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

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




It was a favorite thesis of Fielding, often repeated by his successors,
that the novel is a sort of comic epopee. Yet the romantic and the epic
styles have nothing in common, except that both are narrative. The epic,
the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation and a
civilization; the novel, of a neighborhood and a generation. A thousand
years culminate in the former; it sums up the burden and purpose of
a long historical period; and its characters are prominent types in
universal history and in highest thought. But the novel is the child
of a day; it is the organ of manners and phases, not of principles and
passions; it does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical
relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not
a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles,
Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic
expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck
of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as
Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the
bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll
away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically significant in
the mind.

A contrast of any page of an epic with one of a romance will show
their essential unlikeness. Note, for instance, the beginning of the
"Gerusalemme Liberata." The first stanza presents "the illustrious
captain who warred for Heaven and saved the sepulchre of Christ,--the
many deeds which he wrought by arms and by wisdom,--his great toil, and
his glorious achievement. Hell opposed him, the mingled populations
of Asia and Africa leagued against him,--but all in vain, for Heaven
smiled, and guided the wandering bands beneath his sacred ensigns." Such
are the splendid elements of the poem, outlining in a stanza the finest
type, objects, and scenery of mediaeval heroism. The second stanza
invokes the Muse,--"Not thou whose brow was wreathed with the unenduring
bays of Helicon, but thou who in angelic choirs hast a golden crown set
with immortal stars,--do thou breathe celestial ardor into the poet's
heart!" Then follows an allusion to a profound matter of temper and
experience. He prays that "the Muse will pardon, if sometimes he adorn
his page with other charms than her own; for thus, perhaps, he may
win the world to his higher meanings, shrouding severe truths in soft
verses. As the rim of the bitter cup is sweetened which is extended to
the sick child, so may he, by beauties not quite Christian, attract
mankind to read his whole poem to their health." Such is the stately
soaring of the epical Muse, the Muse of ideal history. Scholars find
Greece completely prefigured in Homer, and the time may come when Dante
and Tasso shall be the leading authorities for the history of the Middle
Ages, and Milton for that of the ages of Protestantism.

In such comparison novels are insignificant and imbecile. Though, like
"Contarini Fleming," they may begin with a magnificent paragraph, and
fine passages be scattered through the volumes, they are yet rarely
stories of ideas as well as persons, rarely succeed in involving events
of more than temporary interest, and rarely, perhaps, should be called
great mental products.

Not less strikingly does the difference between the epic and the novel
appear in their different uses. The one is the inspiration of great
historical action, the other of listless repose. The statesman, in the
moment of debate, and in the dignity of conscious power, finds sympathy
and encouragement in a passage of his favorite epic. Its grand types
are ever in fellowship with high thoughts. The novel is for the lighter
moment after the deed is done, when he is no longer brunting Fate, but
reclining idly, and reflecting humorously or malignly on this life. The
epic is closely and strongly framed, like the gladiator about to strike
a blow: the novel is relaxed and at careless ease, like the club-man
after lighting his pipe. The latter does not bear the burden of severe
responsibility, but is a thing of holidays and reactions. Still, as of
old, it answers to the contemplative castellar cry,--"Hail, romancer!
come and divert me,--make me merry! I wish to be occupied, but not
employed,--to muse passively, not actively. Therefore, hail! tell me
a story,--sing me a song! If I were now in the van of an army and
civilization, higher thoughts would engross me. But I am unstrung, and
wish to be fanned, not helmeted."

It has sometimes been claimed that the romantic style is essentially
lyrical. But though the idea from which many novels start was perhaps
the proper germ for one or more lyrics, it never attains in romance
a pure and unincumbered development. We may illustrate the different
intellectual creations founded on a common conception by imagining how
one of Wordsworth's lyrical fancies might have been developed in three
volumes of romance instead of three stanzas of poetry.

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love."

