Perrault. 53. Charles Perrault may, so far as I know, be said to have invented a kind of fiction which became extremely popular, and has had, even after it ceased to find direct imitators, a perceptible influence over the lighter literature of Europe. The idea was original, and happily executed. Perhaps he sometimes took the tales of children, such as the tradition of many generations had delivered them; but much of his fairy machinery seems to have been his own, and I should give him credit for several of the stories, though it is hard to form a guess. He gave to them all a real interest, as far as could be, with a naturalness of expression, an arch naïveté, a morality neither too obvious nor too refined, and a slight poignancy of satire on the world, which render the Tales of Mother Goose almost a counterpart in prose to the Fables of La Fontaine.
Hamilton. 54. These amusing fictions caught the fancy of an indolent but not stupid nobility. The court of Versailles and all Paris resounded with fairy tales; it became the popular style for more than half a century. But few of these fall within our limits. Perrault’s immediate followers, Madame Murat and the Countess D’Aunoy, especially the latter, have some merit; but they come very short of the happy simplicity and brevity we find in Mother Goose’s Tales. It is possible that Count Antony Hamilton may have written those tales which have made him famous before the end of the century, though they were published later. But these with many admirable strokes of wit and invention, have too forced a tone in both these qualities; the labour is too evident, and, thrown away on such trifling, excites something like contempt; they are written for an exclusive coterie, not for the world; and the world in all such cases will sooner or later take its revenge. Yet Hamilton’s tales are incomparably superior to what followed; inventions alternately dull and extravagant, a style negligent or mannered, an immorality passing onward from the licentiousness of the Regency to the debased philosophy of the ensuing age, became the general characteristics of these fictions, which finally expired in the neglect and scorn of the world.
Télémaque of Fenelon. 55. The Télémaque of Fenelon, after being suppressed in France, appeared in Holland clandestinely without the author’s consent in 1699. It is needless to say that it soon obtained the admiration of Europe, and perhaps there is no book in the French language that has been more read. Fenelon seems to have conceived that, metre not being essential, as he assumed, to poetry, he had, by imitating the Odyssey in Télémaque, produced an epic of as legitimate a character as his model. But the boundaries between epic poetry, especially such epics as the Odyssey, and romance were only perceptible by the employment of verse in the former; no elevation of character, no ideality of conception, no charm of imagery or emotion had been denied to romance. The language of poetry had for two centuries been seized for its use. Télémaque must therefore take its place among romances; but still it is true that no romance had breathed so classical a spirit, none had abounded so much with the richness of poetical language, much in fact of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles having been woven in with no other change than verbal translation, nor had any preserved such dignity in its circumstances, such beauty, harmony, and nobleness in its diction. It would be as idle to say that Fenelon was indebted to D’Urfé and Calprenède, as to deny that some degree of resemblance may be found in their poetical prose. The one belonged to the morals of chivalry, generous but exaggerated; the other to those of wisdom and religion. The one has been forgotten because its tone is false; the other is ever admired, and is only less regarded because it is true in excess; because it contains too much of what we know. Télémaque, like some other of Fenelon’s writings, is to be considered in reference to its object; an object of all the noblest, being to form the character of one to whom many must look up for their welfare, but still very different from the inculcation of profound truth. The beauties of Télémaque are very numerous; the descriptions, and indeed the whole tone of the book, have a charm of grace, something like the pictures of Guido; but there is also a certain languor which steals over us in reading, and though there is no real want of variety in the narration, it reminds us so continually of its source, the Homeric legends, as to become rather monotonous. The abandonment of verse has produced too much diffuseness; it will be observed, if we look attentively, that where Homer is circumstantial, Fenelon is more so; in this he sometimes approaches the minuteness of the romancers. But these defects are more than compensated by the moral, and even æsthetic excellence of this romance.
Deficiency of English romances. 56. If this most fertile province of all literature, as we have now discovered it to be, had yielded so little even in France, a nation that might appear eminently fitted to explore it, down to the close of the seventeenth century, we may be less surprised at the greater deficiency of our own country. Yet the scarcity of original fiction in England was so great as to be inexplicable by any reasoning. The public taste was not incapable of being pleased; for all the novels and romances of the continent were readily translated. The manners of all classes were as open to humorous description, the imagination was as vigorous, the heart as susceptible as in other countries. But not only we find nothing good; it can hardly be said that we find anything at all that has ever attracted notice in English romance. The Parthenissa of Lord Orrery, in the heroic style, and the short novels of Afra Behn, are nearly as many, perhaps, as could be detected in old libraries. We must leave the beaten track before we can place a single work in this class.
Pilgrim’s Progress. 57. The Pilgrim’s Progress essentially belongs to it, and John Bunyan may pass for the father of our novelists. His success in a line of composition like the spiritual romance or allegory, which seems to have been frigid and unreadable in the few instances where it had been attempted, is doubtless enhanced by his want of all learning and his low station in life. He was therefore rarely, if ever, an imitator; he was never enchained by rules. Bunyan possessed in a remarkable degree the power of representation; his inventive faculty was considerable, but the other is his distinguishing excellence. He saw, and makes us see, what he describes; he is circumstantial without prolixity, and in the variety and frequent change of his incidents, never loses sight of the unity of his allegorical fable. His invention was enriched, and rather his choice determined, by one rule he had laid down to himself, the adaptation of all the incidental language of scripture to his own use. There is scarce a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place, bodily and literally, in the story of the Pilgrim’s Progress; and this peculiar artifice has made his own imagination appear more creative than it really is. In the conduct of the romance no rigorous attention to the propriety of the allegory seems to have been uniformly preserved. Vanity Fair, or the cave of the two giants, might, for anything we see, have been placed elsewhere; but it is by this neglect of exact parallelism that he better keeps up the reality of the pilgrimage, and takes off the coldness of mere allegory. It is also to be remembered that we read this book at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceived or little regarded. In his language, nevertheless, Bunyan sometimes mingles the signification too much with the fable; we might be perplexed between the imaginary and the real Christian; but the liveliness of narration soon brings us back, or did at least when we were young, to the fields of fancy. Yet, the Pilgrim’s Progress, like some other books, has of late been a little over-rated; its excellence is great, but it is not of the highest rank, and we should be careful not to break down the landmarks of fame by placing the John Bunyans and the Daniel De Foes among the Dii Majores of our worship.
