THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. VI.--AUGUST, 1860.--NO. XXXIV.
THE CARNIVAL OF THE ROMANTIC.
Whither went the nine old Muses, daughters of Jupiter and the Goddess
of Memory, after their seats on Helicon, Parnassus, and Olympus were
barbarized? Not far away. They hovered like witches around the seething
caldron of early Christian Europe, in which, "with bubble, bubble, toil
and trouble," a new civilization was forming, mindful of the brilliant
lineage of their worshippers, from Homer to Boethius, looking upon the
vexed and beclouded Nature, and expecting the time when Humanity should
gird itself anew with the beauty of ideas and institutions. They were
sorrowful, but not in despair; for they knew that the children of men
were strong with recuperative power.
The ear of Fancy, not long since, heard the hoofs of winged Pegasus
striking the clouds. The long-idle Muses, it seemed, had become again
interested in human efforts, and were paying a flying visit to the
haunts of modern genius from the Hellespont to the Mississippi.
They lingered in sunny Provence, and in the dark forest-land of the
Minnesingers. In the great capitals, as Rome, Berlin, Paris, London,--in
smaller capitals, as Florence, Weimar, and Boston,--in many a village
which had a charm for them, as Stratford-on-Avon, Ferney, and Concord
in Massachusetts,--in the homes of wonderful suffering, as Ferrara and
Haworth.--on many enchanted waters, as the Guadalquivir, the Rhine,
the Tweed, the Hudson, Windermere, and Leman,--in many a monastic nook
whence had issued a chronicle or history, in many a wild birthplace of a
poem or romance, around many an old castle and stately ruin, in many a
decayed seat of revelry and joyous repartee,--through the long list
of the nurseries of genius and the laboratories of art, they wandered
pensive and strangely affected. At length they rested from their journey
to hold a council on modern literature. The long results of Christian
time were unrolled before them as in a chart. They beheld the dawn of a
new historic day, marked by songs of fantastic tenderness, and unwieldy,
long, and jointless romances and poems, like the monsters which played
in the unfinished universe before the creation of man. The Muses smiled
with a look more of complaisance than approval, as they reviewed the
army of Troubadours and Minnesingers and the crowd of romancers who
followed in their train. They decided that the joyous array of early
mediæval literature was full of promise, though something of its tone
and temper was past the comprehension of pagan goddesses. The legends of
saints and pictures of martyrdoms were especially mysterious to them,
and they regarded them raptly, not smilingly, and bowed their heads.
Anon their eyes rested on an Italian city, where uprose, as if in
interstellar space, an erect figure, with a piercing eye, pleasant as
Plato's voice. His countenance was fixed upon the empyrean, and a more
than Minerva-like form hovered above him, interpreting the Christian
universe; and as he wrote what she dictated, the verses of his poem were
musical even to the Muses. Dante, Beatrice, and the "Divine Comedy,"
with a Gothic church as a make-weight, were balanced in Muses' minds in
comparison with the "Iliad" and the age of Pericles; and again they put
on the rapt look of mystery, but a smile also, and their admiration
and applause were more and more. To England they soon turned, and
contemplated the round, many-colored globe of Shakspeare's works. As
playful swallows sometimes dart round and round a lithe and wondering
wingless animal, so they, admiringly and timidly, attracted, yet
hesitating, delighting in his alertness, but not quite understanding it,
flitted like a troubled and beautiful flock around the great magician of
modern civilization. Their glance became lighter and less intent, as if
they were nearer to knowledge, the pain of perplexity disappeared like a
shadow from their countenances, their plaudits were more unreserved, and
it seemed likely that the high desert of Shakspeare would win for our
new literature a favorable recognition from the aristocratic goddesses
of antiquity. Knowing that Jove had made perfection unattainable by
mortals, they yet found in the chart before them epics, dramas, lyrics,
histories, and philosophies that were no unworthy companions to the
creations of classical genius, and they were jubilant in the triumphs
of a period in which they had been rather ignorantly and ironically
worshipped. Their sitting was long, and their review thorough, yet they
found but one department of modern literature which was regarded with a
distrust that grew to an aversion. The romances, the tales, the stories,
the novels were contemned more and more, from the first of them to the
last. Nothing like them had been known among the glories of Hellenic
literary art, and no Muse now stood forth to be their defender and
patron. Calliope declared that they were not epical, Euterpe and Erato
that they were not lyrical, Melpomene and Thalia that they were neither
tragical nor comical, Clio that they were not historical, Urania that
they were not sublime in conception, Polymnia that they had no stately
or simple charm in execution, and Terpsichore, who had joined with
Melpomene in admiring the opera, found nothing in the novel which she
could own and bless. Fleeting passages, remote and slight fragments,
were pleasing to them all, like the oases of a Sahara, or the sites of
high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to
them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty. The gates of
the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to
close against the voluminous prose romances that have sprung from modern
thought, when the deliberations of the Muses were suddenly interrupted.
They had disturbed the divine elements of modern society. Forth from all
the recesses of the air came troops of Gothic elves, trolls, fairies,
sprites, and all the other romantic beings which had inspired the modern
mind to novel-writing,--marching or gambolling, pride in their port,
defiance in their eye, mischief in their purpose,--and began so vigorous
an attack upon their classic visitors and critics, that the latter were
glad to betake themselves to the mighty-winged Pegasus, who rapidly bore
them in retreat to the present home of the _Dii Majores_, that point of
the empyrean directly above Olympus.