The first line, romantically treated, would include description,
soliloquy, and narrative, to show that in solitude the maiden had
habits, duties, something to think about and be interested in. The
accidental approach of some cosmopolitan visitor would give occasion to
illustrate dramatically the contrast between life in retirement and in
society. Some novelists also would inflict, either by direct lecture
or by conversation of the actors, very admirable reflections on the
comparative advantages of the two conditions. The second line would
perhaps suggest only geographical lore and descriptions of scenery,
though historical episodes might be added. The third line would
involve a minute description of dress, complexion, stature, and wild
gracefulness. In a psychological investigation it would come out what
strange and simple notions she entertained of the great world, and what
charming qualities of unsophisticated character belonged to her as she
merrily or pensively went through her accustomed tasks. The fourth line,
in which love is the text, would swell into mammoth proportions. New
characters would be especially necessary in this culminating part of the
story; and though they should be "very few," they would long occupy the
novelist with their diverse excellencies or villanies, their rivalries
and strategies. It is probable that the complete development of the
stanza _a la romance_ would give a circumstantial history of the maiden
from her birth, with glimpses more or less clear of all the remarkable
people who dwelt near or occasionally visited the springs of Dove. Thus
the same conception would become a stanza or a volume, according as its
treatment were lyrical or romantic.

It need hardly be shown that the novel is not a drama, not a history,
nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise. It may have
sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the
highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in
some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they
were the collected charms of literature, do not make a work of art. The
styles are mixed,--a certain sign, according to Lessing, of corruption
of taste. Novels present the anomaly of being fiction, but not
poetry,--of being fruits of imagination, but of imagination improvising
its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from
a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of
ideas. Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they
may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for
the future historian who, in searching the "Pickwick Papers"
for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the
undisciplined witches of Mr. Dickens's imagination.

If the novel be thus excluded from all the classical orders of
literature, a trembling question is suggested, whether it may not be
nevertheless a legitimate work of art. Though it be a _melange_ of
styles, a story told, in literature what the story-teller is in
society, yet why should it not have the honor among readers which
the story-teller in all ages has had among listeners? Though by
its escutcheon it assume a place among the amusing rather than the
instructive class of books, why should not its nobility be recognized?

The answer is found in the essential nature of art, in the almost
eternal distinction between life and thought, between actual and ideal
realities. Unity amid diversity is the type of intellectual beauty and
the law of the universe; to comprehend it is the goal of science, and
to reproduce it in human works is the aim of art. Yet how hard it is to
find the central and essential idea in a world of apparent accidents and
delusions! to chase the real and divine thing as it plays among cheats
and semblances! Hence the difficulty of thorough thought, of faithful
intellectual performance, of artistic creation. To the thoughtless man
life is merely the rough and monotonous exterior of the cameo-stone; but
the artist sees through its strata, discerns its layers of many colors,
and from its surface to its vital centre works them all together into
varied beauty. To live is common; but art belongs only to the finest
minds and the best moments. Life is a burden of present multitudinous
phenomena; but art has the simple unity of perfect science, and is
a goal and aspiration. Life comes by birth, art by thought, and the
travail that produces art is ofttimes the severer. The fashions of life
are bubbles on the surface, and pass away with the season; but the
creations of art belong to the depths of the spiritual world, where they
shine like stars and systems in the physical universe.

Story-telling is the most charming of occupations, and, whatever its
relation to literary art, it is one of the graces of the art of life.
Old as the race, it has always been in fashion on the earth, the delight
of every clime from the Orient to the Occident, and of every age from
childhood to second childhood. We live in such a concatenation of
things,--our hopes, fears, loves, hates, struggles, sympathies, defeats,
and triumphs make such a medley, with a sort of divine fascination about
it,--that we are always interested to hear how anybody has borne himself
through whatever varieties of fortune. At the basis of every other
character which can be assumed by man lie the conceiver and the teller
of stories; story-telling is the _prima facie_ quality of an intelligent
and sociable being leading a life full of events in a universe full
of phenomena. The child believes the wonders of romance by a right
instinct; narratives of love and peril and achievement come home to the
spirit of the youth; and the mystical, wonder-expecting eye of childhood
returns to old age. The humor, wit, piety, and pathos of every age
abound in the written stories of its people and children.

