Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860



THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VI.--AUGUST, 1860.--NO. XXXIV.







THE CARNIVAL OF THE ROMANTIC.


Whither went the nine old Muses, daughters of Jupiter and the Goddess
of Memory, after their seats on Helicon, Parnassus, and Olympus were
barbarized? Not far away. They hovered like witches around the seething
caldron of early Christian Europe, in which, "with bubble, bubble, toil
and trouble," a new civilization was forming, mindful of the brilliant
lineage of their worshippers, from Homer to Boethius, looking upon the
vexed and beclouded Nature, and expecting the time when Humanity should
gird itself anew with the beauty of ideas and institutions. They were
sorrowful, but not in despair; for they knew that the children of men
were strong with recuperative power.

The ear of Fancy, not long since, heard the hoofs of winged Pegasus
striking the clouds. The long-idle Muses, it seemed, had become again
interested in human efforts, and were paying a flying visit to the
haunts of modern genius from the Hellespont to the Mississippi.
They lingered in sunny Provence, and in the dark forest-land of the
Minnesingers. In the great capitals, as Rome, Berlin, Paris, London,--in
smaller capitals, as Florence, Weimar, and Boston,--in many a village
which had a charm for them, as Stratford-on-Avon, Ferney, and Concord
in Massachusetts,--in the homes of wonderful suffering, as Ferrara and
Haworth.--on many enchanted waters, as the Guadalquivir, the Rhine,
the Tweed, the Hudson, Windermere, and Leman,--in many a monastic nook
whence had issued a chronicle or history, in many a wild birthplace of a
poem or romance, around many an old castle and stately ruin, in many a
decayed seat of revelry and joyous repartee,--through the long list
of the nurseries of genius and the laboratories of art, they wandered
pensive and strangely affected. At length they rested from their journey
to hold a council on modern literature. The long results of Christian
time were unrolled before them as in a chart. They beheld the dawn of a
new historic day, marked by songs of fantastic tenderness, and unwieldy,
long, and jointless romances and poems, like the monsters which played
in the unfinished universe before the creation of man. The Muses smiled
with a look more of complaisance than approval, as they reviewed the
army of Troubadours and Minnesingers and the crowd of romancers who
followed in their train. They decided that the joyous array of early
mediaeval literature was full of promise, though something of its tone
and temper was past the comprehension of pagan goddesses. The legends of
saints and pictures of martyrdoms were especially mysterious to them,
and they regarded them raptly, not smilingly, and bowed their heads.
Anon their eyes rested on an Italian city, where uprose, as if in
interstellar space, an erect figure, with a piercing eye, pleasant as
Plato's voice. His countenance was fixed upon the empyrean, and a more
than Minerva-like form hovered above him, interpreting the Christian
universe; and as he wrote what she dictated, the verses of his poem were
musical even to the Muses. Dante, Beatrice, and the "Divine Comedy,"
with a Gothic church as a make-weight, were balanced in Muses' minds in
comparison with the "Iliad" and the age of Pericles; and again they put
on the rapt look of mystery, but a smile also, and their admiration
and applause were more and more. To England they soon turned, and
contemplated the round, many-colored globe of Shakspeare's works. As
playful swallows sometimes dart round and round a lithe and wondering
wingless animal, so they, admiringly and timidly, attracted, yet
hesitating, delighting in his alertness, but not quite understanding it,
flitted like a troubled and beautiful flock around the great magician of
modern civilization. Their glance became lighter and less intent, as if
they were nearer to knowledge, the pain of perplexity disappeared like a
shadow from their countenances, their plaudits were more unreserved, and
it seemed likely that the high desert of Shakspeare would win for our
new literature a favorable recognition from the aristocratic goddesses
of antiquity. Knowing that Jove had made perfection unattainable by
mortals, they yet found in the chart before them epics, dramas, lyrics,
histories, and philosophies that were no unworthy companions to the
creations of classical genius, and they were jubilant in the triumphs
of a period in which they had been rather ignorantly and ironically
worshipped. Their sitting was long, and their review thorough, yet they
found but one department of modern literature which was regarded with a
distrust that grew to an aversion. The romances, the tales, the stories,
the novels were contemned more and more, from the first of them to the
last. Nothing like them had been known among the glories of Hellenic
literary art, and no Muse now stood forth to be their defender and
patron. Calliope declared that they were not epical, Euterpe and Erato
that they were not lyrical, Melpomene and Thalia that they were neither
tragical nor comical, Clio that they were not historical, Urania that
they were not sublime in conception, Polymnia that they had no stately
or simple charm in execution, and Terpsichore, who had joined with
Melpomene in admiring the opera, found nothing in the novel which she
could own and bless. Fleeting passages, remote and slight fragments,
were pleasing to them all, like the oases of a Sahara, or the sites of
high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to
them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty. The gates of
the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to
close against the voluminous prose romances that have sprung from modern
thought, when the deliberations of the Muses were suddenly interrupted.
They had disturbed the divine elements of modern society. Forth from all
the recesses of the air came troops of Gothic elves, trolls, fairies,
sprites, and all the other romantic beings which had inspired the modern
mind to novel-writing,--marching or gambolling, pride in their port,
defiance in their eye, mischief in their purpose,--and began so vigorous
an attack upon their classic visitors and critics, that the latter were
glad to betake themselves to the mighty-winged Pegasus, who rapidly bore
them in retreat to the present home of the _Dii Majores_, that point of
the empyrean directly above Olympus.

