Chapter III: Father and Son (2)

CURATE.--And will not the authority of parables justify the adoption? There may, it is true, be mischievous novels of the kind; but what is there that may not be perverted to a bad use? We had at one time irreligious and basely immoral novels; and there have been too many such recently from the Parisian press--blasphemous, immoral, seditious. The existence of such demands the antidote. You have, of course, read Miss Hamilton's "Modern Philosophers?" That work was well timed, and did its work well, so cleverly were the very passages from Godwin and others of that school brought in juxtaposition with their necessary results. It is a melancholy tale.

AQUILIUS.--Yes; but this quiet woman, whom, as I am told, if you had met her in society, you would never have suspected of power and shrewd observation, by her little pen scattered the philosophers right and left, and their works with them. I read the other day Godwin's "St Leon"--a most tiresome, objectless novel; the repetitions, varying with no little ingenuity of language, of the expression of the feelings of St Leon, are tiresome to a degree. In his _Caleb Williams_ the same thing is done; but there it agrees well with the nature of the tale, and well represents the movements of the persecuting Erinnys in the mind of the victim. I read it at a great disadvantage, it must be owned, for I had just laid down that tale of singular interest, the "Kreutzner" of Mrs H. Lee. There is a slight resemblance in some points to Godwin's style, especially to this expression of the feelings of the victim; but they are exactly timed to suspend the narrative just where it ought to stay. Too rapid a succession of events would have been out of keeping with that incessant persecution, which tracks more perfectly, because more surely and slowly. The true bloodhound is not fleet. Cassandra stayed her prophetic speech; but the pause was the scent of blood, and awful was the burst that followed. Know you the _Canterbury Tales_?

CURATE.--Oh yes; and well remember that strangely interesting and most powerful one of "Kreutzner." I have admired how, in every tale, the style is various and characteristic. I see, then, that you have taken to "light reading" of late.

AQUILIUS.--It is not very easy to say what light-reading is. I once heard a very grave person accused of light-reading, because he was detected with the "History of a Foundling" in his hand. He replied, "You may call it light-reading, but to me there is more solid matter in it than in most books. I find it all substance,--full weight in the scale of sense, common or uncommon, and will weigh down a library of heavy works. And yet you may pleasantly enough handle it--it fits so well, and the pressure is so convenient. You may even fancy it light too, for it imparts a vigour as you hold it. And so you can play with it for your health, as did the Greek king, in the Arabian tale, with the mallet and medicinal balls which the physician Douban gave him, with which he was lustily to exercise himself. It was all play, but the drugs worked through it. There may be something sanatory even in the 'History of the Foundling.' There is a light-reading which is the heaviest of all reading: it comes with a deadly weight upon the eyelids, and then drops like lead from your fingers,--but then, indeed, it proves light enough in escaping." Fielding's novel is not of this kind: my grave friend always read it once a-year, and said he as often found new matter in it. Did you ever--indeed I ought not to ask the question--notice Fielding's admirable English? Our best writers have had a short vocabulary, and such was the case with Fielding; but he is the perfect master of it. The manners he portrays are gone by. Some of the characters it would be impossible now to reproduce, and yet we know at a glance that they were drawn from life.

CURATE.--Comparing that novel, and indeed those of that day, with our more modern, may we not say, that this our England is improved?

AQUILIUS.--I hope so: it is at least more refined. But there is a question, Is not the taste above the honesty? Some say, it is a better hypocrite. I do not venture an opinion, but take Dr Primrose's ingenious mode of prophecy, who, in ambiguous cases, always wished it might turn out well six months hence.

CURATE.--Now, indeed, you speak of a novel _sui generis_--that had no prototype. It stands now unapproachable and original as the Iliad. Yet I have often wondered by what art Goldsmith invested _such_ characters with so great interest. That in every one he put something of himself, it has been well observed; hence the strong vitality, the flesh and blood life of all. I believe the great charm lies in its simpletonianism--I coin a word; admit it. There is scarcely a character that is not more or less of the simpleton; and the more this simpletonianism is conspicuous, the more are we delighted. Perhaps the reader, whether justified or not, is all along under the conviction that he has himself more common sense than any of the company to whom he is introduced, and with whom he becomes familiar. Simplicity runs through the whole tale--a fascinating simplicity, distinct from, and yet in happy relation with, this simpletonianism. The vicar is a simpleton in more things than his controversy, and is the worthy parent of Moses of the spectacles. The eccentricity of the baronet, the over-trust and the mis-trust of mankind, at the different periods of his life, are of the simpletonian school; and not the least so that act of injurious folly, the giving up his estate to a nephew, of whom he could have known no good. Mrs Primrose is a simpleton born and bred, and in any other hands but those of charitable Goldsmith must have turned out an odious character, for she has scarcely feeling, and certainly no sense. Simpletonianism reigns, whether at the vicarage or at Farmer Flamborough's. Yet is there not a single character in this exquisitely perfect novel that you would in any one respect wish other than as put before you. There is a great charm in this simpletonianism: the reader is in perfect sympathy with the common feelings of all, yet cognisant of a simpletonianism of which none of the _dramatis personae_ are conscious. He thus sits, as it were, in the conclave of nature's administrators, knows the secret that fixes characters in their lines; and is pleased to see the strings pulled, and the figures move according to their kind; is delighted with their perfect harmony, and looks on with complacency and self-satisfaction, believing himself all the while, though he may in reality be something of a simpleton, a person of very superior sagacity. Follies that do not offend, amuse--they are not neutral: we cheat ourselves into an idea that we are exempt from, and are so much above them, that we can afford to look down and laugh: we say to ourselves we are wiser. May not this in some measure be the cause that all, whether children of small or of bigger growth, of three feet or six, take pleasure in the jokes, verbal and practical, of the clown Mr Merryman, and pardon the wickedness of Punch when he so adroitly slips the rope round the neck of the simpleton chief-justice, who trusted himself within reach of the knave's fingers.