Yet between the vocal story and the story in literature there is an
immense difference, like that between talking and writing, between life
and art. The qualities which in the story-teller make even frivolity
weighty and dulness significant--the play of the eye, the lips, the
countenance, the voice, the whole sympathetic expression of the
person--are wanting to the novel; it has passed from the realm of life
to that of art; it loses the charm which personal relations give even
to trifles; it must have the charm which the mind can lend only to its
cherished offspring.

Considered as a thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of
such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse
in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,--now harlequin, now
gossip, now threnodist,--with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy,
uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,--now relating the story, with
childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart
ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting
the little story-cricket that creeps along from page to page with
immense loads of science, history, politics, ethics, religion,
criticism, and prophecy,--always regarded with kindness, always welcomed
in idleness, always presenting in a simple way some spectacle of
merriment or grief, as changeful as the seasons or the fashions,--with
all its odd characteristics, the novel is remarkably popular, and not
lightly to be esteemed as an element in our social and mental culture.

There is probably no other class of books, with literary pretensions,
that contain so little thinking, in proportion to their quantity of
matter, as novels. They can scarcely be called organic productions, for
they may be written and published in sections, like one of the lowest
classes of animals, which have no organization, but live equally well in
parts, and run off in opposite directions when cut in halves. Thoughts
and books, like living creatures, have their grades, and it is only
those which stand lowest in respect of intellectuality that admit of
fractional existence. A finished work of the mind is so delicately
adjusted and closely related, part to part, that a fracture would be
fatal. Conceive of Phidias sending off from his studio at Athens his
statue of Jupiter Olympius in monthly numbers,--despatching now the
feet, now the legs, now the trunk, in successive pieces, now the
shoulders, and at last crowning the whole with a head!

The composition of novels must be reckoned, in design at least, one of
the fine arts, but in fact they belong rather to periodical than to
immortal literature. They do not submit to severity of treatment, abide
by no critical laws, but are the gypsies and Bohemians of literature,
bringing all the savagery of wild genius into the _salons_ of taste.
Though tolerated, admired, and found to be interesting, they do not
belong to the system of things, play no substantial part in the serious
business of life, but, as the world moves on, give place to their
successors, not having developed any principle, presented any picture,
or stated any fact, in a way to suggest ideas more than social
phenomena. They are not permanent, therefore, because finally only
ideas, and not facts, are generally remembered; the past is known to us
more, and exclusively as it becomes remote, by the conceptions of poets
and philosophic historians, the myriads of events which occupied a
generation being forgotten, and all the pith and meaning of them being
transmitted in a stanza or a chapter. Poetry never grows old, and
whatsoever masterpieces of thought always win the admiration of the
enlightened; but many a novel that has been the lion of a season passes
at once away, never more to be heard of here. With few exceptions, the
splendid popularity that greets the best novels fades away in time
slowly or rapidly. A half-century is a fatal trial for the majority; few
are revived, and almost none are read, after a century; will anybody
but the most curious antiquary be interested in them after one or
two thousand years? Without delaying to give the full rationale of
exceptions which vex this like every other general remark, it may
be added briefly that fairy stories are in their nature fantastic
mythological poems, most proper to the heroic age of childhood, that
historical romances may be in essence and dignity fantastic histories or
epics, and that, from whatever point of view, Cervantes remains hardly
less admirable than Ariosto, or the "Bride of Lammermoor" than the "Lay
of the Last Minstrel."

In the mental as in the physical world, art, diamonds and gems come by
long elaboration. A thoughtless man may write perennially, while the
result of silent meditation and a long tortured soul may be expressed
in a minute. The work of the former is akin to conversation, one of the
fugitive pleasures of a day; that of the latter will, perchance, be a
star in the firmament of the mind. Eugene Sue and Beranger both wished
to communicate their reflections on society. The former dissipated his
energies in the _salons_, was wise and amusing over wine, exchanged
learning and jests, studied the drawing-room as if it were the
macrocosm, returned to his chamber, put on kid gloves, and from the odds
and ends of his dishevelled wits wrote at a gallop, without ever looking
back, his "Mysteres de Paris." The latter lived in an attic year after
year, contemplated with cheerful anxiety the volatile world of France
and the perplexed life of man, and elaborated word by word, with
innumerable revisions, his short songs, which are gems of poetry,
charming at once the ear and the heart. Novels are perhaps too easily
written to be of lasting value. An unpremeditated word, in which the
thoughts of years are exploded, may be one of the most admirable of
intellectual phenomena, but an unpremeditated volume can only be a
demonstration of human weakness.