And well, indeed, might the Muses wonder at the rise of the novel and
its vast developments, for the classic literature presents no similar
works. One of Plato's dialogues or Aesop's fables is as near an approach
to a prose romance as antiquity in its golden eras can offer. The few
productions of the kind which appeared during the decline of literature
in the early Christian centuries, as the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius and
the "AEthiopica" of Heliodorus, were freaks of Nature, an odd growth
rather than a distinct species, and are also to be contrasted rather
than compared with the later novel. Such as they are, moreover, they
were produced under Christian as much as classic influences. The
aesthetic Hellenes admitted into their literature nothing so composite,
so likely to be crude, as the romance. Their styles of art were all
pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly
forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters. The
history of their development opens with an epic yet unsurpassed, and
their literary creations have been adopted to be the humanities of
Christian universities. A writer has recently proposed to account for
their success in the arts from the circumstance that the features of
Nature around them were small,--that their hornet-shaped peninsula was
cut by mountains and inlets of the sea into minute portions, which the
mind could easily compass, the foot measure, and the hand improve,--that
therefore every hillock and fountain, every forest and by-way was
peopled with mythological characters and made significant with
traditions, and the cities were adorned with architectural and
sculptured masterpieces. Greece thus, like England in our own time,
presented the character of a highly wrought piece of ground,--England
being the more completely developed for material uses, and Greece being
the more heavily freighted with legends of ideal meaning. Small-featured
and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the
mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense
plains and interminable mountain-chains. But whatever the reason,
whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of
Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced
all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a
plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive
beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became
statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from
the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought
rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid
of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were
indiscriminately regarded by them as barbarous. But guarded by the
bounds of their civilization, as by the circumfluent ocean-stream of
their olden tradition, they were prompted in all their movements by the
spirit of beauty, and philosophers have accounted them the very people
whose ideas were adequately and harmoniously represented in sensible
forms,--unlike the nations of the Orient, where mind is overawed by
preponderating matter, and unlike the nations of Christendom, where the
current spiritual meanings reach far into the shadowy realm of mystery
and transcend the power of material expression.

Thus art was the main category of the Greeks, the absolute form which
embraced all their finite forms. It moulded their literature, as it did
their sculpture, architecture, and the action of their gymnasts and
orators. They therefore delighted only in the highest orders and purest
specimens of literature, refused to retain in remembrance any of the
unsuccessful attempts at poetry which may be supposed to have preceded
Homer, and gave their homage only to masterpieces in the dignified
styles of the epic, the drama, the lyric, the history, or the
philosophical discussion. Equal to the highest creations, they refused
to tolerate anything lower; and they knew not the novel, because their
poetical notions were never left in a nebulous, prosaic state, but were
always developed into poetry.

