As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote, the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy's “pictured page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as rounded, as full as Shakespeare's, and partaking of the great master's “infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss-trooper or a crusader, a free-lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext; whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good-naturedly sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who, when stranded somewhere with his mess-mate in the neighborhood of the North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.
“What's that 'ere beggar, Jack?”
“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the whiffs of his pipe, “I can't say exactly, but I expect it's one o' them there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”
Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way. The barriers of anti-Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow-men.
From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.
They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm, steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high-minded spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all a great sham. The [pg 251] genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty, grim death's-head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness. After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten, and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray-hairs, his asses or black-legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft-hunters, his silly, useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting ring, or a faro-table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray's world; and he has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion, among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be found in the pages of Thackeray.
In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer's way, with less of heart and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills, kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world; their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously, while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far, then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful negative gain.
And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and quiet nobleness of humble [pg 252] struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less degree than the two above-mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single-handed and hold its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever. Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the drawing-room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation, as Disraeli called it in Sybil; because that world was to them as far off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves' and harlots' dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found lawyers and excellent “ministers of God's Word” to uphold them, and proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform. He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly did great good; and many a book of his is a never-ending, never-wearying sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and demoralizing to-day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the better of the bargain. [pg 253] That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of arriving safe at the end of life's journey, wherever or whatever that end may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at; something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears, we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not a heart open only to mere human goodness.
To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power among us to-day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan, rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is time for us to purge this poison out.
Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon, and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this, and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of The House of Yorke. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven, Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases, the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week, month after month. [pg 254] If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of that hearty knock-down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.