Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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