REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER ANTICIPATED AND ANSWERED.
Ὦ πολλὰ λέξας ἄρτι κάνόνητ᾽ ἔπη,
Οὐ μνημονεύεις οὐκέτ᾽ οὐδὲν;
SOPHOCLES.
Novel readers are sometimes so impatient to know how the story is to
end, that they look at the last chapter, and so—escape, should I
say—or forfeit that state of agitating suspense in which it was the
author or authoress's endeavour to keep them till they should arrive
by a regular perusal at the well-concealed catastrophe. It may be
apprehended that persons of this temper, having in their composition
much more of Eve's curiosity than of Job's patience, will regard with
some displeasure a work like the present, of which the conclusion is
not before them; and some perhaps may even be so unreasonable as to
complain that they go through chapter after chapter without making any
progress in the story. “What care the Public,” says one of these
readers, (for every reader is a self-constituted representative of
that great invisible body)—“what do the Public care for Astrology and
Almanacks, and the Influence of the Tides upon diseases, and
Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, and the Koran, and the Chronology of
this fellow's chapters, and Potteric Carr, and the Corporation of
Doncaster, and the Theory of Signatures, and the Philosophy of the
Alchemists, and the Devil knows what besides! What have these things
to do with the subject of the book, and who would ever have looked for
them in a Novel?”
“A Novel do you call it, Mr. Reader?”
“Yes, Mr. Author, what else should I call it? It has been reviewed as
a Novel and advertised as a Novel.”
“I confess that in this very day's newspaper it is advertised in
company with four new Novels; the first in the list being ‘Warleigh,
or the Fatal Oak,’ a Legend of Devon, by Mrs. Bray: the second,
‘Dacre,’ edited by the Countess of Morley; Mr. James's ‘Life and
Adventures of John Marston Hall,’ is the third: fourthly, comes the
dear name of ‘The Doctor;’ and last in the list, ‘The Court of
Sigismund Augustus, or Poland in the Seventeenth Century.’”
I present my compliments to each and all of the authoresses and
authors with whom I find myself thus associated. At the same time I
beg leave to apologize for this apparent intrusion into their company,
and to assure them that the honour which I have thus received has been
thrust upon me. Dr. Stegman had four patients whose disease was that
they saw themselves double: “they perceived,” says Mr. Turner,
“another self, exterior to themselves!” I am not one of Dr. Stegman's
patients; but I see myself double in a certain sense, and in that
sense have another and distinct self,—the one incog, the other out of
cog. Out of cog I should be as willing to meet the novelist of the
Polish Court, as any other unknown brother or sister of the quill. Out
of cog I should be glad to shake hands with Mr. James, converse with
him about Charlemagne, and urge him to proceed with his French
biography. Out of cog I should have much pleasure in making my bow to
Lady Morley or her editee. Out of cog I should like to be introduced
to Mrs. Bray in her own lovely land of Devon, and see the sweet
innocent face of her humble friend Mary Colling. But without a proper
introduction I should never think of presenting myself to any of these
persons; and having incog the same sense of propriety as out of cog, I
assure them that the manner in which my one self has been associated
with them is not the act and deed of my other self, but that of
Messrs. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, my very worthy
and approved good publishers.
“Why, Mr. Author, you do not mean to say that the book is not printed
as a novel, does not appear as one, and is not intended to pass for
one. Have you the face to deny it?”
“_Lecteur, mon ami, la demande est bien faite sans doute, et bien
apparente; mais la response vous contentera, ou j'ai le sens
malgallefretu!_”
“_Lecteur, mon ami!_ an Incog has no face. But this I say in the face,
or in all the faces, of that Public which has more heads than a Hindu
Divinity, that the character and contents of the book were fairly,
fully, carefully and considerately denoted,—that is to say, notified
or made known, in the title-page. Turn to it, I intreat you, Sir! The
first thing which you cannot but notice, is, that it is in motley.
Ought you not to have inferred, concerning the author, that in his
brain
—he hath strange places cramm'd
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.[1]
And it you could fail to perceive the conspicuous and capacious
&c.
which in its omnisignificance may promise anything, and yet pledges
the writer to nothing; and if you could also overlook the mysterious
monograph
[Illustration: a tetrahedron]
your attention was invited to all this by a sentence of Butler's on
the opposite page, so apposite that it seems as if he had written it
with a second-sight of the application thus to be made of it: ‘There
is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the
faces of men, by which a skilful observer will as well know what to
expect from the one as the other.’ This was the remark of one whose
wisdom can never be obsolete; and whose wit, though much of it has
become so, it will always be worth while for an Englishman to study
and to understand.
[Footnote 1: SHAKESPEARE.]
