_Zanoni, a Novel. By the Author of “Pelham,” “Rienzi,” &c. Two
Volumes. Harper & Brothers._
A few years ago, in the first volume of “The Monthly Chronicle,” a tale,
or rather the fragment of one, appeared, professedly from the pen of
Bulwer. But the story defied critical as well as common sense to
understand it. It opened abruptly and closed abruptly. It had, properly
speaking, neither beginning nor end. It was incomprehensible. By general
consent, “Zicci” was regarded as a freak of the author—its only merit
was the novelty of having no merit at all. After being the jest of the
reviewers for years, this story has been completed, and now lies before
us, under the altered name of “Zanoni.”
The idea of the novel is borrowed from the dreams of the old
Rosicrucians, and of the predecessors of that sect as far back as the
Chaldeans. These visionaries imagined that man, by a rigid practice of
virtue and the sublimation of every earthly feeling, could attain to a
perfect comprehension of the most hidden secrets of nature—could hold
communion with, and exercise control over, the unseen powers of the
air—and could even preserve human life to an indefinite extent, by
acquiring the means by which it might be perpetually renovated. The
story opens at Naples, towards the close of the last century. The hero
is a noble Chaldean, who, having attained to the knowledge of this last
secret of his sect while yet in the prime of youthful manhood, wears now
the same aspect as when he gazed on the stars from his home in Assyria,
before the temple had been built on Mount Zion—before the Greeks had
fought at Marathon—before the builders of the pyramids had died. To an
imaginative mind, such a character possesses peculiar charms. He comes
before us with all the solemnity of the past, making vivid to us the
great deeds of buried ages. He has seen the army of Alexander on the
Indus. He was in Egypt when Antony’s fleet set sail for Actium. He
remembers when Demosthenes thundered for the crown, when Cæsar fell in
the Senate House, when Rome was sacked by Attila. For three thousand
years he has gazed on mankind with a face as unchanging as that of the
weird Sphinx of the desert. For ninety generations, he has survived war,
and pestilence, and the slow decay of the system,—a being mysterious in
his subtle power, wonderful in his awful and majestic beauty. This
exemption from death he has won by the subjugation of every feeling and
passion to the mastery of a PURE INTELLECT. But still retaining his
_youth_, he retains the capacity to _love_; and though, for such a lapse
of ages, he has withstood temptation, he is destined at last to yield to
it. He meets with and loves a beautiful Italian girl. He thus endangers
his earthly immortality; for the moment he yields to earthly passion,
however pure, his intellect becomes clouded, and he loses the prophetic
faculty as well as others of his high attributes. Conscious of this, and
knowing that he will bring peril and sorrow around the path of Viola by
linking her fate with his, he struggles long against his passion, and
even after yielding to it, endeavors to avert from her head the dangers
which, as consequences of his conduct, thicken around her. In this
Titanic conflict betwixt the intellect and the heart—in the alternation
of the aspirations of the one and the agonizing throes of the other,
lies the _burden_—as the old writers would call it—of the novel.
The idea, as thus stated, is simply grand. It has a unity that
overpowers us. Had the author contented himself with merely developing
this idea, omitting every thing which had no necessary bearing on the
_dénouement_, he would have produced an almost faultless story. But he
has, in a great measure, failed in carrying out his conception. He has
weakened the effect by diverging from the _burden_ of the story. As the
novel has been circulated in various cheap forms throughout the country,
we shall take it for granted that our readers have perused the book.
This will save us the necessity of recapitulating the plot as the basis
of our remarks.
