Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/410

Rh meant to rivet no ordinary degree of interest. But as to the propriety of making his sceptical career the subject of romantic narrative, grave doubts may be preferred. This the author meant to challenge when, after presenting a collection of excerpts from the letters of the half-converted freethinker, she supposes her reader to turn to the title-page "Olive, a Novel," and to exclaim, "Most incongruous—most strange!" or perhaps to accuse her of irreverence in thus bringing into a fictitious story those subjects which are acknowledged as most vital to every human soul, but yet which most people are content, save at set times and places, tacitly to ignore. Now, there are those who, as she observes, sincerely believe that in such works as this there should never once be named the Holy Name. Objecting, as we are disposed to do, to the story of Harold Gwynne, we yet repudiate the notion that novels are to exclude religion, and either to be "without God in the world," or to have the altar of an Unknown God. We are willing to accept her definition of what a novel is, or rather ought to be—namely, the attempt of one earnest mind to show to many what humanity is and may become—to depict what is true in essence through imaginary forms—to teach, counsel, and warn, by means of the silent transcript of human life. "Human life without God! Who will dare to tell us we should point that?" Who, indeed! But be it remembered, that while we would protest against a novel without traces of the Divine, as we would against the production of "Hamlet" without the Prince of Denmark, we at the same time distinguish broadly between the spirit of religion and the polemics of religion—between a novel as the reflection of a holy pervading presence, and a novel as the vehicle of dogmatic dispute. A hero inspired with thoughts that wander through eternity, that come from God and go to God, that with the lofty sanctify the low in his existence, and with one mellow hue chasten every change in his many-coloured life,—is a hero worthy of all acceptation, provided only he savour not of Salem Tabernacle, and snuffle not with the Little Bethelites. But a hero whose intellectual crochets, or delusions, or blindnesses, are to be entrusted for repairs to a fascinating heroine—a mental perplexity which is to be solved in fiction—a deep-rooted scepticism which is to lose its vis vitæ according to the artistic demands of a tale of the fancy,—this we cannot away with. If arguments ore used in a controversial fiction, we can never escape the often and justly repeated caution, that here the facts, as well as the arguments, are made by the novelist. He coins—to use the language of an Edinburgh Reviewer—the premises from which his conclusions are deduced; and he may coin exactly what he wants: nay, the controversial writer of fiction need not actually make his facts; he needs only to select them. the author of "Olive" has not, indeed, written a polemical novel; she has not made it the arena for theological discussion, as Plumer Ward did with his "Man of Refinement," or for sociological exposition, as Mr. Kingsley did with his "Tailor and Poet." But she has made enough of Harold Gwynne