DUNLOP’S HISTORY OF FICTION
Vol. xxiv.] [November 1814.
We are very much of Mr. Dunlop’s opinion,—that ‘life has few things better, than sitting at the chimney-corner in a winter evening, after a well-spent day, and reading an interesting romance or novel.’ In fact, of all the pleasures of the imagination those are by far the most captivating which are excited by the representation of our fellow-creatures struggling with great difficulties, and stimulated by high expectations or formidable alarms. And if the reader or spectator have no personal interest in the subject, his emotions are but slightly, if at all, affected by his judgment concerning its authenticity. On the contrary, the fictions of genius may be rendered far more engaging than the greater part of real history.
But the invention of interesting narratives is by no means an easy exercise; and we apprehend that tales entirely and professedly fictitious are exclusively the production of a civilized age; and are never introduced into any nation till long after the genuine exploits of its own heroes have been sung by its bards (who are the first historians), for the entertainment and information of ruder times. These journalists may indeed be expected to exaggerate the truth; and, on very slender evidence, or merely from the warmth of their imagination, to represent the powers of the invisible world as interposing their mighty influence in the shape most agreeable to the prevalent superstitions. But in relating events which passed within the memory of their hearers, these exaggerations would generally be kept within such bounds as not to shock the credulity, and consequently be less gratifying to the national curiosity, and even to the national vanity of their audience: and hence sagacious historians are able to extract a probable narrative from the songs of contemporary bards.
Long however before the period of sober and scrutinizing history, the more ancient of these songs would gradually receive additions and embellishments from the patriotic fancies of the persons who successively transmitted them to posterity; of the extent of which some idea may be formed from the amplifications with which the account of any surprising event is adorned, even during a short time after its first promulgation, as it passes from house to house, and from village to village. A bard also of one generation, gathering information from those of another, and from the traditionary anecdotes of the aged with whom he conversed, would be apt to compose a narrative in which a greater latitude would be assumed for adjusting it to his own views or to the taste of his countrymen, according to the remoteness of the time to which it referred, and his security from the examination of critical inquirers. And we may well suppose that his audience would receive indulgently, or rather would indispensably require a high colouring of the marvellous in the accounts of their favourite heroes.
In ruder times, therefore, the fiction would chiefly consist, not so much in the troublesome task of inventing incidents, as in exaggeration: And the tendency to exaggerate would act in two ways: it would on the one hand enlarge the scale and heighten the colours of the natural objects and real events which were understood to have existed; and on the other hand it would multiply as well as magnify, and would render distinctly visible the supernatural interpositions which were suggested by the popular creed. When Achilles in a pet retired with his myrmidons, it is probable enough that Diomed was roused to exert himself to the utmost in the common cause, and performed wonders in the first engagements after the secession of his great rival. On such an occasion it would not be unnatural for his brave companions, and still less for enraptured parasitical bards, to have expressed their admiration by saying, that they beheld him as if shining with a light from heaven in the battle; that Minerva was his friend and protector; that under her guidance he not only slew many of the Trojan chiefs, but completely routed and made an incredible havock among the throng of the less noble combatants, who furiously assailed him, led on by the God of war in all his terrors;—in short, that Diomed was a match for Mars himself. But the heroes of the Trojan expedition were seen as visions by Homer and his cotemporaries: And, according to the representation in the fifth book of the Iliad, Minerva adorns the warrior with a real star-like flame beaming from the crest of his helmet; she obtains Jupiter’s permission to assist the Greeks; rouses Diomed’s courage who had been compelled to retreat; with her own divine hand, she pulls down the charioteer, mounts into his seat, and drives to where Mars was combating in propriâ personâ, but who is soon wounded by Diomed in the small guts, νείατον ἐς κενεῶνα, and sent roaring as loud as nine or ten thousand men to his father Jupiter on the top of Olympus. Thus the surprising events which were but moderately hyperbolized at the time, in the relation of the eyewitnesses, and ascribed to the secret influences of the supernatural powers, rather than to the agency of their daylight apparitions, are wonderfully changed in the representation, at no great distance of time. The real hero slays his tens; the hero of the men-singers and women-singers slays his thousands and his tens of thousands: The real hero is large of bone and strong of muscle; the hero of the poet is a Hercules; and if not a giant, he is much more—like Tom Thumb he is the conqueror of giants: Those superior Beings, with whom the popular religion or superstition has peopled heaven and earth and hell, mingle openly in the fray: they are seen and recognized as distinctly as any others of the Dramatis Personæ, and act and converse very sensibly, sometimes very foolishly, not only with each other, but with their mortal associates. These superior Beings themselves, indeed, frequently owe their supernatural character, and in some cases, their very existence, to exaggeration. The heroes in process of time become demi-gods; and at last are invested with the full honours and emoluments of Deities acknowledged and established by law;
‘Romulus et Liber pater, et cum Castore Pollux;
Post ingentia facta Deorum in templa recepti.’
The unknown causes which actuate the material world,—the passions which agitate the human breast,—and even several of those shadows of entity, the allegorical characters, have been distinctly personified, and many of them admitted to seats of greater or less dignity in the sacred college of Divinities.