The plot is grossly defective in several important particulars. Many
even of the leading incidents have no bearing on the _dénouement_. The
compact betwixt Zanoni and the Evil Eye, at Venice, is of this
character. The author’s original intention was to make the condition
exacted from the husband play a prominent part at the crisis; but he
subsequently changed his mind, and brought about the _dénouement_ by
other means, forgetting, however, to rewrite this scene, so as to adapt
it to the altered aspect of the story. The Evil Eye, when he comes to
assert his rights, is cavalierly dismissed, in a very inartistical
manner. It would have contributed far more to the unity of effect of
which we have spoken, if the author had pursued his original design, and
made the condition exacted from Zanoni, the sacrifice of his own life,
when, at any future period, he should wish again to preserve the life of
Viola. By following out this plan, Bulwer would have been saved the
necessity of introducing the sanguinary scenes of the French Revolution;
and the crisis would have been brought about in a far more natural
manner than it is at present. The introduction of Robespierre and his
associates is _forced_; it renders involved an otherwise simple and
effective plot. We are astonished that an adept in Art, such as Bulwer
professes to be, should have committed a blunder for which, if he had
been a schoolboy, he should have been soundly whipped. If he intended to
enlist and keep up the interest of his readers in his two chief
characters, why has he distracted the attention by the introduction of
The Reign of Terror, that most real of tragedies, whose horrors exceed
anything that romance can imagine, whose thrilling story stops the
pulsation of the heart for anything less terrible? The mind should have
been left undistracted to contemplate the stern, Doric self-sacrifice of
Zanoni! The author should not have sacrificed the unity of effect for
the dying struggles of Robespierre, or any other human butcher in the
blood-bespattered shambles of Paris. We can see what misled Bulwer. Not
satisfied with the grandeur of his original conception of the
_dénouement_, he sought to increase the interest by the clap-trap effect
of rapidly shifting the perilous incidents in which all the chief actors
are involved. This is a trick he has learned behind the foot-lights, and
not in the study of the great old masters.
There are numerous minor errors in the plot. Glyndon’s _liaison_ with
Floretta does not advance the story, and the only part she plays in
evolving the crisis, is the betrayal of Viola at Paris. If the plot had
been handled properly, there would have been no necessity for her agency
here. But the desire to paint mere sensual love, in this character,
induced Bulwer to patch her into the tale. He has been persuaded, from
the same reason, to introduce other unimportant characters we might
name. In short, his motley array of personages reminds us of Burke’s
graphic picture of Chatham’s last piebald ministry, where he compares it
to a piece of mosaic, “here a bit of black stone and there a bit of
white,” and humorously depicts the consternation of men, who had been
all their lives libelling each other, on finding themselves “pigging
together in the same truckle-bed.” In like manner the robber figures in
the scene. So do Mervale and that worthy shrew his wife. These are all
gross faults; for the necessity of preserving that oneness and
entireness of effect, of which we have spoken so much, exists in
peculiar force in a highly imaginative work like this. The introduction
of supernal agents is, at all times, a dangerous experiment; and, when
they are introduced, the illusion is to be kept up at every sacrifice.
This can scarcely be done where the reader listens on one page to the
converse of immortal powers, and on the next to the wrangling of a
cross, sleepy wife with a drunken husband—when we are hurried from the
lofty aspirations of Menjour and Zanoni, to the silly love toying
betwixt Glyndon and Floretta. This brings us to another error in the
author—an error which lies at the very bottom of all his errors.
The subject is unfit for prose. It properly belongs to the drama. The
true province of the imagination is poetry, and although this divine
faculty may stoop to prose, it can never truly shine but in the
celestial garments of the muse. We do not deny the impossibility of
treating an ideal theme in prose—we only assert the superior advantages
which poetry affords for the same object. Transitions may be tolerated
in the drama which should be anathematized in prose. But, above all,
poetry would favor the preservation of the illusion to which we have
already referred. The _tone_ of a story such as Zanoni is, could be
better preserved in poetry. The idea of the tale is inexpressibly grand,
and might have been worked out with terrible effect. The struggle in
Zanoni’s mind betwixt his love for Viola and his longing for an earthly
immortality would have produced, if evolved by a master hand, a tragedy
equal to Manfred, Faust, we had almost said Prometheus.
But we have said enough under this head. Let us look at the characters.
Of Zanoni we have already spoken. His character belongs to a lofty
region of the ideal. The conception of Pisani, also, is highly
imaginative. He comes in, at the opening of the tale, with the same
effect with which a fine overture precedes an opera. He prepares the
mind, by his unearthly music, for the mysteries that are to follow. His
barbican, his solitary life, his dreams of wild figures and wilder music
in the air, entitle him to a high rank in the ideal. What a grand
thought is that which represents him at the theatre, mechanically
performing his part, while all the time his soul is thinking of his
beloved opera, so that often, unconsciously to himself, he bursts out
into its weird and startling music!
