THE DISOWNED. By the Author of Pelham. J. & J. Harper, New York: 1829. pp. 505.

THE popularity of Pelham has caused the Disowned to be sought after by the public with so much avidity, that it is quite too late for us to attempt to discharge the office of anticipating public curiosity, by a sketch of the story and character of the Book. But the publication of these two novels helps to give so much importance to what may be called a new school of romance writers, that it can hardly be passed unnoticed, as such, by any Magazine, which takes upon itself the office of a Literary Register. We say a new school of novel writers; but most of the authors who compose it, are so strongly infected with the manner of the literary artists, if we may so call them, of London, and the very fact of their writing, is so much more to be attributed to the state of the trade, than to the turn of their own genius, that perhaps they may, with more accuracy, be said to belong to a department of a much larger literary school.

Fashions in literature arise either from the genius of the most distinguished authors, by the effect of example and imitation; or from the influence of public

taste, the character of the reading public, the greater or less diffusion of literature, and indeed from the general state of the literary market, by the demand which these circumstances give rise to, for certain kinds and styles of composition. In proportion as knowledge becomes diffused, the writer becomes more of an artisan; the first of the above causes loses, the second gains in influence. While genius is supported by royal munificence or private taste, the splendor of the material is more regarded than the demand. The workmen of kings manufacture only tapestry, lace and porcelain, but those who labor for the public and for themselves, find that there is more profit on calicoes, ginghams, and sheetings. As the number of readers increases, the business of writing becomes more of a trade. The certainty of obtaining a livelihood by it becomes greater; as great indeed as by any profession which is an essential part of the productive machinery of society; but the effect of it is to make the author consider rather what he can be best paid for than what he can write best; and though everything in a practical way will be done in a more workmanlike manner, yet it will be less contemplative, original, and tasteful; and though ordinary jobs will be done better, yet there will be fewer (they cannot be entirely suppressed,) of those productions which are elaborated by the taste, reflection, and dignified contemplation of years. Every body now-adays dwells in a good house, but no one undertakes to rival those masses of Grecian simplicity, or luxuriant Gothic tracery, which arose among the huts of the Roman republic and of the feudal villeins.

It would be very difficult, (indeed it is quite astonishing how much it is the case, considering the difficulty,) for a novelist at this day, of any judgment of his own, to adopt so entirely the manner of any particular school, as not to copy each some particular part of the many excellent and much admired models which have hitherto obtained; yet in spite of this difficulty the influence of fashion has produced such a similarity in Almacks, Vivian Grey, Cyril Thornton, and several other novels lately published in England, that we think they may be fairly classed together as the members of a certain school. They are the novels of high life; as much as the eternal old Romances of Scudari, Marivaux, and Mademoiselle de La Fayette, belonged to the courts in which they were composed. And as those derived their interest from some highly romantic sentiments of chivalry and love, peculiar to the court and its train, so these derive theirs, from the peculiar spirit, amusements and customs of fashionable life. In this respect the two schools resemble each other, and differ from all others that we remember, that they have their origin in the taste of the society they were composed for, and not in the invention and fancy of the author; while those of the schools of Richardson, (which first displaced the romantic school) of Fielding and Smollett, of Walpole, of Sterne, of McKenzie, of Scott, and of Edgeworth, have originated in the genius of their founders. They wrote novels at the suggestion of their own genius, and they obeyed its humor in the writing; the school of Almacks, Pelham and Vivian Grey wrote to supply the public demand merely, and they have consulted its humors only. The rule of criticism, which teaches that they should have a dignity of rank as well as of character, has ever secured to the dramatis persona of romances a respectable sufficiency of titles and wealth, but we do not know that any other than the novelists above mentioned, have attempted to describe the beau monde as such, to breathe its spirit, and to be punctiliously familiar with all its observan15

VOL. I.-NO. II.

ces, and proprieties; which they sometimes do with an affectation which is the most odious and suspicious of all pedantries.

