The prospect hardly seems inviting; but as the English guns _Essays in miniature

merrily away in behalf of English tradition, they were promptly met by

an answering roar from this side of the water. A Boston paper rushed

gallantly to the defense of the New York periodical, and gave Mr. Lang—to

use a pet expression of his own—“his kail through the reek.” American

children, it appears, are too sensitively organized to endure the

unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories. The British child may sleep

soundly in its little cot after hearing about the Babes in the Wood; the

American infant is prematurely saddened by such unmerited misfortune. “If

a consensus of American mothers could be taken,” says the Boston writer,

“our English critic might be infinitely disgusted to know in how many

nurseries these cruel tales must be changed, or not told at all to the

children of less savage generations. No mother nowadays tells them in

their unmitigated brutality.”

Is this true, I wonder, and are our supersensitive babies reared perforce

on the optimistic version of Red Riding Hood, where the wolf is cut

open by the woodman, and the little girl and her grandmother jump out,

safe and sound? Their New England champion speaks of the “intolerable

misery”—a very strong phrase—which he suffered in infancy from having

his nurse tell him of the Babes in the Wood; while the Scriptural

stories were apparently every whit as unbearable and heart-breaking. “I

remember,” he says, “two children, strong, brave man and woman now, who

in righteous rage plucked the Slaughter of the Innocents out from the

family Bible.” This was a radical measure, to say the least, and if many

little boys and girls started in to expurgate, the Scriptures in such

liberal fashion, the holy book would soon present a sadly mutilated

appearance. Moreover, it seems to me that such an anecdote, narrated

with admirable assurance, reveals very painfully the lack of a fine

and delicate spirituality in the religious training of children; of

that grace and distinction which are akin to saintship, and are united

so charmingly in those to whom truth has been inseparably associated

with beauty. There is a painting by Ghirlandaio hanging over the altar

in the chapel of the Foundling Asylum in Florence. It represents the

Adoration of the Magi, and kneeling by the side of the Wise Men is a

little group of the Holy Innocents, their tiny garments stained with

blood, their hands clasped in prayer; while the Divine Child turns from

his mother’s embraces, and from the kings’ rich gifts to greet the little

companions who have yielded up their spotless lives for him. Now, surely

those lean, brown Florentine orphans, who have always before their eyes

this beautiful and tender picture, absorb through it alone a religious

sentiment unfelt by American children who are familiar only with the ugly

and inane prints of American Sunday-schools, in which I have known the

line, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” to be illustrated by a man with

a magnifying-glass in his hand. Possibly our Sunday-school scholars,

being more accurately instructed as to dates, could inform the little

Florentines that the Innocents were not slaughtered until after the Magi

had returned to the East. But no child who had looked day after day upon

Ghirlandaio’s lovely picture—more appealing in its pathos than Holman

Hunt’s brilliant and jocund Triumph of the Innocents—could desire to

pluck “in righteous rage” that chapter from the Bible. He would have at

least some dim and imperfect conception of the spiritual meaning, the

spiritual joy, which underlie the pain and horror of the story.

This reflection will help us in some measure to come to a decision, when

we return to the vexed problem of nursery tales and legends. I believe it

is as well to cultivate a child’s emotions as to cultivate his manners

or his morals, and the first step in such a direction is necessarily

taken through the stories told him in infancy. If a consensus of mothers

would reject the good old fairy tales “in their unmitigated brutality,”

a consensus of men of letters would render a different verdict; and such

men, who have been children in their time, and who look back with wistful

delight upon the familiar figures who were their earliest friends, are

entitled to an opinion in the case. How admirable was the “righteous

rage” of Charles Lamb, when he wanted to buy some of these same brutal

fairy stories for the little Coleridges, and could find nothing but the

correct and commonplace literature which his whole soul abhorred! “Mrs.

Barbauld’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about,” he wrote

indignantly to papa Coleridge, “and have banished all the old classics

of the nursery. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld’s

books convey, must, it seems, come to a child in the shape of knowledge;

and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when

he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and that Billy is better than

a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales

which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be

no bigger than a child.”