Viola, the impersonation of the purest love, unalloyed by any sensual
feeling—Glyndon, the weak, vacillating, yet aspiring man—and Menjour,
the embodiment of mere intellect, apart from any influence of the heart,
good or bad, are well drawn characters—_of their kind_. Their fault is
that they have no individuality. All Bulwer’s personages partake of this
error. There is not, in his numerous novels, a single personage whom we
can look back on as on a real individual. Falstaff and Nicol Jarvie are
so life-like that it seems as if we had drunk canary with the one, at
the Boar’s Head, and “had a crack” with the other, on the causeway of
Glasgow. Bulwer’s characters have none of this personal identity—they
are only embodiments of certain passions or peculiarities. His actors
are like the knights of Spencer, mere stalking horses for particular
vices or virtues—or, like a wigmaker’s block, the representative in
turn of the heads of all his customers. Every personage in Zanoni,
without, as we remember, a _single_ exception, is thus ticketed for a
particular vice or virtue, like passengers in a railroad car. Now, we do
not object to the introduction of these personages if they are necessary
to the plot; but, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Bulwer, give us something more
than mere automatons! Don’t ask us in to a second Mrs. Jarley’s
wax-works!
We have spoken, in terms of high praise, of the character of Zanoni. We
have, however, said that the theme was more adapted for poetry than
prose. Having chosen prose, the author has erred in calling his book A
NOVEL. Let us be understood. Feeble as is the province of prose to do
justice to so ideal a character as Zanoni, we do not base our present
objection to the book on that ground. It is one of the inalienable
rights of man to show his ignorance, to make a blunder, or in any other
way to play the fool. This is not the question now. The work before us
purports to be a novel, and nothing but a novel. It might have been
named a romance, a mystery, or the Lord knows what! But it is put forth
as a novel, under the _imprimatur_ of the writer of “Art in Fiction,” of
the man who sets up to be the high priest of the synagogue! Is it such?
A novel, in the true acceptation of the name, is a picture of real life.
The plot may be involved, but it must not transcend probability. The
agencies introduced must belong to real life. Such were Gil Blas and Tom
Jones, confessedly the two best novels extant. Whether the title was
properly applied, in the inception, is not the question. Usage and
common sense have affixed a definite meaning to the word. When authors
cease to paint real life they cease to write novels. The tales may be
very good of their kind, but they are no more novels than a sirloin is a
mutton chop, or than Bulwer is the artist he pretends to be. Judged by
this standard, Zanoni is not a novel. There are pictures of real life in
it; but to paint society, _as it is_, was only collateral to the chief
aim of the work.
We say nothing of the moral of the story; for all that is truly noble in
Bulwer’s imaginary doctrines of the Rosicrucians is stolen from the pure
precepts of our holy religion.
The English of the author is neither better nor worse than in his former
novels. His language was always inflated, often bombastic. He
personifies as desperately as ever. His allegories are as plentiful as
Sancho Panza’s proverbs, or as an old maid’s ailings. The same straining
after effect, the same attempts at fine writing which were such glaring
defects in his former novels, are here perceptible. Through every line,
the author looks out, eager, like Snug the joiner, to tell you he is
there.
There are many fine thoughts, nevertheless, in these volumes; and, on
the whole, the book is a valuable addition to our imaginative
literature.
If we have dwelt longer on the faults than on the merits of “Zanoni,” it
is because the latter are more apparent to the popular eye. We have
dealt out, however, even-handed justice to the book, since the province
of a critic is not that of the state advocate, who argues only on one
side, but rather that of the judge who sums up the case, and of the jury
who are sworn “a true verdict to give according to the evidence.” With
this remark, we leave “Zanoni” to its fate.
* * * * *
_The Poets and Poetry of America, with an Historical
Introduction. By Rufus Willmot Griswold. One vol. Carey & Hart:
Philadelphia._
This is the best collection of the American Poets that has yet been
made, whether we consider its completeness, its size, or the judgment
displayed in its selections. The volume is issued in a style
commensurate with its literary worth. The paper, type and printing are
unexceptionable. Messrs. Carey & Hart have, in “The Poets and Poetry of
America,” published the finest volume of the season.
The editor begins his selections of American Poets with Frenau,
prefacing them, however, with an historical introduction evincing
considerable research. In this introduction he shows that, prior to the
revolution, the pretenders to the muse in the colonies scarcely rose to
the level of versifiers. From Frenau downwards, the chain is kept up to
the youngest poet of the day. About eighty-eight authors are embraced in
the body of the work. To the selections from each author is prefixed a
short but clear biography. The editor has not always been guided, in
making his selections, by the relative merit of the various authors,
but, in cases where the writers have published editions of their poems,
he has been less copious in his extracts, than when the poet has left
his works to take care of themselves. Thus we have the whole of Dana’s
“Buccanier,” of Whittier’s “Mogg Magone,” of Sprague’s “Curiosity,” and
of Drake’s “Culprit Fay.” Most of C. Fenno Hoffman’s songs are also
included in the collection. But Pierpoint’s “Airs of Palestine,” are
excluded, as are the longer and best poems of Willis. At the end of the
volume is an appendix, in which about fifty writers, whom the editor has
not thought worthy of a place in the body of his book, figure under the
name of “Various Authors.” Such is the plan of the work. A word, in
detail, on its merits.