“Mr. D'Israeli has said that ‘the false idea which a title conveys is
alike prejudicial to the author and the reader, and that titles are
generally too prodigal of their promises;’ but yet there is an error
on the other hand to be avoided, for if they say too little they may
fail of attracting notice. I bore in mind what Baillet says upon this
subject, to which he has devoted a long chapter: _le titre d'un Livre
doit être son abregé, et il en doit renfermer tout l'esprit, autant
qu'il est possible. Il doit être le centre de toutes les paroles et de
toutes les pensées du Livre; de telle sorte qu'on n'y en puisse pas
même trouver une qui n'y dit de la correspondance et du rapport._ From
this rule there has been no departure. Every thing that is said of
Peter Hopkins relates to the Doctor prospectively, because he was the
Doctor's master: every thing that may be said of, or from myself,
relates to the Doctor retrospectively, or reflectively, because he,
though in a different sense, was mine: and every thing that is said
about anything else, relates to him collaterally, being either
derivative or tributary, either divergent from the main subject, or
convergent to its main end.
“But albeit I claim the privilege of motley, and in right thereof
I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please;——[2]
yet I have in no instance abused that charter, nor visited any one too
roughly. Nor will I ever do against all the world what John Kinsaider
did, in unseemly defiance,—nor against the wind either; though it has
been no maxim of mine, nor ever shall be, to turn with the tide, or go
with the crowd, unless they are going my road, and there is no other
way that I can take to escape the annoyance of their company.”
[Footnote 2: SHAKESPEARE.]
“And is this any reason, Mr. Author, why you should get on as slowly
with the story of your book, as the House of Commons with the business
of the nation, in the present reformed Parliament, with Lord Althorpe
for its leader?”
“Give me credit, Sir, for a temper as imperturbably good as that which
Lord Althorpe presents, like a sevenfold shield of lamb's wool, to
cover him against all attacks, and I will not complain of the
disparagement implied in your comparison.”
“Your confounded good temper, Mr. Author, seems to pride itself upon
trying experiments on the patience of your readers. Here I am in the
middle of the third volume, and if any one asked me what the book is
about, it would be impossible for me to answer the question. I have
never been able to guess at the end of one chapter, what was likely to
be the subject of the next.”
“Let me reply to that observation, Sir, by an anecdote. A collector of
scarce books was one day showing me his small but curious hoard; ‘Have
you ever seen a copy of this book?’ he asked, with every rare volume
that he put into my hands: and when my reply was that I had not, he
always rejoined with a look and tone of triumphant delight, ‘I should
have been exceedingly sorry if you had!’
“Let me tell you another anecdote, not less to the purpose. A
thorough-bred fox-hunter found himself so much out of health a little
before the season for his sport began, that he took what was then
thought a long journey to consult a physician, and get some advice
which he hoped would put him into a condition for taking the field.
Upon his return his friends asked him what the Doctor had said. ‘Why,’
said the Squire, ‘he told me that I've got a dyspepsy:—I don't know
what that is: but it's some damn'd thing or other I suppose!’—My good
Sir, however much at a loss you may be to guess what is coming in the
next chapter, you can have no apprehension that it may turn out
anything like what he, with too much reason, supposed a dyspepsy to
be.
“_Lecteur, mon ami_, I have given you the advantage of a motto from
Sophocles, and were it as apposite to me, as it seems applicable when
coming from you, I might content myself with replying to it in a
couplet of the honest old wine-bibbing, Water-poet:—
That man may well be called an idle mome
That mocks the Cock because he wears a comb.
But no one who knows a hawk from a hernshaw, or a sheep's head from a
carrot, or the Lord Chancellor Brougham in his wig and robes, from a
Guy Vaux on the fifth of November, can be so mistaken in judgment as
to say that I make use of many words in making nothing understood; nor
as to think me,
ἄνθρωπον ἀγριοποἰον, αὐθαδόστομον,
ἔχοντ᾽ ἀχαλινον, ἀκρατὲς, ἀπύλωτον στόμὰ,
ἀπεριλάλητον, κομποφακελοῤῥήμονα.[3]
[Footnote 3: ARISTOPHANES.]
“Any subject is inexhaustible if it be fully treated of; that is, if
it be treated doctrinally and practically, analytically and
synthetically, historically and morally, critically, popularly and
eloquently, philosophically, exegetically and æsthetically, logically,
neologically, etymologically, archaiologically, Daniologically and
Doveologically, which is to say, summing up all in one,
Doctorologically.
“Now, my good Reader, whether I handle my subject in any of these
ways, or in any other legitimate way, this is certain, that I never
handle it as a cow does a musquet; and that I have never wandered from
it, not even when you have drawn me into a Tattle-de-Moy.”
“_Auctor incomparabilis_, what is a Tattle-de Moy?”
“_Lecteur mon ami_, you shall now know what to expect in the next
chapter, for I will tell you there what a Tattle-de-Moy is.”