THE LONDON REVIEW. JULY, 1861. ART. 1.-1. Oceola.-The War Trail. By MAYNE REID. 2. Felicita.-The Romance of Agostini. Blackwood. 3. The Neighbours. By MISS BREMER. 4. DICKENS's Works. 5. Framley Parsonage.—The Three Clerks.—The Bertrams. By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 6. Vanity Fair.-The Newcomes. By THACKERAY. 7. Hypatia. By CHARLES KINGSLEY. 8. Adam Bede.-The Mill on the Floss. By GEORGE ELIOT. 9. Tom Brown's School Days.-Tom Brown at College. 10. The Caxtons. By SIR EDWARD Lytton Bulwer. 11. The Heir of Redclyffe. By MISS YONGE. 12. Zanoni. By SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULlwer. It is useless to shut our eyes to the fact that fiction, so long exposed to undiscriminating reproach, has stepped at last into a certain place among the literary powers that be. Thirty years ago many sober people had strong things to say against fiction. Some averred that, like olives, it was nauseous to the natural taste; and that the child's invariable question, 'Is it a true story?" attested the first uncorrupted instincts of youth. Some went so far as to declare that fiction was falsehood, because it was not fact. Fairy tales were banished from the nursery not less rigorously than three-volume novels were declared contraband in the parlour, thirty years ago. Such restrictions were then possible. Children spent more time in active employments, more time in the kitchen, the stable, the garden, the farmyard; less, a great deal less, with books. With no cheap crimson and gold volumes for presents, no circulating library at the corner of the street, no monthly serials to introduce the poison in a diluted form, young people could be easily limited by domestic police to the perusal of unobjectionably stupid books, or-of none at all. But this becomes impossible when hosts of periodicals and cheap books offer supplies of fiction suited to every class and age. All sorts of philanthropic societies, with the Religious Tract Society at their head, fight against the most vicious part of the press with its own weapons, and seek to invade the enemies' camp by furnishing truth and morality with the pass-word of fiction. But this service, be it observed, is done by stories, not by novels; at least, not by novels in their three-volume form. Serials stand on a ground of their own: and, though many sober people read novels without scruple in their pages, they would be shocked to call them by their right name. It would seem that an unquestionable novel ceases to be the poisonous thing it is, when it appears in monthly numbers! But only let the stories in Chambers' or 'Fraser' be bound up in that particular brown calf which stamps the circulating library, and they become in a measure tabooed, to be pushed off serious drawingroom tables, and excluded from serious book clubs. Doubtless all our readers could point out certain households and literary circles to which magazines are readily admitted, while threevolume novels are forbidden. So far from taking this view of the case, we contend not only that stories and novels stand on the same ground, but that they stand on the same ground as all other books, and must be judged by the same rule. If fiction is not in itself sinful-and those who allow stories yield this point; if it has a special purpose to serve-and those who give stories to their children yield this point; then, a work of fiction is to be judged by its own merits as a work of fiction, just as a sermon is judged by its own merits as a sermon. It is a separate question whether novels which give innocent amusement and recreation, may not be turned into a source of injury by being made a predominant and habitual study. We must not confound the good of novels with the evils of novel-reading, any more than we should confound the wholesomeness of sugar with the mischief of a surfeit. As to our bodily food, the common experience of mankind determines whether sugar is eatable or not, and afterwards the chemist determines whether sugar is adulterated or not; but finally, each individual must determine whether sugar agrees with Place and Power of Fiction. 283 him or not. Just so, when the common sense of mankind has decided that fiction does minister to the refreshment of our mental faculties, it is the part of the analyser to test each particular sample, and discover how much is nourishment and how much is sweet clay or poison; but when that is done, each individual reader must decide whether it shall minister to health by moderate use, or to disease by excess. Perhaps the lowest sort of novel is that which derives its interest from wild adventures or horrors; and in these the author of The War Trail' and 'Oceola' greatly excels. We should have judged that his popularity would be almost limited to school-boys, who rejoice in wild adventures, and call everything that belongs to the softer sentiments 'bosh;' but, considering how much all uneducated people delight in horrors, we incline to think he may be popular among a lower order of readers; and, indeed, we have often seen Mayne Reid's works in the hands of adult second-class railway passengers. It would be hard to say that this style of writing does harm; much more hard to suppose that it does any good; but, like the clay with which the wild Indian fills his stomach when he cannot get food, it may possibly allay a craving without doing injury. The wild improbability of these stories is in favour of their harmlessness. When we plunge into Indian wars and stratagems with Oceola, in the swamps of Florida, we find ourselves in a sphere completely separated from our own. It is not our life; not our joy and grief, our good and evil. We do not weigh or consider it, we pass no judgment, learn no lesson; we look on it as a spectacle, and that is all. If we are but young enough or ignorant enough to lose sight of the gross improbability, then, the more wonderful and appalling the incidents, the better we shall enjoy the phantasmagoria of our adult magic-lantern. Something of the same influence hangs over us in the perusal of novels of a higher class which profess to give us pictures of civilized but foreign life: such as the two pretty Italian stories which have lately appeared in 'Blackwood,' and