We have said that this volume is superior to any former collection of
the American Poets, whether we regard its size, its completeness, or the
taste displayed in the selections. This is our _general_ opinion of the
book. We do not, however, _always_ coincide with the judgment of the
editor. There are several writers in the Appendix who have as good
claims to appear in the body of the work, as others who figure largely
in the latter more honorable station. There are many mere versifiers
included in the selection who should have been excluded, or else others
who have been left out should have been admitted. Perhaps the author,
without being aware of it himself, has unduly favored the writers of New
England. Instances of all these faults will be noticed by the reader,
and we need not further allude to them.
The editor has scarcely done justice to some of our younger poets,
either in his estimate of their genius, or in his selections from their
poems. A glaring instance of this is the case of Lowell, a young poet,
to whom others than ourselves have assigned a genius of the highest
rank. We would have been better pleased to have seen a more liberal
notice of his poems. We know that, with the exception of “Rosaline,”
better selections might have been made from his works. A few years
hence, Mr. Griswold himself will be amazed that he assigned no more
space to Lowell than to M’Lellan, Tuckerman, and others of “Οι Πολλοι.”
Holmes is another instance of the injustice done an author by the
editor’s selections. The author of “Old Ironsides” has written better
poems than that, all about the old man, of whom
“My grandmamma has said—
Poor old lady! she is dead
Long ago—
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow.”
And again,
“I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here,
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches—and all that,
Are so queer!”
Little more can be said in the way of criticism, unless we should follow
up these remarks by further examples in detail. For this we have no
inclination, since, after all, the book, as a whole, is one of high
merit; and, from the very nature of the work, it is impossible for an
editor to produce a faultless volume. A thorough analysis of the book
might induce many, whose minds are not comprehensive, to think it a bad,
instead of what it really is, a good work.
* * * * *
_The Two Admirals, a Tale, by the Author of “The Pilot,” “Red
Rover,” &c., &c. Two Vols. Lea & Blanchard: Philadelphia._
Mr. Cooper, in the book before us, has re-asserted his right to the rank
of the first living American novelist. The “Two Admirals” is not
inferior to the best of his works. The scenes are described with that
graphic force for which our author is distinguished above all writers of
sea-tales. The two combats betwixt Sir Gervaise Oakes and the French
fleet are told with unusual power. But there is nothing like character
in the tale, and the plot is shamefully commonplace. Mr. Cooper seems to
be aware of his want of ability to write a story, or paint a character,
and he therefore wisely expends his whole strength on particular
incidents and scenes. In his line he is without a rival here or in
Europe.
* * * * *
_The Poetical Works of John Sterling. First American Edition.
One vol. Herman Hooker: Philadelphia._
Every man of taste will rejoice at this collected edition of the poems
of Sterling, the “Archæus” of Blackwood. To Rufus W. Griswold, the
editor, and Herman Hooker, the publisher, the American public is
indebted for this edition of the works of one of the most pure,
delicate, fanciful, and idiomatic, of the poets of the present day.
* * * * *
_Essays for Summer Hours. By Charles Lanman. Second Edition.
Boston: Hilliard, Grey & Co. London: Wiley & Putnam._
These essays are distinguished by grace, sweetness, and graphic force of
language. The author is a devout lover of nature in all her moods, but
especially in her more quiet aspects. He has produced a book which will
be no discredit to him.
* * * * *
_Tecumseh, or the West thirty years since. A Poem. By Geo. H.
Colton. Wiley & Putnam: New York & London. Moore & Wiley:
Philadelphia._
This book is an elegant specimen of American typography. Of the merits
of the poem we shall not speak until July, when we trust to have leisure
and space for the task.
* * * * *
[Illustration: three ladies and a gentleman dressed in latest fashions]
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Table of Contents has been added for reader convenience. Archaic
spellings and hyphenation have been retained. Obvious punctuation and
typesetting errors have been corrected without note.
A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.
[End of _Graham’s Magazine, Vol. XX, No. 6, June 1842_, George R.
Graham, Editor]