AQUILIUS.--Your theory is plausible; be the cause what it may, our best authors seem to have been aware of the charm of simpletonianism. Never was there a more perfect master of it than Shakspeare. And how various the characters--what differences between Shallow, Slender, Malvolio, and indeed all his troop of simpletons! None but he would have thought of putting Falstaff in the category. But let no man boast of his wisdom; we had laughed with him, but laugh too at him when simpletonianised in the buck basket. The inimitable Sterne, did he not know the value of simpletonianism, and make us love it, in the weak and in the wise, in the Shandean philosophy and the no-philosophy of the misapprehending gentle Uncle Toby, and the faithful Trim, taking to himself a portion of both masters' simpletonianism? Did not Le Sage know the value of this art?--Gil Blas retaining to the last somewhat of the simpleton, and, as if himself unconscious, so naively relating his failure with the Archbishop of Grenada. And have we not perfect examples in the delicious pages of Cervantes?--the grave, the wise, the high-minded simpletonianism of Don Quixotte; and that contrastingly low and mother-wit kind in the credulous Sancho Panza--ignorance made mad by contact with madness engendered of reading? The very Rosinante that carried madness partakes of the sweet and insane simpletonianism, and Sancho and his ass are fellows well met, well matched.

CURATE.--As he is the cleverest actor that plays the fool, so is he the wisest and ablest writer that portrays simpletonianism. I suppose it is an ingredient in human nature, and that we are none of us really exempt, but that it is kept out of sight, for the most part, and covered by the cloak of artificial manners; and so, when it does break out, the touch of human nature is irresistible; we in fact acknowledge the kinship. But the nicest painting is required; the least exaggeration turns all to caricature. Even Fielding's hand, though under the direction of consummate genius, was occasionally too unrestrained. His Parson Adams might have been a trifle more happily delineated; we see its error in the after-type, Pangloss. What a field was there for extravagance in Don Quixotte! but Cervantes had a forbearing as well as free hand. How could people mistake the aim of Cervantes, and pronounce him to be the Satirist of Romance? He was himself the most exquisite romancer. His episodes are romantic in the extreme, whether of the pastoral or more real life. Though it was not right in Avelanda to take up his tale, it must be regretted that Cervantes changed the plan of his story. What would the tournament have been? Some critics have thought all the after-part inferior: without admitting so much, he certainly wrote it in pique, and possibly might not have concluded the tale at all, if it had not been thus forced upon him.

AQUILIUS.--We must not omit to mention our own Addison. There is an air of simpletonianism running through all his papers, as one unconscious of his own wit, so perfect was he in his art; and as to character, the simpletonianism of Sir Roger de Coverley must ever immortalise the author--for the good eccentric Sir Roger is one of the world's characters, that can never be put by and forgotten. What nice touches constitute it!

CURATE.--Yes, great nicety; and how often the little too far injures! I confess I was never so charmed with some of the characters in Sir Walter Scott's novels, from this carrying too far. Even simpletonianism must not intrude, as did sometimes Monkbarns and the Dominie: the "prodigious!" and absence of mind were beyond nature. Character should never become the author's puppets: mere eccentricity and catch phraseology do not make simpletonianism. Smollet, too, fell into the caricature. He sometimes told too much, and let his figures play antics. The fool would thereby spoil his part. There must be some repose every where, into which, as into an obscure, the mind of the reader or spectator may look, and make conjecture--some quiet, in which imagination may work. The reader is never satisfied, unless he too in a certain sense is a creator; the art is, to make all his conjectures, though seemingly his own, the actual result of the writing before him. "Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds." How much does the mind accumulate at once, to fill up the history of those few words! There is no need of more--all is told; while the spectator thinks he is making out the history himself.

AQUILIUS.--It is a great fault in a very popular novel writer of the day, that he will not give his readers credit for any imagination at all; every character is in extreme. To one ignorant of the world, but through books, it would appear that there is not a common middle character in life: we are to be acquainted with the minutest particulars, or rather peculiarities, of dress and manners. It is as if a painter should colour each individual in his grouping, in the most searching light. The inanimate nature must be made equally conspicuous, and every thing exaggerated. And it is often as forced in the expression as it is exaggerated in character. He has great powers, great genius, overflowing with matter, yet as a writer he wants agreeability: his satire is bitter, unnecessarily accumulated, and his choice of odious characters offers too frequently a disgusting picture of life.