Just such a wild tale, fantastic rather than beautiful, haunted

Châteaubriand all his life—the story of Count Combourg’s wooden leg,

which, three hundred years after its owner’s death, was seen at night

walking solemnly down the steep turret stairs, attended by a huge black

cat. Not at all the kind of story we would select to tell a child

nowadays. By no means! Even the little Châteaubriand heard it from

peasant lips. Yet in after years, when he had fought the battle of life,

and fought it with success; when he had grown gray, and illustrious,

and disillusioned, and melancholy, what should come back to his mind,

with its old pleasant flavor of terror and mystery, but the vision of

Count Combourg’s wooden leg taking its midnight constitutional, with

the black cat stepping softly on before? So he notes it gravely down in

his Memoirs, just as Scott notes in his diary the pranks of Whippity

Stourie, the Scotch bogie that steals at night into open nursery windows;

and just as Heine, in gay, sunlit Paris, recalls with joy the dark,

sweet, sombre tales of the witch and fairy haunted forests of Germany.

These are impressions worth recording, and they are only a few out of

many which may be gathered from similar sources. That which is vital in

literature or tradition, which has survived the obscurity and wreckage

of the past, whether as legend, or ballad, or mere nursery rhyme, has

survived in right of some intrinsic merit of its own, and will not

be snuffed out of existence by any of our precautionary or hygienic

measures. We could not banish Bluebeard if we would. He is as immortal

as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this

uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who, thank

Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown up—will still

tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big brave brothers

come galloping up the road. We could not even rid ourselves of Mother

Goose, though she, too, has her mortal enemies, who protest periodically

against her cruelty and grossness. We could not drive Punch and Judy from

our midst, though Mr. Punch’s derelictions have been the subject of much

serious and adverse criticism. It is not by such barbarous rhymes or by

such brutal spectacles that we teach a child the lessons of integrity and

gentleness, explain our nursery moralists, and probably they are correct.

Moreover, Bluebeard does not teach a lesson of conjugal felicity, and

Cinderella is full of the world’s vanities, and Puss in Boots is one

long record of triumphant effrontery and deception. An honest and

self-respecting lad would have explained to the king that he was not the

Marquis of Carabas at all; that he had no desire to profit by his cat’s

ingenious falsehoods, and no weak ambition to connect himself with the

aristocracy. Such a hero would be a credit to our modern schoolrooms, and

lift a load of care from the shoulders of our modern critics. Only the

children would have none of him, but would turn wistfully back to those

brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid past, and of

which no hand shall rob them.

THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT

A great deal of generous scorn has been expended of late years upon those

old-fashioned novels in which the characters were given plenty to do,

and did it with a supreme energy and passion, only possible, perhaps,

within the enchanted precincts of fiction. Such stories, we are told, are

false to life, which is monotonous, uneventful, and made up day by day of

minute and tedious detail, small pleasures which are hardly recognizable

as such, and grim vexations which can never be persuaded to assume noble

or heroic proportions. The truthful representation of life being the only

worthy object of a novelist’s skill, it follows that his tale should be

destitute of any incidents save those with which we are all familiar in

the narrow routine of existence. We should be able to verify them by

experience—to prove them, as children prove their examples at school.

To meet these current severities of realism, the advocates of a livelier

fiction unite in saying a great many sarcastic and amusing things about

the deadly dulness of their opponents; about the hero and heroine who,

in the course of three volumes, “agree not to become engaged,” and about

the lady’s subtle reasons for dropping her handkerchief, or passing a

cruet at table. It may be hard work to build up a novel out of nothing,

they admit, but we can only echo Dr. Johnson’s words, and wish it

were impossible. Where is the gain in this perpetual unfolding of the

obvious? What is the advantage of wasting genuine ability upon a task the

difficulties of which constitute its sole claim to distinction?