Another reason, doubtless, was the wonderful activity of the Greek mind,
finding its amusement and relaxation in the forum, theatre, gymnasium,
or even the barber's shop, in constant mutual contact, in learning
wisdom and news by word of mouth. The long stories which they may
have told to each other, as an outlet for their natural vitality, as
extemporaneous exercises of curiosity and wit and fancy, did not creep
into their literature, which included only more mature and elaborate
attempts.

The modern novel was born of Christianity and feudalism. It is the child
of contemplation,--of that sort of luxurious intellectual mood which has
always distinguished the Oriental character, and was first Europeanized
in the twilight of the mediaeval period. The fallen Roman Empire was
broken into countless fragments, which became feudal baronies. The heads
of the newly organized society were lordly occupants of castles, who in
time of peace had little to do. They were isolated from their neighbors
by acres, forests, and a stately etiquette, if not actual hostility.
There was no open-air theatre in the vicinity, no forum alive with
gossip and harangues, no public games, not even a loquacious barber's
shop. During the intervals between public or private wars,--when the
Turks were unmolested, the crescent and the dragon left in harmless
composure, and no Christians were in mortal turmoil with each other,--it
is little wonder that restless knights went forth from their loneliness
errant in quest of adventures. What was there to occupy life in those
barricaded stone-towers?

It was then that the domestic passion, love, rose into dignity. Homage
to woman assumed the potency of an idea, chivalry arose, and its truth,
honor, and obeisance were the first social responses from mankind to
Christianity. The castle was the emblem and central figure of the time:
it was the seat of power, the arena of manners, the nursery of love, and
the goal of gallantry; and around it hovered the shadows of religion,
loyalty, heroism. Domestic events, the private castellar life, were thus
exalted; but they could hardly suffice to engross and satisfy the spirit
of a warrior and crusader. A new diversion and excitement were demanded,
and soon, in response to the call, minstrels began to roam from castle
to castle, from court to court, telling long stories of heroism and
singing light songs of love. A spark from the Saracenic schools and
poets of Spain may have flitted into Provence to kindle the elements
of modern literature into its first development, the songs of the
Troubadours. Almost contemporary were the lays of the Minnesingers in
Germany and the romances of the Trouveres in Northern France. Beneath
the brooding spirit of a new civilization signs of life had at length
appeared, and Europe became vocal in every part with fantastic poems,
lyrical in the South, epical in the North. They were wildly exuberant
products, because severe art was unknown, but simple, _naive_, and gay,
and suited to the taste of a time when the classics were regarded as
superstitiously as the heavens. Love and heroism, which somehow are the
leading themes of literature in all ages, now assumed the chivalric type
in the light hands of the earliest modern poets.

Yet these songs and metrical romances were most inadequate
representatives of the undeveloped principles which lay at the root of
Christian civilization. Even Hellenic genius might here have been at
fault, for it was a far harder task to give harmonious and complete
expression to the tendencies of a new religion and the germs of new
systems, than to frame into beauty the pagan clear-cut conceptions. The
Christian mind awoke under a fascination, and, for a time, could
only ejaculate its meanings in fragments, or hint them in vast
disproportions, could only sing snatches of new tunes. Its first signs
were gasps, rather than clear-toned notes, after the long perturbations
and preparations of history. The North and the South, the East and the
West had been mingled together; the heated and heaving mass had been
tempered by the leaven of Christianity:--and had all this been done
only to produce an octo-syllabic metre in praise of fantastic and semi-
barbaric sentiments and exploits? Had there been such commotions of the
universe only for a song? Surely these first creations of art, these
first attempts at literature, these first carvings of a rude spiritual
intensity, were only such as the Greeks may have forgotten any quantity
of before Homer came, their first glory and their oldest reminiscence.

