Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 63, No. 388, February 1848

by Various

The incognito of Mr Warren was preserved till towards the close of the work; and upon its completion, being published in a separate form, it shared the well-deserved success of the “Diary of a Physician,” and travelled with it, either in, its original garb or as a translated book, into every quarter of the globe. Be it remembered that, during the whole long period of which we speak, Mr Warren was passing his days in any thing but the luxurious case of an unoccupied gentleman, or of one engaged only in the prosecution of intellectual pleasures. His entrance into life as a public writer was concurrent with his adoption of the most arduous and difficult of all professions. Literature was less his business than his recreation; his chosen evening pastime after the noonday’s enervating heat; his dignified solace, not his painful necessity. In plain words, whilst he used his pen for the amusement and instruction of his fellows, Mr Warren was a laborious legal plodder on his own account in the Temple; first as a special pleader, and afterwards as a counsel; in which last capacity he produced, as a tribute to law as well as to literature, an important standard law-book, held at this moment in high repute.

Now, if what we have said be true,—and if it be not, we shall be glad to be informed of our error—we hold it to be an utter impossibility for Maga either to look coldly upon Mr Warren’s literary career, or to stand mutely by with her hands behind her, when all honest people are vociferously applauding that gentleman upon his first appearance in an entirely new character. If we don’t clap our hands, who shall applaud? Nobody will respect the mother who thinks her child less worthy than the world esteems him. If we should hold our peace, Maga would be despised—not by the world—that would not affect her much, but by her own honest soul, and her eternal sense of right, which would destroy her. We have held our peace long enough. Impatient as we were to be the first to hail our own, to introduce him to his readers in the columns in which first he introduced himself, we have committed violence to our affection, and bided our good time. Maga watched with natural fond anxiety the proceedings of her son. She called to mind their long connexion, and had maternal apprehensions—the best of mothers have them—lest the third appearance of her offspring on the literary stage of life might dim the lustre of his former efforts in the same arena. Moreover, people of a certain age have whims and fancies. Maga, young, buxom, sportive, and healthy as she looks, has reached a matron’s years. Her contemporaries, judging from her feats, and vexed in heart, will not believe it. We cannot wonder at their scepticism; they look old in their infancy. Maga has the playfulness and elasticity of youth in her prime. If she is so sprightly with a load of years upon her, she may live for ever. Honest contemporaries are right; she may—she WILL! But, as we said, folks of a certain age have whims. Men who have prospered under one system are not eager to adopt and try another. The guardianship of Maga, in Maga’s eyes, casts a halo around the doings of her children. Mr Warren had achieved noble triumphs, walking hand-in-hand with her month after month and year after year. If he should deny himself the aid and run alone, might he not fall? We feared he might, till we had read his book, and then our fear was gone. But though fear departed, modesty—Maga’s ancient fault—remained. The proprieties of the case bade her be silent till the world had spoken. Though she was not bound to withhold her smile and warm approval in her royal privacy, sweet decorum forbade a syllable of public praise until her panegyric might no longer sway the universe. The hour for breaking silence has arrived: Maga seizes it proudly and unreservedly, as her custom is: who shall blame her?

Mr Warren has, indeed, achieved a signal and complete success. The opinion which we formed of his new labour, ere it went to press, is confirmed and echoed by the enthusiastic unanimity of the public; by those who read, and by those useful organs which undertake to guide the reader’s taste and judgment. The first few pages of the volume dispel at once all fears as to backsliding or downsinking on the part of the author. Fresh, vigorous, racy, and pure—such are the well-known characteristics of Mr Warren’s style: they are here as they were present in his earliest productions almost twenty years ago. From the first page to the last, there is not the slightest evidence of exhaustion from over-cropping or superfetation. All is new, healthy, wholesome, and genuine: bright as the purest water, clear as the summer’s sky, and as full of holy promise.

