Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/904

896 shrewd occasional comments on the policy of the government, and the thorough analysis of the rascality of the Russian police, are admirable in substance, if somewhat flippant in expression. In power of holding the amused attention of the reader, equally by the pertinence of the matter and the impertinence of the tone, the volume is unexcelled by any other book on the subject of Russia.

southeastern portion of the island of Newfoundland, as may be seen by a glance at the map, may be well described by that expressive epithet of "nook-shotten," which in Shakspeare is applied to the mother-island of which it is a dependent. The land is indented by bays and estuaries, so that it bears the same relation to the water that the parted fingers of an outstretched hand do to the spaces of air that are between them. One of these inlets bears the name of Conception Bay; and it is around the shores of this bay that the scene of this novel is laid. Everything in it suffers a sea-change; everything is set to the music of the winds and the waves. We find ourselves among a people with whom the sea is all, and the land only an appendage to the sea,—a place to dry fish, and mend nets, and haul up boats, and caulk ships. But though the view everywhere, morally and physically, is bounded by the sea, and though one of the finest of the characters is a fisherman, yet the moving springs of the story are found in elements only accidentally connected with the sea, and by no means new to novel-writers or playwrights. The plot of the novel is taken from, or founded upon, the peculiar relations existing between the Roman Catholic priesthood and the female sex; and, with only a change in costume and scenery, the events might have taken place in Maryland, Louisiana, or France.

The novel is one of a peculiar class. To borrow a convenient phraseology recently introduced into the language, its interest is more subjective than objective,—or, in other words, is derived more from marked and careful delineations of individual character than from the march of events or brilliant procession of incidents. With a single exception,—the abduction of the fisherman's daughter,—the occurrences narrated are such as might happen any day in any small community living near the sea. Novels constructed on this plan are less likely to be popular than those in which the interest is derived from a skilfully-contrived plot and a rapid and stirring succession of moving events. To what extent the work before us may be popular we wilt not undertake even to guess; for we have had too frequent experience of the capriciousness of public taste to hazard any prediction as to the reception a particular book may meet with, especially if it rely exclusively upon its own merits, and be not helped by the previous reputation of the writer. But we certainly can and will say that to readers of a certain cast it will present strong attractions, and that no candid critic can read it without pronouncing it to be a remarkable work and the production of an original mind. The author we should judge to be a man who had lived a good deal in solitude, or at least removed from his intellectual peers,—who had been through much spiritual struggle in the course of his life,—who had been more accustomed to think than to write, at least for the press,—and whose own observation had revealed to him some of the darker aspects of the Roman Catholic faith and practice.

There is very little skill in the construction of the plot. Most of the events stand to each other in the relation of accidental and not of necessary succession, and might be transposed without doing any harm. Many pages are written simply as illustrations of character; and a fair proportion of the novel might be called with strict propriety a series of sketches connected by a slight thread of narrative. But it would be unreasonable to deal sharply with an author for this defect; for the faculty of making a well-constructed story, in which every event shall come in naturally, and yet each bring us one step nearer to the journey's end, is now one of the lost arts of earth. But this is not all. A considerable portion of it must be pronounced decidedly slow. We use the word not in its slang application, but in the sense in which Goldsmith used it in the first line of "The