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Show THE MODERN NOVEL. As Viewed By a Brilliant Catholic Critic Maurice Francis Egan Compares the Unnatural Novelists of Today With the Masters of Former Generations Much Less Misery in the World if the Sentimental Senti-mental Novel Could Be Suppressed The distinguished literateur, Maurice Francis Egan. lectured before the Catholic Cath-olic club of Baltimore recently, on "The Philosophy of the Novel." He considered consid-ered for the most part those novelists of the latter portion of the century, whose tendencies are materialistic or naturalistic. "Pe5im-am and evolution and experi-mentalism experi-mentalism are apparent, more or loss, in all. Even Stevenson does not concern con-cern himt-elf with God and the supernatural super-natural motive Hardy and Meredith are consummate artists,, and nobody will . refuse that . adjective to Steven-fion'-a art. But let us remark, in all coldness, without partisanship, if necessary, neces-sary, that in the nineteenth century after the birth of Christ, the false philosophies phi-losophies of the vanished world again appear, and the intellectual and cultivated culti-vated Christiana of our time receive them with much question, with no apol- ogles, with no protests, under the form most insidious, most permeating. With Stevenson life is a problem for whfch he has no solution. To live 'bravely, net thinking of the end, is his code. "The tone of the novel is dependent, then, on the demands of the people, or, rather, one reflects the other. We owe the good tanle and purity of our best novels to Thackeray and Dickens, as we owe the high moral tone of our fl :eg!; modern poetry to Tennyson, and our best modern tssays to Newman. We are told over and over again that the reason why our American literature of fiction is the purest in the world is because be-cause the 'ANGLO-SAXON MIND' is the most moral of all minds. The truth is that the purity of our greatest novels is due to the fact that they are not, according to our social customs, forbidden to be read in the family circle. "If our fiction is to remain pure and brilliant, it lies with our young people to keep it so. At present our greatest' complaint against much of it is that it is unnatural; and against this unnatur-alness unnatur-alness I invoke your Aid. "Even in the reading of the works of the-greatest novel writers there jnut be discrimination. From Thackeray one gets no false view of life. He has ono grave fault, and this is that he writes as if a nian could be good of himself; he rn-akes his characters act from natural goodness, never from supernatural. su-pernatural. In his "Becky Sharp," that famous personage in 'Vanity Fair.' who resolves to gain her ends by s?lfishnees and intrigue, we have a terrible example ex-ample of how vain human effort is where the heart is hollow and the mind corrupt. In Blanche Amory, in the same book, we are made to detest the heartless creature who tortures the helplc-iss, who us impertinent and cruel in her family, but who, in public, weeps sentimental tears and pretends to be an angel of compassion; in Major Penden-nia Penden-nia and Baroness Bernstein we see the decay of telfh lives. Thackeray never leads his readers to confound right with wrong. If he seem unrelenting, it is only to the utterly bad; he is always tender to the good, and he never fails to point out that the only thing in life worth life itself is a good conscience. con-science. Hia ladies and gentlemen have natural manners. Ethel Newcome never 'cranes her neck.'- or 'throws herself her-self with a spasmodic sob' at the feet of anybody, and Philip Warrington never takes hi? tea 'with a grand air of utter disdain.' And where can we find a more upright, true and natural gentleman than Thackeray paints George Washington to be? A READER OF LIGHT NOVELS may find it difficult to acquire a taste for Thackeray. It requires a good judgment judg-ment to appreciate the marvelous art shown in every line of 'Henry Esmond.' It is worth taking pains to acquire that judgment. Once gained it is gained forever. Once gained, the meretricious mere-tricious in literature is easily discovered discov-ered by the sense so refined. "Dickens has not Thackeray's almost perfect style. His personages are often grotesque and sometimes, I must admit, ad-mit, a little vulgar, sometimes, too, strained and artificial. But, like Man-zoni's Man-zoni's great novel, 'The Betrothed,' 'Nicholas Nickleby' and 'David Copper-field' Copper-field' will remain joys forever to the healthy and cultivated mind. "We may not agree as to tho death of Little Nell; it may be overstrained and long drawn out; it may not have the manly pathos of the chapter in Thackeray's 'Newcomes,' where the colonel cries 'Adsum'; but the dying child and her canary have drawn tears from thousands of eyes which, since it was written, have themselves closed in death. "And of George Eliot how much good can be said? What more perfect piece of literary art have we in English literature lit-erature than the 'Scenes from Clerical life'? Her philosophy was bad; her life gloomy, and her teaching gloomier still. But when she writes, not as a teacher, but as an observer, how