The 'Blackwood' Group

Cyril Thornton is the scion of an old county family, who, at a very early age, has the misfortune accidentally to kill his elder brother. His father's affection is in consequence alienated from him, and he grows up under a cloud. In time he is sent to the University, and the scene of the story shifts to Glasgow, thus affording opportunity for some scathing portraiture of the merchant life of that city. At Glasgow Cyril makes the acquaintance of his uncle, and by the amiability and independence of his character conquers the affection of the rich old childless man. He has now arrived at man's estate, and whilst visiting his aristocratic connection, the Earl of Amersham, at Staunton Court, he sees, loves, and is beloved by, the beautiful and fascinating Lady Melicent, the daughter of the house. Their scarcely-avowed attachment is interrupted by the fatal illness of Cyril's mother, and being summoned to return home with all speed, Cyril is there informed that, in a spirit of cruel vindictiveness, his father has disinherited him. His gloom deepens, and after some further romantic and amatory experience, at length – alas! it is, indeed, at length – he joins the army. This is what we have been waiting for, and our patience is now rewarded. At first he is quartered at Halifax, where, at that time, the Duke of Kent was Commander-in-Chief, and we are treated to a satirical portrait of His Royal Highness, followed by a good deal of interesting description of the military life of those days, interspersed with characteristic anecdote, and varied by love-intrigue and a duel. Then follow travel and sea-faring, with eloquent picture of an ascent of the Peak of Teneriffe, of the Bermuda islands, and Gibraltar. Whilst Cyril is at the last-named station, the vicissitudes of military life are illustrated by an outbreak of yellow-fever, and when he is on his way back to England the transport ship which bears him becomes engaged with a French privateer. From all this it will be seen that of incident and movement there is no lack, yet it is not until after the outbreak of the Spanish War of Independence, when the hero is ordered with his regiment to the Peninsula, that our expectations are fully satisfied. In such passages as, for instance, those which describe the storming of the heights of Roleia, the night spent by Cyril on out-piquet duty, or the capture of the fort witnessed by the light of fire-balls, we have, not only the scenes of war, but the poetry of the soldier's life set before us to admiration. Scarcely less excellent is the account of Cyril's further service under Wellington, Sir Rowland Hill, and Marshal Beresford, at the lines of Torres Vedras, the siege of Badajos, and the battle of Albuera, our interest in which is greatly strengthened by knowledge that the writer was himself a part of what he describes. Our only regret is that he has devoted so comparatively little of his book to what he does so well. For all too soon we have the hero back in London once more, frightfully disfigured by a wound received in action, and as a consequence slighted by the dazzling but shallow Lady Melicent, who before had looked so graciously upon the handsome soldier. And now the novel begins to drag lamentably. The hero's domestic misfortunes strike us as superfluous, whilst the madhouse scenes, where the characters discourse in 'poetic prose,' are in the basest style of melodrama. Nor do we care enough for Mr Spreull and his Girzy to have much patience with the languid and long-drawn concluding scenes in which they take part. Suffice it then to say that, ere we bid adieu to Cyril, he is restored to his family estate, enriched by the inheritance of his uncle's fortune, and consoled for the loss of the fickle Melicent by worth and affection in the person of Laura Willoughby, the friend of his youth.

The writer of the obituary of Hamilton in Blackwood is eloquent in praise of the literary style of the book. But when we find the novelist, who writes in the first person, declaring that 'the elements of thought and feeling within him were conglomerated into confused and inextricable masses,' or describing a housemaid as being 'busied in her matutinal vocation,' or alluding to the 'supererogatory decoration of shaving,' or, when he wishes to inform us that there was a doctor in a certain village, employing the locution that the village 'had the advantage of including in its population a professor of the healing art,' – then we dispute the competency of his critic. This inflation of style is the more curious in that, fortified by his English education, Hamilton, like Miss Ferrier, is by no means inclined to deal mercifully with the foibles of his countrymen, as is amply shown by his portrait of Mr Archibald Shortridge, or his account of the visit of the five Miss Spreulls, of Balmalloch, and their mother to Bath. But for this we should naturally have passed over any slips in his own style, preferring to regard them as the not unamiable lapses of a hand more skilled to wield the sword than drive the pen. His book on the Peninsular Campaigns is written in good straightforward English, but in Men and Manners in America he again falls victim to the temptation never to use one word where two will do nearly as well. When the characters in Cyril Thornton converse – be they officers in the army, charming young ladies, peers of the realm, or (like Miss Mansfield) daughters of respectable tradesmen – they uniformly make use of finely rounded and elaborately constructed periods, preferring as a rule the third person as a form of address – as, for instance, when a lady, addressing the hero, observes, 'I should be surprised to hear that Captain Thornton was of those,' and so on. This, however, is, of course, no fault of the author's, but simply a not ungraceful literary convention of the age in which he wrote.

Though he professed Whig politics, Hamilton's pose throughout his writings is one of aristocratic hauteur, and we are consequently the less surprised to learn that the book in which he embodied his observations on America gave dire offence in that country, provoking angry reprisals. It may be that the comments of the gallant captain are made occasionally in a spirit neither wholly free from insular prejudice, nor from that particular pedantry which is sometimes generated by a military training. But it is also manifest that the existence which he surveyed – in a world, as must be remembered, at that time really new – was in many respects a sufficiently bare, comfortless, inelegant, and unrefined one, strangely lacking in the elements of elevation in public or private life. Hamilton strove to judge it fairly, and his observations are those of an intelligent and honest critic. Passing easily, as they do, from grave to gay – now commenting on the tendencies of democratic government or of the tariff, now comparing the constitutions of the different States, now describing the prison or scholastic systems of the country, and now touching upon the beauty and the dress of the ladies, upon dinner parties, modes of eating, barbarisms of language, and the like – they may be read with interest and historically not without profit to this day.

Of his Annals of the Peninsular Campaigns, the author tells us that it was intended to appeal to a wider public than was likely to be available for the lengthy histories of Napier and Southey, its object being to extend a knowledge of the great achievements of the British arms and an appropriate pride in them. Hamilton had special qualifications for the task, and he supplied an admirably terse and lucid narrative, but this was not accomplished without a sacrifice of much of that picturesque and personal detail which does so much to save history from dryness, and to make it attractive and memorable to the general reader. So that his end was but half attained.

1

It is distinctly stated in the Life, vol. 1, p. 180, that the loss of fortune was complete; but a subsequent statement is somewhat at variance with this.

2

Letter quoted by Mrs Gordon.

3

The Crusade.

4

Literary Life, p. 79.

5

Autobiography, vol. i., p. 147.

6

R. P. Gillies, Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, vol. iii., p. 59.

7

Autobiography, vol. ii., p. 157.

8

'Journal,' under date January 21st, 1832.

9

No. 198 Atholl Place. Article in Glasgow Herald, 1st May 1895.