Atlantic Monthly | Page 8

didn't he throw ink at him?" Recommending Australia, he wrote, "Earth is so kindly there, that, tickle her with a hoe, and she laughs with a harvest." The last of these sayings is in his best manner, and would be hard to match anywhere for grace and neatness. Here was a man to serve big cause, for he embodied its truths in forms of beauty. His use to his party could not be measured like that of commoner men, because of the rarity and attractive nature of the gifts which he brought to its service. They had a kind of incalculable value, like that of a fine day, or of starlight.
He was now immersed in literary activity. He had all kinds of work on hand. He brought out occasionally a five-act comedy, full as usual of wit. He wrote in "Punch,"--started a newspaper,--started a magazine,--published a romance,--all within a few years of each other. The romance was "A Man made of Money," which bids fair, I think, to be read longer than any of his works. It is one of those fictions in which, as in "Zanoni," "Peter Schlemil," and others, the supernatural appears as an element, and yet is made to conform itself in action to real and every-day life, in such a way that the understanding is not shocked, because it reassures itself by referring the supernatural to the regions of allegory. Shall we call this a kind of bastard-allegory? Jericho, when he first appears, is a common man of the common world. He is a money-making, grasping man, yet with a bitter savour of satire about him which raises him out of the common place. Presently it turns out, that by putting his hand to his heart he can draw away bank-notes,--only that it is his life he is drawing away. The conception is fine and imaginative, and ought to rank with the best of those philosophical stories so fashionable in the last century. Its working-out in the every-day part is brilliant and pungent; and much ingenuity is shown in connecting the tragic and mysterious element in Jericho's life with the ordinary, vain, worldly existence of his wife and daughters. It is startling to find ourselves in the regions of the impossible, just as we are beginning to know the persons of the fable. But the mind reassures itself. This Jericho, with his mysterious fate,--is not he, in this twilight of fiction, shadowing to us the real destiny of real money-grubbers whom we may see any day about our doors? Has not the money become the very life of many such? And so feeling, the reader goes pleasantly on,--just excited a little, and raised out of the ordinary temperature in which fiction is read, by the mystic atmosphere through which he sees things,--and ends, acknowledging that with much pleasure he has also gathered a good moral. For his mere amusement the best fireworks have been cracking round him on his journey. In short, I esteem this Jerrold's best book,--the one which contains most of his mind. Certain aspects of his mind, indeed, may be seen even to better advantage in others of his works; his sentimental side, for instance, in "Clovernook," where he has let his fancy run riot like honeysuckle, and overgrow every thing; his wit in "Time works Wonders," which blazes with epigrams like Vauxhall with lamps. But "A Man made of Money" is the completest of his books as a creation, and the most characteristic in point of style,--is based on a principle which predominated in his mind,--is the most original in imaginativeness, and the best sustained in point and neatness, of the works he has left.
During the years of which I have just been speaking, Jerrold lived chiefly in a villa at Putney, and afterwards at St. John's Wood,--the mention of which fact leads me to enter on a description of him in his private, social, and friendly relations. Now-a-days it is happily expected of every man who writes of another to recognize his humanity,--not to treat him as a machine for the production of this or that--scientific, or literary, or other--material. Homo sum is the motto of the biographer, and so of the humbler biographic sketcher. Jerrold is just one of those who require and reward this kind of personal sympathy and attention;--so radiant was the man of all that he put into his books!--so quick, so warm, so full of light and life, wit and impulse! He was one of the few who in their conversation entirely come up to their renown. He sparkled wherever you touched him, like the sea at night.
The first thing I have to remark, in treating of Jerrold the man, is the entire harmony between that figure and Jerrold the writer. He talked very much as