GLITTER AND GOLD.*
THE purpose of this book is of the highest kind, and is stated by the author in the following striking passages :—" Daily experience teaches us that the empire of the soul is in the hand of Christ. The
faint knowledge of this fact, waking into the endeavour to serve Him, soon passes on to the desire to absorb Him and live in Him, —to be His alone, until the gracious day comes in which we per- ceive that every act of enduring influence we perform is the act alone of the Christ in us. Having become satisfied by such per- sonal experience that rule over the inner kingdom is in the hand of Christ, I have been anxious to pass outward, and search for, and if possible recognise, the same hand exercising a like controlling and absorbing power in society—in the social man—in social order." In this search, "no course appeared so full of promise and so attractive as to follow the imaginary history of a seeker after God planted amid our social conditions, and observe whither he was led."
Unfortunately, the author's execution of this purpose is so very imperfect, as to make the book utterly fail in realising his inten- tion. The story turns upon the internecine war between two rivet manufacturers, and the misery, madness, and death which result from such unbridled competition. The "seeker," Ernest, (how often do speculative novelists delight in this typical name for their heroes!) is the nephew of one of the manufacturers and the con- fidential agent of the other, while the handsome but worldly daughter of his uncle and the spiritual invalid daughter of his employer are the most prominent personal examples of the
• Glitter and Geld By Horace Field, RA., Author of "A Home for the Homeless," "Heroism," do. London: Longmans.
respective "glitter and gold" between which he has to choose, each heroine being the representative of diametrically opposite conceptions of life. He chooses the better part, and ends by devoting himself to carrying out plans of co-operation among the workmen which eventually supersede the evil state of things caused "by competition. This theme might have been made to illustrate the author's purpose very effectively, if well worked out ; but the literary power and grace of Mr. Field's previous works have not accompanied him in his attempt at fiction. The narrative is so confusedly told (even the punctuation being strangely at fault throughout), and the conversations are so often incoherent and enigmatical, that the reader's ingenuity is kept on a perpetual strain to discover what is meant, still more what is supposed to have taken place in the unexplained gaps of the story. The characters, with the exception of a fine old Scottish weaver, are as unreal as shadows on a wall, and most of them are very uncouth shadows. Even the saintly Grape manifests an amount of unrestrained jea- lousy and ill-temper towards her rival which is quite out of keeping with the character ascribed to her. A mass of unpleasant detail almost chokes the religious element throughout the greater part of the book, and when that element does appear, it is often of an un- healthy type. There is a slight sketch of a "Holy Society" called "The Lovers of Christ," who emigrate to America, and succeed wonderfully ; but with the exception of this faint adumbration of a Church in the background, the recognition of religious reali- ties is virtually confined to three personages,—the village clergy- man, though represented as an excellent and energetic man, never taking any part in the religious development of his friends. In the conversations of the two theorists, Grace and Ernest, with much that is noble and true, there is also a great deal of unnatural mannerism, and nearly all that concerns the relation of Grace to Ernest is pervaded by a morbid excitability which is very painful, and quite destructive of the impression which her character is meant to produce. The sayings of Handyside, the half-crazed old -weaver, are far more simple and spontaneous than hers, and some of his prayers are really beautiful.
The religious fatalism of Mr. Field's earlier works does not appear in this volume, the only apparent vestige of it being the theory that the evil deeds of men are in some way ordained by God as a necessary education of other men, and eventually of the sinners themselves, in order to bring out the full distinction between evil and good. This theory is, however, only expounded once (pp. 200-203), and does not appear to form an indispensable part of the author's plan, as is the case with another view which pervades the whole work, and to which we cannot but take exception, viz., the exclusive worship of Christ, which seems entirely to ignore the first person in the Godhead. Evidently the author's vivid sense of the divineness of Christ, as the King of martyrs and eternal guide and support of struggling humanity, has so possessed him that he has almost lost sight of the supremacy of the Father to whom Christ's filial sacri- fice was rendered. This view is not confined to Mr. Field, being virtually held by many fervent Evangelicals, and having found the grandest poetic expression in the language of Mr. Browning. But it is a heresy (in the legitimate sense of that much-abused term) that should be steadily resisted. To ignore the genuineness of the relation between the Son of God and his Father, is really to destroy the most important feature of Christianity, and to obliterate any true idea of the Son of God altogether. That the union between the Son and the Father is one of the closest inter- penetration we cannot doubt, but harmony is not unison, either in music, in colours, or in souls, and to confound two identities is to destroy the harmony between them.
It is with reluctance that we have expressed so unfavourable an opinion of a work which manifests such generous aspirations and so deep a sense of spiritual realities ; but a religious novel, to be truly successful, needs not less, but more of dramatic and con- structive art than the ordinary secular tale. Without this, it can- not be a vision for the world, though it may be a spiritual exercise for the writer that may well repay him the effort of its production.
Previous page
