, he would have worked at his models just the same, we feel sure. An idea has for him a constraining power, which makes the labour requisite to try and perfect it as natural and as little of an effort as the act of breathing is. The tyranny of an idea, the hold that it takes upon him, is described as follows :—

"The idea comes to you some day,—imperfectly, of course, but still the idea ; why should you doubt it came for good ? because it did come, and must have been meant to live. Well, it keeps on haunting you, though for a long time you scarcely dare to believe in it. Then you feel that you must try to realise it somehow. You begin to work it out. Of course, you fail,—many times, perhaps ; still, you see clearly that it can be done, and still you try, because by this time you have grown to love it, and feel that giving it up would be giving up part of yourself."

And again :—

"The first dawning of the idea may be pleasant enough,—it is that, surely; but when it comes to the working-out, and something won't go right, and yet keeps bothering you, and your brain works away against your will at nights when you want to sleep—in fact, the thing you have imagined becomes the master, while you are but the slave to it—is that perfect happiness, think you ? Will that compare with the delight it once was to seek the kye in the gloamin', or to ride home one of the horses from the plough ?"

And here we are told of the tender love that he felt for an idea developed :—" He spoke little of this new scheme of his. It almost seemed too sacred to be talked of lightly. When he did mention it, it was with a little tremor in his voice, like that with which a girl tells of her first lover, a mother of her new- born babe, a poet of what he holds his highest work." These three extracts suffice to show that the writer is capable of appreciating how great and wonderful a thing an idea is, and of paying due homage to it.

But it is not only as an inventor that David Armstrong is portrayed. We are shown his strong, earnest, simple, impressionable nature going through various phases of life, and gradually moulded by its trials and temptations. With the iron strength that distinguishes both mind and body are intermingled elements of weakness which might hardly have been expected in such a man, and which are yet made to fit in naturally, so as not to seem in any way out of place. There is the curiously simple-minded readiness to accept the verdict of his fellow-men, which disposes him to distrust the first model he makes, when he finds the other workmen regard it as " devil's work." Then there is the craving after excitement, which makes him give way to drink and passion from time to time, in spite of his own self-condemnation for doing so. Strangely susceptible to external influences, he finds an omen in a star or a rainbow, and has a lasting impression produced upon him.

in a picture by "the wonderful, loving, far-seeing eyes of Christ, crucified, yet conquering;" in that picture he seems to find the idea of another soul expressed so that his own soul can under- stand it ; it speaks to him of past struggle and present triumph, and helps him on towards the faith which he has often longed for and tried to lay hold of before. For effort after religion forms an important part of his life. Living amongst people who make "conscious faith a sine qui; non of acceptance," and unable to feel this himself, he has fits of being alternately careless as to the welfare of his soul, or else anxious, depressed, and un- happy on the subject. He attends a "revival " held at Old- boro', and we quote the account of that service, wherein the preacher and the hymns are happily satirised, and wherein we would draw special attention to the graceful little allegory of the snowflake. The text for the sermon was" Our Father which art in Heaven," on which words it was surely to be supposed that a discourse of love and universal charity might have been founded :— "The words of this prayer were spoken by Christ to his immediate disciples. You, the unconverted—you, the unregenerate—though your mothers in their ignorance have taught you to lisp it at their knees, have no more right to use this formula than the pigs and the devils ! God made you ?—yes; but he made thorn just as truly ! He is the Father only of those who, by faith in his Son, have become part of his family,—heirs of God, joint heirs with Jesus Christ !' This is the way the thing is done,—quite simple, and so unanswerable ! The man who preached this doctrine was a poet in his way, and the Record and the Revivalist had often in their poets' corner scraps from his pen. There be would weep over a dead rose-leaf or a crushed butterfly, or go into agonies over a snowflake which had lost its pristine purity. The same eloquence now was used to picture the tortures of an endless eternity for those who refused this adoption ;' and his voice never faltered as he consigned their souls to sin and hell for over and ever. Not, perhaps, that he was harder- hearted than the rest of the world ; but only—poor parrot that he was !—he repeated what he had been taught, without giving himself the trouble of realising what it meant. Perhaps, like Hawthorne's Hilda in Transformation, he needed a sin to soften him ; or maybe, when his imagination developed a little more, he might be able to pity a crushed or withered life as much as a dying leaf, or a sin-stained soul as well as a soiled snowflake. The latter might have given him a hint of a happier faith, if, instead of writing its elegy, he had watched whore it lay hardening under the traffic of life in the town street, until the sun shone down, warming it through and through ; and how at last it began to weep over its fall, not because it hated, but loved the sun, and the sun, taking pity upon its tears, gave it a inew birth ; then it sprang up from earth, leaving all its pollution behind, and lived again as part of some wonderful, rose-hued cloud, or bright, glorious rainbow. After the dreadful sermon was over, there was an invitation to the 'penitent form;' and to give the people time to respond, a hymn was sung. Perhaps there is no species of com- position which contains so many words to such a small amount of meaning as the usual revival hymn. It is worse than a modern drawing-room song in this respect, and that is saying a good deal ! This particular ono, however, was offensive, as well as meaningless. It tried to impress you with the wisdom of becoming a Christian, but only succeeded in impressing you with the presumption of the singers. Every one who listened was addressed as you poor sinner,' which might be just, but was not pleasant. The horrors of the Judgment-day -vere coarsely sketched in vermilion and indigo; and the hymn finished off with the abrupt question,—' Dear friend, and where will you go on that great day ?" You '—written large in the hymn-books, and sung with befitting emphasis, and the whole set to a tune of a cheerful, if not rollicking description—meant, we presume, to express the happy confidence of the singers that they at least were safe."