And well, indeed, might the Muses wonder at the rise of the novel and
its vast developments, for the classic literature presents no similar
works. One of Plato's dialogues or Aesop's fables is as near an approach
to a prose romance as antiquity in its golden eras can offer. The few
productions of the kind which appeared during the decline of literature
in the early Christian centuries, as the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius and
the "Æthiopica" of Heliodorus, were freaks of Nature, an odd growth
rather than a distinct species, and are also to be contrasted rather
than compared with the later novel. Such as they are, moreover, they
were produced under Christian as much as classic influences. The
æsthetic Hellenes admitted into their literature nothing so composite,
so likely to be crude, as the romance. Their styles of art were all
pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly
forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters. The
history of their development opens with an epic yet unsurpassed, and
their literary creations have been adopted to be the humanities of
Christian universities. A writer has recently proposed to account for
their success in the arts from the circumstance that the features of
Nature around them were small,--that their hornet-shaped peninsula was
cut by mountains and inlets of the sea into minute portions, which the
mind could easily compass, the foot measure, and the hand improve,--that
therefore every hillock and fountain, every forest and by-way was
peopled with mythological characters and made significant with
traditions, and the cities were adorned with architectural and
sculptured masterpieces. Greece thus, like England in our own time,
presented the character of a highly wrought piece of ground,--England
being the more completely developed for material uses, and Greece being
the more heavily freighted with legends of ideal meaning. Small-featured
and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the
mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense
plains and interminable mountain-chains. But whatever the reason,
whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of
Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced
all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a
plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive
beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became
statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from
the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought
rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid
of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were
indiscriminately regarded by them as barbarous. But guarded by the
bounds of their civilization, as by the circumfluent ocean-stream of
their olden tradition, they were prompted in all their movements by the
spirit of beauty, and philosophers have accounted them the very people
whose ideas were adequately and harmoniously represented in sensible
forms,--unlike the nations of the Orient, where mind is overawed by
preponderating matter, and unlike the nations of Christendom, where the
current spiritual meanings reach far into the shadowy realm of mystery
and transcend the power of material expression.
Thus art was the main category of the Greeks, the absolute form which
embraced all their finite forms. It moulded their literature, as it did
their sculpture, architecture, and the action of their gymnasts and
orators. They therefore delighted only in the highest orders and purest
specimens of literature, refused to retain in remembrance any of the
unsuccessful attempts at poetry which may be supposed to have preceded
Homer, and gave their homage only to masterpieces in the dignified
styles of the epic, the drama, the lyric, the history, or the
philosophical discussion. Equal to the highest creations, they refused
to tolerate anything lower; and they knew not the novel, because their
poetical notions were never left in a nebulous, prosaic state, but were
always developed into poetry.
Another reason, doubtless, was the wonderful activity of the Greek mind,
finding its amusement and relaxation in the forum, theatre, gymnasium,
or even the barber's shop, in constant mutual contact, in learning
wisdom and news by word of mouth. The long stories which they may
have told to each other, as an outlet for their natural vitality, as
extemporaneous exercises of curiosity and wit and fancy, did not creep
into their literature, which included only more mature and elaborate
attempts.
The modern novel was born of Christianity and feudalism. It is the child
of contemplation,--of that sort of luxurious intellectual mood which has
always distinguished the Oriental character, and was first Europeanized
in the twilight of the mediæval period. The fallen Roman Empire was
broken into countless fragments, which became feudal baronies. The heads
of the newly organized society were lordly occupants of castles, who in
time of peace had little to do. They were isolated from their neighbors
by acres, forests, and a stately etiquette, if not actual hostility.
There was no open-air theatre in the vicinity, no forum alive with
gossip and harangues, no public games, not even a loquacious barber's
shop. During the intervals between public or private wars,--when the
Turks were unmolested, the crescent and the dragon left in harmless
composure, and no Christians were in mortal turmoil with each other,--it
is little wonder that restless knights went forth from their loneliness
errant in quest of adventures. What was there to occupy life in those
barricaded stone-towers?
It was then that the domestic passion, love, rose into dignity. Homage
to woman assumed the potency of an idea, chivalry arose, and its truth,
honor, and obeisance were the first social responses from mankind to
Christianity. The castle was the emblem and central figure of the time:
it was the seat of power, the arena of manners, the nursery of love, and
the goal of gallantry; and around it hovered the shadows of religion,
loyalty, heroism. Domestic events, the private castellar life, were thus
exalted; but they could hardly suffice to engross and satisfy the spirit
of a warrior and crusader. A new diversion and excitement were demanded,
and soon, in response to the call, minstrels began to roam from castle
to castle, from court to court, telling long stories of heroism and
singing light songs of love. A spark from the Saracenic schools and
poets of Spain may have flitted into Provence to kindle the elements
of modern literature into its first development, the songs of the
Troubadours. Almost contemporary were the lays of the Minnesingers in
Germany and the romances of the Trouvères in Northern France. Beneath
the brooding spirit of a new civilization signs of life had at length
appeared, and Europe became vocal in every part with fantastic poems,
lyrical in the South, epical in the North. They were wildly exuberant
products, because severe art was unknown, but simple, _naïve_, and gay,
and suited to the taste of a time when the classics were regarded as
superstitiously as the heavens. Love and heroism, which somehow are the
leading themes of literature in all ages, now assumed the chivalric type
in the light hands of the earliest modern poets.
Yet these songs and metrical romances were most inadequate
representatives of the undeveloped principles which lay at the root of
Christian civilization. Even Hellenic genius might here have been at
fault, for it was a far harder task to give harmonious and complete
expression to the tendencies of a new religion and the germs of new
systems, than to frame into beauty the pagan clear-cut conceptions. The
Christian mind awoke under a fascination, and, for a time, could
only ejaculate its meanings in fragments, or hint them in vast
disproportions, could only sing snatches of new tunes. Its first signs
were gasps, rather than clear-toned notes, after the long perturbations
and preparations of history. The North and the South, the East and the
West had been mingled together; the heated and heaving mass had been
tempered by the leaven of Christianity:--and had all this been done
only to produce an octo-syllabic metre in praise of fantastic and semi-
barbaric sentiments and exploits? Had there been such commotions of the
universe only for a song? Surely these first creations of art, these
first attempts at literature, these first carvings of a rude spiritual
intensity, were only such as the Greeks may have forgotten any quantity
of before Homer came, their first glory and their oldest reminiscence.
One reason, perhaps, why mediæval literature assumed so light and
unartistic a form was, that by necessity it could not be full-orbed.
Religion could not enter into it as a plastic element, but was fixed, a
veiled, external figure, radiating indeed color and fragrance, but
not making one of the struggling, independent vitals of the heart.