CURATE.--The worst is, that, with a genius for investing his characters with interest, by the events with which he links them together, in which he has so much art, that he compels persons of most adverse tastes to read him,--he is not a good-natured writer, and he evidently, it might be almost said professedly, writes with a purpose--and that I think a very mischievous one, and one in which he is to a certain extent joined by some other writers of the day--to decry, and bring into contempt as unfeeling, the higher classes. This is a very vulgar as well as evil taste, and is quite unworthy the genius of Mr Dickens. And, what is a great error in a novelist, he gives a very false view of life as it is. There is too much of the police-office reporter in all his works. _Dombey and Son_ is, however, his greatest failure, as a whole. You give him credit for a deep plot and mystery, ere you have gone far; but it turns out--nothing. Admirable, indeed, are some things, parts and passages of wonderful power; but the spring that should have attached them has snapped, and they are, and ever will be, admired, only as scenes. The termination is miserable--a poor conclusion, indeed, of such a beginning; every thing is promised, nothing given, in conclusion. Some things are quite out of possibility. The whole conduct of the wife is out of nature. Such a character should have a deep cause for her conduct: she has none but the having married a disagreeable man, out of pique, from whom she runs away with one still more odious to herself and every one, and assumes, not a virtue which she has not, but a vice which she scorns, and glories in the stigma, because it wounds her husband. Such a high and daring mind, and from the commencement so scorning contamination, could not so degrade itself without having a stronger purpose than the given one. The entire change of character in Dombey is out of all nature--it is impossible; nor does the extraordinary affection of the daughter spring from any known principle of humanity. The very goodness of some of the accessory characters becomes wearisome, as the vice of others is disgusting.

AQUILIUS.--After all, he is an uncomfortable writer: he puts you out of humour with the world, perhaps with yourself, and certainly with him as a writer. Yet let us acknowledge that he has done much good. He should be immortalised, if only for the putting down the school tyrannies, exposing and crushing school pretensions, and doubtless saving many a fair intellect from withering blight and perversion. He takes in hand fools, dolts, and knaves; but Dickens wants simpletonianism. He gave some promise that way in his _Pickwick Papers_, but it was not fulfilled. Turn we now to Mrs Trollope. What say you to her _Vicar of Wrexhill_? let it have a text, and what is it? I will not suggest a text--that is your province. I dare to say you would easily find one.

CURATE.--Why, I think Mrs Trollope was very unfairly dealt with. The narrative in that novel was a fair deduction from the creed of a sect; and if it does not always produce similar consequences, it is because men will be often better than their creeds. But that fact does not make her comment unfit for the text, that it told; I should judge from the abuse that has been heaped upon it--no, not upon it, but upon the authoress. Why was it not open to her to make this answer to other works of fiction, as she thought, inculcating evil? What Miss Hamilton did with the philosophers, she did with the Antinomians.

AQUILIUS.--It has been the fashion to call her a coarse writer--a vulgar writer. I see nothing of it in her best works. She takes vulgar and coarse people to expose them as warnings, and, if possible, to amend them. We cannot spare Mrs Trollope from our literature. I have been told by an eye-witness that her American "camp scene" is very far short of the truth, and that she could not give the details. He must surely be a bit of a bigot, who would hastily pronounce that even Greave's _Spiritual Quixotte_ is an irreligious work. There are too many people interested in decrying the novel of so powerful a writer as Mrs Trollope, to suffer her to be without reproach both for style and object. I should rather object to her that she writes too much--for she is capable, were she to bestow due time upon it, to write something better than has yet dropped from her pen; let her give up her fashionable novels. When I say better, yet would I except the _Vicar of Wrexhill_: for, however unpopular with some, it places her, as a writer, very high.

CURATE.--They who oppose themselves to any set of opinions must make up their minds, during the present generation at least, to receive but half their meed of praise. Was this ever proved more remarkably than in the publication of that singular novel, _Ten Thousand a-Year_? It is a political satire, certainly; but not only that--it has a far wider scope; but it was sufficiently so to set all the Whigs against it. And sore enough they were. But has there been any such novel since the days of Fielding? And it exhibits a pathos, and tone of high principle and personal dignity, that were out of the reach even of Fielding. This novel, and its precursor, the _Diary of a Physician_ will--must--ever live in the standard literature of the country.

AQUILIUS.--And why not add _Now and Then_? One thing I cannot but greatly admire in Mr Warren--he is ever alive to the dignity of his profession. Hating law as I do, in all its courses, ways, contacts, and consequences, and officials, from the Lord Chief-Justice to the petty constable; and having a kind of envious dislike to the arrogation to themselves, by lawyers, of the greater part of the great profits and emoluments of the country; and seeing, besides, that most men of any station and property pay, in their course of life, as much to lawyers as in taxes, the one cried-up grievance; yet I confess that Mr Warren has put the noble portraiture of the profession, in all its dignity and usefulness, and in its high moral and intellectual acquirements and actions, so vigorously before me, that I recant, and even venerate the profession--against my will, nevertheless.

CURATE.--How touching are the early struggles with his poverty, in the person of the young physician himself! with what fine taste and feeling of the gentleman and the scholar are they written! Perhaps no novel can show a more perfectly complete-in-itself character than his Gammon, in whom is the strange interweaving of the man of taste and sense--even, in some sense, better feeling--with the vile and low habits of knavery.

AQUILIUS.--The author differs from most novelists in this, that he does not make love, by which must be understood love-making or love-pursuing, the subject, but incidental to his subject. He sets up affection, rather, in the niche for his idolatry. Tenderness, and duty linked with it, and made sublime by it, is with him far more than the "passion," of love. It is life with love, rather than in the chase of it, that we see detailed in trial and in power.

