No. DCV.

VOL. XCIX.

that age.

Ir must always remain an open question how far the literature of an age represents the manners of First impressions uniformly take for granted that it does. People jump to the conclusion that a man of genius would never portray a state of things foreign to his readers' experience, and unverified by his own observation, as actually existing; because any other assumption is supposed to cast a slur at once on the writer's truth of perception, if not his honesty, and on his readers' common sense; who, by their approval, would seem to affix their seal to a false presentment for themselves, under no assignable temptation to do so. Yet how little ground we have for this plausible theory! which, if we come to think of it, supposes the authors of past times to be a different sort of people altogether from the popular writers of our own day; and our great-great-grandfathers jealous for truth in a way beyond any example we can show.

It appears to us that, in assuming the writers of a former age to have even aimed at representing existing manners according to any

VOL. XCIX.-NO. DCV.

matter-of-fact experience, we run counter to the teaching of our own eyes. In all the infinite varieties of life depicted by the volumes of the circulating library, when do we come upon anything like what we have ourselves seen and heard, more especially in those works which are most eagerly devoured by the widest, most various circles of readers? What echo, what response, does our own experience give back?

When a future generation judges us by Mr Dickens's animated pictures of life, or by the works of such lesser luminaries as Charles Reade or Wilkie Collins, on the ground of their universal acceptance, they will have the same reason for their opinion which satisfies us of the truth of many a picture of past society, and which prompted some of Macaulay's most telling representations. Yet, conspicuous as is the genius of the first, and able as are the other two, regard their works as being really what they profess to be-pictures of English social life-and how grotesque, distorted, and absolutely and ridiculously improbable one and all are! What a masquerade-like jum

ble of ranks and degrees-what impossible combinations in some, what impossible courses of action in others! And for all this who cares, so long as they are amused? The majority mind no more being misrepresented in the mass than abused in the mass. The few, indeed, do care, who cannot help appealing as they read to their own experience. Anomalies perplex them; it is more than their fancy can accomplish to picture gentlemen and dustmen on terms of absolute equality, and interchanging ideas permanently, over the same dinnertable. But this defiance of fact in some form or other is a positive charm with the many it is an exception to find any fiction widely and with all classes popular without it. We have, no doubt, some few trustworthy delineations, but they are none of them popular in the full triumphant sense of the term; or on this account mainly so little is truth to our experience the one great desideratum we are sometimes disposed to think it. Our conclusion, therefore, is, that we may not trust pictures of manners of any day without large reservations, and constant reference to our own notions of nature and probability; taking into account the universal attraction of the exceptional over the commonplace. We see that the most profound study of men and society constantly does no more than provide a plausible home for impossible creations, or help a man to personify his own various qualities and propensities; his sympathies possess ing each by turn; all the personages talking his talk in different moods; as his separate faults or virtues, opinions or qualities, assert themselves, and take the lead.

But books which do not represent society as it is, or ever was, may yet have a powerful influence on manners. They may indicate what things are going to be, and foreshadow the changes time is on the eve of working. The novel which

portrays manners and modes of action preposterous to our observation may, if it is powerfully written, bring about its verification by hitting the fancy of a class open to new impressions, and impatient of present restraints. An undisciplined fancy may imagine things for which it has small warrant and no general example, yet only anticipate: planting seeds which shall bear fruit in another generation, and suggesting to untutored fancies possibilities before undreamt of. Most fiction is founded either on some moral ideal, and is a glorification of what has been, but which has never been seen by the writer's bodily eyes; or it pictures his wishes and testifies to his impatience of some form of bondage. Very few people find enough in the actual, in the mere interest of delineating men and women as they see them, to induce them to the intense intellectual labour of absolute elaborate truth of portraiture, stroke for stroke, and line for line-where success can only be attained by long study of the mind's anatomy. Either of the other alternatives is the natural resource of an active imagination which can manage anything better than a correct likeness of what is; which even as an object to be aimed at they regard intellectually as slavish task-work, and morally as purposeless, and achieving nothing. Every true, natural, wholesome picture of life will do good, though the writer must, in the drawing, be more intent on doing his own part well than in instructing or improving others; but it seems a finer thing, as well as a pleasanter, to create a world after your own mind, and, likely enough, will present more showy conspicuous effects. For effects may be more telling and conspicuous; for every shadowy creation that takes other imaginations is likely to consolidate itself in course of time; for good possibly, but also, it may be, for harm little contemplated.

