papers and government documents, and display his peculiar ability in sifting the measures of a party, and following up the consequences of a bill or a statute. For literary criticism, his cold temperament and negative taste are ill adapted. They incline him to look on the frank relation of an author's feelings as offensive egotism, and wholly obscure his perception of characteristic individuality or marked personal traits. IV. RELIGIOUS NOVELS. A CERTAIN class of prose fictions is included under the above general term, which, from Bunyan to Brownson, is and ever has been exceedingly popular. They are, for this reason, to be closely scrutinized, as their scope and tendency may prove productive either of great good or considerable injury, not only to the cause or literature, but even to the cause of vital religion and Christian morality. The phrase, "Religious Novels," comprehends equally those works written professedly to favor or satirize particular sects and creeds, and those works which, with a more general and popular interest, still aim to take a high stand on all questions of morality, and to be, in effect, text-books of ethics and casuistry. A general objection that strikes one at once, on the very face of the matter, is with regard to the intention and spirit of these and similar productions. Is a novel, we would ask, the proper vehicle for religious sentiment and moral instruction? We would not be misunderstood. We sincerely believe that every good book, even of the lightest character, should carry its moral with it, and that a good moral. What we doubt is, whether the morality of the book should be made offensively prominent,should stand foremost, casting all its other merits into the background, or whether it should not lie covert and unpretendingly under a cheerful face of humble docility Pope has wisely advised us that "Men should be taught as if we taught them not; The skilful man of the world-the Sir Politic Would-be of this generation, always reminds and never informs directly. "The agreeable man is he who agrees." So the judicious moralist, if at the same time a writer of fiction, conceals his moral under a veil of fancy's weaving, and impresses a solemn truth on our hearts, whilst he is delighting the imagination or instructing the reason. This palpable error of overdoing the matter, being "too moral by half" (always smacking of hypocrisy), has been remarked by the ablest critical and æthetical philosophers; but it is a vulgar error of such frequent occurrence as to call for as frequent animadversion. It is not necessary that every book should contain a confession of faith, nor comprehend a code of religious precepts. Every biography is not of a good man; some histories must relate the successes of bad men and evil principles. Novels, of all books, are permitted to be least didactic and hortatory (to employ a Johnsonian phrase). We hate misnomers. A book of devotion, a tract of conversial divinity, a sermon, a moral essay, are all well in their proper place; but a book professing to be a novel, but which is, in fact, a sham novel, a mere cover for the introduction of a work of another class, under its name, is a forgery, a falsehood, a contemptible piece of deception. The title may be assumed to gain a wider circle of readers (it may be a fetch of the author's, or a trick of the publisher's), but that affords no just excuse for falsifying its character by giving it a name that means something directly the reverse. Lord Peter, in the Tale of the Tub, endeavored to make a loaf of bread to stand for "fish, flesh and fowl," but such is now a stale cheat. It is for bread, giving a stone, in the language of Scripture. It is virtually telling a falsehood. No honest man could countenance such an imposition, evidently a piece of Jesuitical policy. The defender of the practice would argue, probably, the purity of his intention and the goodness of the end to be reached: for " a verse may take him whom a sermon flies;" shielding himself under these batteries from the charge of employing unfair means. We have a word more to say on this head. We urge, a novel is not, as a matter of course, to be a moral treatise or ecclesiastical horn-book (all good works of fiction presuppose the essentials of religion and the reality of virtue); but,-and here we join with the strictest religionists,--if it pretend directly to teach morals or religion at all, it must teach pure doctrine and sound ethics. It is essential, primarily, that it be consistent with itself and faithful to nature. Let an exact picture of life, and manners, and character be presented, without any formal comment or prefatory analysis; give character, and feeling, and principle fair play; let opposites contend, and then good will be apparent, evil be manifest. Allurements will be offered to virtue, and vice be her own corrector. No danger need be apprehended from too close fidelity of description, for in that case the evil will correct itself. Grossness is repulsive enough; it is the elegant voluptuousness of polished vice that is so baleful and pernicious. By all means to be avoided is the hateful paradox of painting good infidels, or cold skeptics with all the virtues of humanity. And some who pass for mere skeptics, have a natural religion and a pious benevolence in their hearts, which they do not dream of, and do not profess. Such was "the good David" (Hume), the friend and almost the idol of Adam Smith, and Macintosh, and Mackenzie. We have mentioned two classes of religious novels. Under the first denomination would fall Bunyan's Pilgrim and Holy War, Patrick's Imitation (taken by Gray as a standard of dullness), the Spiritual Quixote, Walker's Vagabond, Colebs in search of a Wife, and later fictions of a somewhat similar character by De Wette and Brownson. These are but a few. Of the second description are the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Dr. Moore, Johnson's Rasselas, and a vast collection of moral tales, by Marmontel, and Cottin, and De Genlis, and Chateaubriand, and St. Pierre, with a thousand others. A striking defect is common to the above works, and the religious biographies, the heroes are made perfect; they are morally and intellectually accomplished, and unite the piety of the saint to the polish of the gentleman. They are literally "just men, that need no repentance." Instead of being represented as human and fallible, they are painted as so pure and immaculate as to preclude us from sympathy with weakness or failure, and leave nothing for the mind but stupid admiration. We are called by the creators of these models of superhuman excellence to fall down and do homage to the idols of their fancy, the gods of their idolatry, as to our liege exemplars. The characters themselves, by their monotony of merit, into which no particle of folly is allowed to intrude, are made tiresome and unnatural. They are flattered into the most disgusting form of vanity-spiritual conceit. They are moral and religious coxcombs. "It is the man, Sir Charles Grandison," is the constant exclamation of praise. The morality of these novels is moral pedantry. It is as different from true moral wisdom as genuine learning is different from the pedantry of books and colleges. The morality of ethical novels is generally a conventional mannerism: the pretensions to piety savor of Puritanical assumption. The religious conversations are often blasphemous, from their absurd and presumptuous familiarity. We read a sort of RELIGIOUS SLANG, too often found even in the pulpit; by which we intent to express, a stereotyped repetition of phrases, employed without any definite meaning, and in an indifferent, careless spirit. The most serious Christian cannot avoid allowing the existence of cant, which is more injurious in religion than anywhere else. In religious novels, any expression of this kind exposes the work to the sneers of wicked men, as well as to the intelligent censure of the critic, who is no scoffer. One description of religious novels, that might be better styled moral satires, if not carried out into burlesque or disfigured by liberality, may be the vehicle of sound argument and pointed rebuke. The Vagabond, by Walker, is a book of this nature. Such, also, we conceive the Spiritual Quixote to be; a satire directed against the Methodists and their extravagances. Bunyan, the first of religious writers, was an allegorical painter with little of the satirist. He has nothing in common, as a mere writer, with later writers of religious fiction, -Hannah More, for instance. Pilgrim's Progress is dramatic and spiritual; Colebs is a tract on the art of selecting a wife, transformed into the shape, the figure "extern," of a novel. Bunyan gives us pictures; Hannah More furnishes |