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generally injurious, as those which insinuate cunning doses of such stimulants, amidst materials which the wisest must admire, and the gravest cannot condemn.

It may seem strange to find the masters of literature thus undervaluing its influence; but our wonder will be diminished when we reflect how strongly such persons are tempted to overlook, in the midst of their habitual study of art and analysis of its productions, the extent to which the creations of genius affect everyday natures, incapable of tracing how or for what purposes these are formed. Clairon, as Grimm tells us, whispered gaily to the partner of her bier, while all the parterre before them was full of sobbing and sighing: and it is not improbable that the tragic queen was quizzing the sensibilities she had moved. Was he then a silly statesman who said, Let who will frame the laws of the people, so I have the making of their songs'? Or has no one ever had better reason than Cowley to complain of the 'slackening of his nerves' by reason of their having

-so oft been made to be

The tinkling strings of a loose minstrelsy-'

and to reproach a Fallacious muse,' that

'When the new mind had no infusion known,
She gave so deep a tincture of her own,

Long work perchance may spoil her colours quite
But never will reduce my native white.'

Our author, as we have already seen, betrays the dictates of his better reason in the midst of his apology for Tom Jones; but what importance he really attaches to the influence so undervalued in the passage we have quoted, is distinctly proved and abundantly illustrated in his preface to the works of a very inferior novelist, Robert Bage. The writer whose works have thus been recalled from an oblivion which we cannot help thinking they merited, wrote at the` period of the French revolution; and though he had been born and bred among the primitive and virtuous sect of our quakers, he systematically made his novels the vehicle of all the anti-social, anti-moral, and anti-religious theories that were then but too much in vogue among the halfeducated classes in this country. Sir Walter, after exposing with just ridicule the style of gross and senseless caricature in which Mr. Bage, the son of a miller, and himself a paper-maker in a little country town, has thought fit to paint the manners of English gentlemen and ladies, proceeds, as follows, to notice the far graver offences of which his pen had been guilty.

'This misrepresentation of the different classes in society is not the only speculative error in which Bage has indulged during these poetic narratives. There is in his novels a dangerous tendency to slacken

the

the reins of discipline upon a point, where, perhaps, of all others, society must be benefited by their curbing restraint.

'Fielding, Smollett, and other novelists, have, with very indifferent taste, brought forward their heroes as rakes and debauchees, and treated with great lightness those breaches of morals, which are too commonly considered as venial in the male sex; but Bage has extended, in some instances, that license to females, and seems at times even to sport with the ties of marriage, which is at once the institution of civil society most favourable to religion and good order, and that which, in its consequences, forms the most marked distinction between man and the lower animals. All the influence which women enjoy in society,-their right to the exercise of that maternal care which forms the first and most indelible species of education; the wholesome and mitigating restraint which they possess over the passions of mankind; their power of protecting us when young, and cheering us when old,-depend so entirely upon their personal purity, and the charm which it casts around them, that to insinuate a doubt of its real value is wilfully to remove the broadest corner-stone on which civil society rests, with all its benefits and with all its comforts. It is true, we can easily conceive that a female like Miss Ross, in Barham Downs, may fall under the arts of a seducer, under circumstances so peculiar as to excite great compassion, nor are we so rigid as to say that such a person may not be restored to society, when her subsequent conduct shall have effaced recollection of her error. But she must return thither as a humble penitent, and has no title to sue out her pardon as a matter of right, and assume a place as if she had never fallen from her proper sphere. Her disgrace must not be considered as a trivial stain, which may be communicated by a husband as an exceeding good jest to his friend and correspondent; there must be, not penitence and reformation alone, but humiliation and abasement, in the recollection of her errors. This the laws of society demand even from the unfortunate; and to compromise farther, would open a door to the most unbounded licentiousness.

