Chapter XVIII: Part I (3)

The ancients seem not to have conceived such a thing. And, despite the danger of such an admission in the face of what the novel has come to be among ourselves, we can only regret its loss among them. Had the Greeks and Romans caught the idea, and turned their brilliant, clear‐sighted, manly, and truth‐loving intellects to the portrayal of everyday life; to the picture of how the world wagged behind the scenes long ago, what a flood of light would have been let in on their history, its meaning, its philosophy, so as to render almost superfluous the works of such men as Niebuhr, Gibbon, Grote. We should have had plenty of evil undoubtedly, plenty to sicken us; but, after all, would the foulness of the pagans have been much worse than the spicy dishes cooked and served up to us every day by our own novelists; by gray‐haired men; by ladies, at whose age we will not venture to guess; by smart young girls who have just bounced out of their teens? The glimpse we have had of Socrates’ spouse makes us wish for a closer acquaintance with that dame. We are anxious to know how she received the news of his draught of hemlock, for she evidently entertained the utmost contempt for all his doctrine and philosophy, and must have been rather surprised at the state bothering itself so much about _her_ husband. What an irreparable loss we have sustained in Diogenes, his sayings and doings, his snarls and life in that tub of his! What living pictures would have been left us of the life in the groves, the disputations, the clash of intellect with intellect where all was intellect; the great games, who betted, who lost, who won, who contended; of the mysteries and the sacrifices; of Greece at the invasions; of the party strifes; how Alcibiades pranked and ruled in turn; how Balbus built that famous wall of his that he is always building in the _Delectus_; how Agricola ploughed his field; how the _Symposia_ passed off with Cicero and his friends; how Cæsar spent his youth, and how the conspiracy worked that destroyed him; what sort of companions brought Catiline’s conspiracy about; the effect of the _quousque tandem_ speech related by an eye‐ witness; the coming of the great Apostles; the dawn of Christianity; how the gay Greeks listened to that first strange sermon given from the altar to the Unknown God.

These things have been told us in a way. We can pick and sort them out of the brilliant works of the writers of the time. But had they been told us by a Greek or Roman novelist, a Thackeray, Dickens, or Bulwer, with the actors set living and real and palpable on the scenes, speaking the language, using all the little peculiarities, of everyday life, with all their natural surroundings and coincidents, what a lost world would have been opened up to us!

Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction, distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists, we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third‐ rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time, of the sensational novel.

As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose do novels serve; with what object are they written?

A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire of earning one’s bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom of the “psychological romance,” as of far humbler things in this world. As to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that depends, first of all, on the author’s secondary motive in writing them; secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid. M. Dumas _fils_, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general. M. Dumas _fils_ is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas _fils_; from which, we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the marriage‐knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas _fils_ will be satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement, that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband’s infidelity. But probably such a high‐minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.

Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected. At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social physicians to the craving multitude.

Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors; laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They constitute the play‐ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient took his weekly sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind’s eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air‐drawn as Macbeth’s. We can commit cold‐blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock; or shocking improprieties that even the far‐reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never _will_ run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well‐known form, if we have. And if the never‐running‐smooth theory be true of love, this much we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether. The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings, the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world ever witnessed!

The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which, while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind, is effected.

But let the novel be like the favorites of its class, a thing to fire the imagination with impure thoughts clothed in the thinnest veil of mock morality, at the very moment when the imagination of the reader is ready to run riot; and evil, great, sometimes irreparable, is produced.

“All the wrong that I have ever done or sung has come from that confounded book of yours,” writes Byron to Moore in a moment of bitterness. If the accusation be well founded, what an intellectual wreck has Moore to answer for; what a multitude of lesser disasters following in the train of a great genius, so early led astray!

The novelist beats every other writer from the field. We all read him, from the crop‐haired schoolboy to the octogenarian who has quite grown through his hair; from the nearest approach to Mr. Darwin’s ideal man to the philosopher “who would circumvent God”; from the artless maiden who fondly dotes over those wicked but excessively handsome villains, those athletic but ridiculously stupid lovers, those consumptive heroines with the luminous eyes and rippling glories of golden hair; those lady poisoners with the floating locks and sea‐green orbs—to the dyspeptic lady who makes novel‐reading a science, who dawdles out her languid existence in elegant nothingness, who looks to the production of a new story as men look to a change in the constitution, or as astronomers lately looked to the comet that would not come; who is, in a word, utterly useless for all the purposes of life, of wifehood, of womanhood—novel‐struck, novel‐bred, only fit to “resolve and thaw into a dew” of weak sentimentality and essence of inanity. From this category of readers we must not omit the typical old maid, who is continually telling us that she renounced such things as love and other rubbish long ago; yet daily treats herself to her spruce, strong, highly flavored dish of the purest, spiciest scandal, and takes her diurnal dose of immorality as regularly as her “drops” or her tea.

