ABSTRACT
Santa Maria; or, The Mysterious Pregnancy: a Romance. In Three Volumes. By J.Fox. Whatever objection may be made, in this philosophical age, to mysteries in religion, they are acknowledged to be excellences in novels and romances. The wonderful and miraculous is the forte of our modern novel-writers, and a most singular revolution has taken place in this department of literature. Instead of pictures sketched from Nature, and portraits drawn from Life, ‘catching the Manners living as they rise,’1 we have narrations of haunted towers, old Blue Beards and Red Beards, spectres, sprites, apparitions, black banners waving on the battlements of castles, strange voices, tapers burning one moment and extinguished by some unknown hand the next, clandestine noises, flashing of lightning, and howling of winds. The ‘Old Wives’ Fables,’ and legendary tales of old, are vamped up afresh, and put into a modern dress, to spread terror throughout all the nurseries and boarding-schools of the metropolis. To be serious; we know of no useful purpose novels of such a nature can produce. They can only tend to infuse the most wild and ridiculous ideas into the minds of young people; fill them with groundless fears; make them imagine every dark chamber to be haunted, and even to be startled at their own shadows. Mr. Fox has very justly named his novel ‘The Mysterious Pregnancy;’ but it is too mysterious even. for romance. The idea of a woman being pregnant, and yet totally ignorant of the cause of it, pertinaciously persisting in asserting her virgin innocence, when she had actually been ravished, is so abominably absurd and outré as to bid defiance to all probability. We have also to object to Mr. Fox’s novel the history of Father Conrad the monk, which seems purposely introduced (to ape the present unhappy custom of our romance-writers) to cast an odium upon religion and its ministers. We are willing to allow that, in those monastic societies which are now nearly abolished throughout Europe, there were to be found men of the most profligate and licentious manners; but we think it unfair to throw an odium upon any collective body of men on account of the nefarious conduct of a few individuals belonging to that body. If the ministers of religion are intended to be aspersed in the person of Father Conrad, or if the grand body of the Roman Catholic clergy only are designed by Mr. Fox to be held up to view as base and profligate men, we abhor the idea. Had Mr. F. exercised the least candour and liberality of sentiment, he would have disdained to have joined in the ungenerous and insidious attempts to render religion odious, by drawing the characters of its ministers in the most degrading and contemptible point of view imaginable. With respect to the other characters introduced, that of ‘Dros’ appears to most advantage.
