and fine linen" to be able to say, "Continue in your sins." The world vanquishes with its speciousness and its show, and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit.

its life. It is a debate in the Long Par- who, at Satan's instance, proposes the liament, and though the theme of Para- invasion of earth-are as distinct as so dise Lost obliged Milton to side with many statues. Even Belial, "the man the monarchical element in the universe; of the world," the sort of man with his old habits are often too much for whom Milton had least sympathy, is him; and his real sympathy--the impe perfectly painted. An inferior artist tus and energy of his nature-side with would have made the actor who counthe rebellious element. For the pur- selled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth," poses of art this is much better-of a a degraded and ugly creature; but Milcourt a poet can make but little; of a ton knew better. He knew that low heaven he can make very little, but of a notions require a better garb than high courtly heaven, such as Milton conceiv- notions. Human nature is not a high ed, he can make nothing at all. The thing, but at least it has a high idea of idea of a court and the idea of a heaven itself; it will not accept mean maxims, are so radically different, that a distinct unless they are gilded and made beauticombination of them is always grotesque ful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, and often ludicrous. Paradise Lost," Repent, repent," but it takes "purple as a whole, is radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the ways of God to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton's theory he had an arguable case at least. There was something arbitrary in the promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; in Paradise Lost it is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear that the angels are the better. Milton's sympathy and his imagination slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the courtly angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder that Milton's hell is better than his heaven, for he hated officials and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and accumulates his pedantry above. the great debate in Pandemonium all his genius is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, "What are we devils to do, now we have lost heaven ?" Satan, who presides over and manipulates the assembly; Moloch,

"the fiercest spirit

On

That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by de

spair,"

who wants to fight again; Belial, "the man of the world," who does not want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,

deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat and public care,"

"He ended frowning, and his look denounced Desp'rate revenge, and battle dangerous To less than Gods. On th' other side up

rose

Belial, in act more graceful and humane :
A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seemed
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow, though his
tongue

Dropt manna, and could make the worse

appear

The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were

low;

To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Tim'rous and slothful: yet he pleased the

ear,

And with persuasive accent thus began:"

He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men for giving it. Here, as elsewhere, though to take it, he must carefully apologize

the formal address is to devils, the real
address is to men: to the human nature
which we know, not to the fictitious de-
monic nature we do not know:

"I should be much for open war, O Peers!
As not behind in hate, if what was urged
Main reason to persuade immediate war,
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast

Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
When he who most excels in fact of arms,
In what he counsels and in what excels

Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
And utter dissolution, as the scope
Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
First, what revenge? The tow'rs of Heav'n
are filled
With armed watch, that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bord'ring deep
Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
Scorning surprise. Or could we break our

way

By force, and at our heels all hell should

rise

With blackest insurrection, to confound
Heav'n's purest light, yet our Great Enemy,
All incorruptible, would on his throne
Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mould
Incapable of stain would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire
Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
Is flat despair. We must exasperate
Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
And that must end us: that must be our

cure,

To be no more? Sad cure; for who would
lose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eter-

nity,

To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion? And who
knows,

Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How he can
Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire
Belike through impotence, or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger, whom his anger saves
To punish endless? Wherefore cease we

then?

Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,

What can we suffer worse? Is this then
worse,

excellence of Belial's policy, but with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible, with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of character common at all times, dangerous in many times; sure to come to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than then. As Milton describes, it is one among several typical characters which will ever have their place in great councils, which will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The debate in Pandæmonium is a debate

among these typical characters at the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which no other situation could rival. It is the greatest classical triumph, the highest achievement of the pure style in English literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the fewest words.

It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in Paradise Lost the best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical nothing so impure in style-as pedantry. The outof-door conversational life of Athens was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of books, but by those who thought little, by those who were under the restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed something, and a various eager life the

Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in rest. Milton is generally unclassical in

arms?

spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty and unclassical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of the pure

style. There is a want of spontaneity, and a sense of effort. It has been happily said that Plato's words must have grown into their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious sense of the good man's task. Things seem right where they are, but they seem to be put where they are. Flexibility is essential to the consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the poet's efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are admiring his labors when we should be enjoying his words. But this is a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead of using all which comes to hand; it is an additional labor if you write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in choosing, or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so. Take the well known lines:

"There was a little lawny islet By anemone and violet,

Like mosaic, paven:

And its roof was flowers and leaves
Which the summer's breath enweaves,
Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
Pierce the pines and tallest trees,

Each a gem engraven.

Girt by many an azure wave

mons.

Saturday Review.

HISTORICAL NOVELS.