CURATE.--It is so; and yet you do not, I presume, mean to blame other authors if they have made "the passion" their subject. We are only bound to the author's choice, be it what it may--love, ambition, or, any other--we must have every feature of life, every notice of action, pictured.

AQUILIUS.--Surely: but there is a masculine virtue, seeing that the one field has been so decidedly occupied, in making it less prominent; and where it is thus abstinently administered, there is often a great charm in the conciseness and unexpectedness. Let me exemplify Mr Southey's _Doctor_. There may be, strictly speaking, or rather speaking after the fashion of novels, but little love-making; there are, nevertheless, two little scenes, that are the most touchingly effective I ever remember to have read. The one is a scene between cousins--dependent and in poverty, I think, at Salisbury; the other, the unexpected and brief courtship of Doctor Dove himself. It is many years since I read _The Doctor_, yet these two scenes have often been conjured up, and vividly pictured to my imagination. I doubt if Southey could have told a love-tale in any other way, and few in any way would have told one so well.

CURATE.--Those who dwell too unsparingly on such scenes, and spin out their sentimental tales, and bring the loving pair incessantly before the eye, do for the most part the very thing which the nature of the passion forbids. Its whole virtue is in the secrecy. And though the writer often supposes a secrecy, by professing himself only the narrator and not the witness, yet the reader is not quite satisfied, seeing that he too is called in to look over the wall or behind the hedge; and the virtue he is willing to give the lovers is at some expense of his own, for he has a shrewd suspicion that both he and the writer are little better than spies.

AQUILIUS.--Surely you will admit something conventional, as you would the soliloquy on the stage--words must pass for thoughts. I find a greater fault with those kind of novels; they work, as it were, too much to a point, beyond which, and out of which aim, there is no interest. These I call melodramatic novels, in which the object seems to harrow up or continually excite the feelings, to rein the hasty course of curiosity, working chiefly for the denouement, after which there is nothing left but a blank. Curiosity, satisfied, cannot go back; the threads have all been taken up that lead out of the labyrinth--they will not conduct you back again. Novels of this kind have greater power, at first, than any other; but, the effect for which they labour fully produced, the effervescence is over; and though we remember them for the delight they have given, we do not return to them. Novels of less overstrained incident, full of a certain _naivete_ in the description of men and manners, from which the reader may make inferences and references out of his own knowledge, though they will not be read by so many, will be read oftener by the same persons. Perhaps there is more genius in the greater part of these novels, but the writers sacrifice to effect--to immediate effect--too much. Cooper's novels are somewhat of this kind; and may I venture to say that the Waverley novels, as they are called, assume a little more than one could wish of this character. Authors, in this respect, are like painters of _effect_--they strike much at first, but become even tiresome by the permanency of what is, in nature, evanescent. It is too forced for the quietness under which things are both seen and read twice. Generally, in such tales, when the parties have got well out of their troubles, we are content to leave them at the church door, and not to think of them afterwards.

CURATE.--Novelists, too, seem to think that, by their very title, they are compelled to seek novelties. I have to complain of a very bad novelty. The "lived together happy for ever after" is not only to be omitted, but these last pages of happiness are sadly slurred over; as if the author was mostly gifted with the malicious propensity for accumulating trouble upon his favourites, and with reluctance registered their escape into happiness. They do out of choice what biographers do out of necessity, the disagreeable necessity of biography, and for which--I confess the weakness--I dislike it. I do not like to come to the "vanitas vanitatum"--to see the last page contradict and make naught of the vitality, the energy, the pursuit, the attainment of years. It is all true enough--as it is--that old men have rheum, but, as Hamlet says, it is villanous to set it down. You have, of course, read that powerful novel _Mount Sorel_. You remember the last page--the one before had been "voti compos"--all were happy; and there it should have ended. Not a bit of it. Then follows the monumental scene. You are desired to look forward, to see them, or rather to be told of their lying in their shrouds, with their feet, that recently so busily walked the flowery path of the accomplishment of their hopes, upturned and fixed in the solemn posture of death.

AQUILIUS.--Yes, I remember it well, and being rather nervous, declined reading _Emilia Wyndham_, by the same author, because I heard it was melancholy, and feared a similar conclusion. I agree with you with respect to biography: and remember, when a boy, the sickening sensation when I read at school the end of Socrates. I wish biographers would know where to stop, and save us the sad catastrophe. It is strange, that you must not read the life of a buffoon but you must see his tricks come to an end, and his whole broad farce of life suddenly drop down dead in tragedy. Whatever may be said of the biographer in his defence, I hold the novelist inexcusable.

CURATE.--I should even prefer the drop-scene of novel happiness to come quietly down before the accoucheur and the registrar of births make their appearance. Why should we be told of a nursery of brats--a whole quiverful, as Lamb says, "shot out" upon you? It is better to take these things for granted. Doubtless it is as true, that the happy couple will occasionally suffer--she from nerves, and he under dyspepsia; but we do not see such matters, nor ought they to be brought forward, although I doubt not the authors might obtain a very handsome fee from an advertising doctor for only publishing the prescriptions. If they go on, however, in this absurd way, it is to be feared they will go one step further with the biographers, and publish the will, with certificate of probate and legacy-tax duly paid.

