Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/165

1885.] Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good, that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my garments! May I seek to be sanctified wholly! My nineteenth birthday will soon be here (the 22d) – an awakening signal. My mind has been much clogged lately by languor of body, to which I am prone to give way, and for the removal of which I shall feel thankful."

Music had not only been for her an enthusiastic study, but an extraordinary enjoyment; nevertheless she says: –

"It would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship; nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency."

Now her present biographer has judiciously refrained from signifying any approval or disapproval on this or the future phase of her theological opinions. It would be futile to argue a matter on which most readers must have made up their minds, and he evidently thinks that his business is to present the woman of genius in all the main circumstances of her life, and to leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. A cheap and easy effect might be gained by taking either side, but we shall follow the course of the biographer. Our only comment on the foregoing extracts will be of a literary kind. They prove that if she had held to her opinions, riot only there could have been no 'Adam Bede,' 'Mill on the Floss,' or other novels; but she could never have achieved literary excellence of any kind, because her thoughts were working in a quite uncongenial medium, and the more she wrote in this style, the farther would she diverge from the path that afterwards led her to fame. The opinion of the future novelist about fiction at the age of twenty was uncompromisingly severe.

"I venture to believe," she writes, "that the same causes which exist in my own breast to render novels and romances pernicious, have their counterpart in that of every fellow-creature. ... As to the discipline our minds receive from the perusal of fictions, I can conceive none that is beneficial but may be attained by that of history. It is the merit of fictions to come within the orbit of probability: if unnatural they would no longer please. If it be said the mind must have relaxation, 'Truth is strange – stranger than fiction.' When a person has exhausted the wonders of truth, there is no other resort than fiction: till then, I cannot imagine how the adventures of some phantom, conjured up by fancy, can be more entertaining than the transactions of real specimens of human nature from which we may safely draw inferences. I daresay Mr James's 'Huguenot' would be recommended as giving an idea of the times of which he writes; but as well may one be recommended to look at landscapes for an idea of English scenery. The real secret of the relaxation talked of is one that would not generally be avowed; but an appetite that wants seasoning of a certain kind cannot be indicative of health. Religious novels are more hateful to me than merely worldly ones: they are a sort of centaur or mermaid, and, like other monsters that we do not know how to class, should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born. The weapons of the Christian warfare were never sharpened at the forge of romance. Domestic fictions, as they come more within the range of imitation, seem more dangerous. For my part, I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for