A felt want of the South is the restoration of old-fashioned love of country. A sore need is to feel in our souls, as a passion, that this is our country; that we have part and lot in it; and to be deeply interested in its welfare and perpetuity. To keep alive animosities is unchristian. Brooke found it impossible to frame an indictment against a whole people. It ought to be equally hard to involve a whole party, or geographical section, in sweeping accusations of injustice, and tyranny, and fraud. Strong as is the provocation at times to bitterness and hatred, the South should not cherish resentment, but rather seek that which makes for peace and reconciliation. It is better, as far as possible, to obliterate unpleasant memories, to practise toleration and forgiveness, to cultivate a genuine patriotism, ardent love for this ancient birth land of the free. It is easy by cheap rhetoric to open wounds afresh and inflame hostility; but every true son and daughter of the South should strive not to transmit a legacy of hate, nor make our land a Poland or an Ireland. The noble ambition ought rather to be to lift up the South and the United States to the level of its privileges, and in the future to harmonize the ideal and the actual. The South needs the development of her material resources, the diversification of industry, the construction of permanent highways, the power of machinery in its manifold applications, sounder notions of labor, rigid economy and responsibility in all offices. The whole country should encourage universal education in universities, colleges, academies, and public schools; elevate the tone of a free press; preserve an able and independent judiciary; insist upon juster and more enlarged ideas of official duty; maintain the principles of constitutional liberty and absolute freedom of religion, and above all, a spirit of subordination to the divine law, and a reverent acknowledgment of Him in whose hands are the destinies of nations.
J. L. M. Curry.
DRIFT-WOOD.
TALK ABOUT NOVELS.
If the St. Louis preacher who lately tilted against novels chose judiciously his points of attack, he presumably won a victory. His own Sunday-school library is very likely filled with wishy-washy fiction for bright young minds that might be harvesting works worth remembering, whether of romance or history. The prudent Quakers of Germantown rejoice in a free library without a novel, and a librarian who never read one. Indiscriminate novel reading is as sorry a tipple as addiction to newspapers, which also, in fact, are largely works of the imagination. Besides, the moral of even a goody-good story may be ingeniously twisted by perverse readers. The other day a lad was indicted in England for breaking into the Rev. Mr. Sherratt's schoolroom, where he stole some books and cake, trudging off with them in a wheelbarrow at midnight. He was an old pupil, the son of respectable parents; in his pocket was a book entitled "Industry Without Honesty," and his ambition was to become a Chevalier d'Industrie of the sort he had been reading about. It is said that Dumas's story, "Monsieur Fromentin," so spread the rage for lottery gambling that the author in great grief bought up and burned every copy he could lay hands on. For generations English youth have turned footpads or thieves, in emulation of Sir Richard Turpin, Lord John Sheppard, and other knights of the road whose careers are set forth in the shining pages of biographical romance. French youngsters have a like exemplar in Louis Cartouche. Two San Francisco lads are now in jail for trying to rob a stagecoach, in Claude Duval style—luckless little victims, knocked down by the passengers in a way not recorded in the novels that had ruined them. Lads are for ever running away to sea in imitation of some Jack Halyard or Ben the Bo's'n; and surely we know that urchins of all ages and sizes are picked up on their way west to "fight Injuns," thanks to their dogs'-eared dime novels narrating the prowess of Buffalo Bills and Texas Jacks. Boyish sympathy goes out toward the Paul Cliffords, the Arams of romance. I remember, as if it were of yesterday, the sad fate of Red Rover, and how the overwrought little reader, when he came to the hero's death, put by the book that he could not finish, and walked about in the twilight of a Saturday whose hours had slipped unnoticed away, inconsolable with sympathy and grief.
But the preacher need not rest his case on "Mike Martin," or "Rinaldo Rinaldini," or "The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main," or any of the predatory heroes embalmed in story for the improvement of youth, since he has also the field of poisonous French romance to complain of, with its imitations in our tongue. In short, he can indict in a lump the bad books of fiction, and against the good he may charge that they exhaust our tears and passion on imaginary distresses.
Still, nothing would then have been said of novels which could not be said in a degree of the newspapers, the drama, the law, the pulpit itself. We must not judge them by their worst fruits. "Pamela" was praised from the pulpits of its day, although, to be sure, it would hardly now be given to young women. I well remember, when prowling about the homestead bookcase, coming upon Rowland Hill's "Village Dialogues." Their characters were fictitious, the distresses imaginary; still I presume the St. Louis preacher would not object to "Socinianism Unmasked," the "Evils of Seduction," and the "Awful Death of Alderman Greedy." Everybody sees how fiction is a weapon of philanthropy. Christ himself taught by parables. Clergymen resort to romance to achieve what the sermon cannot do, and men of science to achieve what the essay cannot do. Religious newspapers publish serial novels. The anti-slavery, temperance, prison reform, and poor law agitations owe immeasurably to novels. Daniel Webster said of Dickens that he had done more to ameliorate the condition of the British poor than all the statesmen that ever sat in Parliament. And this present wonderful movement of the Jews to recover Palestine—what does it not owe to a novel?
A noble influence, too, comes from some novels that do not aim to be doctrinaire or proselyting. A story of Thackeray is a tonic to the scorn of base action; a story of Charles Kingsley is a trumpet call to Christian duty; a story of George Eliot is an inspiration to high thought and honorable living. Some of her sisterhood are probably capable of uneasily disliking George Eliot because she has a depth of intelligence quite beyond their plummet, which the world admires; but I should think that most women would be proud of the strength and vast influence of one who, in succeeding to the royal line of feminine novelists, has carried its triumphs far beyond anything achieved by Miss Burney, Jane Austin, Miss Porter, Miss Martineau, Charlotte Bronté, and Georges Sand.