AQUILIUS.--We are not, however, as bad as the French. If our novels do sometimes require an epitaph at the end, they do not make death at once a lewd, sentimental, frightful, and suicidal act--and that not as a warning, but as a French sublime act.

CURATE.--You have read, then, the _Juif Errant_. I am not very well acquainted with French novels, but have read some very pretty stories in the voluminous Balzac, most of which were not of a bad tendency. Did you ever read the Greek novels _Theagenes and Chariclea_, and the _Loves of Ismenias and Ismene_? Being curious to see how the Thessalonian archbishop, who lived in the times of Manuelis and Alexis Commenus, about the year 750, would speak the sentiments of his age on the passion of love, I lately took up his novel, the "_Loves of Ismenias and Ismene_."

AQUILIUS.--I know it not; perhaps you will give me an outline, and select passages. I have great respect for the old Homeric commentator.

CURATE.--I remember a few tender passages, and graceful descriptions of gardens and fountains, and that he is not unmindful of his Homer, for he refers to the gardens of Alcinous as his model. I confess I am a little ashamed of the archbishop; but read with more than shame that Greek novel of Longus, written it is doubted whether in the second or fourth century, and to which, it is said, Eustathius was indebted for his novel. Longus's _Daphnis and Chloe_ is a pastoral,--it would burn well. There are pleasing descriptions in both of garden scenery. Speaking of gardens and fountains reminds me of the richness of the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_, which I am surprised did not before come into our discussion. How strange is it that, though manners and scenes are so far from our usages and any known locality, we admit them at once within the recognised boundary of imaginative nature! They are indeed fascinating; yet have I not unfrequently met with persons who professed that they could not endure them.

AQUILIUS.--Were they young persons?--if so, they must be very scantily gifted with a conciliating imagination, though they may very possibly be the most reasonable of human beings. The charm that renders the _Arabian Nights_ acceptable in all countries appears to me to arise from this--that vivid are the touches which speak of our common nature, and what is extraneous is less defined. Indeed, not unfrequently is great use made of the obscure--such obscure as Rembrandt, the master of mystery, profusely spread around the gorgeous riches of his pencil. There is here and there, too, a sprinkling of simpletonianism in a foreign shape, showing that all nations have something akin.

CURATE.--Besides, they have the charm of magic, and a magic which blends very skilfully and harmoniously with the realities of every-day life. They were evidently composed in a country where magic was a creed. Could such tales have been ever the product of this country, so different from any of our "fairy tales?" though perhaps none of ours, those that delighted us in our childhood, are of English origin. Magic of some kind or other must have been adopted in tale at a very early period. Ulysses' safety girdle, which he was directed mysteriously to throw behind him, and I believe not to look back, comes undoubtedly from some far land of faery, from whence the genius of Homer took it with a willing hand.

AQUILIUS.--Grecian fable is steeped in the charmed fountain. The power of the Medusa's head, and the black marble prince's metamorphoses, are nearly allied. And a Circe may be discovered in many places of Arabic enchantment.

CURATE.--Time converts everything into beauty. You smile, thinking doubtless that age has something to do with ugliness. Perhaps so, though it follows not but that there may be, personally speaking, to every age its own beauty, visible to eyes not human, whilst we are under earthly beauty's fascination, at any rate with regard to fact and to fable. Time unites them, as it covers the riven rock with lichen; so the shattered and ugliest idols of remotest ages doth Time hand over to Fable, to remodel and invest with garments of beauty or deformity, to suit every desire of the imagination. Strange as it may seem, it is true that there is in most of us, weary and unsatisfied with this matter-of-fact world, a propensity to throw ourselves into dream, and let fancy build up for us a world of its own, and, for a season, fit us with an existence for it--taking with us the beautiful of this, and charming what is plain under the converting influence of fiction. Who understood this as Shakspeare did? His _Tempest_, _Midsummer's Night Dream_, his _Merchant of Venice_, are built up out of the materials supplied by this natural propensity.

AQUILIUS.--How beautiful are impossibilities when genius sets them forth as truth! Who does not yield implicit belief to every creation of Shakspeare? I prefer the utter impossibilities to improbabilities converted into real substantial fact. Let us have _Mysteries of Udolpho_ uncleared up; it is dissatisfying at the end to find you have been cheated. One would not have light let in to a mysterious obscure, and exhibit perhaps but a bare wall ten feet off. I had rather have the downright honest ghost than one, on discovery, that shall be nothing but an old stick and a few rags. The reader is put in the condition of the frogs in the fable, when they found themselves deluded into wonder and worship of an old log. I would not even clear up the darkness of ignorance respecting the Pyramids, and will believe that the hieroglyphics are the language of fables, that are better, like the mummies, under a shroud. Wherever you find a bit of the mysterious, you are sure to be under a charm. In _Corinne_ of Madame de Stael, not the most romantic of authors, the destiny cloud across the moon you would not have resolved into smoke ascending from a house-top. Let the burial-place of Oedipus be ever hid. Imagination converts ignorance into a pleasure. There is a belief beyond, and better than that of eyes and ears.

CURATE.--Not at present; at this moment I will trust both. I hear the carriage, and here is Lydia returned from ----. I hope she has picked up the parcel of books which I gathered for our reading.

