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archæology more searching than any novelist can attempt. Even if learning could supply the medieval counterpart of every detail in Adam Bede, it would be of no use, because neither the writer nor the reader of to-day would have the necessary instinctive feeling of its dramatic significance. The modern novelist uses his wealth of modern detail intuitively, in a sense unconsciously, feeling immediately and without effort its dramatic effect, indeed feeling the dramatic passion in Such and by means of the detail. tragedies as Adam Bede and Le Père Goriot are born incarnate in the minds of a Balzac or a George Eliot. Similarly the reader immediately and without / effort takes in along with the details their full significance. In the historical novel this is impossible. "Either," to quote Mr. Leslie Stephen once more, "the novel becomes pure cram, a dictionary of antiquities dissolved in a thin solution of romance, or, which is generally more refreshing, it takes leave of accuracy altogether."

The

halves of Mr. Stephen's soul are in conflict, and in that " generally more refreshing" we see the novel-reading Dr. Jekyll, who loves his Ivanhoe and his Raphael ben Ezra, getting the better of the scientific Mr. Hyde.

But there is an even subtler difficulty. The spirit of man changes with the ages. Sentiment, and a novel must deal largely with sentiment, changes rapidly. A writer of to-day can no more put his spirit back some centuries than a man of fifty can feel like a boy of fifteen. And in this matter of accurate sentiment, again, as in the matter of accurate detail, there is further the If it were reader to be considered. possible to reproduce the sentiment of a bygone time, accuracy would be dearly purchased by the sacrifice of dramatic impressiveness and of the reader's sympathy. Scott, in the dedicatory epistle to Dr. Dryasdust prefixed to Ivanhoe, shows himself fully alive to this, and as an artist deliberately puts dramatic interest above historical accuracy.

"It is true," he writes, "that I neither can nor do pretend to the observation of complete accuracy, even in matters of outward costume, much less in the important points of language and manners. But the same motive which prevents my writing the dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, and which prohibits my sending forth to the public this essay printed with the types of Caxton or Wynken de Worde, prevents my attempting to confine myself within the limits of the period in which my story is laid. It is necessary for exciting interest of any kind, that the subject assumed should be as it were, translated into the manners, as well as the language of the age we live in. No fascination has ever been attached to Oriental literature equal to that produed by Mr. Galland's first translation of the Arabian tales; in which, retaining on the one hand the splendour of Eastern costume, and on the other the wildness of Eastern fiction, he mixed these with just so much ordinary feeling and expression, as rendered them interesting and intelligible."

The above reflections serve, we think, to make clear the negative limitations of the historical novel. Wherever the method adopted makes the dramatic force dependent on vivid portrayal of mental experience, or wherever the dramatic action is involved intimately, and so to speak organically, in a frame of familiar circumstance, the historical form presents unconquerable difficulties. Hence, in the first place, the historical novel cannot achieve in its sphere the triumphs of the great poetic tragedies. The attempt to present

Hamlet as a veritable Dane in all the Danish detail of his uprising and downsitting, or to embody the tragedy of Othello in a careful reproduction of the daily life of old Venice, must necessarily break down, and we should find that the spiritual realism, so intense in the poetry, had also vanished. Novels, again, in which the interest depends upon the reader's sympathetic realisation of the most intimate feelings and passions depicted, and of every incident and habit of daily life in which the dramatic action is involved: or again, so-called psychological novels, delighting their votaries by keen and accurate observation of special character or shades of idiosyncrasy or novels of manners like Miss Austen's or Trollope's or Thackeray's

(if we may isolate a side of his genius): -all these fields are closed to the historical novelist.

