_Armadale._ A Novel. By WILKIE COLLINS. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Except for the fact that there is nothing at all automatic in his
inventions, there seems to be no good reason why Mr. Collins should not
make a perpetual motion. He has a surprising mechanical faculty, and
great patience and skill in passing the figures he contrives through the
programme arranged for them. Having read one of his novels, you feel as
if you had been amused with a puppet-show of rare merit, and you would
like to have the ingenious mechanician before the curtain. So much
cleverness, however, seems to be thrown away on the entertainment of a
single evening, and you sigh for its application to some work of more
lasting usefulness; and the perpetual motion occurs to you as the thing
worthiest such powers. Let it be a perpetual literary motion, if the
public please. Given a remarkable dream and a beautiful bad woman to
fulfil it; you have but to amplify the vision sufficiently, and your
beautiful bad woman goes on fulfilling it forever in tens of thousands
of volumes. As the brother of De Quincey said, when proposing to stand
on the ceiling, head downwards, and be spun there like a whip-top, thus
overcoming the attraction of gravitation by the mere rapidity of
revolution, "If you can keep it up for an instant, you can keep it up
all day." Alas! it is just at this point that the fatal defect of Mr.
Collins's mechanism appears. But for the artisan's hand, the complicated
work would not start at all, and we perceive that, if he lifted it for a
moment from the crank, the painfully contrived dream would drop to
pieces, and the beautiful bad woman would come to a jerky stand-still in
the midst of her most atrocious development. A perpetual literary motion
is therefore out of the question, so far as Mr. Collins is concerned;
and we can merely examine his defective machinery, with many a regret
that a plan so ingenious, and devices so labored and costly, should be
of no better effect.
We think, indeed, that all his stories are constructed upon a principle
as false to art as it is false to life. In this world, we have first men
and women, with certain well-known good and evil passions, and these
passions are the causes of all the events that happen in the world. We
doubt if it has occurred to any of our readers to see a set of
circumstances, even of the most relentless and malignant description,
grouping themselves about any human being without the agency of his own
love or hate. Yet this is what happens very frequently in Mr. Collins's
novels, impoverishing and enfeebling his characters in a surprising
degree, and reducing them to the condition of juiceless puppets without
proper will or motion. It is not that they are all wanting in
verisimilitude. Even the entirely wicked Miss Gwilt is a conceivable
character; but, being destined merely to fulfil Armadale's dream, she
loses all freedom of action, and, we must say, takes most clumsy and
hopeless and long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which
one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found
much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all
her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a
dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in
art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's advantages should not marry both of
them; and the author's overruling on this point is more creditable to
his heart than to his head. These three people are the chief persons of
the story, and their hands are tied from first to last They are not to
act out their characters: they are to act out the plot; and the author's
designs are accomplished in defiance of their several natures. Some of
the minor persons are not so ruthlessly treated. The Pedgifts, father
and son, are free agents, and they are admirably true to their instincts
of upright, astute lawyers, who love best to employ their legal
shrewdness in a good cause. Their joint triumph over Miss Gwilt is
probable and natural, and would be a successful point in the book, if it
were conceivable that she should expose herself to such a defeat by so
much needless plotting with Mrs. Oldershaw. But to fill so large a
stage, an immense deal of by-play was necessary, and great numbers of
people are visibly dragged upon the scene. Some of these accomplish
nothing in the drama. To what end have we so much of Mr. Brock? Others
elaborately presented only contribute to the result in the most
intricate and tedious way; and in Major Milroy's family there is no
means of discovering that Miss Gwilt is an adventuress, but for Mrs.
Milroy to become jealous of her and to open her letters.
It cannot, of course, be denied that Mr. Collins's stories are
interesting; for an infinite number of persons read them through. But it
is the bare plot that interests, and the disposition of mankind to
listen to story-telling is such that the idlest _conteur_ can entertain.
We must demand of literary art, however, that it shall interest in
people's fortunes by first interesting in people. Can any one of all Mr.
Collins's readers declare that he sympathizes with the loves of Armadale
and Neelie Milroy, or actually cares a straw what becomes of either of
those insipid young persons? Neither is Midwinter one to take hold on
like or dislike; and Miss Gwilt is interesting only as the capable but
helpless spider out of which the plot of the story is spun. Pathos there
is not in the book, and the humor is altogether too serious to laugh at.