Now here, Eusebius, our dialogue broke off, and we greeted the Curate's wife. The box, it seems, had not reached the little town; so, with a woman's nice tact, Lydia, the Curate's Lydia, had brought us two novels to begin with. I therefore put my letter to you by, until we had read them, and I was enabled to say something about them. You perceive, Eusebius, that I have made some mention in the dialogue of you, and your opinions upon nursery _fabulous_ education. Lydia says--for to her we mentioned your whim--that you must come and discuss it with her; and she will, to provoke you, bring you into company with some very good people, and very much devoted to education. She tells me she has a neighbour who burnt Gay's fables, which a godfather had given to one of her children; because, said she, it taught children lying, for her children looked incredulous as one day she told them that beasts cannot speak. The Curate's wife promises herself some amusement, you perceive, when you come; you must therefore be as provoking as possible. But now, Eusebius, we have read the novels brought to us. The first, _Jane Eyre_, has been out some time: not so the other, _Madame de Malguet_, which has only now made its first appearance. I do not think it fair, though it is a common practice with critics, to give out a summary of the tales they review--for this is sure to spoil the reading. I will resume, then, the dialogue, omitting such parts as may be too searching into the story.

LYDIA.--Well, I am glad we read _Jane Eyre_ first, for I should have been sorry to have ended with tears, which she has drawn so plentifully; and not from my eyes alone, though both you men, as ashamed of your better natures, have endeavoured to conceal them in vain.

AQUILIUS.--It _is_ a very pathetic tale--very singular; and so like truth that it is difficult to avoid believing that much of the characters and incidents are taken from life, though woman is called the weaker sex. Here, in one example, is represented the strongest passion and the strongest principle, admirably supported.

CURATE.--It is an episode in this work-a-day world, most interesting, and touched at once with a daring, yet delicate hand. In spite of all novel rules, the love heroine of the tale has no personal beauty to recommend her to the deepest affection of a man of sense, of station, and who had seen much of the world, not uncontaminated by it. It seems to have been the purpose of the author to show that high and noble sentiments, and great affection, can be both made subservient, and even heightened, by the energy of practical wisdom. If the author has purposely formed a heroine without the heroine's usual accomplishments, with a knowledge of the world, and even with a purpose to heighten that woman in our admiration, he has made no small inroad into the virtues that are usually attributed to every lover, in the construction of a novel. He, the hero, has great faults--why should we mince the word?--vice. And yet so singular is the fatality of love, that it would be impossible to find two characters so necessary to exhibit true virtues, and make the happiness of each. The execution of the painting is as perfect as the conception.

LYDIA.--I think every part of the novel perfect, though I have no doubt many will object, in some instances, both to the attachment and the conduct of Jane Eyre.

AQUILIUS.--It is not a book for Prudes--it is not a book for effeminate and tasteless men; it is for the enjoyment of a feeling heart and vigorous understanding.

LYDIA.--I never can forget her passage across the heath, and her desolate night's lodging there.

CURATE.--But you will remember it without pain, for it was at once the suffering and the triumph of woman's virtue.

AQUILIUS.--To my mind, one of the most beautiful passages is the return of Jane Eyre, when she sees in the twilight her "master" and her lover solitary, and feeling his way with his hands, baring his sightless sorrow to the chill and drizzly night.

CURATE.--But what think you of _Madame de Malguet_? In a different way, that is as unlike any other novel as _Jane Eyre_. This, too, is written to exhibit the character of woman under no ordinary circumstances.

AQUILIUS.--She reminds me of the Chevalier d'Eon, whose portrait I remember to have seen years ago in the _Wonderful Magazine_--half man, half woman. Madame de Malguet is perhaps an amalgamation of the Chevalier and Lady Hester Stanhope. These, after all, are not the beings to be exempt from the _tender passion_, but it is under the strongest vagaries. Love without courtship is the very romance of the passion; and such is there in the tale of _Madame de Malguet_. The scene is laid in a little town, and its immediate neighbourhood, in France; and though a "Tale of 1820," carries back its interest, and much of the detail of the story, to the horrors of the first French Revolution. There is consequently a wide field for diversity of character, and for conflict of opinions, and their effects, as shown upon every grade of social life; and it is very striking that the deepest rooted prejudices, ere the conclusion, change sides, and are fitted upon characters to whom, at the commencement, they seemed but little to belong. The inborn aristocratic feelings, alike with the republican habits, meet their check; and I suppose it was the intention of the author to show the weakness of both.

CURATE.--I am not certain of that, for I think the innate is preserved even through the disguise of contrary habits. I know not which is the hero--the Buonapartean soldier or the English naval captain. There are some discussions on subjects of life interspersed, which show the author to be a man of a deeply reflecting mind, and endued with no little power of expressing what he thinks and what he feels.

AQUILIUS.--When I found fault with this wet blanket of happiness, the monumental termination of _Mount Sorel_, I did not so soon expect to meet with a repetition of this fault. I must pick a quarrel with the writer for unnecessarily putting his characters _hors-de-combat_. I think authors now-a-days need not be afraid of the fate of Cervantes--of having them taken off their hands, and made to play their parts upon any other stages than their own.

LYDIA.--You seem, both of you, to forget the real moral of the story--that a person endowed with a little more than common sense, general kindness, amiability, and energy of character, may be more useful in the world than the most accomplished hero.