But in general the most enormous exaggeration would disfigure those events which were the most ancient in the national traditions;—those events which bordered upon utter darkness and appeared to be coeval with the birth of Time. In a period of such dim antiquity, it appears that a certain Crown Prince of Crete, very enterprising and very unprincipled, rebelled successfully against his father, seemingly still more unprincipled than his son, and carried every thing before him. This worthy young gentleman, after being worshipped by the Cretans during his life, very much, we suppose, as other successful tyrants are worshipped, had the astonishing good fortune, in the course of a few centuries after his death, to be acknowledged as the King of Gods and men throughout all Greece, and afterwards through the whole extent of the Roman empire. The abortive insurrection of his kinsmen in Thessaly was in due time represented as the enterprise of stupendous giants, who heaped mountain upon mountain to attack the Thunderer in his Olympian Palace. And as nobody could tell any thing about the parents of these great men, it was concluded, with a degree of probability amounting to what in the language of philosophers is with much propriety called moral certainty, that they had risen out of the ground like mushrooms. The events prior to his establishment on the throne, appear dimly in the back-ground of the sacred mythology—involved in all the awful obscurity of mysteries, not to be profaned by the scrutiny of impious mortals. We are told that there was a war in heaven of the Titans against Saturn the chief of the Gods, for not having devoured his son Jupiter. For it would appear that this good king, in whose reign, according to the poets, all the world, except the royal family, were virtuous and happy, had cajoled his elder brother Prince Titan out of his inheritance, under the express condition of destroying, or, according to the more elegant mystical account, of eating his male children as soon as they were born. The chief of the gods was at first defeated and imprisoned by the Titans, but was soon rescued and restored by Jupiter, the hopeful Crown Prince, who afterwards expelled his father, and reigned in his stead.
In some such manner real events are represented by the bards of future generations; with a strange fantastic jumble of hyperbole and allegory, converted partly or entirely from a figurative to a literal meaning, the marvels of superstition, childish fancies, and the brilliant conceptions of poetical genius; while during the whole time there is but little invention of incident, and far less of any thing like that artificial fabrication of a continued fiction, which critics like Bossu have ascribed to Homer so gratuitously, and indeed in such contradiction to all that is known from experience concerning the progress of the human mind in any of the arts.
Fictitious incidents would generally be at first introduced by a much easier method than invention into the narratives of the bards. The gentlemen of this ancient, itinerant corporation would naturally, in the course of their peregrinations, become acquainted with many tales, both foreign and domestic, not generally known to the rest of their countrymen; and would be tempted to steal the most striking of the incidents, whether true or false, and transfer them to the characters in their own histories. Various instances of such pilfering are every day detected in the story-tellers of society, as well as in authors both ancient and modern; and hence it sometimes happens that the same transaction appears in several different associations. Thus, much use has been made, in various books, of the transaction so well known to the readers of plays and romances,—the conspiracy for ruining a lady’s reputation by carrying her friends to a hiding-place from whence they could spy the improper behaviour of a person who was dressed so as to resemble her. This clumsy contrivance seems to have been stolen by Bandello from Ariosto,—and has been employed both by Shakespeare and Spenser. And when authors endowed with so fertile inventions condescend to borrow incidents so ill-contrived, (and indeed they sometimes stoop to still poorer thefts), we cannot doubt that similar plagiarisms must have been frequent among the inferior practitioners in the trade of story-making.
In fact, the piracy of incidents may be traced from the most remote antiquity down to modern times, in the histories both of supernatural agents and of mortal men. There are strong presumptions that the Grecian archives of Hercules, and of Jupiter himself, have been enlarged by plunder both from Egypt and Asia. The Jewish visionaries superadded to the truths of the sacred Scriptures many curious anecdotes relating to the celestial principalities,—which they learned from the authentic records of their Chaldean conquerors. The Romances of chivalry have been enriched by contributions from various quarters; from the songs of the Scalds, the bards of the Northern tribes that overran so many provinces of the Roman empire; from the tales of Arabia, Persia, and other eastern nations; and also from the fables transmitted by the classics of Greece and Rome. Mr. Dunlop very properly rejects any theory which would ascribe the beauties of romantic fiction to any one of these sources exclusively, and we shall quote his general account of the subject, as a fair specimen of his style and sagacity.
‘From a view of the character of Arabian and Gothic fiction, it appears that neither is exclusively entitled to the credit of having given birth to the wonders of romance. The early framers of the tales of chivalry may be indebted to the northern bards for those wild and terrible images congenial to a frozen region, and owe to Arabian invention that magnificence and splendour, those glowing descriptions and luxuriant ornaments, suggested by the enchanting scenery of an eastern climate,
“And wonders wild of Arabesque combine
With Gothic imagery of darker shade.”
‘It cannot be denied, and indeed has been acknowledged by Mr. Warton, that the fictions of the Arabians and Scalds are totally different. The fables and superstitions of the Northern bards are of a darker shade and more savage complexion than those of the Arabians. There is something in their fictions that chills the imagination. The formidable objects of nature with which they were familiarized in their northern solitudes, their precipices and frozen mountains and gloomy forests, acted on their fancy, and gave a tincture of horror to their imagery. Spirits who send storms over the deep, who rejoice in the shriek of the drowning mariner, or diffuse irresistible pestilence; spells which preserve from poison, blunt the weapons of an enemy, or call up the dead from their tombs—these are the ornaments of northern poetry. The Arabian fictions are of a more splendid nature; they are less terrible indeed, but possess more variety and magnificence; they lead us through delightful forests, and raise up palaces glittering with gold and diamonds.