But _is_ the so-called novel of character more difficult to write than

the novel of romance? This question can be answered satisfactorily only

by an author who has done both kinds of work sufficiently well to make

his opinion valuable; and, so far, no such versatile genius has appeared

in the field of letters. If we may judge by results, we should say that

artistic labor is as rare in one school of fiction as in the other,

and apparently as far out of the reach of the ordinary champion in the

arena. It is easy enough to be analytic; but it is extremely hard to be

luminous, or interpretative, or to know when analysis counts. It is easy

to stuff a book full of incidents; but it is hard to make those incidents

living pages in literature. After De Foe had led the way with _Robinson

Crusoe_, a whole army of imitators wrote similar tales of adventure;

but Robinson Crusoe is to-day the only shipwrecked mariner whose every

action awakens interest and delight. Mr. Stevenson in _The Black Arrow_,

and Mr. Rider Haggard in _Nada the Lily_, have given us stories rich

in horrors which do not horrify, and excitements which do not excite.

Mr. Stevenson’s tale is one bewildering succession of murders, plots,

hairbreadth escapes, bloody skirmishes, and perils by field and flood;

yet a gentle indifference as to which side wins is the only distinct

sentiment with which we follow the windings of his narrative. Sir Daniel

is a perjured villain; but it is with no stern sense of just retribution

that we see him fall under the fatal arrow. Master Dick is a stout young

soldier; but where is the breathless attention with which we pursue

every step of another young soldier, equally brave and quick-witted,

Quentin Durward of Glen-houlakin? Even Joan in her doublet and hose—a

device dear to the heart of the romanticist—is almost as uninteresting

as Joan in her petticoats; though perhaps the most striking scene in the

book is that in which Dick endeavors with hearty good will to administer

a little well-deserved chastisement to the supposed boy, and finds

himself withheld by some subtle apprehension of a secret he is far from

suspecting. To compare _The Black Arrow_ with _Ivanhoe_ or _Quentin

Durward_ is manifestly unjust. It is no shame to any man to be surpassed

by Scott. But when we remember the admirable and satisfying events in

_Treasure Island_, or the well-sustained interest of _Kidnapped_, it

seems incredible that Mr. Stevenson, of all novelists, should have

succeeded in telling a lifeless story of adventure.

As for _Nada the Lily_, its incidents are too monotonously painful to

do more than distress the reader. I am inclined to think that a greater

number of people die in the course of this tale than in all the rest

of English fiction, exclusive of Mr. Haggard’s other novels. They die

singly, in pairs, in groups, in armies, in whole tribes. They die in

battle, by fire, by torture, by starvation, at the hands of pitiless

slaughterers, and under the fangs of ghost wolves. They die for every

imaginable cause, and under every conceivable circumstance. To keep the

death-rate of such a story would be like keeping the death-rate of the

Deluge. There is the same comprehensive and all-embracing destruction.

This maybe true to Zulu history—in fact, Mr. Haggard tells us as much in

his preface to “Nada,” and few people are in a position to dispute the

point; but it is radically false to art, and impairs the natural vigor

of the tale. While one tragedy may be sombre and impressive, a dozen are

apt to be fatiguing, and half a hundred border closely on the burlesque.

Chaka, “a Napoleon and Tiberius in one,” reminds the irreverent reader

irresistibly of the Queen in _Alice in Wonderland_, who is all the time

saying, “Off with his head!” and ordering everybody to execution; the

only difference being that the Queen’s victims turn up blandly in the

next chapter, and Chaka’s never reappear. He it is who slays Unandi his

mother, Baleka his wife, all his children save one, all his enemies,

and most of his friends. Then his turn comes—and none too soon—to be

murdered, and Dingaan his brother, “who had the fierce heart of Chaka

without its greatness,” sets to work systematically to kill everybody

who chances to be left. By the time he, too, is flung over the cliff to

die, Mopo and Umslopogaas alone survive; the first because he has to

tell the tale—after which he promptly expires—and the second because he

has already been slain in battle during the progress of another story.

The most curious thing about this wholesale devastation is that Mr.