The argument thus far has been in favor of the Muses. Hellenic taste and
the principles of high art ratify the condemnation passed on the novel
by the aesthetic goddesses. A wider view, however, will annul the
sentence, giving in its stead a warning and a lesson. If the prose
romance be not Hellenic, it is nevertheless humane, and has been in
honor almost universally throughout the Orient and the Occident. Its
absence from the classical literature was a marvel and exception, a
phenomenon of the clearest-minded and most active of races, who thought,
but did not contemplate,--whose ideal world consisted only of simple,
but stately legends of bright-limbed gods and heroes. A felicitous
production of high art, also, is among the rarest of exceptions, and
will be till the Millennium. Myriads of comparative failures follow in
the suite of a masterpiece. We have, therefore, judged the novel by an
impracticable standard, by a comparison with the highest aims rather
than the usual attainments of other branches of literary art. Human
weakness makes poetry, philosophy, and history imperfect in execution,
though they aspire to absolute beauty and truth; human weakness
suggested the novel, which is imperfect in design, written as an
amusement and relief, in despair of sounding the universe. A novel is in
its nature and as a matter of necessity an artistic failure; it
pretends to nothing higher; but under the slack laws which govern its
composition, multitudes of fine and suggestive characters, incidents,
and sayings may be smuggled into it, contrary to all the usages and
rules of civilized literature. Hence the secret of its popularity,
that it is the organ of average as distinguished from highest thought.
Science and art are the goals of destiny, but rarely is there a
thinker or writer who has an eye single to them. It is an heroic,
self-sacrificing, and small platoon which in every age brunts Fate, and,
fighting on the shadowy frontier, makes conquests from the realm of
darkness. Their ideas are passed back from hand to hand, and become
known in fragments and potent as tendencies among the mass of the race,
who live in the circle of the attained and travel in the routine of
ages. The novelist is one of the number who half comprehend them, and
borrows them from all quarters to introduce into the rich _melange_ of
his work. To solve a social problem, to reproduce an historical age or
character, or to develop the truth and poetry latent in any event, is
difficult, and not many will either lead or follow a severe attempt;
but the novelist will merrily chronicle his story and link with it in a
thousand ways some salient reminiscences of life and thought.

What, then, is the highest excellence that the novel can attain? It is
the carnival of literary art. It deals sympathetically and humorously,
not philosophically and strictly, with the panorama and the principles
of life. A transcript, but not a transfiguration of Nature, it assumes a
thousand forms, surpassing all other books in the immense latitude left
to the writer, in the wild variety of things which it may touch, but
need not grasp. Its elements are the forests, the cities, and the seven
ages of man,--characters and fortunes how diversified! All species
of thinkers and actors, of ideas and passions, all the labyrinthine
complications and scenery of existence, may be illustrated in persons or
introduced by-the-by; into whatever colors make up the phantasmagoria
of collective humanity the novelist may dip his brush, in painting
his moving picture. Yet problems need not be fully appreciated, nor
characters or actions profoundly understood. It must be an engrossing
story, but the theme and treatment are as lawless as the conversation of
an evening party. The mind plays through all the realm of its knowledge
and experience, and sheds sparks from all the torches of thought, as
scenes and topics succeed each other. The pure forms of literature may
be reminiscences present to the imagination, the germs of new truths and
social arrangements may occupy the reason; but the novelist is neither
practical, nor philosophical, nor artistic; he is simply in a dream; and
pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the
sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque
mediaeval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their
place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each
other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here
below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men
who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the
drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together in the
revelries of the novel. To state the degree of excellence possible to
a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of
essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength
of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius
free to introduce his creations just as they occur to him, and the
author of talent free to range through all books and all time and
reproduce brilliant sayings and odd characters,--which, with no other
connecting thread than a story, freaks like a spirit through every
shade of feeling and region of thought, from the domestic hearth to the
ultimate bounds of speculative inquiry,--and which, by its daring
and careless combinations of incongruous elements, exhibits a free
embodiment in prose of the peculiar genius of the romantic.

