ABSTRACT
We are glad to meet with a respectable specimen of that class of works called 'novels of fashionable life,' which furnish an extensive and popular part of the light reading of the present day. We are not going, on this occasion, to break these butterflies upon the wheel of an austere criticism, or discourse of them in the language of Utilitarians. We will not, therefore, deplore that it should be impossible to extract from their pages any addition to intellectual philosophy. We do not censure them for the absence of qualities which some of the best of their class have never professed to exhibit. Every sensible person will look elsewhere for solid information. He turns to the novel for amusement, and hates to be cheated by a homily in disguise. Division of labour is a principle scarcely less commendable in literature than in manufactures; and the attempt to combine many objects, is often productive of a failure in all. Many writers, in order to avoid the stigma of having indited a mere novel, have stuffed the pages of an ordinary love-tale with grave and weighty disquisitions; but we question if the most elaborately didactic of this tribe has, after all his pains, produced any thing which the philosopher or politician would think deserving of serious attention, or which would excite the jealousy of a tenth-rate essayist. To works of this heterogeneous and deceptive class, which allure to the well-cushioned sofa of the novel-reader, and leave us seated in the uneasy chair of the scholastic disputant, we do not scruple to confess that we prefer the mere novel; we prefer, that is, that a work should be solely and completely of the class to which it professes to belong. We have never heard it objected to the most popular dramatic works in our language that they were mere plays, and that the introduction of discussions which no audience would tolerate, would be very improving, and raise them considerably in the seale of literature. A novel and a play are only two different modes of telling a story, and there is no reason why an infusion which would spoil the one, should be considered beneficial to the other. If books were written, like the History of Herodotus, to be read aloud, this position would be too evident to need enforcement; but an author now thinks he is excusable in being dull, if he only informs his readers that they may skip what they do not like. Let it not, however, be supposed, that because we reprobate the forced introduction of grave disquisitions into works of fiction, we are therefore disposed to advocate frivolous and profitless compositions, and disclaim for the novel the merit of utility. We have spoken thus, not because we do not wish a novel to do good, but because we are convinced that it cannot do good in that way. Though there be many whose minds require the occasional relaxation of light reading, and far too many who, we fear, are not disposed to read any thing else; yet we would say, if a novel shall only amuse, without awakening one generous thought, one feeling of sympathy with virtue, and abhorrence of vice, it were better that such a book, however innocent it may be deemed, should never have been written. It is by an unforced and insensible enlistment of our better feelings on the side of what is estimable, that the novel must hope for the commendation of the judicious, and raise itself to a height in the scale of literature, which, as a production intended solely to amuse, we would be the last to allow it. But it will not gain this desirable object by ambitiously arraying itself with an encumbering panoply, which will only cheek its progress, and render it distasteful to those very readers who might otherwise have derived from it most advantage. We require from the novel that it shall be moral in its tendency, that it shall be amusing, and that it shall exhibit a true and faithful delineation of the class of society which it professes to depict. This we would require alike from every novel which attempts to describe men and manners, of whatever class; and we would reprobate every endeavour to ground a distinction upon the station of the characters described, particularly by the use of a foolish word, 'fa'shionable;' which only a compliance with popular usage has induced us to insert in these pages. The object of the novelist is to delineate human nature, whether existing among lords and ladies, or in the lowest dregs of mendicancy. Some prefer pictures of the latter class, under the notion, which we think erroneous, that they are thereby afforded a better insight into human character, and view mankind in a less artificial state. For our own part, we conceive that it is more desirable to have correct delineations of that class of society which exercises the greatest influence; and in the absence of modern comedy, we are glad that our novelists should endeavour to present such sketches of the existing surface of society, as were once afforded in a different form by the Congreves and Cibbers of other times.