But to admit thus much is by no means to give up the historical novel as Mr. Leslie Stephen has sorrowfully brought himself to do. A criticism which is bound by its theory to say that Ivanhoe and Les Trois Mousquetaires are not good novels surely stands self-condemned. The keenest admirer of the art which has given us Eugènie Grandet, Mme. Bovary or Amos Barton will occasionally, when in the swing of Dumas' stride, and under the spell of his matchless buoyancy and resource, recall those masterpieces with something like a mental yawn. Scott and Dumas have fascinated and continue to fascinate thousands, who are perfectly well aware that the history of their novels is as romantic as the fiction. Whatever else it may do, the inevitable inaccuracy, which, as we see, Scott serenely admits, manifestly does not spoil the novel as a novel for the, unsophisticated reader. He instinctively recognises that he has to do with a different kind of novel, depending for its effect upon different conditions. To confound the kinds, and require the same conditions in all, is but a blundering criticism. These historical romances bear to such novels as Balzac's something of the same relation that the Epic bears to Tragedy. The attempt to include the Epic within the type of Tragedy involved Green in the critical blunder of ranking Paradise Lost above The Iliad, like Mr. Bright. If Le Père Goriot is worthy to be called a French Lear, Les Trois Mousquetaires may not unfitly be styled a French Iliad. Scott and Dumas were in fact born story tellers -would there were more like them! -and story is not tied down to rigorous scientific accuracy. It is as it were a literary decorative art. It depends, that is to say, upon a sense of beauty, rather than on a demand for truth it appeals chiefly to the imagination. Like much beautiful Oriental decoration it may often set

literal truth at defiance, yet convince by its flawless decorative propriety. When we read these romances, we are not studying archæology, nor are we looking for solutions of psychological or moral problems: we simply ask to be interested by the story, and charmed by romantic scenes and stirring incidents. We demand before all things beauty and imaginative satisfaction. We crave a poetic justice, which would be childish in the other sphere: heroism must triumph at last and villainy die horrid deaths. And provided the imagination be indeed satisfied, literal accuracy is immaterial. In order to satisfy the imagination, the novelist, it is true, must produce a temporary illusion of reality; but it is enough if the spirit is cheated or charmed into acquiescence. In a recent book on Shakespeare it was laid down as a canon of dramatic criticism, that improbability only apparent to subsequent reflection was no valid objection to a piece of action felt by an actual spectator to be at the time natural and right. Now the magic of these masters of narrative fiction produces at the time just the illusion of reality appropriate to their class and scale of work. While you surrender yourself to their spell, you feel yourself moving naturally among historic scenes and personages. While you have faith, you walk the treacherous waters like the firm earth. The interest and charm prevent your being disquieted by critical doubts at the time, whatever history may have to say to you on the morrow when you' are in cold blood. And illusion is rendered the easier to produce by the kind of detail and scale of characterdrawing appropriate to what we may call the Epic novel. Minute and elaborate character and familiar detail are here out of place. Yet it is a grave mistake to suppose character and incident independent of each other, much less antagonistic. They are strictly inseparable: being indeed, if the expression be tolerable, statical and dynamical aspects of the same

facts. We may talk of this novel being saved by its drawing of character, and that story by its plot or incidents; but true salvation lies in the right artistic proportion between character and incident. The incidents, for after all they are incidents, of Eugénie Grandet and Mme. Bovary are just the inevitable incidents in the evolution of the moral tragedy. So on the other hand, there is in fact admirable drawing of character in Athos, Porthos and Aramis, above all in the incomparable d'Artagnan; but it is of the precise scale fitted to carry the rush of exciting incident. The truth of this may be recognised by imagining the effect on the narrative of replacing these splendid fellows by some of Mr. Henry James's carefully analysed souls, but, be it also observed, we should equally destroy the interest of the narrative by replacing them with the wooden layfigures of inferior craftsmen. If Dumas's people were mere lay-figures, we should no longer listen with rapture to the click and clash of d'Artagnan's sword, nor follow the progress of Aramis' subterranean intrigues with breathless interest, nor weep salt tears, as all right-minded people now do, over the Homeric death of Porthos. An historical novelist can only attempt elaborate character or familiar detail on peril of awakening a fatal critical spirit by inevitable modernisms. He is however in no way obliged to incur this peril. As Scott says in the Epistle to Dryasdust, our ancestors "had 'eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions'; were 'fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer' as ourselves;" and by confining himself to these permanent elements, and to the simple character suitable to the Epic style, he may produce and maintain all the illusion of reality which is needed to give the full effect to his story.