One reason, perhaps, why mediaeval literature assumed so light and
unartistic a form was, that by necessity it could not be full-orbed.
Religion could not enter into it as a plastic element, but was fixed, a
veiled, external figure, radiating indeed color and fragrance, but
not making one of the struggling, independent vitals of the heart.
Literature could play about this figure, but could not grasp it, and
take it in among the materials to be fashioned. The Church, through
its clergy, held jealous command of divine knowledge, beneath divine
guidance, and left no developments of it possible to the lay mind, which
culminated in minstrels and romancers. The Greeks, on the contrary,
whose religion was an apotheosis of the earth, framed upwards and only
by fiction of fancy handed downwards, derived all their theology from
the poets. Prophecy and taste were combined in Homer,--Isaiah and the
king's jester in Pindar. The care of the highest, not less than the
lowest departments of thought, fell upon the creative author, and
a happy suggestion became a new article in the Hellenic creed. His
composition thus bore the burden and was hallowed by the sanctity
of piety, the key to every human perfect thing. But the Provencal
celebrators of love and chivalry had no such dignity in their task. The
solemnities of thought and life were cared for and hedged about by the
Church as its own peculiar treasure, and to them there remained only the
lighter office of amusing. The age was eminently religious, but the poet
could not aid in erecting and adorning its temples. Every fair work of
art must have a central idea; but the proper principle of unity for
all grand artistic efforts not being within the reach of authors, it
followed that their productions were not symmetrical, did not have an
even outline nor cosmical meaning, did not consist of balanced parts,
were poorly framed and articulated, and were charming only by their
flavor, and not by their form. The cultured intellect will not seriously
work short of a final principle; and if a materialized religion, an
ecclesiastical structure, be firmly planted on the earth by the same
hand that established the universe and tapestried it with morning and
evening, and if its gates and archways, its altar, columns, and courts
be given in trust to chosen stewards as a divine priesthood, then the
highest problem of being is not a human problem, and the mind of the
laity has nothing more important to do than to play with the flowers of
gallant love and heroism. Such was the feeling, perhaps the unconscious
reasoning, of the founders of modern literature, as they began their
labors in the alcoves of that church architecture which covered
Christendom, embracing and symbolically expressing all its ideas
and institutes. Therefore some vice of imperfection, a character of
frivolity, or an artificially serious treatment of lightsome subjects
marked all the literature of the time, which resembled that grotesque
and unaccountable mathematical figure that has its centre outside of
itself.

Modern literature thus had its origin in romantic metrical pieces,
which, in the next stage, were transformed into prose novels. Two
circumstances contributed to this change,--a change which could not have
been anticipated; for the Trouvere _fabliaux_ and _romans_ promised only
epics, and the Troubadour _chansons_ and _tensons_ promised only lyrics
and dramas. But the mind was now obliged to traverse the unbeaten paths
of the Christian universe; it was overwhelmed by the extent of its
range, the richness and delicacy of its materials; it could with
difficulty poise itself amid the indefinite heights and depths which
encompassed it, and with greater difficulty could wield the magician's
rod which should sway the driving elements into artistic reconstruction.
This mental inadequacy alone would not have created the novel, but would
only have made lyrics and epics rare, the works of superior minds. The
second and cooperating circumstance was the prevalence of the Christian
and feudal habit of contemplation, which made constant literature a
necessity. Nothing less than eternal new romances could save the lords,
the ladies, and the dependents from _ennui_. But to supply these in a
style of proper and antique dignity was beyond the power of the poets.
In the wild forests of the mind they could rarely capture a mature idea,
and they were as yet unpractised artists. Yet contemplative leisure
called eagerly for constant titbits of romance to tickle the palate and
furnish a diversion, while the genius of Christian poetry was yet in
infantile weakness. The dilemma lasted but a moment, and was solved by
an heroic effort of the poets to do, not what they would, but what they
could. Yielding to practical necessities, they renounced the traditions
of the classical past, which now seemed to belong to another hemisphere,
abandoned the attempt to realize pure forms, postponed high art; melody
gave way to prose, the romance degenerated into the novel, and prose
fiction, which erst had flitted only between the tongue and ear,
entered, a straggling and reeling constellation, into the firmament of
literature. Hence the novel is the child of human impotency and despair.
The race thereby, with merriment and jubilee, confessed its inability
to fulfil at once its Christian destiny as completely as the Greeks
had fulfilled their pagan possibilities. Purity of art was left to
the future, to Providence, or to great geniuses, but the novel became
popular.