Turkish spy. 58. I am inclined to claim for England not the invention, but, for the most part, the composition of another book which, being grounded on fiction, may be classed here, The Turkish Spy. A secret emissary of the Porte is supposed to remain at Paris in disguise for above forty years, from 1635 to 1682. His correspondence with a number of persons, various in situation, and with whom therefore his letters assume various characters, is protracted through eight volumes. Much, indeed most, relates to the history of those times and to the anecdotes connected with it; but in these we do not find a large proportion of novelty. The more remarkable letters are those which run into metaphysical and theological speculation. These are written with an earnest seriousness, yet with an extraordinary freedom, such as the feigned garb of a Mohammedan could hardly have exempted from censure in catholic countries. Mahmud, the mysterious writer, stands on a sort of eminence above all human prejudice; he was privileged to judge as a stranger of the religion and philosophy of Europe; but his bold spirit ranges over the field of Oriental speculation. The Turkish Spy is no ordinary production, but contains as many proofs of a thoughtful, if not very profound mind, as any we can find. It suggested the Persian Letters to Montesquieu and the Jewish to Argens; the former deviating from his model with the originality of talent, the latter following it with a more servile closeness. Probability, that is, a resemblance to the personated character of an Oriental, was not to be attained, nor was it desirable, in any of these fictions; but Mahmud has something not European, something of a solitary insulated wanderer, gazing on a world that knows him not, which throws, to my feelings, a striking charm over the Turkish Spy; while the Usbek of Montesquieu has become more than half Parisian; his ideas are neither those of his birthplace, nor such as have sprung up unbidden from his soul, but those of a polite, witty, and acute society; and the correspondence with his harem in Persia, which Montesquieu has thought attractive to the reader, is not much more interesting than it is probable, and ends in the style of a common romance. As to the Jewish Letters of Argens, it is far inferior to the Turkish Spy, and, in fact, rather an insipid book.
Chiefly of English origin. 59. It may be asked why I dispute the claim made by all the foreign biographers in favour of John Paul Marana, a native of Genoa, who is asserted to have published the first volume of the Turkish Spy at Paris in 1684, and the rest in subsequent years.[1056] But I am not disputing that Marana is the author of the thirty letters, published in 1684, and of twenty more in 1686, which have been literally translated into English, and form about half the first volume in English of our Turkish spy.[1057] Nor do I doubt in the least that the remainder of that volume had a French original; though it happens that I have not seen it. But the later volumes of the Espion Turc, in the edition of 1696, with the date of Cologne, which, according to Barbier, is put for Rouen,[1058] are avowedly translated from the English. And to the second volume of our Turkish Spy, published in 1691, is prefixed an account, not very credible, of the manner in which the volumes subsequent to the first had been procured by a traveller in the original Italian; no French edition, it is declared, being known to the booksellers. That no Italian edition ever existed, is, I apprehend, now generally admitted; and it is to be shown by those who contend for the claims of Marana, to seven out of the eight volumes, that they were published in France before 1691 and the subsequent years, when they appeared in English. The Cologne or Rouen edition of 1696 follows the English so closely that it has not given the original letters of the first volume, published with the name of Marana, but rendered them back from the translation.
[1056] This first portion was published at Paris and also at Amsterdam. Bayle gives the following account. Cet ouvrage a été contrefait à Amsterdam du consentement du libraire de Paris, qui l’a le premier imprimé. Il sera composé de plusieurs petits volumes qui contiendront les événemens les plus considérables de la chrétienté en général, et de la France en particulier, depuis l’année 1637 jusqu’en 1682. Un Italien natif de Gênes, Marana, donne ces rélations pour des lettres écrites aux ministres de la Porte par un espion Turc qui se tenoit caché à Paris. Il prétend les avoir traduites de l’Arabe en Italien: et il raconte fort en long comment il les a trouvées. On soupçonne avec beaucoup d’apparence, que c’est un tour d’esprit Italien, et une fiction ingénieuse semblable à celle dont Virgile s’est servi pour louer Auguste, &c. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres; Mars, 1684; in Œuvres diverses de Bayle, vol. i., p. 20. The Espion Turc is not to be traced in the index to the Journal des Sçavans; nor is it noticed in the Bibliothèque Universelle.
[1057] Salfi, xiv., 61. Biograph. Univers.
[1058] Dictionnaire des Anonymes, vol. i., p. 406. Barbier’s notice of L’Espion dans les cours des princes Chrétiens ascribes four volumes out of six, which appear to contain as much as our eight volumes, to Marana, and conjectures that the last two are by another hand; but does not intimate the least suspicion of an English original. And as his authority is considerable, I must fortify my own opinion by what evidence I can find.