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Difficulties of Historical Romance.

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ranged through the middle ages, stopped short at the Greek empire; and the novel in which he portrayed the effete senility of the Byzantine court bears too evident marks of his own decay. Mr. Lockhart's Valerius,' we suppose, is not meant to be understood as having been produced under his inspiration, though it has touches which would not discredit such a source. The Last Days of Pompeii' attracts the sympathies of the man of taste, rather than addresses him as a prophecy of the past' from the depths of history. No one has favoured us with such a representation of an ancient Greek as Anastasius' gives of his modern counterpart. If those whose works we have now to notice cannot complain of the ground as being preoccupied, they have the disadvantage, on the other hand, of having no bright example to cheer them, no acknowledged model to strive after.

This very circumstance would seem to make them more deserving objects of critical attention than they might have been, had their department been one where the standards of excellence are less equivocal, and the conditions of success better ascertained. Whatever may be the intrinsic worth of the popular judgment, no one will refuse it at least a concurrent jurisdiction over works which have for their main object the gratification of the popular taste; though it may be no less true that the popular taste is all the better for cultivation and direction. To contradict it flatly would be to imitate the tailor in the play, arguing against Lord Foppington's natural perception of the fitness of things: to ratify all its conclusions is to convert the upper house of literary legislation into a chamber for registering democratical edicts. But a subject like the present may be safely looked upon as a critic's peculium. The sphere of his authority is narrow perhaps, but it is at any rate tolerably independent. It would be affectation to deny that classical romance must conform to the fundamental rules which regulate all other fiction: it must be equally vain to pretend that it has not special necessities of its own, which require special treatment from the writer and special consideration from the reader.

Every one knows that in historical romance-writing the great, perhaps the only special difficulty, is to preserve a proper medium between the old and the new-between a literalising adherence to the past, and a modernising disposition to confound it with the present. This difficulty, formidable at all times, is peculiarly felt when the subject chosen is from ancient history. On the one hand, the difference of thought and feeling, in the times before and after the fall of the Roman Empire, is so striking and unmistakable, that a writer, especially if he is a

competent scholar, is in danger of forgetting the essential unity in the apparent contrast, and exciting wonder and curiosity at the expense of sympathy. If he has genius of his own, he may produce something like a tale of mythology, where the persons and actions, though utterly foreign to experience, may still be interesting: if not, his work can only be a sort of incarnation of the Dictionary of Antiquities, in which the clothes will be much more genuine, as well as more conspicuous, than the men who fill them. On the other hand, the similarities between ancient and modern history are at least as deceptive as their discrepancies. The two civilisations, of Paganism and of Christianity, stand out in broad opposition to each other: but it is no less evident that they are the only two phases of society which admit of being so compared. Ancient civilisation, indeed, has been somewhat irregular in its development, visiting different parts of the heathen world at different times; so that parallels may be made between its several periods: but the civilisation of modern Europe has been much more uniform, in proportion to the greater uniformity of its causes; and in comparing its various manifestations, we think not so much of different ages, as of different nations, contemplated at the same moment. Thus, if a novelist, professing to represent the sixteenth century, introduces the features of any other, it merely proves, so far as it goes, his want of historical discrimination. But when a period of ancient history is selected by a modern writer, the very possession of a certain degree of historical power is likely to lead him wrong. He sees the truth of Arnold's remark, that there is a modern history in ancient times, and does not take into account how much the antiquity of the time must have balanced the modernness of the history. Accordingly he writes a story, of which the names and facts are ancient, but the whole substance and life belong to his own century. We are mistaken if this is not the extreme which, of the two, requires to be more carefully guarded against in the present day. Formerly the dilemma naturally lay between the scholar, who was absorbed in the study of past ages, and the general littérateur, who could form no conception of any age but that in which he was himself born and bred. Now, however, no one is more eager than the professed historian to assert the essential identity of the times he is actually living in with those he has dwelt with in thought. We realise the party struggles of Greece and Rome as keenly as if they were now going on about us, and are guided in our view of their merits by our opinions on home politics. Consequently the novelist is free to indulge his natural bent without rebuke, and sketch his Athenians and Romans as if they were persons

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Defective Analyses and Analogies.

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of exactly the same stamp as those whom he meets with daily in society. It is only now and then, when we have been bewildered by some book like those in which Professor Becker has tried to combine the tale with the archæological treatise, and of course spoiled both, that we need to go out into the streets in order to assure ourselves that we are in a land of ordinary mortals. The books before us, at any rate, err in the direction of modernism rather than in that of antiquarianism. If the characters are occasionally stiff and unlifelike, it is for the same reason which would have made them stiff and unlifelike in a story of 1850. As we are not writing a general treatise, but simply commenting on certain faults of practice, it may be well to confine our observations to the more pressing evil.