true and natural she is! Had she been content con-tent with being the most brilliant woman wo-man in England without attempting to be the most intellectual man. we would easily put her beside Thackeray. As it is. compare her 'Mill on the Floss' or 'Middlemarch' with Mrs. Humphrey Ward's 'Robert Elsmere' or 'David Crier' and see what George Eliot might have been had she mistaken the desire to teach for the impetus of genius. "Say that Thackeray Is verbose and Dickens grotesque, if you will, but you can say no worse. THEY TOUCH THE HEART; they do not allure the senses; if they make us laugh it is an honest laugh; if they draw tears to our eyes, it is because of the sufferings of beings of high purpose: they do not deceive the young by pointing to . the prismatic scum on the surface of a stagnant pool and telling us that It reflects the rainbow. rain-bow. The 'Ouido' and her followers do to the destruction of many. "Miss Austen, in 'Northanger Abbey,' expresses a' fair . opinion of a good novel. 'Although,' she writes, speaking speak-ing as a novelist, 'our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than any. other compositions in the world, no species of composition has been so derided. From pride, ignorance ig-norance or fashion our foes are almost as many as our readers, and while the abilities of the 900th. abridger of the history of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope or Prior, with a paper from the Spectator and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, there seems almost al-most a general wish to decry the capacity ca-pacity and undervalue the labor of the novelist, and to slight the performances) perform-ances) which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them. A good novel ia only some work in which the .greatest powers of the nlind are displayed, dis-played, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest hap-piest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions' of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language." We have changed all that. The novel i3 now one of the GREATEST FACTORS IN CIVILIZATION, CIVILIZA-TION, and, unhappily, as I said before, so overrated hasi it become that some people peo-ple look on it alone as literature. And though nothing: could be more fortunate fortun-ate for the broadening of the human mind that the due recognition of the novel, yet it is a duty to protest against this undiscriminating view which sees in the novel the best and only form of literature. What we need, above all things is to give our young people a standard of judgment. "In speakinig of the morals and man-nerrt man-nerrt of the novel. I have almost omitted omit-ted the central subject of most of them of all of them, in fact love. And on no subject doet? the majority of novels give more delusive views. Thackeray and Dickens are robust and honest and practical in their treatment of this theme. Thackeray, who drew the pictures pic-tures from real lift and taught a lesson les-son by each picture, does not pretend that love ia the main motive and marriage mar-riage the great end of living. Madame Swetchine says of novels: 'They generally gen-erally end with marriage, like a comedy; com-edy; whereas, marriage is only the be-ginningof be-ginningof life.' In Thackeray's 'Pen-dennis,' 'Pen-dennis,' in 'The Newcomes.' in 'The Virginians' a novel that has special interest for us sentimental love is not the principal theme; nor is it in Sir Walter Scott's, nor in the best of Dickens'. Dick-ens'. But it is in a vast swarm of novels nov-els which, like the Egyptian locust?, devour every green thing. They turn the young in heart old before their time. They raise delusive hopes which sink in disappointment. If the sentimental senti-mental novel could be suppressed there would be much less misery in the world. The novelists who write without with-out reason generally represent two persons as meeting suddenly. They are both handsome; that is enough; they were made for each other. . THE PLOT THICKENS. Sensible parents oppose, the experienced experi-enced warn them that they are fools. The reader hates the parents and the experienced people. The heroine and the hero are both poor. He has a rich but honest uncle, who may leave him some money; consequently he has never learned to work. Why should he? Hi? businef.t in the novel is to love. She has never learned to darn stockings, or wash dishes, or tell chicken from turkey. Why should she? Her business busi-ness is to look beautiful. There is talk of love In a cottage, and rosea and woodbine. .But there is no mention of who to nay the rent and the bills for quinine love in a cottage usually means malaria or whether he has a knack of splitting wood or whether she has a good temper. Now, without these two requisites, love in a cottage la impossible. im-possible. Let the admirer of the sentimental sen-timental novel lay this axiom to heart. "The novice who would take his opinion? opin-ion? of the way in which people act in good society from the popular novel and try to Imitate them would speedily be an object of very unflattering at-j tention. We do not find these absurdities absurd-ities in tho work of the truly great novelsit." |