‘It may also be observed, that, allowing the early Scaldic odes to be genuine, we find in them no dragons, giants, magic rings, or enchanted castles. These are only to be met with in the compositions of the bards who flourished after the native vein of Runic fabling had been enriched by the tales of the Arabians. But if we look in vain to the early Gothic poetry for many of those fables which adorn the works of the romancers, we shall easily find them in the ample field of oriental fiction. Thus the Asiatic romances and chemical works of the Arabians are full of enchantments similar to those described in the Spanish, and even in the French, tales of chivalry. Magical rings were an important part of the eastern philosophy, and seem to have given rise to those which are of so much service to the Italian poets. In the Eastern peris, we may trace the origin of the European fairies in their qualities, and perhaps in their name. The griffin or hippogriff of the Italian writers, seems to be the famous Simurgh of the Persians, which makes such a figure in the epic poems of Sadii and Ferdusii.
‘A great number of these romantic wonders were collected in the East by that idle and lying horde of pilgrims and palmers who visited the Holy Land through curiosity, restlessness, or devotion, and who, returning from so great a distance, imposed every fiction on a believing audience. They were subsequently introduced into Europe by the Fablers of France, who took up arms and followed their barons to the conquest of Jerusalem. At their return, they imported into Europe the wonders they had heard, and enriched romance with an infinite variety of Oriental fictions.
‘A fourth hypothesis has been suggested, which represents the machinery and colouring of fiction, the stories of enchanted gardens, monsters, and winged steeds, which have been introduced into romance, as derived from the classical and mythological authors; and as being merely the ancient stories of Greece, grafted on modern manners, and modified by the customs of the age. The classical authors, it is true, were in the middle ages scarcely known; but the superstitions they inculcated had been prevalent for too long a period, and had taken too firm a hold on the mind, to be easily obliterated. The mythological ideas which still lingered behind were diffused in a multitude of popular works. In the travels of Sir John Mandeville, there are many allusions to ancient fable; and, as Middleton has shown that a great number of the Popish rites were derived from Pagan ceremonies, it is scarcely to be doubted, that many classical were converted into romantic fictions. This at least is certain, that the classical system presents the most numerous and least exceptionable prototypes of the fables of romance.
‘In many of the tales of chivalry, there is a knight detained from his guest, by the enticements of a sorceress; and who is nothing more than the Calypso or Circe of Homer. The story of Andromeda might give rise to the fable of damsels being rescued by their favourite knight, when on the point of being devoured by a sea monster. The heroes of the Iliad and Æneid were both furnished with enchanted armour; and in the story of Polyphemus, a giant and his cave are exhibited. Herodotus, in his history, speaks of a race of Cyclops who inhabited the North, and waged perpetual war with the tribe of Griffons, which was in possession of mines of gold. The expedition of Jason in search of the golden fleece; the apples of the Hesperides, watched by a dragon; the king’s daughter who is an enchantress, who falls in love with and saves the knight,—are akin to the marvels of romantic fiction—especially of that sort supposed to have been introduced by the Arabians. Some of the less familiar fables of classical mythology, as the image in the Theogony of Hesiod, of the murky prisons in which the Titans were pent up by Jupiter, under the custody of strong armed giants, bear a striking resemblance to the more wild sublimity of the Gothic fictions.’ (Vol. 1. p. 135.)
Thus Bayes is not the only poet whose invention is indebted to his memory or common-place book; and the art of fictitious narrative, like every other art, seems to have arisen gradually from very humble beginnings; and to have consisted, at first, not in the invention of incidents, but in the exaggeration, natural even to eyewitnesses, in relating any interesting or surprising event; and afterwards, in borrowing incidents, true or false, from every quarter, whenever such a license had the chance of escaping detection, or of being favourably received.
But the licence, whether of exaggerating, of borrowing, or of inventing incidents, would be more freely assumed by the bard, and more indulgently admitted by his audience; and indeed the reports of travellers, who have always enjoyed a peculiar privilege, would provide the materials of fiction in greater variety, and of a more wonderful kind, when the scene of the hero’s adventures happened to be in distant and unknown regions, inhabited by other races of men, enclosed by other mountains and other seas, subject to the influence of other skies, and governed by other gods and another order of Nature.—The Odyssey is a curious example.—If we except the usual interposition of the usual deities, the history of what passes in Ithaca and Greece seems to contain little which may not be more easily conceived to have actually happened, than to have been invented by the poet. But when we accompany Ulysses to Italy, Sicily and Ogygia, countries so little known in those early times to the inhabitants of Ionia or Greece, we find ourselves in another world. We meet with the enchantments of Circe, the mother of a large family of enchantresses; and the songs of Sirens—whose fascinating progeny has multiplied still more extensively both in verse and in prose. We meet with Giants who devoured human flesh, and are manifestly near of kin to the raw-boned gentlemen against whom not only the knights-errant of after-times, but also our dearly beloved school-fellow Jack the Giant-killer exerted his prowess and sagacity—though we have some pleasure in remarking that the more modern giants are of a finer breed, and farther removed from the savage state, as they look through two eyes instead of one, and live in castles instead of caves. What is more wonderful, we meet with the road to hell; not indeed the broad way through the wide gate, so well known and so much frequented by men of all ranks in every age of the world; but the secret path which it requires mystic rites to open, and by which a hero, a saint, or a poet, with a proper guide and good interest at court, may not only descend with all his flesh and blood about him to gratify his curiosity, but also return safe and sound, to entertain his friends above ground with the sights he saw below.