Literature could play about this figure, but could not grasp it, and
take it in among the materials to be fashioned. The Church, through
its clergy, held jealous command of divine knowledge, beneath divine
guidance, and left no developments of it possible to the lay mind, which
culminated in minstrels and romancers. The Greeks, on the contrary,
whose religion was an apotheosis of the earth, framed upwards and only
by fiction of fancy handed downwards, derived all their theology from
the poets. Prophecy and taste were combined in Homer,--Isaiah and the
king's jester in Pindar. The care of the highest, not less than the
lowest departments of thought, fell upon the creative author, and
a happy suggestion became a new article in the Hellenic creed. His
composition thus bore the burden and was hallowed by the sanctity
of piety, the key to every human perfect thing. But the Provençal
celebrators of love and chivalry had no such dignity in their task. The
solemnities of thought and life were cared for and hedged about by the
Church as its own peculiar treasure, and to them there remained only the
lighter office of amusing. The age was eminently religious, but the poet
could not aid in erecting and adorning its temples. Every fair work of
art must have a central idea; but the proper principle of unity for
all grand artistic efforts not being within the reach of authors, it
followed that their productions were not symmetrical, did not have an
even outline nor cosmical meaning, did not consist of balanced parts,
were poorly framed and articulated, and were charming only by their
flavor, and not by their form. The cultured intellect will not seriously
work short of a final principle; and if a materialized religion, an
ecclesiastical structure, be firmly planted on the earth by the same
hand that established the universe and tapestried it with morning and
evening, and if its gates and archways, its altar, columns, and courts
be given in trust to chosen stewards as a divine priesthood, then the
highest problem of being is not a human problem, and the mind of the
laity has nothing more important to do than to play with the flowers of
gallant love and heroism. Such was the feeling, perhaps the unconscious
reasoning, of the founders of modern literature, as they began their
labors in the alcoves of that church architecture which covered
Christendom, embracing and symbolically expressing all its ideas
and institutes. Therefore some vice of imperfection, a character of
frivolity, or an artificially serious treatment of lightsome subjects
marked all the literature of the time, which resembled that grotesque
and unaccountable mathematical figure that has its centre outside of
itself.
Modern literature thus had its origin in romantic metrical pieces,
which, in the next stage, were transformed into prose novels. Two
circumstances contributed to this change,--a change which could not have
been anticipated; for the Trouvère _fabliaux_ and _romans_ promised only
epics, and the Troubadour _chansons_ and _tensons_ promised only lyrics
and dramas. But the mind was now obliged to traverse the unbeaten paths
of the Christian universe; it was overwhelmed by the extent of its
range, the richness and delicacy of its materials; it could with
difficulty poise itself amid the indefinite heights and depths which
encompassed it, and with greater difficulty could wield the magician's
rod which should sway the driving elements into artistic reconstruction.
This mental inadequacy alone would not have created the novel, but would
only have made lyrics and epics rare, the works of superior minds. The
second and cooperating circumstance was the prevalence of the Christian
and feudal habit of contemplation, which made constant literature a
necessity. Nothing less than eternal new romances could save the lords,
the ladies, and the dependents from _ennui_. But to supply these in a
style of proper and antique dignity was beyond the power of the poets.
In the wild forests of the mind they could rarely capture a mature idea,
and they were as yet unpractised artists. Yet contemplative leisure
called eagerly for constant titbits of romance to tickle the palate and
furnish a diversion, while the genius of Christian poetry was yet in
infantile weakness. The dilemma lasted but a moment, and was solved by
an heroic effort of the poets to do, not what they would, but what they
could. Yielding to practical necessities, they renounced the traditions
of the classical past, which now seemed to belong to another hemisphere,
abandoned the attempt to realize pure forms, postponed high art; melody
gave way to prose, the romance degenerated into the novel, and prose
fiction, which erst had flitted only between the tongue and ear,
entered, a straggling and reeling constellation, into the firmament of
literature. Hence the novel is the child of human impotency and despair.
The race thereby, with merriment and jubilee, confessed its inability
to fulfil at once its Christian destiny as completely as the Greeks
had fulfilled their pagan possibilities. Purity of art was left to
the future, to Providence, or to great geniuses, but the novel became
popular.
Thus the modern novel had its genesis not merely in a contemplative
mood, but in contemplation which was forced by the impetuous temper of
the times to fail of ever reaching the dignity of thoughtfulness. It
was the immature product of an immature mental state; and richly as
sometimes it was endowed by every human faculty, by imagination, wit,
taste, or even profound thought, it yet never reached the goal of
thought, never solved a problem, and, in its highest examples, professed
only to reveal, but not to guide, the reigning manners and customs.
Rarely did its materials pass through the fiery furnace whence art
issues; it was a work of unfaithful intellect, prompted by ideas which
never culminated and were never realized; and it did not rise much above
the "stuffs" of life, as distinguished from the organic creations of the
mind. A many-limbed and shambling creature, which was not made a
spirit by the power of an idea, it fluttered amid all the culture of a
people,--amid the ideas and modes of the state, the church, the family,
the world of society,--like a bungler among paint-pots; but the paints
still remained paints on the canvas, instead of being blended and
transfigured into a thing of beauty. It was the organ of society, but
not of the essential truths which vitalize society, and its incidents
did not rise much above the significance of accidents.
What the novel was in knightly days, that it has continued to be. There
is a mysterious practical potency in precedent. All ideas and institutes
seem to grow in the direction of their first steps, as if from germs.
Thus, the doctrines of the Church fathers are still peculiarly
authoritative in theology, and the immemorial traditions of the common
law are still binding in civil life. Man seems to be an experimental
far more than a freely rational animal; for a fact in the past exerts
a greater influence in determining future action than any new idea. A
revolution must strike deep to eradicate the presumption in favor of
ages. Learned men are now trying to read the hieroglyphics of the East,
the records of an unknown history. Perhaps the result of their labors
will temper the next period in the course of the world more than all our
thinkers. Destiny seems to travel in the harness of precedents.