There are a quaintness and a naturalness in the following -criticism on such sermons, made by two of the hearers :—

" Yon's a real powerful speaker,' said one of his listeners, when the meeting terminated, and they talked it over on their way home. 'Ho made me creep in all my bones like, just as when they say somebody walks over one's grave !'—' I don't know as aw care aboot that sort, Betty,' answered the other old woman, slowly. 'It seems to me one wants somethin' comfortin' to think on, to help one ower wi' the cowld, and the roomatics, and the hunger, and all the ills owld, worn-out bodies like you and me has to go through wi'. I like some- thin' about Christ carin' for us, and takin' us where there's to be no more sorrow, nor pain, nor hunger !'—' Ye're a poor, cold, lifeless ereatur', Nancy !' retorted Betty, with scorn. 'Why, everybody knows that ye can get all that out o' the New Testament, just readin' it at home. But there's somethin' more rousin..like wanted at a re-viral, aw reckon!'"

We have also a sketch of a service at a chapel on another occasion, when no "revival" is going on, and wherein we are .shown the sense of the absurd and incongruous, which is one of the many elements that make up David's character :—

" He heeded little that was said, except once or twice, when some- thing struck on his ear with a sense of comedy—as when a little tailor, who had no other fame (nor possibility of acquiring any) than that of making the worst fit in the town, finished up his lengthy Speech with an earnest aspiration- ' Make nie little and unknown, Loved and prized by Clod alone!' —as though the foes he had to contend with on earth were fame and ambition. Or, again, when a certain Dame Marjory Brown, cele- brated as the dirtiest and most unwashed of the community, stated as a fact that for the last few months she had 'lived the life of a spotless and sinless angel !' The idea of a 'spotless and sinless angel,' with the usual white robe matching in impurity the borders of a cap which appeared under the old woman's battered head-gear, was too much for David's gravity. Directly Dame Marjory sat down, up rose Ben Jamieson—once the greatest scamp to be found in the neighbourhood ; a hanger-on at public-house meetings and merry- makings, where his fiddle found him a ready welcome. He was now a shining light among the brethren, for he had, as he phrased it, been made a new man' at the last revival. His account of this trans- formation, told with evident feeling and earnestness, was not without an amusing side ; especially when he related his conflicting senti- ments about the fiddle,—' How he had wondered and wondered whether he ought to give it up or no, and thought of it as a devil tempting him back into the public-house ; and how, at last, the happy thought came to him of making it a new creature too, and he var- nished it thickly till it was fine and shiny ! And now, thank the Lord, there could be no harm in it, because it stands to reason that the natur' of the thing was completely changed ; and instead of the wicked dancing tunes he used to play on it, it was never heard now, save in the songs of Zion.' Fortunately, none of the assembly were violinists, or the idea of the varnish might have upset their solemnity. David knew enough of the art to shudder for the result of such a change. He was tempted to think, too, that perhaps some of the professors were just about as much renewed as the poor fiddle—only made a little shinier outside ! "

All the scenes and characters of the story are taken from the poor, and give us the impression of being drawn by one who is not only a genuine student of human nature, but also so sympathetic with humanity as to appreciate the good that is to be found everywhere in it. Consequently, we have no picture

of utterly repulsive vice and villainy ; and even the evil Peter Dobson has a redeeming touch of love for his idiot son. The characters are natural and well drawn, especially the stern, yet loving, old mother ; and the quiet, self-contained, unselfish Hannah Watson, with her grey life of hopeless love and cease- less labour for others. We doubt whether the heroine is as lifelike a person as the others,—her actions, and especially her sudden running-off to London immediately after having achieved a long wished-for triumph on the stage, seem to us sometimes unnatural and unlikely ; but, after all, that may only be be- cause we have never happened to come in contact with such a nature ourselves. Anyhow, we are not inclined hastily to attribute unnaturalness to an author who has given us so much human nature as we find in the two short volumes whereof David Armstrong consists, and which are none the less true to nature for the pathos and sadness which stamp them.