It appears, then, in what manner the bards, prompted by patriotism, and the desire of exciting the wonder of their auditors, might be enabled, without any great trouble of invention, to adorn with fiction the songs which recorded the exploits of their own countrymen; and their freedom in this respect would be the greater, according to the distance of time or place. But all restraint would be removed, when the hero of the tale was a foreigner. The historical truth would in this case be indifferent to the audience, and the narrative would be more acceptable, according as it was more extraordinary, affecting, and miraculous. Now it is obvious, that as the bards were indebted to their powers of amusing company for their estimation in society, and even for their livelihood, they would be prompted, by vanity and interest, as well as by their genius and habits, to provide an ample store and variety of tales; and not to confine themselves to transactions where they must have been fettered by the national records or traditions, but to adopt also those other subjects, where they could employ without control all the materials which were furnished by their experience, memory or fancy. It is obvious, too, that recourse to foreign subjects would become the more frequent, according as the nation advanced in knowledge and refinement, and ceased to depend on their poets for the preservation of their history. And when the professions of the poets and historians were completely separated, the former would be fully and for ever invested with the privilege of fiction, the quidlibet audendi potestas, in all their narratives, whether of foreign or domestic transactions—subject only to the remonstrances of the critics, not for telling lies, but for telling ill-contrived or uninteresting lies.
We have dwelt the longer on the origin of fictitious narrative, not only because the subject has been strangely misrepresented by the critics, but also because it is entirely overlooked in our author’s history. And this oversight seems to have produced another very material defect, the limitation of his plan to fictions in prose.
The earliest fictions are obviously entitled to the greatest attention, on account of the information which may be extracted from them with regard to the history, manners, and opinions of the nation and age to which they belong. They are also connected with many of the succeeding fictions; so that, by a mutual comparison, they are all rendered more intelligible and agreeable, more valuable both to the antiquary, the philosopher, and the innocents who read for amusement. But all the early fictions are composed in verse; and after fiction became less connected with history, many of the finest specimens of poetry are also the finest specimens of fictitious narrative. In fact, if we except a very few Italian tales, and some of the first-rate French and English novels, by far the best fictitious narratives in existence are poems. And a history of Mathematics which should exclude Archimedes and Newton, would not be more extraordinary, than a history of Fiction which excludes Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Scott, Campbell and Byron.
The reason alleged for this exclusion appears to us, we will confess, altogether unsatisfactory.
‘The history of Fiction,’ says our author in his Introduction, ‘becomes in a considerable degree interesting to the philosopher, and occupies an important place in the history of the progress of society. By contemplating the fables of a people, we have a successive delineation of their prevalent modes of thinking, a picture of their feelings and tastes and habits. In this respect prose fiction appears to possess advantages considerably superior either to history or poetry. In history there is too little individuality; in poetry too much effort, to permit the poet and historian to pourtray the manners living as they rise. History treats of man, as it were, in the mass; and the individuals whom it paints, are regarded merely or principally in a public light, without taking into consideration their private feelings, tastes, or habits. Poetry is in general capable of too little detail, while its paintings at the same time are usually too much forced and exaggerated. But in Fiction we can discriminate without impropriety, and enter into detail without meanness. Hence it has been remarked, that it is chiefly in the fictions of an age that we can discover the modes of living, dress and manners of the period.’
In the two last sentences it is plain that the author means prose fictions, and not fictions in general. But we hope he will consider this matter a little more deliberately. Even though we should grant all that he has here stated, it would not afford a sufficient reason for excluding fictitious narratives in verse from the History of Fiction. But we apprehend that verse is by no means incompatible with accurate and minute description; for which we may appeal to the finest poems that have ever yet been published, as well as to the ruder lays of the bards in the North and West of Europe, which are of such importance both in the history of Fiction, and in the history of Society. Of the manners and characters of the Greek in the heroic ages, we find a distinct and even minute account in the poems of Homer: but it would not be adviseable to form our ideas of the Greek Shepherds and Shepherdesses in any age, from a certain prose romance to which our Author has condescended to afford a conspicuous place in his history—Longus’s pastoral tale of Daphnis and Chloe. We doubt much if the manners of chivalry are as correctly represented in the prose of Amadis de Gaul, and the long train of prose romances to which it gave rise, and which occupy so great a portion of the present work; as in the Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme liberata, under all the fetters of the ottava rima. The voluminous histories of Astrea and Cleopatra, the accomplished Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, and various other celebrated romances, which are admitted into our author’s history on account of their prose, and which are chiefly deserving of attention, from the difficulty of discovering how any body could ever have been at the trouble to read them, describe a state of society which never existed any where but in the fantastic imaginations of those writers, who may κατ’ ἐξοχήν—be denominated Prosers. On the other hand, the Lady of the Lake, Gertrude of Wyoming, the Bride of Abydos and the Corsair, present in the most harmonious versification and highest colouring of poetry, many details of national manners which are not surpassed in accuracy by the plain prose of that most honest of all travellers, Bell of Antermony. We are far however from wishing to insinuate that any of the prose romances which we have mentioned should be excluded from the History of Fiction. On the contrary we are extremely obliged to Mr. Dunlop for his judicious and elegant accounts of them. But we regret that the mere circumstance of versification should have excluded so many capital or curious works which are essentially connected with a philosophical and critical delineation of the origin and progress of Fiction in general, and particularly in the West of Europe.