Thus, in obedience to the law of precedent, the mild gambols, the
_naïve_ superficiality, the child-like irresponsibility for thinking,
which were the characteristics of the first European novels, have
generally distinguished the unnumbered and unclassified broods of them
which have abounded in subsequent literature. Designed chiefly to amuse,
to divert for a moment rather than to present an admirable work of art,
to interest rather than to instruct and elevate, the modern romance has
in general excused itself from thorough elaboration. Instead of being
a chastened and symmetrical product of the whole organic mind, it has
mainly been inspired by the imagination, which has been called the fool
in the family of the faculties, and wrought out by the assistance of
memory, which mechanically links the mad suggestions of its partner
with temporal events. It is in literature something like what a feast
presided over by the king's jester and steward would have been in
mediaeval social life. Let any novel be finished, let all the resources
of the mind be conscientiously expended on it, let it become a thorough
intellectual creation, and, instead of remaining a novel, it would
assume the dignity of an epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, or history. Its
nebulae would be resolved into stars.
Has, then, the mild and favorite blossom, the _fabula romanensis_, which
was so abundant in the Middle Ages, which has grown so luxuriantly
and given so general delight in modern times,--has it no place in
the natural history of literature? Shall it be mentioned only as an
uncompleted something else,--as an abortive effort of thought,--as
a crude _mélange_ of elements that have not been purified and fused
together in the focus of the mind? And were the Muses right in refusing
to admit it into their sacred realm of art?
An affirmative answer can hardly be true; for an absurdity appears in
the reduction that it would cause in the quantity of our veritable
literature, and in the condemnation that it would pass on the tastes of
many most intelligent writers and readers. Yet a comparison of the novel
with the classical and pure forms of literature will show its unlikeness
to them in design, dignity, and essential quality.
It was a favorite thesis of Fielding, often repeated by his successors,
that the novel is a sort of comic epopee. Yet the romantic and the epic
styles have nothing in common, except that both are narrative. The epic,
the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation and a
civilization; the novel, of a neighborhood and a generation. A thousand
years culminate in the former; it sums up the burden and purpose of
a long historical period; and its characters are prominent types in
universal history and in highest thought. But the novel is the child
of a day; it is the organ of manners and phases, not of principles and
passions; it does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical
relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not
a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles,
Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic
expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck
of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as
Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the
bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll
away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically significant in
the mind.
A contrast of any page of an epic with one of a romance will show
their essential unlikeness. Note, for instance, the beginning of the
"Gerusalemme Liberata." The first stanza presents "the illustrious
captain who warred for Heaven and saved the sepulchre of Christ,--the
many deeds which he wrought by arms and by wisdom,--his great toil, and
his glorious achievement. Hell opposed him, the mingled populations
of Asia and Africa leagued against him,--but all in vain, for Heaven
smiled, and guided the wandering bands beneath his sacred ensigns." Such
are the splendid elements of the poem, outlining in a stanza the finest
type, objects, and scenery of mediaeval heroism. The second stanza
invokes the Muse,--"Not thou whose brow was wreathed with the unenduring
bays of Helicon, but thou who in angelic choirs hast a golden crown set
with immortal stars,--do thou breathe celestial ardor into the poet's
heart!" Then follows an allusion to a profound matter of temper and
experience. He prays that "the Muse will pardon, if sometimes he adorn
his page with other charms than her own; for thus, perhaps, he may
win the world to his higher meanings, shrouding severe truths in soft
verses. As the rim of the bitter cup is sweetened which is extended to
the sick child, so may he, by beauties not quite Christian, attract
mankind to read his whole poem to their health." Such is the stately
soaring of the epical Muse, the Muse of ideal history. Scholars find
Greece completely prefigured in Homer, and the time may come when Dante
and Tasso shall be the leading authorities for the history of the Middle
Ages, and Milton for that of the ages of Protestantism.
In such comparison novels are insignificant and imbecile. Though, like
"Contarini Fleming," they may begin with a magnificent paragraph, and
fine passages be scattered through the volumes, they are yet rarely
stories of ideas as well as persons, rarely succeed in involving events
of more than temporary interest, and rarely, perhaps, should be called
great mental products.
Not less strikingly does the difference between the epic and the novel
appear in their different uses. The one is the inspiration of great
historical action, the other of listless repose. The statesman, in the
moment of debate, and in the dignity of conscious power, finds sympathy
and encouragement in a passage of his favorite epic. Its grand types
are ever in fellowship with high thoughts. The novel is for the lighter
moment after the deed is done, when he is no longer brunting Fate, but
reclining idly, and reflecting humorously or malignly on this life. The
epic is closely and strongly framed, like the gladiator about to strike
a blow: the novel is relaxed and at careless ease, like the club-man
after lighting his pipe. The latter does not bear the burden of severe
responsibility, but is a thing of holidays and reactions. Still, as of
old, it answers to the contemplative castellar cry,--"Hail, romancer!
come and divert me,--make me merry! I wish to be occupied, but not
employed,--to muse passively, not actively. Therefore, hail! tell me
a story,--sing me a song! If I were now in the van of an army and
civilization, higher thoughts would engross me. But I am unstrung, and
wish to be fanned, not helmeted."
It has sometimes been claimed that the romantic style is essentially
lyrical. But though the idea from which many novels start was perhaps
the proper germ for one or more lyrics, it never attains in romance
a pure and unincumbered development. We may illustrate the different
intellectual creations founded on a common conception by imagining how
one of Wordsworth's lyrical fancies might have been developed in three
volumes of romance instead of three stanzas of poetry.
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love."
The first line, romantically treated, would include description,
soliloquy, and narrative, to show that in solitude the maiden had
habits, duties, something to think about and be interested in. The
accidental approach of some cosmopolitan visitor would give occasion to
illustrate dramatically the contrast between life in retirement and in
society. Some novelists also would inflict, either by direct lecture
or by conversation of the actors, very admirable reflections on the
comparative advantages of the two conditions. The second line would
perhaps suggest only geographical lore and descriptions of scenery,
though historical episodes might be added. The third line would
involve a minute description of dress, complexion, stature, and wild
gracefulness. In a psychological investigation it would come out what
strange and simple notions she entertained of the great world, and what
charming qualities of unsophisticated character belonged to her as she
merrily or pensively went through her accustomed tasks. The fourth line,
in which love is the text, would swell into mammoth proportions. New
characters would be especially necessary in this culminating part of the
story; and though they should be "very few," they would long occupy the
novelist with their diverse excellencies or villanies, their rivalries
and strategies. It is probable that the complete development of the
stanza _à la romance_ would give a circumstantial history of the maiden
from her birth, with glimpses more or less clear of all the remarkable
people who dwelt near or occasionally visited the springs of Dove. Thus
the same conception would become a stanza or a volume, according as its
treatment were lyrical or romantic.