We think we discern a sneer upon the bilious and discontented cheeks of a certain class of writers as they read the last two words. We know the gentlemen well. They have been scribbling for the last few years with a “oneness of purpose,” as creditable to their understandings as it is significant of their ulterior designs. “Now and Then” is by no means written for their especial delectation, although, if properly and humbly read by the “earnest” worthies, it would go far to secure their moral improvement. The volume neither laughs at ecclesiastical institutions, nor ridicules the professors of religion. It does not make fun of every thing serious, until the unsophisticated reader is reduced to wondering whether he is not in duty bound to smile when and wherever his previous education had instructed him to weep: it does not consider that a man born on a dunghill has all the virtues of Adam before he transgressed, and that another, brought into life on a bed of down in Grosvenor Square, has, poor devil, in virtue of his good luck, inherited the vices of Satan and of the whole company of fallen divinities. There are a heap of Cockneys now gaining their miserable bread by the promulgation of such doctrines, who will look down with supreme contempt and biting sarcasm upon the book of which we treat; not, mark you, the believers of such doctrines, but simply the mischievous and impious promulgators. Trust them, they prefer the company of the wealthy and the well-to-do, as they love cheese and beer more profoundly than all the moral beauty that the earth contains. Catch them giving sixpence to a beggar on a snowy day, or uttering a syllable of human kindness, which costs them nothing, to a houseless wanderer, no one being by. We hold it to be a great jewel in the coronet of Mr Warren, that he sets his face manfully, in the present instance, against the fashion which all honest men and true must deprecate. The freedom from the prevailing cant which his book exhibits, is most refreshing; the certain upturning of misshapen noses which its very tendency must effect, the greatest compliment yet paid to his honest exertions in the cause of morality, and of the holy faith which he professes.

“Now and Then” is a Christmas book for a Christian people. It is a tale of fiction, which the most devout may read with no fear of insult, and without risk of being obliged to suspend their orthodoxy for the sake of an hour’s pleasant reading. The book invests Christmas with its legitimate Christian associations. It cannot be denied that the tendency of this species of literature, for the last few years, has been to denude the sacred season of all these associations, and to surround it with others which are at once trifling, irreligious, and heathenish. We dwell upon this fact, because there needs some courage boldly to speak God’s truth in an age rapidly verging towards practical infidelity. In Parliament, the once great leader of a greater Christian party publicly denies the necessity of a declaration of Christian faith as the test of a legislator. In our light literature, we find references enough to the goodness of Providence, but a studious avoidance of the name and properties by which that Providence is recognised when we come to our knees by the bed-side or in the sanctuary. There is, we grant, not so much a denial of the essential doctrines of Christianity every where about us save in the church, as a studious and utter disregard of them; but there is imminent peril in this very disregard. Neglect precedes desertion. Let us be duly grateful, we say, to one who, in the modest pages of a simple tale, recalls us to our obligations, and reminds us that the chief of duties here is to cling firmly to the faith by which the world is saved, and to proclaim first principles when that world is basely shrinking from their free and open recognition.

Let us, however, not be misunderstood. “Now and Then” is not a religious novel—popularly so called. Mr Warren is not on the present occasion a “religious novelist,” as controversial divines, usurping the functions of the tale writer are, for want of a better term, absurdly styled. The Christianity which pervades this book is pure and catholic, and has nothing to do with the quarrels of sects and classes: it is applicable to universal humanity. There is no vulgar presumptuous dabbling with controverted points of Scripture, which, appearing in works of fiction, is utterly abominable and ludicrous, even in its futility: but the author, starting with a high and admirable purpose, and keeping that purpose in view to the very last, confines himself strictly and solely to what we all regard as Christianity’s irrevocable and fundamental principles;—great saying truths which none can blink with safety, and which he brings forward with an evident profound sincerity and reverence, impossible to mistake and difficult to slight.