The present publication, however, although it ought only to be entitled Sketches of the History of Fiction, is still interesting and amusing, and in general is respectably executed. But we have only to look at the first chapter, in order to be sensible of the imperfection of the plan. This chapter gives a view of the Greek romances in prose, and begins with a work of Antonius Diogenes in the time of Alexander the Great, entitled Accounts of the incredible things in Thule, τῶν ὑπὲρ Θουλην ἀπιστῶν λόγοι. It is now, we believe, extant only in the Epitome of Photius; and is a farrago of absurd and extravagant stories, which its author acknowledges to have been collected from former writers. We mention it only to apprise the reader at how recent a period Mr. Dunlop’s history begins. At this period, the art of composition, both in prose and verse, had attained a high degree of excellence; the departments of history and fiction were completely separated,—though some irregular practices have existed, down to our own days, of borrowing the ornaments of the latter department to decorate the former; fiction had been long cultivated on its own account; the tales which delighted the Milesians, and which probably borrowed many of their incidents from the neighbouring and civilised nations of Persia, were then in circulation; and the intercourse which Alexander’s expedition had opened with the more easterly nations, must have afforded a copious supply of materials for the story-tellers of Greece. Thus our author’s history opens, not in the beginning, but in the midst, of things; an arrangement which, however commendable in an Epic poem, does not appear so well adapted to sober history,—not even to a history of Fiction. Nor does our author, like the Epic poets, fall upon any device for carrying us back in due time to the commencement of the subject; from which indeed he is precluded by the artificial limits of his plan.
Of the Greek Romances in prose, now extant, of any considerable length (if we except the Cyropœdia, which is a fiction of a very particular kind, and not intended for popular amusement), the oldest is not earlier than the end of the fourth century. It is the history of Theagenes and Chariclea, written by Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly, but before his promotion to the episcopal dignity. It is deserving of notice chiefly on account of the hints which it has furnished to succeeding writers of eminence, particularly to Tasso and Guarini; but we mention it here, chiefly for the purpose of recommending to our author a revisal of the principles of criticism which he has laid down in his remarks on this Romance. To us it appears that a story may possess novelty, probability, and variety in its incidents; that the incidents may be arranged by the narrator, so as to keep us ignorant of the final issue till the last; that it may possess all the ornaments which our author has enumerated—a good style, characters well defined and interesting in themselves, sentiments as sublime as any in Epictetus, and descriptions as fine as in the Romance of the Forest, or as correct as in Bell’s Travels; nay, to crown all, we can even conceive that the story shall be written in prose;—and yet, that with all these merits, which are all that our author requires, it shall be a string of events so unimportant or unimpassioned, that a second perusal would be quite insufferable. Have we not seen Mr. Cumberland’s novels?
Waiting to be better instructed, we would merely hint at present, that the proper merit of a Romance consists in Interest and Pathos, including in Pathos the ludicrous as well as the serious emotions. A romance is nothing, if it does not preserve alive our anxiety for the fate of the principal characters, with a constant, though varied, agitation of the passions. For this purpose, we must be made to conceive the whole action as passing before us—to hear the conversations of the different persons—to see their demeanours and looks—to enter into their thoughts—and to have each of them as distinctly and individually present to our mind, as the several characters in the Iliad, in Marianne, in Tom Jones, or in Cecilia. When the characters are striking, either by their virtues, vices, or follies—and when our imagination is thus occupied by a succession of scenes in which these qualities are rendered conspicuous, and in which our sympathies and aversions, our admiration and laughter, our joy and sorrow, our hopes and fears, are kept in continual play—we can forgive many improbabilities and even impossibilities in the story,—as is well known to the readers of Homer, Ariosto, and Shakespeare: still less are we displeased with borrowed incidents,—as almost all our dramatic authors can testify. In fact, there is generally but little merit in the adoption, or even invention of the simple incident, compared to the genius of the poet, the actor, or the painter, who bestows upon it life and passion. Chariclea was appointed by the priest of Apollo to present to Theagenes the lighted torch for kindling the sacrifice in the temple of Delphi. They first saw each other upon this occasion, and became mutually and deeply enamoured. But how feeble is the impression produced by this dry narrative, compared to what we feel at Raphael’s glowing picture of the scene, or compared to what we would have felt if Rousseau had described the looks and thoughts of the enraptured lovers!—When they were flying from Delphi to Sicily, their ship was captured by the pirate Charinus, whom Chariclea implored in vain not to separate her from Theagenes. We hear without emotion the general account of the event; but how affecting is it to contemplate, in the picture drawn by the same great master, the attitude and countenance of Chariclea as she is kneeling at the Pirate’s feet! And how could Otway have wrung the heart by the dramatic representation of such an interview!
It is amusing to observe, at the end of this chapter, how the author endeavours to persuade himself that his history opens with the origin of fictitious narrative in Greece. After some general remarks on the romances he had been reviewing, he adds, ‘In short, these early fictions are such as might have been expected at the first effort’—as if the romances produced several centuries after the Christian era, or even in the time of Alexander the Great, were the first attempts at fiction in the country of Homer and Hesiod.
In the second chapter, where the author proposes to review the Latin romances, the principal article is the Ass of Apuleius, which, from its great popularity, has been called the Golden Ass. It is an improvement of Lucian’s whimsical tale, entitled Lucius; and relates the adventures of the author Apuleius during his transformation into an ass. This misfortune befel him at the house of a female magician in Thessaly with whom he lodged, and whose maidservant at his request had stolen a box of ointment from her mistress, by rubbing himself with which Apuleius expected to be changed into a bird; but as his friend the damsel had by mistake given him a wrong box, he found himself compelled to bray and walk on all fours, instead of whistling and flying in the air. He is informed by her, that the eating of rose leaves is necessary for his restoration to the human form. One should imagine that roses might be found as easily in Thessaly as in this country, where an ass of ordinary observation and address might contrive, without much difficulty, to regale himself with one, if he liked it as well as a thistle—and much more, if it were an object of as great importance to him as to Apuleius. This poor beast, however, went through many adventures, some to be sure agreeable enough, but in general very unpleasant, before he had it in his power to taste a rose leaf. At last, having one evening escaped from his master, he found unexpectedly the termination of his misfortunes. We shall quote Mr. Dunlop’s account of this happy catastrophe.