As a school we think, that, take them in mass, they are if any thing superior in style, scholarship, and studied acquaintance with character to the innumerable imitators of the great masters who have preceded them; but that, with the exception of Vivian Grey, they are all immeasurably inferior to Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Scott, Miss Edgeworth, and perhaps the author of the “ Inheritance."

The Disowned seems to us to be the production of one of the journeymen contributors to the London Reviews and Magazines, trained to writing, a tolerable but not a thorough bred scholar, well acquainted with English Literature, an observer of life, but rather upon the surface; a moralist but after his own peculiar fashion, and of that accommodating school called men of the world, who do not descend beneath the stratum of the first principles, and who regard the easy operation of a part of social life, rather than the good of all mankind; and an assiduous and accurate observer of men and manners, but without any of that intuitive conception of it, which constitutes a dramatic genius-that sort of genius, for which Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott are of all men the most remarkable. We cannot help thinking when we read the works of Fielding and Smollett that they must have had their minds full of characters and adventures, not the hoarded result of industrious observations, but the product which their imagination had worked up, from materials which it had, unknown to its possessor, furtively snatched from the objects which passed before it; and that even if they had not inwoven them into the thread of a connected story, they would nevertheless have existed in their minds, unused, in the same richness and profusion, and containing all the elements of life and scene, whenever the fiat of the inspiring fancy should be issued to call them forth into an imaginative world. But when we set ourselves to imagine the process of the manufacture of Pelham and the Disowned, we think we see first a precedent determination to write the book: secondly, we imagine the author going forth like the bee, gathering from every object his story and descriptions, sketching a character or a scene to-day, fitting it to its place to-morrow, and so gradually compiling together a magazine of adventure and character.

Pelham and the Disowned are certainly, with all their faults, very clever books; but we cannot think they have the least degree of claim to be ranked with the great masterpieces of the art. They belong to a literary community of a much higher standard of education than our own, and of a country in which scholarship and wealth have made the most of their materials, and where the leaven of a few splendid geniuses in every period has given as high a tone, and as brilliant a vein, as could be well diffused through a whole class of scribblers. They are just such books as we are the least likely to write in this country. They are the exact counterparts for instance to the writings of our Cooper. We are never delighted in them with those bursts of genius which seem to purge away (if we may so speak,) the impurities of the uncultivated soil, and, inspired by which, our countryman sometimes pours forth from an imagination overflowing with his subject, a profusion of rapid and grand sketches, in the most liquidly flowing colors; they contain too, particularly the Disowned, quite as frequent offences against good taste in writing; nevertheless, a more classical and brilliant style of thinking and writing, though often ill executed, on the whole makes the read

ing of them the more agreeable amusement. It is a common peculiarity of genius, not of the highest order, and when untrained, to be ordinary on ordinary occasions, and to consist chiefly in the faculty of being supernaturally inspired by the grandeur of an uncommon subject. Cooper's faults are the rudenesses of an untutored genius, those of the Disowned the affected brilliancy and overstrained efforts of the trained and practised writer. The imperfections of the first are those of a fine but unpolished material, while those of the latter are the failures of a naturally less delicate grain which breaks in the polishing.

In his knowledge of character our author is rather a man of the world than a poet or novelist; and therefore succeeds where he draws from observation, and fails where he draws from conception. In the study of human nature, there is one kind of mind, which, like Bacon's, considers character to find out the motives of action, by which to calculate on the conduct of men, and to comprehend their designs; there is another, like that of Shakspeare, which regards the feelings of men as parts of a picture which he wishes to represent. The chief object of the former is the result only, and of the latter the manner more particularly. The former studies our propensities and passions as mere algebraical quantities, or as the material and efficient parts of the machinery of life; and therefore he considers them to estimate their relative force, direction, and inward connexion; the latter views them with the eye of a painter, and studies all those external circumstances of passion and language by which they become visible to the eye of others, and by which his readers are affected by the same emotions. Both would have made Clarence shoot at the robber in Talbot's house, but Shakspeare would hardly have allowed him to stop and congratulate himself and his friend that he had come in time. We can very well conceive that Lord Bacon with all his knowledge of human nature would have been a bad dramatist, and we dare say that honest Will Shakspeare would have been much more easily imposed upon than the Lord Chancellor in the affairs of the world. A man that can write a very good essay on manners, or general characters may be a very indifferent

novelist or dramatist.