The minds that are to be thus moulded are, of course, the young and unformed; and the literature that earliest influences active thought will most surely tell upon their future manners and social morals. If the books they read represent the moral duties that regulate every day's thought and action under a new light, this difference will tell in the long-run far more than if the book implied views on abstract points, not yet forced upon their practical consideration, opposed to the formal teaching of home.

We have been led into this train of thought by a tale which has chanced to fall in our way-a novel by an American writer whose works for young readers have met with more universal acceptance than any reprint except Uncle Tom's Cabin.' We do not attribute to all our readers any personal knowledge of Miss Wetherall's Wide, wide World,' or 'Queechy,' but to all the names will be familiar. Every railway library presents a row of them on sale, and wherever there are schoolroom book-shelves or a parish library to be referred to, we shall be surprised if these tales, well-thumbed, and with every trace of favour, are not forthcoming. They represent manners and a state of things very different from our experience, but this has so far been an attraction. If there is anything that would not quite do in England, it has all been accepted, and even where not quite approved, excused on the ground of nationality. Things are different, we say, in America. Republicanism even affects the relation of parent and child. Precocity and independence, we all know,belong to the backwoods. English children, it is assumed, will get the amusement and the good-for these are religious tales in the fullest sense of the word, whole chapters devoted to doctrine and experiences without any temptation to the Americanisms of all sorts that simply give a zest to the style and narrative. We confess, however, to

have fancied for some time that we could trace, in the young-ladyhood of a certain religious school, the influence of American religious fiction. We notice an independence of conventional restraints, a freedom of accost, an ease in asserting and enforcing opinion, a looseness from the old deference to elders, an aptitude to engraft flirtation on schemes of active good- not, as of old, timidly and evasively, but as a boldly-recognising aid to zeal and consistency and consistency and, finally, a courageous self-reliance, not without its attractions, where a pretty face and sprightly manners carry it off, but still reminding us that we live in days when woman's rights are a leading question," and women are called upon from across the ocean to rouse from their passive dependence, and henceforth to walk in advance of man in the path of reform and spiritual progress. Parents in our day are not strict disciplinarians; and young ladies making a decided profession, and taking a line in any of the fashionable forms, are left in most cases to their own devices, under the trust that the cares of life will soon enough subdue any excess of talkative or fussy zeal. Deference to their will and judgment has long been undermined by the books they have placed in their children's busy hands, so perhaps they do well to succumb. The memory of some of our readers may be familiar with the one cross and trial that tested the youthful heroine of old Dissenting fiction; the dance to which a worldly father in vain would drive his trembling but determined daughter, and the courage with which she resisted the double importunities of his commands, and the worldly corner of her own heart. In all other matters obedience itself, it was here she must make a stand. These struggles, if they ever had place, are a good deal over, and the young people now dance or not to please themselves. But the points on which young and old

are permitted to come to an issue are indefinitely increased; while in every religious novel of modern date that comes to our mind the right is invariably on the daughter's side, for one reason perhaps, that the real patrons of exciting religious fiction are the young. Mothers, never in great favour with novelists, are sinking deeper and deeper in their black booksthere is a positive jealousy of their influence; while the father in the religious tale, as opposed to the moral or sentimental, is commonly either a scamp or nowhere. The heroine has, so to say, to do her work single-handed. We are so used to all this that it took us by surprise the other day to find the teaching of the fifth commandment enforced as it is in that earliest example of this class of fiction, 'Cœlebs.' There the perfect heroine is made the natural product of perfect 'parents; they have made her what she is, not vice versa, as we are used to see it. They are the arbiters of her fate; she is grateful to them for the most modified exercise of private judgment; while the exemplary hero is conspicuous for nothing so much as "veneration" for his elders, unless it be for horror of "intrepid girls," who depart from prescription, and set up for independent views. Stepping on five-and-twenty years farther into the century, we still do not see much approach to the modern gloss on parental duty. In 'Father Clement,' a clever book, which made a great sensation in its day, religion is not allowed to separate mother and child. "Maria, my child!" cries the dismayed Popish mother of her awakened daughter, "what do you mean?" only to be reassured, "I mean to remain with you, dearest mother;" -while all parties show a caution a submission to old obligations which would be considered weak by newer lights. Dormer, for example, the fascinating priest, with commendable prudence, leaves the

young ladies to themselves, and converses on spiritual matters with their mammas in another room; precisely reversing the course of action which we find inculcated in Miss Wetherall's later work, to the consideration of which we have now arrived.

