The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1900-02-24

/ SetS 10 raise views OF lie. tie HdS
/ one grave fault, and this is that ne
writes as if a man could be good OIL
! himself; he makes his characters act
! from natural goodness, never from su-
pernatural. In his Becky Sharp, that
famous parsonage in Vanity Fair, who
resolves to gain her ends by saltlshness
! ana intrigue, we have terrible eN-
4 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
/ helpless, who is impertinent and cruel
in her family, but who, in public, weeps
! sentimental tears and pretends to be an
/ angel of compassion; in Major Penden-
I MS and Baroness Bernstein we see the
decay of selfish lives Thackeray never
leads his readers to contound rlght
with wrong. If he seem unrelenting, 1t
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 con-
science. His ladies and gentlemen have
natural manners. Ethel Newcome
! never cranes her neck, or throws her
self with a epasmodic sob at the feet
of anybody, and Philip Warrington
| of utter disdain. And where can We
find more upright true and natural
| gentleman than Thackeray paints
! George Washington to be?
A READER OF LIGHT NOVELS
may find it difficult to acquire taste
for Thackeray. 1t requires a good judg-
ment to appreciate the marvellous art
shown in every line of Henry Esmond.'
1t is worth taking pains to acquire
that judgment. Once gained it is
gained forever. Once gained, the mere
| triciouS in literature is easily discoV-
cred by the sense SO refined.
Dickens has not Thackeray's almost
! perfect style. His personages are often
! grotesque and sometimes. L must ad-
nit, a little vulgar, sometimes, too,
strained and artificial. But, like Man
zoni's great novel, The Betrothed,
| Nicholas Nickleby' and David Copper
! field will remain joys forever to the
healthy and cultivated mind.
! We may not agree as to the 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 lit
erature than the Scenes from Clerical
life? Her philosophy was bad; her
life gloomy, and her teaching gloomler
STILL But when she writes, not as
teacher, but as an observer how true
and natural she is! Had she been con-
tent with being the most brilliant wo-
man i'll England without attempting to
hst t-IN
easily put her beside Thackeray. AS
or 'Middlemarch' with Mrs. Humphrey
Wards Robert Elsmere' or David
Grier' 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 stagnant pool
and telling US that 1t reflects the rain
bow. The Guido 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, 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, ig-
nOrance or fashion our foes are almost
as many as our readers, and while the
Of IN,-il ,f
history Of England or of the man who
collects and publishes in a volume some
dozen lines of Milton, Pope or Prior
with paper from the Spectator and
chapter from Sterne, are eulogiZed by
thousand pens, there seems al
most a general wish to decry the ca
pacity and undervalue the labor of the
novelist and to slight the perform
ances which have only genius, wit and
taste to recommend them. A good
novel is only some work in which the
greatest powers of the mind are dis
played, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the hap
piest delineation of it's 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
is now one of the
GREATEST FACTORS IN CIVILIZA-
TION,
and, unhappily, as 1 said before, so
oYerrated has it become that some peo-
pie look on it alone as literature. And
though nothing could be more FORUM
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 speaking of the morals and man
ners of the novel, l have almost omit
ted the central subject of most of them
of all of them, in fact-love. And on
no subject does 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 pic
lures from real life and taught a les
son by each picture, does not pretend
that love is the main motive and mar
riage the great end of living. Madame
Swetchine says of novels: They gen
orally end with marriage, like COM
edy; whereas, marriage is only the be-
ginning of life In Thackeray's 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 Scotts. nor in the best of Dick
ems But it is in vast swarm of nov
els which like the Egyptian locusts
devour every green thing. They turn
the young in heart old before their
time They raise delusive hopes which
sink in disappointment. If the senti-
mental novel could be suppressed there
would be much less misery in the
world. The noveliSts who write with
out reason generally represent two
persons as meeting suddenly. They
ara bOtb iS ppOI1ol