The Stimulant and the Sedative of Fiction. 311 common law and lot of Vanity Fair.' Miss Yonge knows better than that. By her skilful treatment of the lighter parts of the story, she prevents the mind from being oppressed by its pathos, and so well works out her hidden meaning, without giving it formal expression, that she makes us feel there is something better than earthly happiness and success, for the sake of which our latent sense of heroism teaches us at last to be content that Guy should die. The same high lesson is brought before us in the wild-dream romance of 'Zanoni.' George Eliot gives us heathen tragedy under a Christian form; Bulwer gives us Christian tragedy under a heathen form, wrapped up in a jargon of art, philosophy, and alchemy. He represents Zanoni, the Pythagorean seer, who has attained the secret of boundless wealth and knowledge, life and youth, constrained by his love, and by the pressure of danger and evil on those he loves, to yield his glorious gifts one by one, to be subject to the malignant powers which he had formerly commanded, beaten backwards, step by step, from intercourse with bright ethereal spirits to the weakness and sorrow of mortal life, until he has to yield that life itself to save his wife and child; yet, in that last hour of defeat, recognising the true secret of victory, and asserting his trust and triumph over earth-evils and spiritfoes. 'Did he mean all that by shaking his head?' says Sheridan, in 'The Critic.' So our English novelists may say, 'Do we mean all this by our amusing stories? Do we inculcate these grand lessons, and do our readers understand us?' That depends-considering that in novels bad lessons are much more often taught than good ones, we should be glad to think that readers in general did not understand them. As a rule, novels are read for mere amusement, all action of the moral judgment being suspended for the time; and in that fact is to be found the greatest evil of a habit of novel-reading. Fiction has two different effects; it is a stimulant and a sedative. It can stimulate the fancy for good or evil, and it can soothe the mind to forgetfulness of good or evil,-to forgetfulness of care or worry, also to forgetfulness of work, of duty, of the claims and responsibilities of real life and though it is customary to condemn fiction chiefly as a stimulant, we think that, in the present day, its sedative effects are far more pernicious. It is injuring us less by that which it does, than by that which it prevents us from doing. If it raises unhealthy longings in those who, by its aid, mistake fancy for truth, it quiets healthy aspirations by thrusting aside real life, and offering us a make-believe in its : stead. It teaches us to take interest in, to feel with, grieve with, rejoice with, that which is not reality, that of which the great charm is, that it does not trouble us with the severe obligations of truth. Many a youth and man who would throw down in disgust the novels which might tend to stimulate his evil passions, wastes over them, without scruple, the time and thought and energy which should be spent in study or in work. Fiction, at present, ministers less to remembrance of evil than to forgetfulness of good; and in this way our swarming serials are doing us a great ill-service. Their power as stimulants is much lessened by the month's interval that separates the consecutive scenes of the story; but their power as sedatives, to indispose us for steady thought or hard work, is much increased by their constant recurrence and wide circulation, for thus they catch us at unwary moments, and waste far more time and thought than would ever be deliberately given to novels in a more condensed form. What shall we say to the habitual novel-reader? It is true that God has given us mental stimulants and sedatives to meet the wear and tear of daily life; and that first among those which refresh without after-exhaustion, the pleasures of imagination take their place. In the glory of nature, the graces of art, the charm of poetry, the magic word-painting which we call 'fiction,' God has supplied us with the means of temporary escape from the pressure of reality, when business, or care, or pain, or sorrow, weighs too heavily upon us. We do not say that tonics would not often better meet the need; nevertheless, in many cases of earthly weakness, stimulants and sedatives are allowed and vided. It would be hard to say why fiction may not be lawfully used in the exhaustion of over-work, or in restlessness and pain, as we use the blessings of wine and opium: the helpful grace of God no more forbids the aid of one than of the other. But when we are strong and well, shall we meet the craving for food by wine? Or, when we are diseased, and in need of medicine or the surgical knife, shall we lull ourselves with opium? For our mental and moral cravings adequate food has been provided, and for our mental and moral disease adequate medicine has been given, -real objects, real motives, real sources of joy and grief, of hope and fear; but in our hours of slothful ease the very reality of these things appals us, and, cowards that we are, we shrink from their contact. Anything that will hide their clear outline, anything that will help us to play with life,-business for the busy, beauty for the graceful, fiction for the idle,-shall be thankfully welcomed in the place of truth. We are accustomed to think of habitual novel-reading as the vice of women, (and probably The Benedictines in England. 313 the quieter life of the sex predisposes them to this indulgence,) but it is far too common among idle youth and men, who need stimulants, yet shrink from vice. Even to such, we question if the conscious stimulant of the habitual dose is not subordinate to its unconscious sedative. Fiction may be pleasant, but the true secret is that reality is not pleasant, that we do not like effort and endurance, those inevitable conditions of mortal life. It is useless to place around the young restrictions which are not sanctioned by the tone and temper of the age; and we might as well bar our doors against the spring-tide as against the torrent of stories, serials, and green and yellow literature, which inundates us on all sides. Each one must bar his own mind, making conscience to himself of the time he devotes to reading, of the nature of the books he reads, and of the effect they have on his mind. But this would carry us far beyond novels. O, studious young men, who scorn light literature, do you never undermine your principles by wild speculations a thousand times more dangerous? O, respectable fathers, who frown at Dumas, do you never read The Times' reports of the Divorce Court, a thousand times more defiling? When the press