_Four Years in the Saddle._ By COLONEL HARRY GILMORE. New York: Harper
and Brothers.
It is sometimes difficult to believe, in reading this book, that it is
not the production of Major Gahagan of the Ahmednuggar Irregulars, or
Mr. Barry Lyndon of Castle Lyndon. Being merely a record of personal
adventure, it does not suggest itself as part of the history of our late
war, and, but for the recurrence of the familiar names of American
persons and places, it might pass for the narrative of either of the
distinguished characters mentioned.
In dealing with events creditable to his own courage and gallantry,
Colonel Gilmore has the unsparing frankness of Major Gahagan, and it
must be allowed that there is a remarkable likeness in all the
adventures of these remarkable men. It is true that Colonel Gilmore does
not fire upon a file of twenty elephants so as to cut away all their
trunks by a single shot; but he does kill eleven Yankees by the
discharge of a cannon which he touches off with a live coal held between
his thumb and finger. Being made prisoner, he is quite as defiant and
outrageous as the Guj-puti under similar circumstances: at one time he
can scarcely restrain himself from throwing into the sea the insolent
captain of a Federal gunboat; at another time, when handcuffed by order
of General Sheridan, he spends an hour in cursing his captors. The
red-hair of the Lord of the White Elephants waved his followers to
victory; Colonel Gilmore's "hat, with the long black plume upon it," is
the signal of triumph to his marauders. Both, finally, are loved by the
ladies, and are alike extravagant in their devotion to the sex. Colonel
Gilmore, indeed, withholds no touch that can go to make him the hero of
a dime novel; and there is not a more picturesque and dashing character
in literature outside of the adventures of Claude Duval. Everywhere we
behold him waving his steel (as he calls his sword); he wheels before
our dazzled eyes like a meteor; he charges, and the foe fly like sheep
before him. And no sooner is he come into town from killing a score or
two of Yankees, than the ladies--who are all good Union women and have
just taken the oath of allegiance--crowd to kiss and caress him; or, as
he puts it in his own vivid language, he receives "a kiss from more than
one pair of ruby lips, and gives many a hearty hug and kiss in return."
In his wild way, he takes a pleasure in evoking the tender solicitude of
the ladies for his safety,--eats a dish of strawberries in a house upon
which the Yankees are charging to capture him, and remains for some
minutes after the strawberries are eaten, while the ladies, proffering
him his arms, are "dancing about, and positively screaming with
excitement." At another time, when the bullets of the enemy are hissing
about his ears, he puts on a pretty girl's slipper for her. "Such," he
remarks, with a pensive air, "are some of the few happy scenes that
brighten a soldier's life."
Colonel Gilmore, who has the diffidence of Major Gahagan, has also the
engaging artlessness which lends so great a charm to the personal
narrative of Mr. Barry Lyndon. He does not reserve from the reader's
knowledge such of his exploits as stealing the chaplain's whiskey, and
drinking the peach-brandy of the simple old woman who supposed she was
offering it to General Lee. "Place him where you may," says Colonel
Gilmore, "and under no matter what adverse circumstances, you can always
distinguish a gentleman." He has a great deal of fine feeling, and can
scarcely restrain his tears at the burning of Chambersburg, after
setting it on fire. Desiring a memento of a brother officer, he takes a
small piece of the dead man's skull. It has been supposed that civilized
soldiers, however brave and resolute, scarcely exulted in the
remembrance of the lives they had taken; and it is thought to be one of
the merciful features of modern warfare, that in the vast majority of
cases the slayer and the slain are unknown to each other. Colonel
Gilmore has none of the false tenderness which shrinks from a knowledge
of homicide. On the contrary, he is careful to know when he has killed a
man; and he recounts, with an exactness revolting to feebler nerves, the
circumstances and the methods by which he put this or that enemy to
death.
We think we could hardly admire Colonel Gilmore if he had been of our
side during the war, and had done to the Rebels the things he professes
to have done to us. As it is, we trust he will forgive us, if we confess
that we have not read his narrative with a tranquil stomach, and that we
think it will impress his Northern readers as the history of a brigand
who had the good luck to be also a traitor.