Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/34

24 says Currer Bell, "slave-masters, and drivers, I consign to the hands of gaolers; the novelist may be excused from sullying his page with the record of their deeds." Whether the novelist may be excused for depicting those deeds in extravagant form and lurid colouring, is another question, and one which touches Mrs. Trollope a little closely. For she has here detailed a very revolting and, as we think (albeit no devotees to the cause of cotton lords and millocracy), a very ex parte sort of history—whereof neither the fiction interests, nor the logic convinces, nor the rhetoric subdues us. The titled Vampire of the tale, Sir Matthew Dowling, is an impossible creature—happily for human nature; though unhappily for the success of the novelist; she represents him as a brute of incomparable coarseness, an atrocious scoundrel whose very name excites kicking propensities in every male reader's pedis pollex, and at the same time a man of ambitious and refined intellect, aspiring to the credit of a literary and accomplished gentleman, a speaker of modern languages, a critical French scholar, a playful votary of the Muses himself, and a universal Mæcenas to all who wield a pen in their service—valuing himself chiefly upon his reputation for the lighter graces of wit and gallantry, for being a delightful something between Killigrew and Count de Grammont,—so that there is no receptacle of wit from Joe Miller downwards, no gallant memoir in an unintelligible tongue, which Sir Matthew docs not study with assiduity and perseverance of the highest order. Such is Mrs. Trollope's Manchester model man—the representative in her parliament of the cotton interest—the ex uno disce omnes pattern of millowners and manufacturers. And this vulgar oppressor has a familiar worthy of him, in the person of Mr. Joseph Parsons—a parasite who contracts to do his principal's dirty work wholesale, and does it beautifully—breaking the hearts and the bones of the factory folks after a magnificent system of his own. Such a couple of ogres can be had to order, to any amount, from the staff of dramatists at our minor theatres, or the "Able Editors" of our red republic-ations. They are unworthy of the ingenuity and Toryism of Mrs. Trollope. Not much more to our taste, in point of draughtsmanship at least, are Dr. Crockley, whose sportive malice is so repulsive—and the Lady Clarissa, a sentimentalist minus a heart; and even the good people have more goodyness than goodness about them—the little hero wanting individuality, his mother wanting nature, and his lady friends wanting ease and relief. The incidents of the tale are carelessly wrought; the descriptions are of the forcible feeble type; the conversations are improbable and stilted. On tho whole, we submit that this volume of political agitation was a mistake. It sought to do in one social department what "Oliver Twist" had just been doing in another; but it had no support ab intrà—no corps dramatique of Bumbles, and Claypoles, and Fagins, and Sykeses, and Artful Dodgers, and Nancys, to clench the argument and drive the nail home.

About the same time, however, Mrs. Trollope played the literary chaperon to a lady of real character and definite idiosyncrasy—one who stands out as a distinct and living form among the accepted celebrities of the English novel. And this is the Widow Barnaby. Her adventures