It need hardly be shown that the novel is not a drama, not a history,
nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise. It may have
sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the
highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in
some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they
were the collected charms of literature, do not make a work of art. The
styles are mixed,--a certain sign, according to Lessing, of corruption
of taste. Novels present the anomaly of being fiction, but not
poetry,--of being fruits of imagination, but of imagination improvising
its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from
a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of
ideas. Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they
may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for
the future historian who, in searching the "Pickwick Papers"
for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the
undisciplined witches of Mr. Dickens's imagination.
If the novel be thus excluded from all the classical orders of
literature, a trembling question is suggested, whether it may not be
nevertheless a legitimate work of art. Though it be a _mélange_ of
styles, a story told, in literature what the story-teller is in
society, yet why should it not have the honor among readers which
the story-teller in all ages has had among listeners? Though by
its escutcheon it assume a place among the amusing rather than the
instructive class of books, why should not its nobility be recognized?
The answer is found in the essential nature of art, in the almost
eternal distinction between life and thought, between actual and ideal
realities. Unity amid diversity is the type of intellectual beauty and
the law of the universe; to comprehend it is the goal of science, and
to reproduce it in human works is the aim of art. Yet how hard it is to
find the central and essential idea in a world of apparent accidents and
delusions! to chase the real and divine thing as it plays among cheats
and semblances! Hence the difficulty of thorough thought, of faithful
intellectual performance, of artistic creation. To the thoughtless man
life is merely the rough and monotonous exterior of the cameo-stone; but
the artist sees through its strata, discerns its layers of many colors,
and from its surface to its vital centre works them all together into
varied beauty. To live is common; but art belongs only to the finest
minds and the best moments. Life is a burden of present multitudinous
phenomena; but art has the simple unity of perfect science, and is
a goal and aspiration. Life comes by birth, art by thought, and the
travail that produces art is ofttimes the severer. The fashions of life
are bubbles on the surface, and pass away with the season; but the
creations of art belong to the depths of the spiritual world, where they
shine like stars and systems in the physical universe.
Story-telling is the most charming of occupations, and, whatever its
relation to literary art, it is one of the graces of the art of life.
Old as the race, it has always been in fashion on the earth, the delight
of every clime from the Orient to the Occident, and of every age from
childhood to second childhood. We live in such a concatenation of
things,--our hopes, fears, loves, hates, struggles, sympathies, defeats,
and triumphs make such a medley, with a sort of divine fascination about
it,--that we are always interested to hear how anybody has borne himself
through whatever varieties of fortune. At the basis of every other
character which can be assumed by man lie the conceiver and the teller
of stories; story-telling is the _primá facie_ quality of an intelligent
and sociable being leading a life full of events in a universe full
of phenomena. The child believes the wonders of romance by a right
instinct; narratives of love and peril and achievement come home to the
spirit of the youth; and the mystical, wonder-expecting eye of childhood
returns to old age. The humor, wit, piety, and pathos of every age
abound in the written stories of its people and children.
Yet between the vocal story and the story in literature there is an
immense difference, like that between talking and writing, between life
and art. The qualities which in the story-teller make even frivolity
weighty and dulness significant--the play of the eye, the lips, the
countenance, the voice, the whole sympathetic expression of the
person--are wanting to the novel; it has passed from the realm of life
to that of art; it loses the charm which personal relations give even
to trifles; it must have the charm which the mind can lend only to its
cherished offspring.
Considered as a thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of
such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse
in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,--now harlequin, now
gossip, now threnodist,--with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy,
uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,--now relating the story, with
childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart
ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting
the little story-cricket that creeps along from page to page with
immense loads of science, history, politics, ethics, religion,
criticism, and prophecy,--always regarded with kindness, always welcomed
in idleness, always presenting in a simple way some spectacle of
merriment or grief, as changeful as the seasons or the fashions,--with
all its odd characteristics, the novel is remarkably popular, and not
lightly to be esteemed as an element in our social and mental culture.
There is probably no other class of books, with literary pretensions,
that contain so little thinking, in proportion to their quantity of
matter, as novels. They can scarcely be called organic productions, for
they may be written and published in sections, like one of the lowest
classes of animals, which have no organization, but live equally well in
parts, and run off in opposite directions when cut in halves. Thoughts
and books, like living creatures, have their grades, and it is only
those which stand lowest in respect of intellectuality that admit of
fractional existence. A finished work of the mind is so delicately
adjusted and closely related, part to part, that a fracture would be
fatal. Conceive of Phidias sending off from his studio at Athens his
statue of Jupiter Olympius in monthly numbers,--despatching now the
feet, now the legs, now the trunk, in successive pieces, now the
shoulders, and at last crowning the whole with a head!
The composition of novels must be reckoned, in design at least, one of
the fine arts, but in fact they belong rather to periodical than to
immortal literature. They do not submit to severity of treatment, abide
by no critical laws, but are the gypsies and Bohemians of literature,
bringing all the savagery of wild genius into the _salons_ of taste.
Though tolerated, admired, and found to be interesting, they do not
belong to the system of things, play no substantial part in the serious
business of life, but, as the world moves on, give place to their
successors, not having developed any principle, presented any picture,
or stated any fact, in a way to suggest ideas more than social
phenomena. They are not permanent, therefore, because finally only
ideas, and not facts, are generally remembered; the past is known to us
more, and exclusively as it becomes remote, by the conceptions of poets
and philosophic historians, the myriads of events which occupied a
generation being forgotten, and all the pith and meaning of them being
transmitted in a stanza or a chapter. Poetry never grows old, and
whatsoever masterpieces of thought always win the admiration of the
enlightened; but many a novel that has been the lion of a season passes
at once away, never more to be heard of here. With few exceptions, the
splendid popularity that greets the best novels fades away in time
slowly or rapidly. A half-century is a fatal trial for the majority; few
are revived, and almost none are read, after a century; will anybody
but the most curious antiquary be interested in them after one or
two thousand years? Without delaying to give the full rationale of
exceptions which vex this like every other general remark, it may
be added briefly that fairy stories are in their nature fantastic
mythological poems, most proper to the heroic age of childhood, that
historical romances may be in essence and dignity fantastic histories or
epics, and that, from whatever point of view, Cervantes remains hardly
less admirable than Ariosto, or the "Bride of Lammermoor" than the "Lay
of the Last Minstrel."