No doubt a very intimate and accu rate acquaintance with the history of

the period may be effectual to break the charm-alas! for the hapless wight cursed with a too intrusive knowledge. And it may indeed be that the old historical romances. are a delight destined to fade in the noonday glare of science. We shall all eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and shall be as Professors of History knowing fact from fancy. But we shall lose our paradise, and our sorrow shall be greatly multiplied in our conception of the historical novel of the future. In sorrow we shall bring them forth, and we shall read them with pearls of sweat upon our brows. In the secret places of our soul, there lurks, we confess it, a love for the "fearless old fashion" of the old romances: yet the bliss of ignorance cannot perhaps last for ever. Let us illustrate the transitoriness of such bliss by reference to a romancer, whom no one has accused of being historical. Love for Quida cannot blind us now to the fact that her fashion is a trifle too fearless; yet in our happy youth that wonderful telegram in Idalia sent to check the mission of the Queen's Messenger,"The Border eagle flies eastward. Clip the last feather of the wing, &c."gave us a fearful joy, denied, possibly to the permanent official familiar with the prose of Foreign Office cipher. Perhaps one reason (among others which it would be painful to press) that we cannot to-day write like Scott and Dumas, is that we are in the fatal transition state between blissful ignorance and complete knowledge. We have not acquired the historical mastery which might enable us, perhaps, to use historical detail naturally and easily; yet we are conscious of the demand for accuracy, and work with the fear of the new broom of historical criticism before our eyes. We have fallen from the innocency of Ouida, and have not yet been redeemed by perfect knowledge. And in this interval, the hand of the artist is only paralysed by the continual demand of the critic for accuracy, and the yearning of historic science to see the abomination of its

own desolation standing also where it ought not, in the temple of Romance.

The foregoing remarks might seem to suggest that it is the romance which charms, and that the historical romance charms not by reason but in spite of its historical character,-the historical character indeed but introducing elements of difficulty and decay. But surely this is not the case: surely the charm lies essentially in the historical character. To recognise this, is it not enough to let the imagination wander in memory for a few seconds amid the romantic scenes of Scott's historical tales, or the variegated dramatic life of Dumas' great cycles? No, assuredly historical romance has special charms of its own, which the world should not willingly let die. What a relief it is to get away from ourselves and our neighbours, our small concerns, petty jealousies or petty ambitions, and all the provinciality of our moment of time and corner of space, to breathe a larger and more heroic air, at whatever cost of archæological accuracy: to rub shoulders with great events, and feel the stir of mighty principles. And see what boundless wealth of picturesque character and scenic effect and dramatic clashings between devotion to great causes and personal loves and hates, the field of history offers. Are we to rob romance of her Paladins, and Huguenots and Covenanters, of her witchcraft, and her Inquisition, of her Cœur de Lion, her Richelieu and her Queen of Scots? What becomes of Ivanhoe, without its strife of English feeling and Norman pride, and its mediæval Judenhetze; or of Les Trois Mousquetaires without the political entanglements of loyalty to Richelieu or to the Queen, which but serve to beat out the heroic friendships into a nobler harmony? And

more important and valuable to the story-teller even than this wealth of scenes and incidents, of great causes and great characters, is the circumambient air of heroism and romance.