THE influence of novels upon morality has afforded texts to a good many serAs a natural consequence, its importance has been absurdly exaggerated. A preacher generally is, and always ought to be, a temporary victim to the delusion which attributes every evil in the world to some one cause-whether that cause be drinking, defective drainage, or the awful extension of sensation novels. Every iconoclast thinks his own Mumbo-Jumbo the worst of all possible idols. Novels, we might have hoped, would be too small game to afford much zest to persecutors; at any rate, like tobacco and other essential elements of civilization, they will doubtless rise superior to the misguided zeal of over-delicate

moralists. From the feeble assaults that
have been made upon their art, authors
of novels
may, however, learn one lesson;
namely, to keep as shy as possible of all
moral tendency whatever. An attack
upon the Ten Commandments is doubt-
less the worst crime of a novelist, as well
as of any other writer; but the crime of
next magnitude of which he can be guilty
is to take the Ten Commandments under
his patronage. The evils of such advo-
cacy both to morality and to the novel
have to be occasionally exposed on new
outbreaks of the tendency to run sermons
into the mould of romances. The deadly.
dulness which overspreads both the

With which the clouds and mountains pave story and the good advice is a sufficient

A lake's blue chasm."

Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a complete or indeed for any estimate of him. But one excellence is most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the perfection of pure art, to embody typical concep tions in the choicest, the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents may produce its full ef fect, and so to embody them withont effort.

[CONCLUDED IN THE NEXT NUMBER.]

penalty; and the certainty of suffering for that one unpardonable sin is, we will hope, beginning to be understood.

There is another disease to which novels are liable, the evils of which are less generally recognized. To confound a novel with a theological treatise is perhaps the worst blunder, but it is one which has few temptations for any writer of artistic perceptions. To confound novels with history is, as a rule, almost equally fatal, and it is specially annoying, because its apparent ease often entices the ablest writers to undertake an impossible task. We do not venture to assert that in all cases an historical novel is a monstrosity in literature, for such an assertion would be to invite contradictions

genius satisfactorily to fuse the two elements. Sir Walter Scott may be supposed to have set the fashion. He is generally held to have written some good historical novels. We do not class amongst them those which, like Waverley, refer to a state of society scarcely removed from his own experience. But we must confess, however much it may make against our theory, that Ivanhoe is an undeniably good novel, if the test of a good novel is the impossibility of closing it before reaching the last page. Nevertheless, on prying profanely even into Ivanhoe, and shutting our eyes resolutely to the irrepressible vigor and spirit of the style, it is easy to find fault. The characters are, for the most part, mere lay-figures, carrying about assortments of mediæval implements of doubtful authenticity. They talk a strange gibberish of stilted twaddle mixed with strange oaths, such as we presume no human be

from every one who had a favorite writer to defend; but, begging every reader to make such exceptions as he chooses, we believe the general rule to be that a good historical novel, like a good translation, is amongst the rarest of literary products. Innumerable failures have only increased the number of candidates for success in translating Homer. The result has hitherto been (we here pronounce no judgment on the latest aspirant) that out of ten given translators, any nine always say that the tenth is execrable. One is sometimes driven by the multitude of requirements to the conclusion that a good translation is a sheer impossibility. The problem, until solved by success, remains, like the attempt to find perpetual motion or to square the circle, a charming employment for youthful aspirants too rash or too ignorant to be warned by the fate of predecessors. The conditions to be satisfied by the historical novelist are almost equally numerous and incompati-ings ever talked; they act on motives so ble. Both writers have to put new wine into old bottles. The translator has to resuscitate antique and alien modes of thought, and to produce with them, when clothed in an English dress, the same effects to which they originally gave rise. The historical novelist has equally to revive pictures long since faded, and to appeal to our sympathy by extinct passions and perplexities. If he is not confined to such narrow limits as the translator, he has less to guide him. The temptation to do for us now what our ancestors have thoughtlessly left undone is so great that many novelists have overlooked both the slenderness of their information and the difficulty of complying with the necessary conditions. They have manufactured dreary articles by the well-known process of combining the information derived from a dictionary of antiquities with recollections of former

romances.

Sometimes, as in those dismal produc tions, Gallus and Charicles, the story is felt to be a mere thread for stringing together detached pieces of useful information; or, more fortunately, you feel that the characters are real English men and women walking about, in contempt of anachronism, say, in the last days of Pompeii, sadly hampered in their movements by an irrelevant masquerade. It seems to be scarcely possible for any

strangely removed from all ordinary canons of criticism that, when the Templar dies promiscuously out of sheer regard for the exigencies of the story, we scarcely feel surprised. In that unaccountable world, strong men may have been in the habit of suddenly "dying in their agony," without any assignable cause.

Even Rebecca-for whom Mr. Thackeray so characteristically expressed his affection-is ostentatiously and unpleasantly impossible. In fact, Ivanhoe is a book which boys of any sense delight to read, and which men look at again with pleasure because they liked it when boys; but it supposes a world so unreal that the passions by which it is moved can hardly affect our sympathy. This becomes more strikingly true when we contrast these unrealities with the exquisite pictures of Scotch life in the Antiquary or Guy Mannering. Ivanhoe occupies to them the same relation as the carpenter's Gothic of sixty years ago to the best modern architec ture. It may be that a more thorough scholarship would have enabled Scott to people the middle ages with characters as real and living as Dandie Dinmont or Edie Ochiltree. But equally ill success has attended most efforts made with more elaborate precautions. Mr. Thackeray's Esmond is a miracle of imitative art. The costumes and scenery are perfect.