All the world lies open to the novelist. From no place is he excluded, save from a few high and dry quarterlies; and even they are stirred from their abstract regions into sledgehammer activity or solemn admiration by him from time to time. Of monthlies, fortnightlies, weeklies, dailies, he forms the chief ingredient. Even editors of metaphysical fortnightlies find they must flavor their own romance with a spice, of the more regular and orthodox in order to make it “go down with the public.”

What a field, then, is the novelist’s!—what ground for a high, pureminded man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their own.

Who has forgotten those earlier days when we stood, fair‐haired, open‐ hearted children, on the threshold of life, steeped in the morning sun of a future that looked all golden? A warm mist hung about us, shrouding all in beautiful, mystical dimness. There was no storm, no darkness, no night. Whisperings of soft voices stole out of the magic mist, and called us on to do great things; to rift the mist and open up the glorious world of God, as we saw it in our imaginings. The morning of life, like the morning of the world, is all Eden. We walk with God, for we are innocent. But the doom is on us; we must pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The moment we taste of it, the golden dream is no more; the mist is reft asunder; and slowly the world opens on our saddened eyes in all its hard reality, to be subjected by the labor of our hands and the sweat of our brow. As we merge from that innocence, so we go on. Some great event may change us; may make this one a saint, that a fiend. But, as a rule, the sapling grows into the tree, weakly or strong, straight and tall and looking heavenwards, or stunted, useless, and unsightly as it grew from the grafting.

The grafting is the mother’s voice, the father’s example, the companions around us, the guidance of our thoughts. And the great mass of our thoughts, at a time when we are all imagination, springs from the books we read. Here steps in the crying need of a series of story‐books for Catholic children; for all children up to the age when study becomes a more serious work.

One other glance back at the days of our childhood, and the manner in which they were spent; for it is not the least important part of our subject. What a round of acquaintance we had, necessitating a corresponding round of visits! One day we dropped in on our best of friends, _Robinson Crusoe_, on that lonely island of his, wishing that all the world were islands and we were all Crusoes. All we wanted to live happily was a boat, six or seven guns and pistols, a goat‐skin cap, a parrot, a Man Friday, an umbrella, and an occasional savage to kill. After taking a sail with him in his boat, helping him to build his castle, tending the goats, running down to see if we could find that second footprint on the sand, giving Friday a lesson in English, we bade him good‐bye with the promise of calling again soon, and hurried off on that expedition to the other end of the world with our old acquaintance Captain Marryat, to search for our father, play our practical jokes, and fight our triangular duels. Then we had to hunt up that Indian trail for Cooper, and no redskin ever followed the track half so keenly as we, marking the way, notching the giant trunks with our six‐bladed penknife, shooting the buffalo with our pop‐guns, sleeping round the campfires in those limitless prairies and thickest jungles of our imagination. Ha! by’r Lady! Here we are at the gentle trial of spears at Ashby de la Zouch. How brave it was! The glinting of the lances, and the clash of steel on helm and hauberk; the gay plumes shorn and floating on the wind like thistledown. And out we rushed, and called the friend of our bosom a caitiff knight and a false knave, and plighted our troth to that imprisoned maiden—no matter who, and no matter where—to do her right, and do our devoir as leal and belted knight. That caitiff deals in leather now, and does a thriving business; his knightly limbs are cased in the best of cloth, cut by the cleverest of artists; his knightly stomach is naught the worse for wear, but quite beyond the girth of steel armor; and he has a son who, at this moment, is assisting at the joust as we did, spurring into the _mêlée_ and bearing all down before us, to spur out again victor, and meet Charlie O’Malley waiting for us outside; to ride with him for dear life into to‐day. What a race it is; how the world spins past us; how our heart throbs, and our eyes grow dim, and our hopes sink as we fall and dislocate our shoulder at that last fence. By heaven! up again—on, and in a winner! And we sink to the ground with the shouts of thousands ringing in our ears, to wake in a darkened chamber with low voices breaking on us—the voices of our dear Irish girls, who make “smithereens” of our hearts only to heal them the next minute, and sit there wooing us back into life and love.