In the mental as in the physical world, art, diamonds and gems come by
long elaboration. A thoughtless man may write perennially, while the
result of silent meditation and a long tortured soul may be expressed
in a minute. The work of the former is akin to conversation, one of the
fugitive pleasures of a day; that of the latter will, perchance, be a
star in the firmament of the mind. Eugène Sue and Béranger both wished
to communicate their reflections on society. The former dissipated his
energies in the _salons_, was wise and amusing over wine, exchanged
learning and jests, studied the drawing-room as if it were the
macrocosm, returned to his chamber, put on kid gloves, and from the odds
and ends of his dishevelled wits wrote at a gallop, without ever looking
back, his "Mystères de Paris." The latter lived in an attic year after
year, contemplated with cheerful anxiety the volatile world of France
and the perplexed life of man, and elaborated word by word, with
innumerable revisions, his short songs, which are gems of poetry,
charming at once the ear and the heart. Novels are perhaps too easily
written to be of lasting value. An unpremeditated word, in which the
thoughts of years are exploded, may be one of the most admirable of
intellectual phenomena, but an unpremeditated volume can only be a
demonstration of human weakness.
The argument thus far has been in favor of the Muses. Hellenic taste and
the principles of high art ratify the condemnation passed on the novel
by the aesthetic goddesses. A wider view, however, will annul the
sentence, giving in its stead a warning and a lesson. If the prose
romance be not Hellenic, it is nevertheless humane, and has been in
honor almost universally throughout the Orient and the Occident. Its
absence from the classical literature was a marvel and exception, a
phenomenon of the clearest-minded and most active of races, who thought,
but did not contemplate,--whose ideal world consisted only of simple,
but stately legends of bright-limbed gods and heroes. A felicitous
production of high art, also, is among the rarest of exceptions, and
will be till the Millennium. Myriads of comparative failures follow in
the suite of a masterpiece. We have, therefore, judged the novel by an
impracticable standard, by a comparison with the highest aims rather
than the usual attainments of other branches of literary art. Human
weakness makes poetry, philosophy, and history imperfect in execution,
though they aspire to absolute beauty and truth; human weakness
suggested the novel, which is imperfect in design, written as an
amusement and relief, in despair of sounding the universe. A novel is in
its nature and as a matter of necessity an artistic failure; it
pretends to nothing higher; but under the slack laws which govern its
composition, multitudes of fine and suggestive characters, incidents,
and sayings may be smuggled into it, contrary to all the usages and
rules of civilized literature. Hence the secret of its popularity,
that it is the organ of average as distinguished from highest thought.
Science and art are the goals of destiny, but rarely is there a
thinker or writer who has an eye single to them. It is an heroic,
self-sacrificing, and small platoon which in every age brunts Fate, and,
fighting on the shadowy frontier, makes conquests from the realm of
darkness. Their ideas are passed back from hand to hand, and become
known in fragments and potent as tendencies among the mass of the race,
who live in the circle of the attained and travel in the routine of
ages. The novelist is one of the number who half comprehend them, and
borrows them from all quarters to introduce into the rich _mélange_ of
his work. To solve a social problem, to reproduce an historical age or
character, or to develop the truth and poetry latent in any event, is
difficult, and not many will either lead or follow a severe attempt;
but the novelist will merrily chronicle his story and link with it in a
thousand ways some salient reminiscences of life and thought.
What, then, is the highest excellence that the novel can attain? It is
the carnival of literary art. It deals sympathetically and humorously,
not philosophically and strictly, with the panorama and the principles
of life. A transcript, but not a transfiguration of Nature, it assumes a
thousand forms, surpassing all other books in the immense latitude left
to the writer, in the wild variety of things which it may touch, but
need not grasp. Its elements are the forests, the cities, and the seven
ages of man,--characters and fortunes how diversified! All species
of thinkers and actors, of ideas and passions, all the labyrinthine
complications and scenery of existence, may be illustrated in persons or
introduced by-the-by; into whatever colors make up the phantasmagoria
of collective humanity the novelist may dip his brush, in painting
his moving picture. Yet problems need not be fully appreciated, nor
characters or actions profoundly understood. It must be an engrossing
story, but the theme and treatment are as lawless as the conversation of
an evening party. The mind plays through all the realm of its knowledge
and experience, and sheds sparks from all the torches of thought, as
scenes and topics succeed each other. The pure forms of literature may
be reminiscences present to the imagination, the germs of new truths and
social arrangements may occupy the reason; but the novelist is neither
practical, nor philosophical, nor artistic; he is simply in a dream; and
pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the
sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque
mediæval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their
place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each
other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here
below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men
who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the
drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together in the
revelries of the novel. To state the degree of excellence possible to
a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of
essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength
of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius
free to introduce his creations just as they occur to him, and the
author of talent free to range through all books and all time and
reproduce brilliant sayings and odd characters,--which, with no other
connecting thread than a story, freaks like a spirit through every
shade of feeling and region of thought, from the domestic hearth to the
ultimate bounds of speculative inquiry,--and which, by its daring
and careless combinations of incongruous elements, exhibits a free
embodiment in prose of the peculiar genius of the romantic.
And some philosophers have styled romance the special glory of
Christianity. It is certainly the characteristic of critical as
distinguished from organic periods,--of the mind acting mystically in
a savage and unknown universe, rather than of the mind that has reduced
the heavens and earth to its arts and sciences. The novel, therefore,
as the wildest organ of romance, is most appropriate to a time of great
intellectual agitation, when intellectual men are but half-conscious of
the tendencies that are setting about them, and consequently cease to
propose to themselves final goals, do not attempt scrupulous art, but
play jubilantly with current facts. Hence, perhaps, its popularity since
the first conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, and especially since
the great French Revolution, when amid new inventions and new ideas
mankind has contemplatively looked for the coming events, the new
historical eras, which were casting their shadows before.