Thus the modern novel had its genesis not merely in a contemplative
mood, but in contemplation which was forced by the impetuous temper of
the times to fail of ever reaching the dignity of thoughtfulness. It
was the immature product of an immature mental state; and richly as
sometimes it was endowed by every human faculty, by imagination, wit,
taste, or even profound thought, it yet never reached the goal of
thought, never solved a problem, and, in its highest examples, professed
only to reveal, but not to guide, the reigning manners and customs.
Rarely did its materials pass through the fiery furnace whence art
issues; it was a work of unfaithful intellect, prompted by ideas which
never culminated and were never realized; and it did not rise much above
the "stuffs" of life, as distinguished from the organic creations of the
mind. A many-limbed and shambling creature, which was not made a
spirit by the power of an idea, it fluttered amid all the culture of a
people,--amid the ideas and modes of the state, the church, the family,
the world of society,--like a bungler among paint-pots; but the paints
still remained paints on the canvas, instead of being blended and
transfigured into a thing of beauty. It was the organ of society, but
not of the essential truths which vitalize society, and its incidents
did not rise much above the significance of accidents.

What the novel was in knightly days, that it has continued to be. There
is a mysterious practical potency in precedent. All ideas and institutes
seem to grow in the direction of their first steps, as if from germs.
Thus, the doctrines of the Church fathers are still peculiarly
authoritative in theology, and the immemorial traditions of the common
law are still binding in civil life. Man seems to be an experimental
far more than a freely rational animal; for a fact in the past exerts
a greater influence in determining future action than any new idea. A
revolution must strike deep to eradicate the presumption in favor of
ages. Learned men are now trying to read the hieroglyphics of the East,
the records of an unknown history. Perhaps the result of their labors
will temper the next period in the course of the world more than all our
thinkers. Destiny seems to travel in the harness of precedents.

Thus, in obedience to the law of precedent, the mild gambols, the
_naive_ superficiality, the child-like irresponsibility for thinking,
which were the characteristics of the first European novels, have
generally distinguished the unnumbered and unclassified broods of them
which have abounded in subsequent literature. Designed chiefly to amuse,
to divert for a moment rather than to present an admirable work of art,
to interest rather than to instruct and elevate, the modern romance has
in general excused itself from thorough elaboration. Instead of being
a chastened and symmetrical product of the whole organic mind, it has
mainly been inspired by the imagination, which has been called the fool
in the family of the faculties, and wrought out by the assistance of
memory, which mechanically links the mad suggestions of its partner
with temporal events. It is in literature something like what a feast
presided over by the king's jester and steward would have been in
mediaeval social life. Let any novel be finished, let all the resources
of the mind be conscientiously expended on it, let it become a thorough
intellectual creation, and, instead of remaining a novel, it would
assume the dignity of an epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, or history. Its
nebulae would be resolved into stars.

Has, then, the mild and favorite blossom, the _fabula romanensis_, which
was so abundant in the Middle Ages, which has grown so luxuriantly
and given so general delight in modern times,--has it no place in
the natural history of literature? Shall it be mentioned only as an
uncompleted something else,--as an abortive effort of thought,--as
a crude _melange_ of elements that have not been purified and fused
together in the focus of the mind? And were the Muses right in refusing
to admit it into their sacred realm of art?

An affirmative answer can hardly be true; for an absurdity appears in
the reduction that it would cause in the quantity of our veritable
literature, and in the condemnation that it would pass on the tastes of
many most intelligent writers and readers. Yet a comparison of the novel
with the classical and pure forms of literature will show its unlikeness
to them in design, dignity, and essential quality.

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