Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 373, November 1846

by Various

But all this, Smith, will not enable you to write a military serial. I therefore hope, that on consideration you will abandon the Algiers expedition, and keep Silas in his native island, where, if you will follow my advice, you will find quite enough for him to do in the way of incident and occupation.

Now let us return to the question of tendency. Once upon a time, it was a trite rule by which all romance writers were guided, that in the denoûment of their plots, virtue was invariably rewarded, and vice as invariably punished. This gave a kind of moral tone to their writings, which was not without its effect upon our grandfathers and grandmothers, many of whom were inclined to consider all works of fiction as direct emanations from Beelzebub. The next generation became gradually less nice and scrupulous, demanded more spice in their pottage, and attached less importance to the prominence of an ethical precept. At last we became, strictly speaking, a good deal blackguardised in our taste. Ruffianism in the middle ages bears about it a stamp of feudality which goes far to disguise its lawlessness, and even to excuse its immorality. When a German knight of the empire sacks and burns some peaceful and unoffending village—when a Bohemian marauder of noble birth bears off some shrieking damsel from her paternal castle, having previously slitted the weasand of her brother, and then weds her in a subterranean chapel—or when a roaring red-bearded Highlander drives his dirk into a gauger, or chucks a score of Sassenachs, tied back to back, with a few hundredweight of greywacke at their heels, into the loch—we think less of the enormity of the deeds than of the disagreeable habits of the times. It does not follow that either German, Bohemian, or Celt, were otherwise bad company or disagreeable companions over a flagon of Rhenish, a roasted boar, or a gallon or so of usquebæ. But when you come to the Newgate Callendar for subjects, I must say that we are getting rather low. I do not know what your feelings upon the subject may be, but I, for one, would certainly hesitate before accepting an invitation to the town residence of Mr Fagin; neither should I feel at all comfortable if required to plant my legs beneath the mahogany in company with Messrs Dodger, Bates, and the rest of their vivacious associates. However fond I may be of female society, Miss Nancy is not quite the sort of person I should fancy to look in upon of an evening about tea-time; and as for Bill Sykes, that infernal dog of his would be quite enough to prevent any advances of intimacy between us. In fact, Smith, although you may think the confession a squeamish one, I am not in the habit of selecting my acquaintance from the inhabitants of St Giles, and on every possible occasion I should eschew accepting their hospitalities.

I have, therefore, little opportunity of judging whether the characters depicted by some of our later serialists, are exact copies from nature or the reverse. I have, however, heard several young ladies declare them to be extremely natural, though I confess to have been somewhat puzzled as to their means of accurate information. But I may be allowed en passant to remark, that it seems difficult to imagine what kind of pleasure can be derived from the description of a scene, which, if actually contemplated by the reader, would inspire him with loathing and disgust, or from conversations in which the brutal alternates with the positive obscene. The fetid den of the Jew, the stinking cellar of the thief, the squalid attic of the prostitute, are not haunts for honest men, and the less that we know of them the better. Such places no doubt exist—the more is the pity; but so do dunghills, and a hundred other filthy things, which the imagination shudders at whenever they are forced upon it,—for the man who willingly and deliberately dwells upon such subjects, is, notwithstanding all pretext, in heart and soul a nightman! Don't tell me about close painting after nature. Nature is not always to be painted as she really is. Would you hang up such paintings in your drawing-room? If not, why suffer them in print to lie upon your drawing-room tables? What are Eugene Sue and his English competitors, but coarser and more prurient Ostades?

Oh, but there is a moral in these things! No doubt of it. There is a moral in all sin and misery, as there is in all virtue and happiness. There is a moral every where, and the veriest bungler cannot fail to seize it. But is that a reason why the minds of our sons and daughters should be polluted by what is notoriously the nearest thing to contact with absolute vice—namely, vivid and graphic descriptions of it by writers of undenied ability? Did Life in London, or the exploits of Tom, Jerry, and Logic, make the youth of the metropolis more staid, or inspire them with a wholesome horror of dissipation? Did the memoirs of Casanova ever reclaim a rake—the autobiography of David Haggart convert an aspiring pickpocket—or the daring feats of Jack Sheppard arrest one candidate for the gallows? These are the major cases; but look at the minor ones. What are the favourite haunts of the heroes in even the most blameless of our serials? Pot-houses—cigariums—green-rooms of theatres—hells—spunging-houses—garrets—and the scullery! Nice and improving all this—isn't it, Smith?—for the young and rising generation! No need now for surreptitious works, entitled, "A Guide to the Larks of London," or so forth, which used formerly to issue from the virgin press of Holywell Street. Almost any serial will give hints enough to an acute boy, if he wishes to gain an initiative knowledge of subjects more especially beneath the cognisance of the police. They will at least guide him to the door with the red lamp burning over it, and only one plank betwixt its iniquity and the open street. And all this is for a moral! Heaven knows, Smith, I am no Puritan; but when I think upon the men who now call themselves the lights of the age, and look back upon the past, I am absolutely sick at heart, and could almost wish for a return of the days of Mrs Radcliffe and the Castle of Otranto.