When, some time, Christian art shall become classical, and Christian
ideas be developed by superior men as fairly as the Hellenic conceptions
were, the novel may either assume to itself some peculiar excellency, or
may cease to hold the comparative rank in literature which it enjoys at
present. Then the numberless prose romances which occupy the present
generation of readers will, perhaps, be collected in some immense
_corpus_, like the Byzantine historians, will be reckoned among the
curiosities of literature, and will at least have the merit of making
the study of antiquities easy and interesting. There is an old
couplet,--
Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
At a time when extemporaneous composition and thoughtless reading are
much in fashion, it will not be amiss to invoke profounder studies, and
slower, but more useful and permanent results. Let it be remembered that
even the Divine Mind first called into being the chaos of creation, and
then in seven days reviewed and elaborated it into a beautiful order.
* * * * *
A LEGEND OF MARYLAND.
"AN OWRE TRUE TALE."
[Concluded.]
CHAPTER VII.
THE OLD CITY.
Let me now once more shift the scene. In the summer of 1684, the
peaceful little port of St. Mary's was visited by a phenomenon of rare
occurrence in those days. A ship of war of the smaller class, with the
Cross of St. George sparkling on her broad flag, came gliding to an
anchorage abreast the town. The fort of St. Inigoes gave the customary
salute, which I have reason to believe was not returned. Not long after
this, a bluff, swaggering, vulgar captain came on shore. He made no
visit of respect or business to any member of the Council. He gave no
report of his character or the purpose of his visit, but strolled to the
tavern,--I suppose to that kept by Mr. Cordea, who, in addition to his
calling of keeper of the ordinary, was the most approved shoemaker of
the city,--and here regaled himself with a potation of strong waters.
It is likely that he then repaired to Mr. Blakiston's, the King's
Collector,--a bitter and relentless enemy of the Lord Proprietary,--and
there may have met Kenelm Chiseldine, John Coode, Colonel Jowles, and
others noted for their hatred of the Calvert family, and in such company
as this indulged himself in deriding Lord Baltimore and his government,
During his stay in the port, his men came on shore, and, imitating their
captain's unamiable temper, roamed in squads about the town and its
neighborhood, conducting themselves in a noisy, hectoring manner towards
the inhabitants, disturbing the repose of the quiet burghers, and
shocking their ears with ribald abuse of the authorities. These
roystering sailors--I mention it as a point of historical interest--had
even the audacity to break into Alderman Garret Van Swearingen's garden,
and to pluck up and carry away his cabbages and other vegetables,
and--according to the testimony of Mr. Cordea, whose indignation was the
more intense from his veneration for the Alderman, and from the fact
that he made his Worship's shoes--they would have killed one of his
Worship's sheep, if his (Cordea's) man had not prevented them; and
after this, as if on purpose more keenly to lacerate his feelings, they
brought these cabbages to Cordea's house, and there boiled them before
his eyes,--he being sick and not able to drive them away.
After a few days spent in this manner, the swaggering captain--whose
name, it was soon bruited about, was Thomas Allen, of his Majesty's
Navy--went on board of his ketch,--or brig, as we should call it,--the
Quaker, weighed anchor, and set sail towards the Potomac, and thence
stood down the Bay upon the coast of Virginia. Every now and then, after
his departure, there came reports to the Council of insults offered by
Captain Allen to the skippers of sundry Bay craft and other peaceful
traders on the Chesapeake; these insults consisting generally in
wantonly compelling them to heave to and submit to his search, in
vexatiously detaining them, overhauling their papers, and offending
them with coarse vituperation of themselves, as well as of the Lord
Proprietary and his Council.
About a month later the Quaker was observed to enter the Patuxent River,
and cast anchor just inside of the entrance, near the Calvert County
shore, and opposite Christopher Rousby's house at Drum Point. This
was--says my chronicle--on Thursday, the 30th of October, in this year
1684. As yet Captain Allen had not condescended to make any report of
his arrival in the Province to any officer of the Proprietary.
On Sunday morning, the 2d of November, the city was thrown into a
state of violent ebullition--like a little red-hot tea-kettle--by the
circulation of a rumor that got wind about the hour the burghers were
preparing to go to church. It was brought from Patuxent late in the
previous night, and was now whispered from one neighbor to another, and
soon came to boil with an extraordinary volume of steam. Stripping it
of the exaggeration natural to such an excitement, the rumor was
substantially this: That Colonel Talbot, hearing of the arrival of
Captain Allen in the Patuxent on Thursday, and getting no message or
report from him, set off on Friday morning, in an angry state of mind,
and rode over to Patuxent, determined to give the unmannerly captain a
lesson upon his duty. That as soon as he reached Mattapony House,
he took his boat and went on board the ketch. That there he found
Christopher Rousby, the King's Collector, cronying with Captain Allen,
and upholding him in his disrespect to the government. That Colonel
Talbot was very sharp upon Rousby, not liking him for old grudges, and
more moved against him now; and that he spoke his mind both to Captain
Allen and Christopher Rousby, and so got into a high quarrel with them.
That when he had said all he desired to say to them, he made a move to
leave the ketch in his boat, intending to return to Mattapony House; but
they who were in the cabin prevented him, and would not let him go. That
thereupon the quarrel broke out afresh, and became more bitter; and it
being now in the night, and all in a great heat of passion, the parties
having already come from words to blows, Talbot drew his skean, or
dagger, and stabbed Rousby to the heart. That nothing was known on
shore of the affray till Saturday evening, when the body was brought to
Rousby's house; after which it became known to the neighborhood; and one
of the men of Major Sewall's plantation, which adjoined Rousby's, having
thus heard of it, set out and rode that night over to St. Mary's with
the news, which he gave to the Major before midnight. It was added, that
Colonel Talbot was now detained on board of the ketch, as a prisoner, by
Captain Allen.
This was the amount of the dreadful story over which the gossips of St.
Mary's were shaking their wise heads and discoursing on "crowner's quest
law" that Sunday morning.