'Having adverted to this prominent error in Mr. Bage's theory of morals, we are compelled to remark, that his ideas respecting the male sex are not less inaccurate, considered as rules of mental government, than the over indulgence with which he seems to regard female frailty. Hermsprong, whom he produces as the ideal perfection of humanity, is paraded as a man, who, freed from "all the nurse and all the priest have taught," steps forward on his path without any religious or political restraint, as one who derives his own rules of conduct from his own breast, and avoids or resists all temptations of evil passions, because his reason teaches him that they are attended with evil consequences. In the expressive words of our moral poet, Wordsworth, he is

"A reasoning self-sufficient thing,

An intellectual all-in-all."

But did such a man ever exist? or are we, in the fair construction of humanity, with all its temptations, its passions, and its frailties, entitled to expect such perfection from the mere force of practical philosophy? Let each reader ask his own bosom whether it were possible for him

to

to hoid an unaltered tenor of moral and virtuous conduct, did he suppose that to himself alone he was responsible, and that his own reason, a judge so peculiarly subject to be bribed, blinded, and imposed upon by the sophistry with which the human mind can gloss over those actions to which human passions so strongly impel us, was the ultimate judge of his actions? Let each reader ask the question at his own conscience, and if he can honestly and conscientiously answer in the affirmative, he is either that faultless monster which the world never saw, or he deceives himself as grossly as the poor devotee, who, referring his course of conduct to the action of some supposed internal inspiration, conceives himself, upon a different ground, incapable of crime, even when he is in the very act of committing it.

'We are not treating this subject theologically; the nature of our present work excludes such serious reasoning. But we would remind, even in those light sketches, those who stand up for the self-sufficient morality of modern philosophy, or rather sophistry, that the experiment has long since been tried on a large scale. Whatever may be the inferiority of the ancients in physical science, it will scarce be denied, that in moral science they possessed all the lights which the unassisted Reason, that is now referred to as the sufficient light of our paths, could possibly attain. Yet, when we survey what their system of Ethics did for the perfection of the human species, we will see that but a very few even of the teachers themselves have left behind them such characters as tend to do honour to their doctrines. Some philosophers there were, who, as instructors in morality, showed a laudable example to their followers; and we will not invidiously inquire how far these were supported in their self-denial either by vanity, or the desire of preserving consistency, or the importance annexed to the founder of a sect; although the least of these motives may afford great support to temperance, even in cases where it is not rendered easy by advanced age, which of itself calms the more stormy passions. But the satires of Juvenal, of Petronius, and, above all, Lucian, show what slight effect the doctrines of Zeno, Epictetus, Plato, Socrates, and Epicurus, produced on their avowed followers, and how little influence the beard of the stoic, the sophistry of the academician, and the self-denied mortification of the cynics, had upon the sects which derived their names from these distinguished philosophers. We will find that these pretended despisers of sensual pleasure shared the worst vices of the grossest age of society, and added to them the detestable hypocrisy of pretending that they were all the while guided by the laws of true wisdom and of right reason.

'If in modern times, they who owned the restraint of philosophical discipline alone have not given way to such gross laxity of conduct, it is because those principles of religion, which they affect to despise, have impressed on the public mind a moral feeling unknown till the general prevalence of the Christian religion; but which, since its predominance, has so generally pervaded European society, that no pretender to innovation can directly disavow its influence, though he endeavours to show that the same results, which are recommended from the Christian pulpit, and practised by the Christian community, might be reached by the unassisted

VOL. XXXIV. NO. LXVIII.

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assisted efforts of that human reason, to which he counsels us to resign the sole regulation of our morals.

"In short, to oppose one authority in the same department to another, the reader is requested to compare the character of the philosophic Square in Tom Jones with that of Bage's philosophical heroes; and to consider seriously whether a system of ethics, founding an exclusive and paramount court in a man's own bosom for the regulation of his own conduct, is likely to form a noble, enlightened and generous character, influencing others by superior energy and faultless example; or whether it is not more likely, as in the observer of the rule of right, to regulate morals according to temptation and convenience, and to form a selfish sophistical hypocrite, who, with morality always in his mouth, finds a perpetual apology for evading the practice of abstinence, when either passion or interest solicits him to indulgence.'