Now, my dear fellow, as I know you to be a thoroughly good-hearted man—not overgiven to liquor, although your estimate of beer is a just one—a constant husband, and, moreover, the father of five or six promising olive-branches, I do not for a moment suppose that you are likely to inweave any such tendencies in your tale. You would consider it low to make a prominent character of a scavenger; and although some dozen idiots who call themselves philanthropists would brand you as an aristocrat for entertaining any such opinion, I think you are decidedly in the right. But there is another tendency towards which I suspect you are more likely to incline. You are a bit of a Radical, and, like all men of genius, you pique yourself on elbowing upwards. So far well. The great ladder, or rather staircase of ambition, is open to all of us, and it is fortunately broader than it is high. It is not the least too narrow to prevent any one from approaching it, and after you have taken the first step, there is nothing more than stamina and perseverance required. But then I do not see that it is necessary to be perpetually plucking at the coat-tails, or seizing hold of the ankles of those who are before. Such conduct is quite as indecorous, and indeed ungenerous, as it would be to kick back, and systematically to smite with your heel the unprotected foreheads of your followers. Nor would I be perpetually pitching brickbats upwards, in order to show my own independence; or raising a howl of injustice, because another fellow was considerably elevated above me. In the social system, Smith, as it stands at present, has always stood, and will continue to stand long after Astley's is forgotten, it is not necessary that every one should commence at the lowest round of the staircase. Their respective fathers and progenitors have secured an advantageous start for many. They have achieved, as the case may be, either rank or fame, or honour, or wealth, or credit—and these possessions they are surely entitled to leave as an inheritance of their offspring. If we want to rise higher in the social scale than they did, we must make exertions for ourselves; if we are indolent, we must be contented to remain where we are, though at imminent risk of descending. But you, I take it for granted, and indeed the most of us who owe little to ancestral enterprise and are in fact men of the masses, are struggling forward towards one or other of the good things specified above, and no doubt we shall in time attain them. In the meanwhile, however, is it just—nay, is it wise—that we should mar our own expectancies, and depreciate the value of the prizes which we covet, by abusing not only the persons but the position of those above us? How are they to blame? Are they any the worse that they stand, whether adventitiously or not, at a point which we are endeavouring to reach? Am I necessarily a miscreant because I am born rich, and you a martyr because you are poor? I do not quite follow the argument. If there is any one to blame, you will find their names written on the leaves of your own family-tree; but I don't see that on that account you have any right to execrate me or my ancestors.

I am the more anxious to caution you against putting any such rubbish into your pages, because I fear you have contracted some sort of intimacy with a knot of utilitarian ninnyhammers. The last time I had the pleasure of meeting you at the Ducrow's Head, there was a seedy-looking, ill-conditioned fellow seated on your right, who, between his frequent draughts of porter, (which you paid for,) did nothing but abuse the upper classes as tyrants, fools, and systematical grinders of the poor. I took the liberty, as you may remember, of slightly differing from some of his wholesale positions; whereupon your friend, regarding me with a cadaverous sneer, was pleased to mutter something about a sycophant, the tenor of which I did not precisely comprehend. Now, unless I am shrewdly mistaken, this was one of the earnest men—fellows who are continually bawling on people to go forward—who set themselves up for popular teachers, and maunder about "a oneness of purpose," "intellectual elevation," "aspirations after reality," and suchlike drivel, as though they were absolute Solons, not blockheads of the muddiest water. And I was sorry to observe that you rather seemed to agree with the rusty patriot in some of his most sweeping strictures, and evinced an inclination to adopt his theory of the coming Utopia, which, judging from the odour that pervaded his apostolic person and raiment, must bear a strong resemblance to a modern gin-shop. Now, Smith, this will not do. There may be inequalities in this world, and there may also be injustice; but it is a very great mistake to hold that one-half of the population of these islands is living in profligate ease upon the compulsory labour of the other. I am not going to write you a treatise upon political economy; but I ask you to reflect for a moment, and you will see how ludicrous is the charge. This style of thinking, or, what is worse, this style of writing, is positively the most mischievous production of the present day. Disguised under the specious aspect of philanthropy, it fosters self-conceit and discontent, robs honest industry of that satisfaction which is its best reward, and, instead of removing, absolutely creates invidious class-distinctions. And I will tell you from what this spirit arises—it is the working of the meanest envy.