'The Old Helmet' may not have attained as yet the enormous circulation of the writer's earlier stories, but it has passed through many large editions, and still has an extensive sale, and may be found in any size and shape, from the two handsome volumes of the circulating library, to the single volume for the parish and schoolroom, and the cheap copy for gift or purchase. That which has chanced to fall in our way is in that soiled and thumbed condition so flattering to an author, and has done its best to disseminate the new morality; for the perusal has been to us something of a revelation. The slightest glimpse into the writer's previous tales shows that the heads of their childish readers are in danger of being filled prematurely with notions of love and admiration. If they are very good and very pious and very busy in doing grown-up work, they have good reason to expect, from these pictures of life, that when they reach the mature age of sixteen or so, some young gentleman who has been in love with them all along will declare himself at the very nick of time; and they may then look to find themselves, all the struggles of life over, reposing a weary head on his stalwart shoulder. But in these stories, as far as we recall them, the heroines are good, and goodness is in a way rewarded. In 'The Old Helmet' it is otherwise. It is a religious story as opposed to a moral one. If the heroine had been one whit more scrupulous, conscientious, straightforward, honest, modest, and single-minded than she is-if she had possessed but a shade more delicacy and refinement-she would never have been converted, or been

a Christian at all, according to this writer's meaning of the word. Every step of spiritual progress tramples on some duty or propriety; her growing convictions are always leading her to do wrong, or what the authoress would allow to be wrong if the end did not justify the means. But our readers shall judge for themselves, if we can condense an abstract within the narrow space such a subject has alone a right to. We give it with the less apology, because this work belongs to the class of books of largest circulation which yet rarely fall under critical eyes. We should premise, in justice to the writer, that though the scene is laid in England, and she desires to give her heroine English characteristics, she betrays an entire ignorance of our manners; and of course in such questions the behaviour of young people must be judged by the standard of their country. Girls in American religious fiction are represented as changing their lovers with the facile flippancy of our housemaids and area belles." Some say this is a misrepresentation arising from the total separation that exists in New England between the religious world and good society, thus throwing their writers on their own unassisted ideas of what is fascinating and likely to attract; but whatever excuse this ignorance may furnish, the mischief is not the less to the young unguarded reader, who takes for granted that English ideas go along with the English language, and is here led to think that, in the judgment of religious people, jilting and vulgar flirting are allowable amusements-the wild oats of girlhood.

The scene of 'The Old Helmet' -which we will explain at once is a patronising synonym for the helmet of salvation-opens with a picnic in one of our counties. Eleanor, the heroine, has strayed away from the rest of the party, and is seated on a bank with a grave young

man, a stranger; her previous and much more interesting companion, Mr Carlisle, having been recently called from her side. This stranger, the real hero, is not described; he is to unfold himself, a task he is quite equal to, as from the beginning to the end he is his own text and subject. Their conversation opens with remarks on the abbey-ruins before them, and on the motives which lead to retirement from society. Eleanor supposes this motive disgust of the world. "Do you mean," he asks, "if this is the beginning of all religious feeling?" "I really think it is," she replies, and turns from the question to admire some violets at her feet. "Then do you suppose," he says, "that these violets are less sweet to me than to you?" "Why should they be?" is her answer. "Because religion is the most precious thing in the world to me." They pursue the subject of the old monks, one of whom had been a soldier, and wore his armour to the last under his monk's habit. This legend elicits the statement from the grave young man that he also wears armour, amusing himself with his companion's puzzled look. In the meanwhile a storm rises and shelter has to be sought. He knows of a window in the ruins, the arch of which still stands; and giving her, in the emergency, the support of his hand (it was a strong hand, and not the only time, by a great many, that we hear of its good points), he seats her on the window-sill, and, with an apology, places himself by her side. The writer thinks it well to state that the window was narrow as well as deep; the two were brought into "very familiar neighbourhood "in fact it was a tight fit; which amuses Eleanor as much as her terror of lightning gave her spirits. for. Here is another opportunity for the young man to assert his superiority he wears armour which makes him safe in all circumstances :—