Haggard apparently deplores it as much as the rest of us. “It would

have been desirable to introduce some gayer and more happy incidents,”

he admits in his preface, “_but it has not been possible_.” Why has it

not been possible, we wonder? It is the privilege of a novelist to select

or discard material according to his good judgment. He is not writing

a history; he is telling a story. He is not chronicling events; he is

weaving a romance. He is an artist, not a recorder; and in the choice as

well as in the use of material lies the test of unblemished art.

What, then, is the vital charm which makes the novel of incident true

literature—the charm possessed by Dumas, and Fielding, and Sir Walter

Scott? Mr. Birrell, who is always in love with plain definitions, says

that if a book be full of “inns, atmosphere, and motion,” then it is a

good book, and he asks no more. Mr. Lang, who shares this hearty sympathy

for action, acknowledges that the best results are often obtained by the

simplest machinery. “Dumas,” he declares, “requires no more than a room

in an inn, where people meet in riding-cloaks, to move the heart with

the last degree of pity and terror.” Scott handles incident with the

matchless skill of a great story-teller. He shows the same instinctive

art in his situations that a great painter like Rembrandt shows in his

grouping. Every figure falls so inevitably into his right place that

it is impossible for us to imagine him in any other. Henry Bertram’s

return to Ellengowan is one of the most artistic and charming scenes in

fiction, though it is described with such careless simplicity. Perplexed

and fascinated by the childish memories tugging at his heartstrings, the

young laird gazes at his ancestral home, and listens with rapture—which

we share—to the fragment of a long-forgotten yet familiar song:

“Are these the Links of Forth,” she said,

“Or are they the crooks of Dee,

Or the bonnie woods of Warroch-head,

That I so fain would see?”

There may be people who are in no way moved by this home-coming, and

who feel no joy when Queen Mary’s boat glides over the dark waters of

Lochleven, and no horror at that ill-omened churchyard gossip which

ushers in the dreadful wedding of Lammermoor. I do not envy them their

composure; but what of King Louis’s visit to the Duke of Burgundy in

_Quentin Durward_, a situation so tense with passion that the least

imaginative reader may well tremble at the possibilities of every minute?

What of the sacking of Liege, the siege of Front de Bœuf’s castle, the

trial of Rebecca, the battle of Bothwell Bridge? He who could carry a

chilly indifference through such narratives as these would not care if

Shylock gained his suit, or King Harry lost the field of Agincourt. I

doubt if he would really care whether Hector or Achilles won the fight.

The casual incidents of life, the trivial possibilities of every day,

are treated by Dickens with extraordinary humor and skill; witness David

Copperfield’s journey to Dover, and Oliver Twist’s first introduction to

Fagin’s den. But his great situations are apt to be theatrical rather

than dramatic. It is not often that he reaches the sombre strength and

passion of that memorable scene where the convict reveals to Pip the

secret of his mysterious wealth. I do not know whether a great many

people read Bulwer’s novels nowadays. They belong to a past generation,

which perhaps was luckier than the present. But I do know that the rescue

of Glaucus from the arena was an epoch in my childhood, and the cry of

joy that rings from Nydia’s lips rang in my heart for years. I have an

inexpressible tenderness now for _The Last Days of Pompeii_, because of

the passionate suspense with which I read it when I was a little girl,

and the supreme gasp of relief with which I hailed the arrival of Sallust

and Calenus, while the lion crouches trembling in his cage. It is not

easy to criticise a book linked with such vivid memories, and perhaps

it is the association with early pleasures which gilds for many of us

the beguiling pages of romance. “We are all homesick, in the dark days

and black towns, for the land of blue skies and brave adventures in

forests, and in lonely inns, on the battle-field, in the prison, on the

desert isle.” It is useless, and worse than useless, to dispute over the

respective schools of fiction, instead of gladly enjoying that which we

like best; and there are different kinds of enjoyment for different kinds

of work. For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can

always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never

lay down.

THE END

FOOTNOTES

[1] “The Pilgrims of the Sun.”

[2] Translated by Sir Theodore Martin.

[3] Translation of Mr. Andrew Lang.

[4] Translation of Lilla Cabot Perry.

The prospect hardly seems inviting; but as the English guns rattled