There never was a time when talent, and genius, and ability, had so fair a field as now. The power of the press is developed to an extent which almost renders exaggeration impossible, and yet it is still upon the increase. A thousand minds are now at work, where a few were formerly employed. We have become a nation of readers and of writers. The rudiments of education, whatever may be said of its higher branches, are generally distributed throughout the masses—so much so, indeed, that without them no man can hope to ascend one step in the social scale. This is a great, though an imperfect gain, and, like all such, it has its evils.

Of these not the least is the astounding growth of quackery. It assails us every where, and on every side; and, with consummate impudence, it asserts its mission to teach. Look at the shoals of itinerant lecturers which at this moment are swarming through the land. No department of science is too deep, no political question too abstruse, for their capacity. They have their own theories on the subjects of philosophy and religion—of which theories I shall merely remark, that they differ in many essentials from the standards both of church and college—and these they communicate to their audience with the least possible regard to reservation. Had you ever the pleasure, Smith, of meeting one of these gentlemen amongst the amenities of private life? I have upon various occasions enjoyed that luxury; and, so far as I am capable of judging, the Pericles of the platform appeared to me a coarse-minded, illiterate, and ignorant Cockney, with the manners and effrontery of a bagman. Such are the class of men who affect to regenerate the people with the tongue, and who are listened to even with avidity, because impudence, like charity, can cover a multitude of defects; and thus they stand, like so many sons of Telamon, each secure behind the shelter of his brazen shield. As to the pen-regenerators, they are at least equally numerous. I do not speak of the established press, the respectability and talent of which is undeniable; but of the minor crew, who earn their bread partly by fostering discontent, and partly by pandering to the worst of human passions. The merest whelp, who can write a decent paragraph, considers himself, now-a-days, entitled to assume the airs of an Aristarchus, and will pronounce opinions, ex cathedrâ, upon every question, no matter of what importance, for he too is a teacher of the people!

This is the lowest sort of quackery; but there are also higher degrees. Our literature, of what ought to be the better sort, has by no means escaped the infection. In former times, men who devoted themselves to the active pursuit of letters, brought to the task not only high talent, but deep and measured thought, and an accumulated fund of acquirement. They studied long before they wrote, and attempted no subject until they had thoroughly and comprehensively mastered its details. But we live under a new system. There is no want of talent, though it be of a rambling and disjointed kind; but we look in vain for marks of the previous study. Our authors deny the necessity or advantage of an apprenticeship, and set up for masters before they have learned the rudiments of their art, and they dispense altogether with reflection. Few men now think before they write. The consequence is, that a great proportion of our modern literature is of the very flimsiest description—vivid, sometimes, and not without sparkles of genuine humour; but so ill constructed as to preclude the possibility of its long existence. No one is entitled to reject models, unless he has studied them, and detected their faults; but this is considered by far too tedious a process for modern ingenuity. We are thus inundated with a host of clever writers, each relying upon his peculiar and native ability, jesting—for that is the humour of the time—against each other, and all of them forsaking nature, and running deplorably into caricature.

These are the men who make the loudest outcry against the social system, and who appear to be imbued with an intense hatred of the aristocracy, and indeed with every one of our time-honoured institutions. This I know has been denied; but, in proof of my assertion, I appeal to their published works. Read any one of them through, and I ask you if you do not rise from it with a sort of conviction, that you must search for the cardinal virtues solely in the habitations of the poor—that the rich are hard, selfish, griping, and tyrannical—and that the nobility are either fools, spendthrifts, or debauchees? Is it so, as a general rule, in actual life? Far from it. I do not need to be told of the virtue and industry which grace the poor man's lot; for we all feel and know it, and God forbid that it should be otherwise. But we know also that there is as great, if not greater temptation in the hovel than in the palace, with fewer counteracting effects from education and principle to withstand it; and it is an insult to our understanding to be told, that fortune and station are in effect but other words for tyranny, callousness, and crime.