The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1880-06-26
THE PRESS.
Facts of Fiction

lHarperS bdZdI.J
1t is a curiosity of travel that SO many trav-
elers, when they are abroad, visit the places
and haunts of famous fiction as much as they
do those of history and reality, if not even
more.
How many people are there who go to Scot
land for no other purpose than to follow out
the wandering fancies of Walter SCOTS i'm
mortal music, who tramp over the Highlands
to the memory of Rob Roy, see the purple
Trossachs for the sake of Roderick Dhu, for
whom Flodden Field would be barren of in
terest had "Marmion' never been written,
and who would never see Dryburgh Abbey, or
the ruins oil Melrose, or Kenilworth Castle,
but for thephantoms that rise to welcome
them at the wand of the Wizard of the North?
How many are there, again, who would nev-
er cross tho limits of the italian town that
knew the history of Romeo and Juliet if Shaks-
peare had told us nothing of their love; whom
neither tho heath of Fores, nor Birnam Wood,
nor Dunsinane would ever tempt from the
beaten path, had not the witches met the
Thane of Cawdor on that heath, had not Mac
beth seen those woods moving on his strong
hold?
Who Of the wandering band has not looked
for Lord Steyne's mansion in London as much
as for the solid stones of the Duke of Yelling
ton's-does not glance for some reminder of
the old Colonel and Give Newcome among
the Bluecoat Boys far more than for any of
the real and famous among the long list of
those bpys2
And for whom is not London peopled with
the beings created by the fancy OF him whom
Lady Bulwer-before his death, in common
with the crew who busy themselves in hunting
out only his follies and blemishes since his
death-styled the Aristophanes Of the Pot
house and the Plutarch Of the Pave, but whom
the world will know, long after his defamers
are forgotten, as the Lord of Laughter and
Tears? What is the Court of Chancery to our
travellers but as it gives them Mr., Jarndyce
and Miss Flyte? OF whom of all that have
entered the gates of the Marshalsea do they
reckon but Little Dorritt? And do they not
know the very house that will presently crack
from top to bottom, the man whose moustache
goes up and whose nose goes down when he
laughs sitting in the window meanwhile?
They walk through High Holborn to look for
the shop of Poll Sweedlepipes and the lodgings
OF Mrs. Camp; they follow Mr.. Pickwick from
the city; Brighton stands to them only for
Paul Dombey and "What are the wild waves
saying?" the dialect of Yorkshire has no other
significance to their ears than that John Brow
die spoke it; Dover is sacred to Betsy Trot-
wood and the donkeys; Yarmouth means the
wreck of Steerforth; England and the English
are, in fact, only Charles Dickens. Soon now
they will be following the footsteps of Macleod
OF Dare, perhaps, or looking up the localities
of the next story writer who stamps his die
with such vigorous action as to impress all
hearts with the personality of his fancies or
his portraits.
Certainly this is a great tribute to the power
Of genius, and to the fact of the existence of
Uauiuu in ho u1or writ IF fctio1 IL
is not only persons and places that have thus
been made so real. but bygone generations
have been infused with such fresh life that
they have become as vivid to us as to-day's,
and scenes and times that would have been but
dry bones otherwise have grown animated and
human and full of vital pith and marrow under
their hand
Does not Hawthorne, in the Scarlet Letter"
and other OF his tales, make the people OF the
old Puritanic era, that once had been repul-
sive to us as ghouls and COLLINS, creatures of
flesh and blood, passions and emotions like our
own, so that we can understand them, feel
with them, aspire with them, forgive them?
Do we not picture to ourselves and realize
more clearly the domestic life of ancient
Egypt better than all the tones of history can
teach it on reading Theophile Gautier's "Ro-
nance of Mummy" What should we reck
OF the barbaric tribes of little peninsula in
the Levant and its Rocky islets if Homer had
not held up his torch to their struggles? Do
we not feel that Homer created Helen? and
should we care straw for all Schliemann's
work II Homer had never sung of Achilles
and the Xanthus?