Herein we find perhaps the only substitute now left to us for the mystery and magic of the world's wondering youth. Mr. Louis Stevenson has taken the Arabian Nights as the crowning type of pure romance,-alas! that the " pure "should have been made equivocal. But such glorious tales it is not for us to write upon whom the ends of the world are come. For many of us the haunted and mysterious spaces of unknown history are the next best playing-ground for the imagination, and afford to the romancer the witching gloom or glamour of golden haze, wherewith to work his miracles. So let us still cling to the hope that even under the full blaze of the meridian sun of science, the world will keep apart a shady bower of art where the eyes shall discern artistic excellence in the midst of much inaccuracy-do we not still admire Raphael's fiddling Apollo ?—that it may still enjoy Scott's genuine enthusiasm for a misunderstood feudalism as we enjoy the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for a misunderstood paganism, not merely because in each case the enthusiasm was but the first step to a truer science, but because it was beautiful in itself and produced much beautiful work. However learned the world may grow, it will be an ill day for it when we can no longer take our pleasure in the buoyant narrative and quick invention of Dumas, or in those incomparable presentations of human nature, eternally the same through all changes of place and time, in which only Homer and Shakespeare have rivalled Walter Scott.

No. 337.-VOL. LVII.

50

SAINT COLUMBANUS.

"THEY are quarto decimans, and they have the tonsure of Simon Magus.' That was the verdict pronounced by the Gallic clergy on a little knot of strange-looking priests, speaking a strange tongue, and shaven from the brow as far back as the middle of the head, the hair behind being left as long as that of a Merovingian king, who appeared in the country of the Burgundians close on the last decade of the sixth century. Of these the leader was Columban, the Scotic Saint Francis Xavier, a man who has at least as much claim on Our remembrance as Saint Nicholas of Myra, or some two-thirds of our other blackletter saints.

Columban was a Scot, one of that nation of whom his biographer, the monk Jonas, second abbot of Bobbio, wonders that, "though outside the laws of the rest of the world, it is superior to the rest in both faith and dogma." Born in Leinster in 543, the year in which Saint Benedict died, he studied under Saint Sinell at Clon Inis (the meadow - isle), in Lough Erne. But he was handsome, as other Scotic saints seem to have been, and his beauty was a snare to him. Α holy woman of the neighbourhood, perhaps a nun in one of those dual monasteries of which Whitby was an English example, warned him: "Away young man, away: shun ruin."

So

he went to Saint Comgall (who at Bangor in Down, and its daughter houses, ruled three thousand monks), entered under him and became his favourite disciple. Comgall's rule, which was practically that of Columban, was a vaguer, shorter, stricter form of Saint Benedict's. It enjoined It enjoined absolute obedience, encouraged labour (the teaching and practice of husbandry, especially), and provided cor

poral punishment for breach of rules. Work was the panacea: when his monks were ill with colds, he cured them by making them get up and thresh wheat till they sweated profusely. Columban's rule was very near superseding the Benedictine: the latter, which, besides being supported by Rome, met human nature half-way, did not gain the victory till fifty years after Columban's death, A. D. 664, when. indeed, the Scots were defeated all along the line, for in that same year Colman lost and Wilfrid won, at the Council of Whitby.

At Bangor, he tells us: "under Comgall, I, Columban the sinner, lived for twelve years in a cell far from home." Rudely built, though wattled work may be very artistically managed, a Scotic monastery was a place of culture beyond most places in that day. Columban's Latin prose is quite Ciceronian compared with that of Jonas, or with the turgid seventeenth century stuff, which in Colgan is about as bad as it is in Neville's Furores Norfolckensium of seventy years earlier. His Latin verse is elegance itself, compared with the metrical life by Flodoard, canon of Rheims. And then he knew Greek and Hebrew (as is seen in his letters to Boniface the Fourth), very rare accomplishments then and long afterwards; and doubtless, like others of his countrymen, he held truer views about astronomy than those with which the rest of the world was satisfied till Copernicus's days. However, when he was more than forty years old, the Scotic lust for travel came on him so irresistibly that he deemed it " a longing kindled by the fire of God"; and, much against Comgall's will, he passed through Britain, some twelve years before Saint Augustine landed, and crossed to Gaul. Here Guntram,

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