That knowledge of character which enables an author to make his characters act naturally in a given situation, and with a given motive, we think our author has displayed in a very considerable degree, particularly in Pelham; (but then the question arises concerning the naturalness of the motive.) Neither do we deny that he has described some of his characters with considerable truth to nature (or rather art) and great spirit as far as they go; but they give us a knowledge of the manners merely, and do not let us into their internal feelings and character.

Besides those general characteristics of human nature which are susceptible of definition, every person has in his character a quality like the indefinable näre,' by which the Duke of Johannisburger, and the Peers of the Wine palace of the Rhine, distinguished, not only the different species but even the different vintages of their wines. There is about the character of every person an essential aroma which gives to it its individuality; and to detect and imitate this is the highest talent of the novelist. It is to steal a second and more subtle Promethian fire; it is an approximation to the most inward mystery of the divine art; which gives the life to life, which stamps the mere animal with its seal of immortality which cannot be effaced, and which makes the mind an imperishable unit among existing things. This effect cannot be produced by taking some universal passion,

and making it the "primum mobile" of a system of other inferior and subordinate passions, equally common, as is done by the author of Pelham; for, to apply to the drawing, an observation of Lord Bacon on the formation, of character, "We must not proceed as the sculptor does in forming a statue, who works sometimes on the face, sometimes on the limbs, and sometimes on the folds of the drapery; but, we must proceed (and it certainly is in our power,) as Nature does in forming a flower, or any other of her productions; she throws out at once the whole system of being, and the rudiments of all the parts." The drawing of characters cannot be effected by combination and compilation; but it must be by instantaneous conception, and wherever it is not so done, it must be inconsistent and unsatisfactory. This accounts for the inconsistencies of most of our author's characters; what for instance can be more inconsistent than Mordaunt's?

In the drawing of characters, as in the kindred art of painting, there are two degrees of genius. The first is like that of the landscape or portrait painter, who has the faculty of taking down with spirit and accuracy the forms and expressions which he sets himself to copy; the other is like that of the fancy, (or as he is termed in art) the historical painter, who extracts from the ever-varying pictures of life, the essential ideas of beautiful forms, fine colors, and highly wrought passions, and who, with a magic like that of nature, (and which is indeed nature working through the instrumentality of his conceptions,) can recombine all the elements which he thus prefers, into new varieties. And this selection of materials is not made by the labored analysis of chemistry, but by an intuitive conception like that by which the philosophical historian detects at a glance the spirit of the events of several centuries, which to another's mind are a mere chaos. Neither do we mean to say that a novelist has any thing to do with metaphysics, or, in the language of the worthy 'Mr. Trollolop,' with the nature of the human mind. The metaphysician descends one degree lower in the subdivision of elements than the dramatist; one takes his material in one stage and the other in another. The novelist is to the metaphysician, what the naturalist is to the chemist.

The last of the two faculties above described, the author of the Disowned certainly has not; and it is on this account that he succeeds better in these characters in which he appears to draw from some original, as in that of Mr. Brown for instance, than in those romantic and more elevated ones (for instance Mordaunt and Clarence Linden,) for which an author must depend upon his own invention. Neither do we think that he has, in a very high degree, the humbler talent which we have compared to the art of the portrait painter; for it is in the drawing of characters as in the drawing of faces, that they who possess the higher gift of creative genius, succeed best in imitation; since it is very possible to catch the features with a most provoking facility and faithfulness, and yet to fail altogether in giving the character and spirit.

We fancy we can perceive the same sort of difference between Scott and his competitors, as that which has been pointed out as to their drawing of character, in the whole manner of the scenes and descriptions. There are very few of the materials which real life furnishes to the novelist, which will bear to be transferred to his pages without much elaboration by his fancy and taste. It is the faculty of taking a picturesque view of every object, the manner of the conception, the degree of the transforming power which constitute the merit of the narrative and descriptive parts of the production. And to do this well, a novelist must ex