The Story of a Bad Boy
By . With Illustrations. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co.
MR. ALDRICH has done a new thing in — we use the phrase with some gasps of reluctance, it is so threadbare and so near meaning nothing—American literature. We might go much farther without overpraising his pleasant book, and call it an absolute novelty, on the whole. No one else seems to have thought of telling the story of a boy’s life, with so great desire to show what a boy’s life is, and so little purpose of teaching what it should be; certainly no one else has thought of doing this for the life of an American boy. The conception of such a performance is altogether his in this case; but with regard to more full-grown figures of fiction, it is that of the best and oldest masters of the art of story-telling; and it is one that will at last give us, we believe, the work which has so long hovered in the mental atmosphere a pathetic ante-natal phantom, pleading to; be born into the world, — the American novel, namely.
Autobiography has a charm which passes that of all other kinds of reading ; it has almost the relish of the gossip we talk about our friends; and whoever chooses its form for his inventions is sure to prepossess us ; and if then he can give his incidents and characters the simple order and air of actual occurrences and people, it does not matter much what they are, — his success is assured. We think this is the open secret of the pleasure which “ The Story of a Bad Boy ” has afforded to the boys themselves, and to every man that happens to have been a boy. There must be a great deal of fact mixed up with the feigning, but the author has the art which imbues all with the same quality, and will not let us tell one from the other. He asks us to know a boy coming from his father’s house in New Orleans, where he has almost become a high-toned Southerner, to be educated under his grandfather’s care in a little New England seaport. His ideas, impulses, and adventures here are those of the great average of boys, and the effect of a boy’s small interests, ignorant ambition, and narrow horizon is admirably produced and sustained. His year is half made up of Fourth-of-julys and Thanksgivings; he has so little vantage-ground of experience that life blackens before him when he is left to pay for twelve ice-creams out of an empty pocket; he has that sense of isolation and of immeasurable remoteness from the sphere of men, which causes half the pleasure and half the pain of childhood; and his character and surroundings are all so well managed, that this propriety is rarely violated. Now and then, however, the author mars the good result by an after-thought that seems almost an alien stroke, affecting one as if some other brain had “ edited ” the original inspiration. We should say, for example, that in all that account of the boytheatricals it is the author who speaks, till after Pepper Whitcomb, standing for Tell’s son, receives the erring bolt in his mouth, when, emulous of the natural touches, the editor appears and adds: “The place was closed; not, however, without a farewell speech from me, in which I said that this would have been the proudest moment of my life if I had n’t hit Pepper Whitcomb in the mouth. Whereupon the audience (assisted, I am glad to state, by Pepper) cried, ‘ Hear! hear ! ’ I then attributed the accident to Pepper himself, whose mouth, being open at the instant I fired, acted upon the arrow much after the fashion of a whirlpool, and drew in the fatal shaft. I was about to explain how a comparatively small maelstrom could suck in the largest ship, when the curtain fell of its own accord, amid the shouts of the audience.”
Most of the characters of the book are as good as the incidents and the principal idea. Captain Nutter, the grandfather, and Miss Abigail, the maiden aunt, are true New England types, the very truth of which makes them seem at first glance wanting in novelty ; but they develop their originality gradually, as New England acquaintance should, until we feel for them the tenderness and appreciation with which they are studied. The Captain is the better of the two ; he is such a grandfather as any boy might be glad to have, and is well done as a personage and as a sketch of hearty and kindly old age, —outwardly a little austere, but full of an ill-hidden tolerance and secret sympathies with the wildness of boyhood. Others among the townspeople, merely sketched, or seen falsely with a boy’s vision, are no less living to us; the pony becomes a valued acquaintance ; nay, the old Nutter house itself, and the sleepy old town, have a personal fascination. Of Kitty, the Irish servant, and of her sea-faring husband, we are not so sure, — at least we are not so sure of the latter, who seems too much like the sailors we have met in the forecastles of novels and theatres, though for all we know he may be a veritable person. We like much better some of the merely indicated figures, like that mistaken genius who bought up all the old cannon from the privateer at the close of the war of 1812, in the persuasion that hostilities must soon break out again; and that shrewd Yankee who looked on from his hiding-place while the boys stole his worn-out stage-coach for a bonfire, and then exacted a fabulous price from their families for a property that had proved itself otherwise unsalable. The boys also are all true boys, and none is truer than the most difficult character to treat, — Binny Wallace, whose gentleness and sweetness are never suffered to appear what boys call “softness”; and on the whole we think the chapter which tells of his loss is the best in the book; it is the simplest and directest piece of narration, and is singularly touching, with such breadth and depth of impression that when you look at it a second time, you are surprised to find the account so brief and slight. Mr. Aldrich has the same good fortune wherever he means to be pathetic. The touches with which he indicates his hero’s homesickness when he is first left at Rivermouth are delicate and sufficient; so are those making known the sorrow that befalls him in the death of his father. In these passages, and in some description of his lovesickness, he does not push his effects too far, as he is tempted to do where he would be most amusing. “ Pepper,” he says the hero said to his friend who found him prowling about an old graveyard after his great disappointment, “ don’t ask me. All is not well here,” — touching his breast mysteriously. “ Earthly happiness is a delusion and a snare,”—all which fails to strike us as an original or probable statement of the case ; while this little picture of a boy’s forlorn attempt to make love to a young lady seems as natural as it is charming: —
“ Here the conversation died a natural death. Nelly sank into a sort of dream, and I meditated. Fearing every moment to be interrupted by some member of the family, I nerved myself to make a bold dash : —
“ ' Nelly.’
“ ' Well.’
“ ' Do you—’ I hesitated.
“ ‘ Do I what ? ’
“ ‘ Love any one very much ?’
“ ' Why, of course I do,’ said Nelly, scattering her revery with a merry laugh. ‘ I love Uncle Nutter, and Aunt Nutter, and you, — and Towser.’
“Towser, our new dog! I couldn’t stand that. I pushed back the stool impatiently and stood in front of her.
“ ' That’s not what I mean,’ I said angrily.
“ ‘ Well, what do you mean?'
“ ' Do you love any one to marry him ? ’
“ ‘The idea of it! ’ cried Nelly, laughing.
“ ‘ But you must tell me.’
“ ‘ Must, Tom ? ’
“ ‘ Indeed you must, Nelly,’
“She had arisen from the chair with an amused, perplexed look in her eyes. I held her an instant by the dress.
“ ' Please tell me.’
“ ' O you silly boy! ’ cried Nelly. Then she rumpled my hair all over my forehead and ran laughing out of the room.”
Mr. Aldrich is a capital conteur; the narrative is invariably good, neither hurried nor spun out, but easily discursive, and tolerant of a great deal of anecdote that goes finally to complete the charm of a life-like and delightful little story, while the moralizing is always as brief as it is pointed and generous. When he comes to tell a tale for older heads,—as we hope he some day will, we shall not ask him to do it better than this in essentials, and in less important particulars shall only pray him to be always himself down to the very last word and smallest turn of expression. We think him good enough.