Such was the favorite mental food of our earlier days, our literary candy. If the reading of youth were restricted to authors such as these, on the whole we might consider them in safe hands. But books multiply and cheapen day by day, and as usual “the cheap and nasty” carries everything before it. The favorite stories of the mass of boys that we see consist of what is known as the _Dime Novel_ and those blood‐and‐thunder weeklies with the terrific titles and startling pictures. By some strange freak of nature, boys are fond of blood; the warlike element prevails; the peaceful is nowhere. We feel certain that, if Mr. Barnum possessed a real live murderer among his collection of curiosities—though we fear he could scarcely ticket such an animal “a curiosity” in these days—and caged him up among the other wild beasts, he would prove a greater attraction to the juvenile visitor than anything else in the famous exhibition. It were easy enough to satisfy this morbid craving for muscular Christianity in a safe and sound manner, if our writers of fiction took up systematically the incidents of history; the great wars; the crusades, the parts played by great Christian heroes, by the saints of God; the scenes of martyrdom, the labors of the missionaries, and a thousand other subjects as entertaining as they are instructive and strictly true. We know that there are many such; but we want to be overloaded with them, as we are with those others to which we referred. We can scarcely at the moment call to mind one Catholic story to compete at all with a crowd of children’s books written by Protestants. The production of children’s stories has grown into a science among them. We frequently see pages of stately reviews and the columns of the London _Times_ devoted to as critical an examination of this class of books as to the works of the greatest writers. They recognize the necessity and the advantage of giving their children something to save them from the evil effects that must ensue from a continual history of daring and impossible feats by young burglars, detectives, spies, and the like. The best writers of this kind are, as they should be, women, who know best how to interest children, who watch them with an eye to their every want, that a man cannot attain. Here, then, is a field for Catholic ladies—a field wide open, which cries to be filled up.

But our article deals not alone with children and children’s books. We purpose looking higher and looking deeper, at the mental recreation of the day, of the age; at the literature that loads our tables, our shelves, our public libraries, our bookstalls: the book “of the period”—the sensational novel.

What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is a pity the author of _Rasselas_ had not some faint conception of it. The idea of calling _Rasselas_ a novel in these days! We might imagine him to have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:

Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek‐ coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.

What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease. Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals the mantle of the genii in the _Arabian Nights_; we had only to step upon it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to sea. We rise from foe‐encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air. The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We have supped full of horrors. Time was when our fell of hair would have uplifted to hear a night‐shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as dreary as a twice‐told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose, of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things; we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder‐workers of the age.

Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away. Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth‐rate newspaper is fond of calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we have into the green‐room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera‐ singer, the ankles of a _danseuse_, the charming slang of an actress. The scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and the gin‐mill; the prize‐ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the gaming‐table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything the lowest, the meanest, the worst.

Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false of ourselves, the simple‐hearted, simple‐mannered republicans, who have set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our old crop‐haired, steeple‐crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed adequately to supply this demand.

There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals, diving into blue‐books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They have so beaten the drawing‐room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most delicately organized imagination of the refined lady could discern, that there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle‐gun, have killed off the slashing cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.” And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!

Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of “the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak, puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure, inhuman? Love is a divine‐inspired passion of the soul, planted there by God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven‐born gift into the lowest of animal passions.

It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to‐day threaten to turn the world topsy‐turvy—the so‐called theory of _Woman’s Rights_—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill and Professor Fawcett, and for first‐born, _Free Love_.

We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the _New York Herald_, to have brought back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.

But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class whom no decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping condemnation?

As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote, the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy’s “pictured page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as rounded, as full as Shakespeare’s, and partaking of the great master’s “infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss‐ trooper or a crusader, a free‐lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext; whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good‐naturedly sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who, when stranded somewhere with his mess‐mate in the neighborhood of the North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.

“What’s that ’ere beggar, Jack?”

“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the whiffs of his pipe, “I can’t say exactly, but I expect it’s one o’ them there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”

Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way. The barriers of anti‐Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow‐men.

From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.

They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm, steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high‐minded spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all a great sham. The genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty, grim death’s‐head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness. After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten, and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray‐hairs, his asses or black‐ legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft‐hunters, his silly, useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting ring, or a faro‐table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray’s world; and he has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion, among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be found in the pages of Thackeray.

In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer’s way, with less of heart and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills, kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world; their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously, while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far, then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful negative gain.

And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and quiet nobleness of humble struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less degree than the two above‐mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single‐handed and hold its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever. Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the drawing‐room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation, as Disraeli called it in _Sybil_; because that world was to them as far off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves’ and harlots’ dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found lawyers and excellent “ministers of God’s Word” to uphold them, and proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform. He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly did great good; and many a book of his is a never‐ending, never‐wearying sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and demoralizing to‐day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the better of the bargain. That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of arriving safe at the end of life’s journey, wherever or whatever that end may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at; something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears, we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not a heart open only to mere human goodness.

To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power among us to‐day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan, rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is time for us to purge this poison out.

Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon, and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this, and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of _The House of Yorke_. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven, Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases, the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week, month after month. If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of that hearty knock‐down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.

Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and _true_ love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self‐ denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul‐conflict of human passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well‐told story of the struggle of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by the adoration of indecency deified.

Review Of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.(114)

In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan’s _Life of S. Thomas of Aquin_. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the _saint_ is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan’s best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint’s personal story.

Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world’s course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private _aside_ with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene‐painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the _moralizing_ element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint’s life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half‐century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the _Vie de Rancé_ contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men’s thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word _revolution_, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.