‘He fled unperceived to the fields; and having galloped for three leagues, he came to a retired place on the shore of the sea. The moon which was in full splendour, and the awful silence of the night, inspired him with sentiments of devotion. He purified himself in the manner prescribed by Pythagoras, and addressed a long prayer to the great goddess Isis. In the course of the night she appeared to him in a dream; and after giving a strange account of herself, announced to him the end of his misfortunes; but demanded in return the consecration of his whole life to her service. On awakening, he feels himself confirmed in his resolution of aspiring to a life of virtue. On this change of disposition and conquest over his passions, the author finely represents all nature as assuming a new face of cheerfulness and gaiety. “Tanta hilaritate, praeter peculiarem meam, gestire mihi cuncta videbantur, ut pecua etiam cujuscemodi, et totas domos, et ipsam diem serena facie gaudere sentirem.”
‘While in this frame of mind, Apuleius perceived an innumerable multitude approaching the shore to celebrate the festival of Isis. Amid the crowd of priests, he remarked the sovereign pontiff, with a crown of roses on his head; and approached to pluck them. The pontiff, yielding to a secret inspiration, held forth the garland. Apuleius resumed his former figure, and the promise of the Goddess was fulfilled. He was then initiated into her rites—returned to Rome, and devoted himself to her service.... He was finally invited to a more mystic and solemn initiation by the Goddess herself, who rewarded him for his accumulated piety, by an abundance of temporal blessings.’—Vol. i. p. 114.
This romance has acquired great celebrity, from having been pressed by Warburton into the service of Christianity, in his curious argument for the Divine Legation of Moses—which we trust is defensible upon other grounds. We cannot go so far as the learned prelate; though we think it extremely probable that Apuleius had in view the general idea of representing, on the one hand, by his metamorphosis, the degradation of human nature in consequence of a voluptuous life; and on the other hand, the dignity and happiness of virtue, by his restoration and admission to the mysteries of Isis. The Golden Ass, however, is not calculated to make converts from pleasure; and is chiefly valuable as a book of amusement, written very agreeably, but not without affectation, and containing some beautiful tales and many diverting incidents.
Of the ancient Latin romances very few are extant; and it is probable that the production of these luxuries was checked in Italy before the end of the fourth century, though the Greek writers continued for nine or ten centuries afterwards to compose tales of various kinds both in prose and verse. But, while the idle people of Constantinople were amusing themselves with their novels, the western provinces of the Roman empire were laid waste by barbarous invaders; and a period of extreme misery was at length succeeded by a new state of society, a new state of government, manners and opinions, very different from that which had been subverted in the west, or from that which subsisted in the refined and effeminate provinces of the east, but far better adapted to rouse the ardour of a poetical imagination. Hence arose a new and remarkable class of fictions,—the fictions of Chivalry, which have so long delighted Britain and France, and Spain and Italy. They are the subject of the third and three following chapters of our Author’s history.
It is in this portion of his work, particularly, that we have to lament the unhappy limitation of his plan. The prose romances of Chivalry were produced for the most part by Bayes’s most expeditious recipe for original composition, namely, by turning verse into prose,—being extremely diffuse and languid compilations from the early metrical tales; and they are in general of little value to the antiquary, as neither their authors nor their dates can be ascertained. Amadis de Gaul is one of the most celebrated; and yet it remains undetermined whether the work now extant under that title has not been greatly altered from the original; nor can any one tell either who composed the original, or who manufactured the present work, or at what time either the one or the other was written. The early metrical tales are far more deserving of attention as connected with real history; and if we consider the romances of chivalry merely as amusements to the imagination, the subject appears better adapted for verse than for prose. The stately and formal manners of those ages soon grow wearisome in ordinary narrative, and require to be enlivened by the rapidity and brilliancy of poetical description: And who does not feel that the marvellous exploits and supernatural events with which they abound, deserve rather to be sung to the sound of the harp, tabret, cymbal, and all manner of musical instruments, than to be detailed in the sober language of truth, which is absurdly affected by the prose romancers, who generally announce themselves as authentic historians, and rail at the falsehood of their metrical predecessors? Accordingly it is among the poets that we are to look for the finest specimens of the fictions which we are now considering; and while the romances of Ariosto, and Tasso and Scott, are read again and again by persons of all descriptions, even Mr. Southey’s translation of the great Amadis de Gaul, though it is ably executed, and has much improved its original by abridging it, was never popular, and is now almost forgotten.
