The Argosy — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ARCOSY. Our Log-Book. 77 Juliet. Her theatrical life leads her to form strange acquaintances with both poor and rich, and these are wrought together in the interest of the story with skill. There are Jerry Shaw, and old Trescott, and young Trescott, the “‘snaky-eyed”—the vagabond of the story, a musical genius without the power of patience to perfect his gift, who, out of sheer selfishness and an old grudge to Clement Charlewood, seeks to secure Mabel’s affections most unsuccessfully. And then there are Walter Charlewood, a brother of Clement’s, a young officer; and Lady Popham, an eccentric worshipper of genius, often genius-bitten, too ; and Miss O’Brien, her ladyship’s god-daughter—a sturdy, honest, Insh girl, whose visit to the Charlewoods had led to the rumour—which, of course, reached Mabel—that Clement Charlewood was affianced to her, and this casts a strange shadow over Mabel, not inimical to the reproduc- tion of Shakespere’s love-lorn maiden. But the Charlewoods met with reverses and were reduced to poverty, the father hurrying on his end by Jaudanum in the midst of the crisis. Clement sacrifices all to honour, and is in London, working as a builder’s clerk, when Mabel and he (who had all along faithfully stood to each other’s love) are brought together, first at the sick-bed of Mrs. Charlewood, and then at the death-bed of Corda Trescott. Of course, it is needless to say that all ends well. There is much exquisite work in the book—much genuine insight into the world’s ways, quickened and sustained by a true percep- tion of life’s manifold mysteries. Perhaps readers who think a little, and go into details affecting truth of delineation, will say that Mr. Saxelby, the Flukes, and that class, are exaggerations—caricatures of what had been much more lovingly, and therefore more sincerely, presented to us before in good old Stock. And if we might venture a word of cri- ticism, we would dissuade the author from this form of caricature, which Mr. Dickens began, and which is now out-worn, threatening to have most disastrous and divisive effects upon our fiction—both prose and poetry. Turning from ‘ Mabel’s Progress” to ‘‘Guild Court” is not so com- plete a transition as might at first sight be supposed. ‘‘ Guild Court,” though hardly so good a specimen of Mr. MacDonald’s fiction as “Alec Forbes,” has this advantage for English readers, that it is wholly free from the Scotch dialect he so delights in. It is thoroughly, and from first to last, a London story. What we meant in hinting that there were points of resemblance between it and ‘“ Mabel’s Progress” was this, that both are disfigured by voluntary caricature of certain forms of religious conception, rather than of religious belief. But, in Mr. MacDonald’s work, this exercises a more injurious influence than in the other, because he has a more direct religious lesson to convey, and works the thread of his caricature more directly into the web of his story. The whole lesson of the book is that, even on a nature with a vast amount of good in it, the narrowing influence of the strict Evangelical training that would piteously run all characters into one mould, may simply ECOMiIcoOolxs.cO©