What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is a pity the author of Rasselas had not some faint conception of it. The idea of calling Rasselas a novel in these days! We might imagine him to have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:
Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek-coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.
What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease. Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals the mantle of the genii in the Arabian Nights; we had only to step upon it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to sea. We rise from foe-encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air. The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We have supped full of horrors. Time [pg 248] was when our fell of hair would have uplifted to hear a night-shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as dreary as a twice-told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose, of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things; we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder-workers of the age.
Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away. Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth-rate newspaper is fond of calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we have into the green-room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera-singer, the ankles of a danseuse, the charming slang of an actress. The scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and the gin-mill; the prize-ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the gaming-table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything the lowest, the meanest, the worst.
Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false of ourselves, the simple-hearted, simple-mannered republicans, who have set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our old crop-haired, steeple-crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed adequately to supply this demand.
There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals, diving into blue-books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They have so beaten the drawing-room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most delicately organized imagination [pg 249] of the refined lady could discern, that there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle-gun, have killed off the slashing cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.” And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!
Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of “the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak, puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure, inhuman? Love is a divine-inspired passion of the soul, planted there by God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven-born gift into the lowest of animal passions.
It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to-day threaten to turn the world topsy-turvy—the so-called theory of Woman's Rights—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill and Professor Fawcett, and for first-born, Free Love.
We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the New York Herald, to have brought back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.
But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class [pg 250] whom no decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping condemnation?