Our author deviates from his plan so far as to give us a slight notice of a few of the metrical romances which were preserved in the library of M. de St. Palaye, the learned writer of the Memoirs on Chivalry. But with this exception, he gratifies his readers with an account of the prose romances only; of which the most ancient, and perhaps the most curious, are those which relate to the fabulous history of England. Amidst the devastation of the Roman empire in the west, this island suffered far more than its share of the general calamity. The Christian religion, which had been elsewhere not only spared but embraced by the conquerors, was exterminated by the idolatrous and unlettered Saxons who subdued the British province; and if any of the Britons were suffered to exist within its bounds, they were only poor despised stragglers of the lower orders; while the remnant of its chiefs, clergy and bards—its traditions, its records, its literature, its very language—were swept into the mountains of Wales, or beyond the sea into Britany. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the history of England should be lost in fable, from the time that the Saxons got a footing in it, about the middle of the fifth century, till the year 600, in which they began to be converted, and civilized, and instructed in letters, by Augustine and the other missionaries of Pope Gregory the Great. This dark period of 150 years, between the entrance of the Saxons under Hengist, and their conversion to Christianity, was the age of the famous King Arthur, his friend Merlin the Enchanter, and the Knights of his illustrious order of the Round Table, who are the great heroes in the older romances of chivalry. Not that these good people, although they fought stoutly against the invaders, knew any thing about the etiquette and parade of chivalry, which was not instituted as an order till long afterwards: but the romancers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries chose to dress in the fashion of their own times, the characters whom they found in the stories of Wales and Britany, or in the chronicle of Geoffry of Monmouth, who reduced these stories into the form of a regular authentic history, ascending to Brutus the Trojan, generally denominated Le Brut by the French, and Brute by the English poets, who was the great-grandson of Æneas, and the undoubted founder of the British kingdom;—a fact which is abundantly confirmed, if it needed confirmation, by the name Britain, quasi Brutain, evidently derived from Brutus.
The earliest of the prose romances relating to Arthur, is the history of Merlin the Enchanter, who was the son of a demon and an innocent young lady, and favourite minister of Uter Pendragon, the British king. It was this monarch who instituted at Carduel (Carlisle), the order of the Round Table; at which were seated 50 or 60 of the first nobles of the country, with an empty place always left for the Sangreal. The Sangreal, our readers must know, was the most precious of all the Christian relics: it was the blood which flowed from our Saviour’s wounds, preserved in the hanap or cup in which he drank with his apostles the night when he was betrayed. This relic was first in the possession of Joseph of Arimathea, by whom it was brought to Britain, and afterwards fell into the hands of king Pecheur, who, by a beautiful ambiguity of the French language, might have received this name either from being a great fisher or a great sinner, or both. His nephew, the redoubted knight Percival, succeeded to his uncle’s kingdom and to the possession of the Sangreal; which, at the moment of Percival’s death, was in the presence of his attendants carried up into heaven, and has never since been seen or heard of. But to return to the romance of Merlin, which is a favourable specimen of the class to which it belongs—we shall extract the following account from our author’s history.
‘Soon after this institution (of the Round Table), the king invited all his barons to the celebration of a great festival, which he proposed holding annually at Carduel.
‘As the knights had obtained permission from his majesty to bring their ladies along with them, the beautiful Yguerne accompanied her husband, the Duke of Tintadiel, to one of these anniversaries. The king became deeply enamoured of the dutchess, and revealed his passion to Ulsius, one of his counsellors. Yguerne withstood all the inducements which Ulsius held forth to prepossess her in favour of his master; and ultimately disclosed to her husband the attachment and solicitations of the king. On hearing this, the duke instantly withdrew from court with Yguerne, and without taking leave of Uter. The king complained of this want of duty to his council, who decided, that the duke should be summoned to court, and if refractory, should be treated as a rebel. As he refused to obey the citation, the king carried war into the estates of his vassal, and besieged him in the strong castle of Tintadiel, in which he had shut himself up. Yguerne was confined in a fortress at some distance, which was still more secure. During the siege, Ulsius informed his master that he had been accosted by an old man, who promised to conduct the king to Yguerne, and had offered to meet him for that purpose on the following morning. Uter proceeded with Ulsius to the rendezvous. In an old blind man whom they found at the appointed place, they recognized the enchanter Merlin, who had assumed that appearance. He bestowed on the king the form of the Duke of Tintadiel, while he endowed himself and Ulsius with the figures of his grace’s two squires. Fortified by this triple metamorphosis, they proceeded to the residence of Yguerne, who, unconscious of the deceit, received the king as her husband.
‘The fraud of Merlin was not detected, and the war continued to be prosecuted by Uter with the utmost vigour. At length the Duke was killed in battle, and the King, by the advice of Merlin, espoused Yguerne. Soon after the marriage she gave birth to Arthur, whom she believed to be the son of her former husband, as Uter had never communicated to her the story of his assumed appearance.
‘After the death of Uter, there was an interregnum in England, as it was not known that Arthur was his son. This Prince, however, was at length chosen King, in consequence of having unfixed from a miraculous stone, a sword which two hundred and one of the most valiant barons in the realm had been singly unable to extract. At the beginning of his reign, Arthur was engaged in a civil war; as the mode of his election, however judicious, was disapproved by some of the Barons, and when he had at length overcome his domestic enemies, he had long wars to sustain against the Gauls and Saxons.
‘In all these contests, the art of Merlin was of great service to Arthur, as he changed himself into a dwarf, a harp player, or a stag, as the interest of his master required; or at least threw on the bystanders a spell to fascinate their eyes, and cause them to see the thing that was not. On one occasion he made an expedition to Rome, entered the King’s palace in the shape of an enormous stag, and in this character delivered a formal harangue, to the utter amazement of one called Julius Cæsar; not the Julius whom the Knight Mars killed in his pavilion, but him whom Gauvaine slew, because he defied King Arthur.
‘At length this renowned magician disappeared entirely from England. His voice alone was heard in a forest, where he was enclosed in a bush of hawthorn: he had been entrapped in this awkward residence by means of a charm he had communicated to his mistress Viviane, who not believing in the spell, had tried it on her lover. The lady was sorry for the accident; but there was no extracting her admirer from his thorny coverture.
