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Novels and Novelists

A Victorian Jungle

A Victorian Jungle

The Gay-Dombeys — By Sir Harry Johnston

It is not without a tinge of malicious satisfaction that we realize there are delights reserved for us elderly creatures which are quite out of sight, out of reach, of the golden boys and girls who are making so wonderfully free of our apples and pears and plums. Perhaps one of the rarest and most delicious is meeting with an old play-fellow who is just come from the country of our childhood, and having an endless talk with him about what is changed and what is the same—whether the Aliens still live in the same house, what has become of the huge Molesworth family, and was the mystery of old Anderson ever solved?

We shall never see these people again; we shall share nothing more with them. We shall never push open their garden gates and smell our way past the flower bushes to the white verandahs where they sit gossiping in the velvet moonlight. Why should we feel then this passionate interest? Is it because, prisoners as we are, we love to feel page 15 we have inhabited other lives—lived more lives than one—or we are reluctant to withdraw wholly because of that whispered word ‘Finis’ which locks the doors against us, one by one, for ever?

The memory of our childhood is like ‘the memory of a tale that is told,’ and the delight of talking over with a boon companion a book you have read in the long ago is hardly less real. It is not very different; you are both left wondering. What happened ‘after that’? Does the author know? Or does he—wonder too? What would Dickens say if he read Sir Harry Johnston's ‘Gay-Dombeys,’ which continues the history of the Dombey family and their circle through the Victorian period and into our own times, with wonderful elaborateness and excursions and allusions such as their author loved, and with a canvas so crowded that you have to stand on tiptoe and look over people's shoulders and under their arms and round them before you can be perfectly sure that you have seen everybody who is there?

We can think of no other author who took a final farewell of his characters with greater reluctance than did Dickens. His meanest villains were, after all, citizens of his world, and as such they stumbled and were up again, to be nearly caught, and again escaped before he could bear to let them go for ever. As to those whom he loved—and in whom he lived—it was anguish to him to submit to their passing. ‘Shall I never be that dying boy again, waving my hand at the water on the wall? Never be again the child-wife, Little Blossom, asking if my poor boy is very lonely downstairs?’ And so the boat puts back once more for one last sob, one last gush of tears. Even the survivors were not allowed to gather without one final Grand Tableau before the fall of the curtain, which is intended for an abiding proof for him and for us that they are still there, still going on, still extravagantly, abundantly alive. It is this extraordinary delight in the exuberance of life, in its endless possibilities of such complications and combinations, that Sir Harry Johnston shares with Dickens. We page 16 are inclined to believe that his fantastic choice of characters is due to his recognition of Dickens as a fellow passionate explorer, with London for a dark continent, and surely as strange a collection of animals as could be discovered in any jungle to wonder at, to watch, and to track to their lairs. It is certain that they both have the peculiarly English gift (which foreigners call our ‘indifference’) of accepting the strange thing in all its strangeness, presenting it with all the freakish detail left in, and of being ‘at home’ anywhere they may choose to feel ‘at home.’

But the author of ‘The Gay-Dombeys’ is far too much the born writer to put on the manner of the author of ‘Dombey and Son.’ To be carried away by him in the good old-fashioned style that your modern writer would think shame to attempt, you must admit that the Dickens world existed as part of the real world, and there is no reason why Mr. Arthur Balfour should not discuss theology with Mrs. Humphry Ward at one of Florence Gay-Dombey's parties in her Morris drawing-room in Onslow Square. Why not? And is not Sir Harry Johnston justified in portraying real personalities of the period by the fact that, for the reader, they are never quite so convincing as the unreal. Indeed, there comes ever a moment in the life of your confirmed reader when he catches himself murmuring: ‘Who shall say which is which …?’ This novel is full of such moments. Nevertheless, it is no hunting-ground for scandalmongers; they may stand up to the canvas as close as they like; the style of the painting is too large, too happy, and too free to feed the prying eye.

It would be difficult to tell the story, for the story is made up of stories, each as separate as flowers on a tree, and all contributing to the delightful effect. One pauses, wondering which to gather; but no—they make so satisfactory a whole that it were useless to attempt to choose. Perhaps the finest bloom is Lady Feenix's friendship with Eustace Morven. But that is because she page 17 is such an adorable woman—and adorable women are still a little painfully rare.

(May 2, 1919.)