CURATE.--You would have found him too a hero, if his actions had been within the sphere of heroism. I hope to meet with Mr Torrens again. He has very great powers, and his conceptions are original.

And now, Eusebius, having written you this account of our dialogue, and breathed country air, and witnessed happiness, I am, yours ever, and

"Precipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est."

AQUILIUS.

CONTINENTAL REVOLUTIONS--IRISH REBELLION--ENGLISH DISTRESS.

Seven months have barely elapsed since the throne of Louis Philippe was overturned, by a sudden and well-concerted urban tumult; and six have not expired since the fervour of revolution invaded the Germanic empire, and Italy, torn by the innovating passions, commenced a strife with the Austrian power. How marvellous have been the changes, how vehement the action, how powerful the reaction, since those events commenced! Involved in the whirlwind of anarchy, the greater as well as the lesser states of Germany seemed to be on the verge of destruction. Austria, tormented by diversity of lineage, race, and interest, seemed to be irrevocably broken up; and amidst the rebellion in Lombardy, the severance of Venice, the insurrection in Bohemia, and the fierce demand of the Hungarians for independence, it seemed scarcely possible to hope that the house of Hapsburg could maintain its existence, or the important element of Austria in the balance of European power be preserved. Torn by contending passions, a prey to the ambition of the republicans, the dreams of the socialists, and the indignation of the loyalists, France resembled a fiery volcano in the moment of irruption, of which the throes were watched by surrounding nations with trembling anxiety for their own existence. Italy, with Sicily severed from the throne of Naples; Rome in scarcely disguised insurrection against the Papal authority; Lombardy, Tuscany, and Venice in open revolt; and Piedmont, under revolutionary guidance, commencing the usual system of external democratic aggression, scarcely presented a spot on which the eye of hope could rest. Prussia, the first to be reached by the destructive flame, seemed so strongly excited, that it was hard to say whether its national unity or monarchical institutions would first fall to pieces. England, assailed by Chartism in the one island, and the approaching insurrection of the Irish in the other; oppressed with a debt to which its finances, under present management, seemed unequal--having borrowed L8,000,000 in a single year of general peace--seemed shaken to its foundation. The distress so generally diffused by the combined effect of free trade and a fettered currency, appeared at once to have dried up its material resources and overturned the wonted stability of the national mind: every thing seemed to be returning to chaos; and even the most sanguine advocates of human perfectibility, the most devout believers in democratic regeneration, looked on with trembling anxiety, and could hardly anticipate any other result from the disturbed passions of society, but a general and sanguinary war, terminating in the irresistible ascendency of one victorious power, or possibly a fresh inundation, over the exhausted field of European strife, of northern barbarians.

But truth is great, and will prevail. There are limits imposed by the wisdom of nature to the madness of the people, not less than the strife of the elements. Extraordinary convulsions seldom fail to restore government, after a time, to a bearable form: the letting loose of the passions of nations ere long rouses the feelings and alarms the interests, which produce reaction, and restore the subverted equilibrium of society. Men will not be permanently ruled by brutal force. Triumph reveals the latent tyranny of the multitude; power brings to light the selfishness and rapacity of their leaders. How strikingly have those truths--so often enunciated, so little attended to--been demonstrated by the events of the last summer! Six months only have elapsed, and what years, what centuries of experience have been passed during that brief period! How many delusions has it seen dispelled, and fallacies exposed; how many pretensions levelled, and expectations blasted; how many reputations withered, and iniquities detected! How much has the peril of inflammatory language been demonstrated, and the hollowness of revolutionary regeneration established! how quickly have words been blown into the air by deeds, and the men of eloquence supplanted by those of the sword! "Words," says Lamartine,[11] "set nations on fire; bayonets alone restore them to reason." Who has furnished such a commentary on these words as Lamartine himself?

Is it the doctrines of the French Revolution which were deemed seductive, its principles insinuating, its example dangerous? The Red Republicans, the insurrection of June, the slaughter of a greater number of men in a single revolt than has taken place in many a decisive battle, the withering agony of Parisian destitution, the ten thousand captives in its dungeons; the nightly transportation, for weeks together, of hundreds of deluded fanatics; the state of siege,--the prostration of freedom, a military dictatorship, rise up in grim and hideous array to dispel the illusion. Is it the Io Paeans of Italian regeneration which have caused the heart of the patriot to throb all over the world, and led the enthusiastic to anticipate a second era of Italian independence in the old age of its civilisation? The defeats on the Adige, the fall of Milan, the dispersion of the Lombard and Tuscan levies, tell us how miserable was the delusion on which such expectations rested, and how vain is the hope that a selfish and worn-out nation, destitute alike of civil firmness or military courage, can successfully establish its independence. Is it from Rome that this regeneration of society is expected to arise, and the reforming pope who is to be the Peter the Hermit of the new crusade in favour of the liberties of mankind? Behold him now trembling in his palace, bereft of authority, deprived of consideration; hated, despised, discrowned; waiting to see which of the Tramontane powers is to send a regiment of horse to receive the keys of the Eternal City, and give a lasting ruler to the former mistress of the world.