The story, potently simple in itself, opens with marvellous simplicity. We quote from the beginning:—

“Somewhere about a hundred years ago (but in which of our good kings’ reigns, or in which of our sea-coast counties, is needless to be known) there stood, quite by itself, in a parish called Milverstoke, a cottage of the better sort, which no one could have seen, some few years before that in which it is presented to our notice, without its suggesting to him that he was looking at a cottage quite of the old English kind. It was most snug in winter, and in summer very beautiful; glistening, as then it did, in all its fragrant loveliness of jessamine, honeysuckle, and sweet-brier. There, also, stood a bee-hive, in the centre of the garden, which, stretching down to the road-side, was so filled with flowers, especially roses, that nothing whatever could be seen of the ground in which they grew; wherefore it might well be that the busy little personages who occupied the tiny mansion so situated, conceived that the lines had fallen to them in very pleasant places indeed. The cottage was built very substantially, though originally somewhat rudely, and principally of sea-shore stones. It had a thick thatched roof, and the walls were low. In front there were only two windows, with diamond-shaped panes, one above another, the former much larger than the latter, the one belonging to the room of the building, the other to what might be called the chief bed-room; for there were three little dormitories—two being small, and at the back of the cottage. Close behind, and somewhat to the left, stood an elm-tree, its trunk completely covered with ivy; and so effectually sheltering the cottage, and otherwise so materially contributing to its snug, picturesque appearance, that there could be little doubt of the tree’s having reached its maturity before there was any such structure for it to grace and protect. Beside this tree was a wicket, by which was entered a little slip of ground, half garden and half orchard. All the foregoing formed the remnant of a little freehold property, which had belonged to its present owner and to his family before him, for several generations. The initial letter (A) of their name, Ayliffe, was rudely cut in old English character in a piece of stone forming a sort of centre facing over the doorway; and no one then living there knew when that letter had been cut.”

Such is the scene, and such the small house, in and from which the events evolve, that form the solemn and instructive narrative. The owner of the cot, the foremost though the humblest personage in the drama, was once a substantial, but is now a reduced yeoman, well stricken in years, being, at the opening of the story, close upon his sixty-eighth year.

“The crown of his head was bald, and very finely formed; and the little hair that he had left was of a silvery colour, verging on white. His countenance and figure were very striking to an observant beholder, who would have said at once, ‘That man is of a firm and upright character, and has seen trouble,’—all which was indeed distinctly written in his open Saxon features. His eye was of a clear blue, and steadfast in its gaze; and when he spoke, it was with a certain quaintness, which seemed in keeping with his simple and stern character. All who had ever known Ayliffe entertained for him a deep respect. He was of a very independent spirit, somewhat taciturn, and of a retiring, contemplative humour. His life was utterly blameless, regulated throughout by the purifying and elevating influence of Christianity. The excellent vicar of the parish in which he lived reverenced him, holding him up as a pattern, and pointing him out as one of whom it might be humbly said, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile. Yet the last few years of his life had been passed in great trouble. Ten years before had occurred, in the loss of his wife, who had been every way worthy of him, the first great sorrow of his life. After twenty years spent together in happiness greater than tongue could tell, it had pleased God, who had given her to him, to take her away—suddenly, indeed, but very gently. He woke one morning, when she woke not, but lay sweetly sleeping the sleep of death. His Sarah was gone, and thenceforth his great hope was to follow her, and be with her again. His spirit was stunned for a while, but murmured not; saying, with resignation, ‘The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.’ A year or two afterwards occurred to him a second trouble, great, but of a different kind. He was suddenly reduced almost to beggary. To enable the son of an old deceased friend to become a collector of public rates in an adjoining county, Ayliffe had unsuspiciously become his surety. The man, however, for whom he had done this service, fell soon afterwards into intemperate and dissolute habits; dishonesty, as usual, soon followed; and poor Ayliffe was horrified one evening by being called upon, his principal having absconded, a great defaulter, to contribute to repair the deficiency, to the full extent of his bond.”