‘The earliest edition of this romance was printed at Paris, in three volumes folio, 1498.... Though seldom to be met with, the Roman de Merlin is one of the most curious romances of the class to which it belongs. It comprehends all the events connected with the life of the enchanter, from his supernatural birth to his magical disappearance, and embraces a longer period of interesting fabulous history than most of the works of chivalry.... The language, which is very old French, is remarkable for its beauty and simplicity. Indeed the work bears everywhere the marks of very high antiquity—though it is impossible to fix the date of its composition: It has been attributed to Robert de Borron, to whom many other works of this nature have been assigned; but it is not known at what time this author existed; and indeed he is believed by many, and particularly by Mr. Ritson, to be entirely a fictitious personage’ (Vol. i. p. 178).
Our author has given an amusing enough account, not only of the various prose romances relating to chivalry, but also of those circumstances in the state of the western nations which gave rise to the singular institutions and manners of that proud order, and consequently to this particular species of fiction; and we are moreover instructed in the origin of the marvels with which these fictions abound. The subject has been treated so ably, and in such detail, by former writers, that little new is to be expected; but we have already had occasion to commend our author’s judgment,—who has not confined himself to any one of the theories which have been ingeniously and learnedly maintained on the topic last mentioned, but has shown that they are all founded on truth, and consistent with each other.
We shall now refer the reader to the work itself, of which we have produced abundant specimens. Its multifarious nature is indicated by the title-page; and it contains much curious information, both with regard to the particular romances which are reviewed, and also with regard to the transition of stories from age to age, and from the novelist to the dramatic poet. But we cannot dismiss the subject, without stating briefly one or two additional remarks, which we submit to our author’s consideration in the view of another edition.
It is a material defect that his Reviews are so general, and so uniform in their style, that although we are amused with their pleasantry, they enable us to form but a very imperfect idea of the original compositions. The abridgments of some of the narratives are extremely jejune; and although he has inserted in the Appendix to the first volume some curious passages from the old French romances, and has even been so obliging as to furnish a specimen of John Bunyan’s style in the Pilgrim’s Progress, and of Mrs. Radcliffe’s in the Romance of the Forest, these favoured writers are almost the only ones whom he allows to address us in their own persons. Now it is obvious, that even the detail of all the incidents in a romance would be a very insufficient ground for judging of its merit. If the narrative is not animated, interesting, and impassioned, it is deficient in the essential requisites. But it is Mr. Dunlop who tells all the stories; and he tells them in his own way. He tells them indeed agreeably, and in many cases, we believe, more agreeably than the authors. This, however, is not precisely the entertainment to which we understood ourselves to have been invited. At another time we shall be happy to listen to Mr. Dunlop’s uninterrupted lecture; but on this occasion we expected that he was to introduce us to a great company of literati,—that he was to show them off and draw them out: Yet though they are all eager to talk,—being indeed all of them professed story-tellers, he talks the whole talk himself, and allows very few of the poor gentlemen to put in a word. It is true that he is doing the honours, and consequently we expect that he should prepare us in every case for what we are to hear; but still he should have let the good people speak a little for themselves, and then we might have formed some guess of their mettle. Mr. Ellis has managed this matter better in his specimens of the early metrical romances.
We must likewise observe, that our author is not always sufficiently attentive to make his criticisms intelligible to those who are not acquainted with the original works. Thus, after giving us an outline of the Greek story of Clitophon and Leucippe, he remarks (Vol. i. p. 38) that a number of the incidents are original (how does he know that?) and well imagined; ‘such as the beautiful incident of the Bee, which has been adopted by Tasso and D’Urfé:’ of which mysterious bee we do not hear another syllable either before or afterwards.
The state of Fiction in modern times is by far the finest and most interesting part of the whole subject; but our author’s account of it is extremely imperfect indeed, and seems to have been got up in very great haste, that the contents of his chapters might have some correspondence with his title-page. In fact, it is so inferior to what he has shown himself capable of accomplishing, that it would not be fair to advert to it more particularly.—There is however one incidental circumstance which we cannot omit. Miss Burney is mentioned, only to suggest that both the general incidents and the leading characters in Evelina have been derived from Mrs. Heywood’s stupid history of Betsy Thoughtless. This is really too much in the style of the schoolboy critics,—who make a prodigious noise about originality and invention, without attending to what constitutes the real value of works addressed to the imagination. Does it derogate from Shakespeare’s genius, that his fables are not his own? Or does any person now suppose that Homer invented, or would it have been much to his credit if he had invented, the story of the Trojan war, or even the principal events in his immortal poems? We will not however resume this topic, which we had already occasion to consider; but only observe, that from whatever quarter the author of Evelina may have derived the hints of her stories and characters, there are but few novelists who deserve to be compared to her in the capital merit of a powerful dramatic effect.
We shall conclude with merely suggesting that our author’s history would be greatly improved if he were careful to trace the connexion between the variations in the popular fictions of the western nations of Europe, and the variations in the political, moral, religious and literary state of those nations since the first establishment of the feudal governments. There are not wanting materials and helps for such an investigation; and as Mr. Dunlop is a man of erudition and research, we have no doubt that he would find it an interesting amusement for his leisure hours.
Upon the whole, though we wish to see the History of Fiction executed on a very different plan, and with a greater spirit of philosophical inquiry and critical acuteness, we recommend the present publication as an agreeable and curious Miscellany, which discovers uncommon information and learning.