the well known novels of Miss Bremer. Just so far as the life presented to us is like our own, we look on it with the interest of sympathy; just so far as it is unlike our own, we look on it with the curiosity of spectators and the two feelings meet in a suspension of judgment highly favourable to the authors of such works. Everything that is true and good is set down to their credit as well drawn; while everything that is silly or coarse is set down to the discredit of the life they have sketched for our benefit. When the young Italian, in Felicita,' calmly discourses to the cousin he loves, about the intended wife whom he does not love, it : does not jar on our feelings as it would do in the mouth of an English lover. When little Lucy makes her wild compact of endless trust with the young Roman painter,-when that young Agostino himself suddenly rises from an idler into a hero,-in short, when the whole story bears on its face the romance which it bears in name, we read it with indulgence, and are willing to accept the faults of the story as part of the social system that belongs to Italy rather than to England. This is equally the case with Miss Bremer's novels. If some of her scenes seem vulgar, some of her characters ill-drawn, some of their sentiments highflown, we scarcely venture to apply these terms to such unfamiliar phenomena:-perhaps they are only Swedish life and Swedish feelings. When the young married couple find their respected chère mère fiddling to her dancing servants on Sunday afternoon; when she slaps and pinches the young bride, and gives them a bundle of veal-cutlets for their breakfast the next morning; when a wife of twenty-seven and a husband of forty scuffle and romp till he is rolled into a ditch,—we stare and laugh, but pass no judgment, for perhaps these are Swedish manners. In short, we accept the home life of "The Neighbours,' with its quiet wisdom and right feeling, as part of our common humanity; and we accept everything peculiar or fantastic as a Swedish slide in the magic-lantern which amuses us by its novelty, and with regard to which we never pause to decide how far its tragic and comic figures are caricatures of life. We would fain hope that many of the French novels which we do not here notice, owe much of their circulation in England to this suspension of judgment. Unwatchful and dangerous as such suspension is, we would rather think that our innocent boys and girls are thrown off their guard by the novelty of these features of foreign life, than that, seeing all the human loathsomeness that lies beneath the French clothing, they should yet read and enjoy such depraved books. The union of life-interest with the interest derived from spectacles unlike our own life, is characteristic of one of our most popular English novelists,-Dickens. Sometimes he gives us horrors and adventures, robbery and murder, storm and shipwreck, great Fire of London, spontaneous combustion; oftener he gives us scenes of foreign life,-for what are the lives of thieves, beggars, clerks, footmen, prisoners, and policemen, but foreign to the mass of his readers? But his chief forte consists in delineating that particular aspect of life which admits of high caricature. On this ground he stands forth the unrivalled master of his art. His harlequin slides in the magic-lantern are inimitable; but, when he rises into the higher region of feeling : Dickens-his Success and Failure. 285 and passion, his tendency to caricature becomes ridiculous; and when he rises into principles, he shocks us. Yet in the simpler emotions that belong rather to pathos than passion, Dickens is more successful. Little Nelly, for instance, in 'The Old Curiosity Shop,' has been greatly praised; yet we suspect most readers turn with a feeling of relief from her to the incomparable Richard Swiveller. Generally speaking, we like a little pathos interspersed with his delightful fun, as we like a wafer with an ice, less for the sake of the wafer than for the better enjoyment of the ice. As for his principles, they may be said to resolve themselves into three cardinal points, continually implied, though never formally expressed, in his writings. First: that no woman ought to be judged hardly who is led astray by her affections. Secondly: that illegitimacy is no sort of disgrace. Thirdly that it is an excessively harsh thing that society should make us eat the fruit of our own doings! There is scarcely one of his works which does not contain something uncomfortable or revolting, and something altogether distorted by caricature. He is especially unfortunate in his sketches of women. His ungentle women, Mrs. Dombey, Miss Wade, and Rosa Dartle, are monsters; and his gentle women have a particular aptitude for making mistaken marriages. Madeline Bray would have married the wretched usurer Arthur Gride; Florence, the young lady, marries Walter the sailor boy; Ada marries poor lost Richard Carstone, and Esther would have married Mr. Jarndyce, if he had not had sense enough to prevent her just in time. And then what sad stories are found in his works:-what sin, and sorrow, and disgrace! Illegitimacy in 'Oliver Twist,' 'Bleak House,' and 'Little Dorrit,'-seduction in 'David Copperfield,'plotted adultery in 'Dombey,'-hatred between father and child in 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and 'Dombey,'-murder in 'Oliver Twist,' -suicide in 'Nicholas Nickleby,'-murder and intended parricide in Martin Chuzzlewit;'-and, saddest, though not worst of all, gradual deterioration of character, and waste of gifts of high promise, in Richard Carstone and Steerforth:-and all these dark spots and stains relieved, not so much by contrasted brightness, by energy in action, or heroism in endurance, as by drollery and broad fun. Perhaps these flaws are less evident in 'David Copperfield' than in any other of his works; it has less caricature, either tragic or comic, less stilted emotions, less broad merriment, and is more like life in its subdued gaiety and pathos, and pleasant cheerfulness. Yet, even in David Copperfield,' Rosa Dartle and Miss Mowcher are outrageous caricatures. Authors have a standing jest against the sagacity of critics, based upon the fact that such alleged |