And some philosophers have styled romance the special glory of
Christianity. It is certainly the characteristic of critical as
distinguished from organic periods,--of the mind acting mystically in
a savage and unknown universe, rather than of the mind that has reduced
the heavens and earth to its arts and sciences. The novel, therefore,
as the wildest organ of romance, is most appropriate to a time of great
intellectual agitation, when intellectual men are but half-conscious of
the tendencies that are setting about them, and consequently cease to
propose to themselves final goals, do not attempt scrupulous art, but
play jubilantly with current facts. Hence, perhaps, its popularity since
the first conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, and especially since
the great French Revolution, when amid new inventions and new ideas
mankind has contemplatively looked for the coming events, the new
historical eras, which were casting their shadows before.

When, some time, Christian art shall become classical, and Christian
ideas be developed by superior men as fairly as the Hellenic conceptions
were, the novel may either assume to itself some peculiar excellency, or
may cease to hold the comparative rank in literature which it enjoys at
present. Then the numberless prose romances which occupy the present
generation of readers will, perhaps, be collected in some immense
_corpus_, like the Byzantine historians, will be reckoned among the
curiosities of literature, and will at least have the merit of making
the study of antiquities easy and interesting. There is an old
couplet,--

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

At a time when extemporaneous composition and thoughtless reading are
much in fashion, it will not be amiss to invoke profounder studies, and
slower, but more useful and permanent results. Let it be remembered that
even the Divine Mind first called into being the chaos of creation, and
then in seven days reviewed and elaborated it into a beautiful order.

* * * * *




A LEGEND OF MARYLAND.

"AN OWRE TRUE TALE."

[Concluded.]


CHAPTER VII.

THE OLD CITY.


Let me now once more shift the scene. In the summer of 1684, the
peaceful little port of St. Mary's was visited by a phenomenon of rare
occurrence in those days. A ship of war of the smaller class, with the
Cross of St. George sparkling on her broad flag, came gliding to an
anchorage abreast the town. The fort of St. Inigoes gave the customary
salute, which I have reason to believe was not returned. Not long after
this, a bluff, swaggering, vulgar captain came on shore. He made no
visit of respect or business to any member of the Council. He gave no
report of his character or the purpose of his visit, but strolled to the
tavern,--I suppose to that kept by Mr. Cordea, who, in addition to his
calling of keeper of the ordinary, was the most approved shoemaker of
the city,--and here regaled himself with a potation of strong waters.
It is likely that he then repaired to Mr. Blakiston's, the King's
Collector,--a bitter and relentless enemy of the Lord Proprietary,--and
there may have met Kenelm Chiseldine, John Coode, Colonel Jowles, and
others noted for their hatred of the Calvert family, and in such company
as this indulged himself in deriding Lord Baltimore and his government,
During his stay in the port, his men came on shore, and, imitating their
captain's unamiable temper, roamed in squads about the town and its
neighborhood, conducting themselves in a noisy, hectoring manner towards
the inhabitants, disturbing the repose of the quiet burghers, and
shocking their ears with ribald abuse of the authorities. These
roystering sailors--I mention it as a point of historical interest--had
even the audacity to break into Alderman Garret Van Swearingen's garden,
and to pluck up and carry away his cabbages and other vegetables,
and--according to the testimony of Mr. Cordea, whose indignation was the
more intense from his veneration for the Alderman, and from the fact
that he made his Worship's shoes--they would have killed one of his
Worship's sheep, if his (Cordea's) man had not prevented them; and
after this, as if on purpose more keenly to lacerate his feelings, they
brought these cabbages to Cordea's house, and there boiled them before
his eyes,--he being sick and not able to drive them away.

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