It is, in truth, a melancholy matter of reflection how largely the works, not of Bage merely, but of the true classics of the English Novel, stand in need of being introduced with preliminary cautions such as we have now been quoting. But perhaps the best of all antidotes is that which Sir Walter has furnished in his plain and intelligible narratives of the lives of the writers themselves. Their works should be uniformly prefaced in this manner, and we hope henceforward they will be so. When the youthful admirer of Tom Jones finds that Fielding himself, originally placed by birth, connection, and education in the first class of English society, was a man so utterly lowered in his personal feelings, through long worship of pleasure, that at the moment when all England was ringing with the praises of his genius, he could be discovered in his glory (as Lord Orford describes the scene)

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'banqueting with a blind man, a wh- and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth:' when he hears Fielding's dear friend and relation Lady Mary Wortley Montague extolling

the

'the animal spirits that gave him rapture with his cook-maid' happy constitution that (even when he had with great pains half demolished it) made him forget every evil when he was before a venison pasty or over a flask of Champagne'

he will perhaps come to her ladyship's conclusion that, if few men enjoyed life more than the author of those exquisite fictions, few had less occasion to do so-the highest of his preferment being raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery.'

The unhappiness to which Smollett's violent and misanthropical temper through life condemned him, may in like manner afford an useful lesson to those who have been sympathizing with his hot headed and cold hearted heroes. And the mind that has been bewildered amidst Sterne's contradictions of fine sentiment

and

and prurient filth, will find a salutary clue in the knowledge of a fact which all Sir W. Scott's good nature cannot prevent him from hinting-namely, that the tender and simple Yorick was, in his own person, a profligate man and a mean priest.

To return to our first extract-We must further dissent altogether from Sir Walter's opinion, that

the worst evil to be apprehended from the perusal of novels is, that the habit is apt to generate an indisposition to useful literature and real history.'

The person who devours the Memoirs of a Cavalier, and allows his Clarendon to sleep on a dusty shelf, would have treated the Lord Chancellor, we shrewdly suspect, with equal disrespect, although Defoe's delightful novel had never existed; and many, on the other hand, who, if that had never existed, would never have troubled Clarendon, have their curiosity stimulated by the charm of the fiction, and are compelled to gratify it by having recourse to the history. We have had abundant evidence of this tendency in our own times. The author of Waverley's historical romances have, with hardly one exception, been immediately followed by republications of the comparatively forgotten authors from whom he had drawn the historical part of his materials. A new edition of Philip de Comines was sold rapidly during the first popularity of Quentin Durward. A variety of contemporaneous tracts concerning the Scotch religious and civil wars have in like manner been recalled from oblivion in consequence of Waverley, and Old Mortality and some valuable MS. memoirs even have been sent to the press solely under the influence of the curiosity which these and other novels of the same author had excited. It is certain there are more readers of novels now than in any former time; but we suspect the readers of almost all other kinds of books are increased in at least as large a proportion. The elder established classics of our literature, historians among the rest, are eternally republished: the chief of them are obliged to be stereotyped in order to meet the constantly growing demand. Indeed it is a most remarkable fact, that no former period, eminently distinguished for the production of works of imagination, was at all to be compared with the present, for the encouragement and favour bestowed on departments of intellectual exertion, apparently the most remote from that to which these belong. The public that is so voracious of novels is the same public that gives ear so willingly to the expounders of many branches of science, from which our ancestors would unquestionably have turned away as utterly dry and uninteresting. The novel-readers, who remain. in our time exclusively novel-readers, would, we take leave to think, have been, in the immense majority of cases, readers of exactly nothing at all, had they lived a hundred years ago.

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