gives such publicity to every kind of vice and error, there can be no effectual barrier against evil but that which is placed within. Curious youth turns towards forbidden knowledge ere it rightly apprehends the extent of the stain; and it is in that age of departing innocence and advancing temptation that we should most seek to inculcate the great duty of self-restraint. The wise son of Sirach tells us, that 'the knowledge of wickedness is not wisdom.' Who is there that, in sober manhood, has never had cause to mourn over the dark corners of his mind, where dangerous or defiling knowledge has been stored, (drawn from other sources than novels,) and to wish that, in the mercy of God, it had been possible to blot out the memory with the guilt of sin? Our stained thoughts remain to trouble or to tempt us, like dry-rot that has crept into the hidden timbers of a house, which, kept by great care from spreading, oozes out in damp spots on the wall,—an incurable evil, only to be met by a rough remedy, when the architect shall take down the house, and build it all anew.' ART. II.-1. Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon. Edited by the REV. JOSEPH STEVENSON, M.A. Published by the authority of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, &c. Two Volumes. London. 1858. 2. Les Moines d'Occident, depuis Saint Benoit jusqu'à Saint Bernard. Par LE COMTE DE MONTALEMBERT. Deux Tomes. Paris. 1860. If we might think of the course of Church systems as we are taught to think of the daily action of individual Christians, that it is ceaselessly watched by a concourse of invisible spectators, we should give a prominent place in the 'great cloud of witnesses' to a grand leading spirit by the name of Benedict. That Benedict we mean whose name has been wreathed with saintly honours in both eastern and western calendars; the distinguished Patriarch, the great legislator of Western Monachism, styled with much beauty and some truth, the founder of peace:' Ipse fundator placidæ quietis. He was born in troublesome times. The heart of Europe seemed as it were in its last agony. The worn-out frame of social life was breaking up. Corruption and confusion were preparing the way for despair; no remedy, no check appeared. Government, laws, manners, customs, arts, sciences, religion, and truth, all seemed to be doomed; secularity, error, and schism rendered the Church unequal to her calling; while civil rule and power were all but lost amidst the triumphs of brute force. There was 'dimness of anguish' everywhere. Indeed, it might have been said of Europe, If one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof.' This was all that was seen by the father of those ascetic but active communities which, from the seventh to the ninth century, did so much to redeem the finest parts of Europe from Paganism;-by whose aid, and under whose influence, the founders of the western kingdoms laid the groundwork of modern civilization, and prepared the way for the final establishment of Christian governments. The period of Benedict's birth reminds us forcibly of Samson's riddle, 'Out of the eater came forth meat.' He sprang from among the degenerate representatives of patrician rank; so that from the class which had gone far towards bringing the social life of Europe to its last gasp arose one who, by the vigorous use of extreme measures, took a leading part in bringing that life back into a process of restoration. His mother was one of the last offshoots from the illustrious house of Anicius; and her distinguished son first smiled on her in the cool region of the central Apennines, near the foot of Mount Fiscellus, and the source of the sulphureous Nar. His native town, Nursia, claimed the honour of giving Sertorius to the Roman world, and of being the birth-place of Vespasian's mother; whilst near its gates extensive ruins bore witness for centuries after his death to the dignity and power of his own Early Training of Benedict. 315 ancestral line. The son of so noble a house must be trained at Rome. To Rome the lad was sent under the care of a nurse: a female nurse, of course; for the Romans had learnt to find comfort in the care and rule of old women; nor have they rid themselves of that conceit even to this day. The scenes which were thought most favourable to the preparation of the young Benedict for a place in the world, produced, however, an unlooked-for effect; they repelled his spirit, and sent him into the wilderness. That intuitive philosophy and that spiritual taste for which he afterwards became so distinguished, were manifested when he was scarcely fourteen; for at that age his plan of life was formed, and his resolutions fixed. What others learn from bitter experience, he seemed instinctively to discover, without any painful experiment,-the miserable disproportion between the earlier promises and the later performances of the outside world. Where others saw smiling pleasure, he detected dangers and death in disguise; and, at the same time charmed with an ideal of contemplative piety, he turned his back on the attractions and advantages of the imperial city, forsook family and fortune, and ventured even to break away from a course of liberal education, in search of what one of his biographers calls 'learned ignorance and untaught wisdom.' His fond old, nurse looked for him, and he was not; he had slipped from his leading strings. Whither had he gone? Montalembert would be grand in answer to this question. History,' says he, 'fixes her regards upon the hills which in the centre of Italy and by the gates of Rome detach themselves from the chain of the Apennines, and extend from the ancient country of the Sabines to that of the Samnites. A lone hermit goes to kindle on those heights a fire of supernatural virtue, and to illumine them with a splendour which for ten centuries was to shed its beams upon regenerated Europe.' We would not be unjust to our author, the friend and vindicator of 'les Moines d'Occident.' He is industrious, knows how to charm some minds, at least, by the use of his learning, and is not unfrequently eloquent. We have no sympathy, however, with some of his notions, or much respect for the logical powers which he puts forth in their defence; we cannot think he has made his pages fully answer to his purpose, as expressed in starting, 'I write not a panegyric but a history;' nor have we been provoked to anything but a smile at his declared intention to 'avenge' what he calls 'catholic and historical truth' upon that land even where she has been least known,' as he thinks, and where she still meets with most of antipathy and prejudice.' To write about monks is evidently a labour of love to the Comte de Montalembert. We wonder he never retreated |