As soon as Major Sewall received these unhappy midnight tidings, he went
instantly to his colleague, Colonel Darnall, and communicated them to
him; and they, being warm friends of Talbot's, were very anxious to get
him out of the custody of this Captain Allen. They therefore, on Sunday
morning, issued a writ directed to Roger Brooke, the sheriff of Calvert
County, commanding him to arrest the prisoner and bring him before
the Council. Their next move was to ride over--the same morning--to
Patuxent, taking with them Mr. Robert Carvil, and John Llewellin, their
secretary. Upon reaching the river, all four went on board the ketch
to learn the particulars of the quarrel. These particulars are not
preserved in the record; and we have nothing better than our conjectures
as to what they disclosed. We know nothing specific of the cause or
character of the quarrel. The visitors found Talbot loaded with irons,
and Captain Allen in a brutal state of exasperation, swearing that he
would not surrender his prisoner to the authorities of the Province, but
would carry him to Virginia and deliver him to the government there, to
be dealt with as Lord Effingham should direct. He was grossly insulting
to the two members of the Council who had come on this inquiry; and
after they had left his vessel, in the pinnace, to return to the shore,
he affected to believe that they had some concealed force lying in wait
to seize the pinnace and its crew, and so ordered them back on board,
but after a short detention thought better of it, and suffered them
again to depart.
The contumacy of the captain, and the declaration of his purpose to
carry away Talbot out of the jurisdiction of the Province within which
the crime was committed, and to deliver him to the Governor of Virginia,
was a grave assault upon the dignity of the government and a gross
contempt of the public authorities, which required the notice of the
Council. A meeting of this body was therefore held on the Patuxent,
at Rich Neck, on the morning of the 4th of November. I find that five
members were present on that occasion. Besides Colonel Darnall and Major
Sewall, there were Counsellor Tailler and Colonels Digges and Burgess.
Here the matter was debated and ended in a feeble resolve,--that, if
this Captain Allen should persist in his contumacy and take Talbot to
Virginia, the Council should immediately demand of Lord Effingham
his redelivery into this Province. Alas, they could only scold! This
resolution was all they could oppose to the bullying captain and the
guns of the troublesome little Quaker.
Allen, after hectoring awhile in this fashion, and raising the wrath of
the Colonels of the Council until they were red in the cheeks, defiantly
took his departure, carrying with him his prisoner, in spite of the
vehement indignation of the liegemen of the Province.
We may imagine the valorous anger of our little metropolis at this
act or crime of lese-majesty. I can see the group of angry burghers,
collected on the porch of Cordea's tavern, in a fume as they listen to
Master John Llewellin's account of what had taken place,--Llewellin
himself as peppery as his namesake when he made Ancient Pistol eat
his leek; and I fancy I can hear Alderman Van Swearingen's choleric
explosion against Lord Effingham, supposing his Lordship should presume
to slight the order of the Council in respect to Talbot's return.
But these fervors were too violent to last. Christopher Rousby was duly
deposited under the greensward upon the margin of Harper's Creek, where
I found him safe, if not sound, more than a hundred and fifty years
afterwards. The metropolis gradually ceased to boil, and slowly fell
to its usual temperature of repose, and no more disturbed itself with
thoughts of the terrible captain. Talbot, upon being transferred to the
dominion of Virginia, was confined in the jail of Gloucester County, in
the old town of Gloucester, on the northern bank of York River.
The Council now opened their correspondence with Lord Effingham,
demanding the surrender of their late colleague. On their part, it was
marked by a deferential respect, which, it is evident, they did not
feel, and which seems to denote a timid conviction of the favor of
Virginia and the disgrace of Maryland in the personal feelings of the
King. It is manifest they were afraid of giving offence to the lordly
governor of the neighboring Province. On the part of Lord Effingham, the
correspondence is cavalier, arrogant, and peremptory.
The Council write deploringly to his Lordship. They "pray"--as they
phrase it--"in humble, civil, and obliging terms, to have the prisoner
safely returned to this government." They add,--"Your Excellency's great
wisdom, prudence, and integrity, as well as neighborly affection and
kindness for this Province, manifested and expressed, will, we doubt
not, spare us the labor of straining for arguments to move your
Excellency's consideration to this our so just and reasonable demand."
Poor Colonel Darnall, Poor Colonel Digges, and the rest of you Colonels
and Majors,--to write such whining hypocrisy as this! George Talbot
would not have written to Lord Effingham in such phrase, if one of you
had been unlawfully transported to his prison and Talbot were your
pleader!
The nobleman to whom this servile language was addressed was a hateful
despot, who stands marked in the history of Virginia for his oppressive
administration, his arrogance, and his faithlessness.
To give this beseeching letter more significance and the flattery it
contained more point, it was committed to the charge of two gentlemen
who were commissioned to deliver it in person to his Lordship. These
were Mr. Clement Hill and Mr. Anthony Underwood.
Effingham's answer was cool, short, and admonitory. The essence of it
is in these words:--"We do not think it warrantable to comply with your
desires, but shall detain Talbot prisoner until his Majesty's particular
commands be known therein." A postscript is added of this import:--"I
recommend to your consideration, that you take care, as far as in you
lies, that, in the matter of the Customs, his Majesty receive no further
detriment by this unfortunate accident."
One almost rejoices to read such an answer to the fulsome language which
drew it out. This correspondence runs through several such epistles. The
Council complain of the rudeness and coarse behavior of Captain Allen,
and particularly of his traducing Lord Baltimore's government and
attempting to excite the people against it. Lord Effingham professes to
disbelieve such charges against "an officer who has so long served his
King with fidelity, and who could not but know what was due to his
superiors."
Occasionally this same faithful officer, Captain Allen himself,
reappears upon the stage. We catch him at a gentleman's house in
Virginia, boasting over his cups--for he seems to have paid habitual
tribute to a bowl of punch--that he will break up the government of
Maryland, and annex this poor little Province of ours to Virginia: a
fact worth notice just now, as it makes it clear that annexation is not
the new idea of the Nineteenth Century, but lived in very muddy brains
a long time ago. I now quit this correspondence to look after a bit of
romance in a secret adventure.