More than twenty years ago, Mr. Macaulay, with his usual felicity of language, pointed out in this Review* the mistake of attempting to embody in a fiction the result of an imperfect critical analysis. He spoke merely of character-drawing: but the remark is susceptible of wider application. A whole nation and its history, all or part, may be the subject of a similar error. It is possible to make not only a character but an entire narrative or fable a personified epigram,' by following those pointed descriptions in which satirists and historians so much indulge.' And not only satirists and historians. For instance, the life of Athens has been called one glorious boyhood; and the descriptive epigram, unless objected to on other grounds, may very well pass, since it happens to express a really prominent feature, and that in terms sufficiently concise and picturesque to attract the attention and occupy the memory. Upon this hint, however, a novelist will, perhaps, arise and speak, investing his characters with such properties as a moderately logical imagination may be able to deduce from the knowledge of their essence, so communicated: forgetting all the time that Nature is not bound to conform exactly, though she may approximate, to the proposition of a rhetorical writer, still less to the inferences drawn from it by an artist of not absolutely transcendent genius. It is another form of the scholastic attempt to substitute logic for the interrogation of Nature, only repeated in this case by men of inferior mental power. Such a temptation is likely to prove peculiarly seductive where the propositions which the critic offers to the creative spirit, are based on the doctrine of historical analogy, before mentioned. As we saw in our last number, this doctrine has asserted its right to determine the theory of translation. The process is the same as we have just described:

* Edinburgh Review, vol. liii. p. 566.

criticism declares epigrammatically that the Scotch are the modern Dorians, and the translator (Mr. Walsh in his Aristophanes, for instance,) renders the Megarian calling out his pigs for sale and the clouds pouring out their dithyrambic rhapsodies into the language of Burns, in its gaiety and in its gravity. Here the effect will probably not be felt as discordant or unpleasing; the coincidence, whether exact or not, is acknowledged to be a happy one; and, if the writer has only tolerable skill, it will not fail in the execution. For the mere form of a translation, the character of the diction, is not usually so much studied, at least in England, as to make it easy to detect any latent discrepancy which the adoption of a style only partially similar to that of the original may have introduced. Again, to turn from translation to the experiment, so happily conceived and exemplified in the Lays of Ancient Rome. On Mr. Macaulay's success in preserving a thorough nationality in both the materials and the spirit of the successive legends he has reproduced, we have never heard two opinions. But language has difficulties of its own. If it often fails in saying all we want it to say, it sometimes fails from its saying something more, - from its striking upon a chord we did not mean to touch. A word or cadence, which should call up associations foreign to the subject of a poem, would so far interfere with its effect. Mr. Macaulay observes, in his preface, on the obvious impropriety of mimicking the manner of any particular age or country: and was so little conscious of the possible existence of any resemblance of style, such as could suggest a suspicion of imitation, or disturb the poetical illusion of a single passage, that he mentions, in the same sentence, his having borrowed something from our own 'old ballads, and more from Sir Walter Scott, the great restorer of our ballad poetry.' However slight may be what has been so borrowed, yet any reader, who is unfortunate enough to be called away by it, though for a moment, from the Minstrel and the Forum, will regret its presence. But in the construction of a romance or classical drama there is far greater peril than that of a tone or manner associated with more recent times. An author who has discovered that the age of which Thucydides wrote had some of its most distinctive features in common with our own, will be in perpetual danger of running his parallels aground; and will pay dearly for his good fortune if it leads him to copy the nineteenth century too minutely, and in making his characters half Athenians, half modern Europeans, to lose sight of the real humanity which might have been attained by a proper observation of either.

The authoress of Amymone,' Miss Lynn, is in this respect the greatest offender on our list. Her minute inaccuracies, such

as her mention of the statue of Anthemocritus (the herald whose death was imputed to the Megarians), as erected before Pericles' expedition to Samos, her representation of Nicias and Alcibiades as schoolboys together, and her singular orthography of Greek names, an unlearned mixture of the old forms with Mr. Grote's new spelling,-are presumptive evidence that she has only a superficial acquaintance with the subject; but the entire manner in which she characterises the period tells much more strongly against her. It would seem that she has acquired, perhaps not from the best sources, a notion of Pericles and his times, serviceable for rhetorical purposes, but not very distinct or comprehensive; and perceiving vaguely its relevancy to certain matters in which she is herself interested, has sat down to draw, under its name, and with the addition of as many of its peculiar catchwords as she has been able to pick up, a picture of modern society. Indeed, she avows as much in her preface. After expressing her fervent hope that the love of classic life may 'stand in the place of deeper knowledge, and earnestness hold ' good if skill have failed,' she goes on to declare that she has but clothed in Grecian form the spirit of modern England, speaking, under local names, of questions which interest uni'versal man.' We believe ourselves that the analogy between Athenian civilisation and our own is something more than fanciful, even in many of its details; we are convinced that a vivid interest in the subjects of the present day will help the student to appreciate points of Athenian thought and practice which have perplexed really learned men; but we must refuse to let love stand in the place of deeper knowledge,' wherever love should prove mistaken, not only, with its customary blindness, in the merits, but in the actual character of the object loved, and when deeper knowledge may appear to include all information which lies below the surface. Where the general spirit of a work is the thing complained of, it is not always easy to give specimens; the following, however, may serve as an instance of what we mean. It is part of an account of a conversazione at the house of Pericles. We pass over a slight impediment at the threshold, where we are told in an eloquent sentence that thus and there were gathered together the men, whose words 'go forth in the Antigone, Alcestis, and Eumenides,' (Æschylus

The author of 'Pericles' in a note (vol. i. pp. 312 et seq.) gives reasons for supposing that the death of Anthemocritus took place soon after Pericles' return from Eubœa: but this is an opinion of his own, and as Miss Lynn cannot be assumed to have adopted it, she cannot well be cleared of an anachronism.