Is it Prussia that is to take the lead in the regeneration of the world, and from the north that a new Arminius is to issue, to assert the liberties of the great Teutonic family of mankind? Turn to Berlin, and see to what a pitiable degree of weakness revolutionary triumphs have reduced the monarchy of the Great Frederick. Behold its monarch and its army defeated by a band of students and shop-boys; its arsenal pillaged by an insurgent mob; and the power which withstood the banded strength of Europe, a century ago, and fronted Napoleon in the plenitude of his power, waging a doubtful and aggressive war with Denmark, a fifth-rate power, and paralysed by processions of apprentices, and the menaces of trades-unions, in the capital. Is it Ireland that is regarded as the sheet-anchor of the cause of revolution, and from the Emerald Isle that the bands of heroes are to issue who are to crush the tyranny of England, restore the freedom of the seas, and avenge the long quarrel of the Celt with the Saxon? It is in Boulagh Common that we must look for the exploits of the new Spartan heroes, and among the widow's cabbages we must search for the grave of a modern Leonidas! Is it in the energy, courage, and perseverance of the army of Tipperary, that we must find the realisation of the long-cherished hopes of Irish independence, and the demonstration of the solid foundation on which the much vaunted prospects of Hibernian success against British oppression is to be founded! It must augment the admiration which all the world must feel at the _gallant_ conduct of the Irish, in this memorable struggle, to reflect that they owed their _success_ to themselves alone; that none of their arms had been purchased, nor preparations made, with the wealth of the stranger; that they had spurned the charity of England as proudly as they had repelled its arms; and that, whatever could be cast up against them, this, at least, could not be said, that they had evinced ingratitude for recent benefits, or eaten the bread of their benefactor while they were preparing to pierce him to the heart!

Memorable, indeed, has been the year which has given these examples, and taught these lessons, to mankind. History will be sought in vain for a period in which, during so short a time, so many important political truths were unfolded, so many moral precepts taught, by suffering; or in which, after being for a season obscured by clouds, the polar star of religion and duty has shone forth with so bright a lustre. It is a proud thing for England to reflect on the exalted post she has occupied during this marvellous and trying time. While other nations, possessed of far greater military forces, were reeling under the shock, or prostrated by the treachery and treason of their defenders, she alone has repelled the danger by the constable's baton. She has neither augmented her army, nor increased her navy; she has not added a gun to her ships, nor a bayonet to her battalions. She has neither yielded to the violence of the Revolutionists, nor been guilty of deeds of cruelty to repress them. If her government is to blame for their conduct during the crisis, it is for having been too lenient--for having dallied too long with agitation, and winked at sedition till it grew into treason. A fault it undoubtedly has been, for it has brought matters to a crisis, and caused the ultimate outbreak to be repressed with far greater and more unavoidable severity than would have been required if the first merciful coercion had taken place. Had the Habeas Corpus Act been suspended in November, and the farce of Irish patriotism been hindered from turning into a burlesque tragedy, for one person whom it would have been necessary to imprison or transport, fifty must now undergo that punishment. Yet is this leniency or temporisation, misplaced as it was, and calamitous as it has turned out, a proud passage in England's story. It is some consolation to reflect that she conquered the revolutionary spirit, by which so many of the military monarchies of Europe had been prostrated, by moral strength alone; that scarce a shot was fired in anger by her troops, and not a drop of blood was shed on the scaffold; and that undue forbearance and lenity is the only fault which, during the crisis, can be imputed to the government which braved the storm under which the world was reeling.

Nor is the moral lesson less striking, or less important, which France, during the same period, has read to mankind. She has not, on this occasion, been assailed by the Continental powers. No Pitt or Cobourg has stood forth to mar, by ensanguined hostility, the bright aurora of her third Revolution. No Louis Philippe has stepped in, to change its character or intercept its consequences, and reap for royalty the fruits of insurrection. No bands of Cossacks or plumed Highlanders have again approached the capital of civilisation, to wrest from Freedom the rights she has acquired, or tear from her brows the glory she has won. Whatever she has gained, or suffered, or lost, has been owing to herself, and herself alone. Europe has looked on in anxious, it may be affrighted, neutrality. Though undermined every where by the spirit of propagandism, though openly assailed in some quarters by scarcely disguised attacks, the adjoining powers have abstained from any act of hostility. Albeit attacked by a revolutionary expedition, fitted out and armed by the French government at Paris, Belgium has attempted no act of retaliation. Victorious Austria, though grievously provoked, has accepted the mediation of France and England: when Turin was at his mercy, the triumphant Radetsky sheathed his victorious sword at Milan, and sought not to revenge on Piedmont the unprovoked aggression which its revolutionary government had committed on the Imperial dominions in Italy. Russia has armed, but not moved; the Czar has left to the patriotism and valour of Denmark the burden of a contest with the might of revolutionised Germany. Revolution has every where had fair play; a clear stage and no favour has been accorded to it by all the surviving monarchies in Europe. The enthusiasm of Lamartine, the intrigues of Caussidiere, the dreams of Louis Blanc, the ambition of Ledru Rollin, have been allowed their full development. Nothing has intercepted the realisation of their projects. If France has suffered beyond all precedent from her convulsion; if her finances are in a state of hopeless embarrassment; if forty-five per cent has been added to her direct taxes, and the addition cannot be levied from the public distress; if three hundred thousand men have been added to her regular army; if poverty and destitution stalk through her streets; if her jails teem with ten thousand captives, and thousands of families mourn a father or a brother slain on the barricades, or transported for civil war,--the cause is to be found in the Revolution, and the Revolution alone.