CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

CONTENTS

DUNLOP’S HISTORY OF FICTION

We are very much of Mr. Dunlop’s opinion,—that ‘life has few things better, than sitting at the chimney-corner in a winter evening, after a well-spent day, and reading an interesting romance or novel.’ In fact, of all the pleasures of the imagination those are by far the most captivating which are excited by the representation of our fellow-creatures struggling with great difficulties, and stimulated by high expectations or formidable alarms. And if the reader or spectator have no personal interest in the subject, his emotions are but slightly, if at all, affected by his judgment concerning its authenticity. On the contrary, the fictions of genius may be rendered far more engaging than the greater part of real history.

But the invention of interesting narratives is by no means an easy exercise; and we apprehend that tales entirely and professedly fictitious are exclusively the production of a civilized age; and are never introduced into any nation till long after the genuine exploits of its own heroes have been sung by its bards (who are the first historians), for the entertainment and information of ruder times. These journalists may indeed be expected to exaggerate the truth; and, on very slender evidence, or merely from the warmth of their imagination, to represent the powers of the invisible world as interposing their mighty influence in the shape most agreeable to the prevalent superstitions. But in relating events which passed within the memory of their hearers, these exaggerations would generally be kept within such bounds as not to shock the credulity, and consequently be less gratifying to the national curiosity, and even to the national vanity of their audience: and hence sagacious historians are able to extract a probable narrative from the songs of contemporary bards.

6Long however before the period of sober and scrutinizing history, the more ancient of these songs would gradually receive additions and embellishments from the patriotic fancies of the persons who successively transmitted them to posterity; of the extent of which some idea may be formed from the amplifications with which the account of any surprising event is adorned, even during a short time after its first promulgation, as it passes from house to house, and from village to village. A bard also of one generation, gathering information from those of another, and from the traditionary anecdotes of the aged with whom he conversed, would be apt to compose a narrative in which a greater latitude would be assumed for adjusting it to his own views or to the taste of his countrymen, according to the remoteness of the time to which it referred, and his security from the examination of critical inquirers. And we may well suppose that his audience would receive indulgently, or rather would indispensably require a high colouring of the marvellous in the accounts of their favourite heroes.

In ruder times, therefore, the fiction would chiefly consist, not so much in the troublesome task of inventing incidents, as in exaggeration: And the tendency to exaggerate would act in two ways: it would on the one hand enlarge the scale and heighten the colours of the natural objects and real events which were understood to have existed; and on the other hand it would multiply as well as magnify, and would render distinctly visible the supernatural interpositions which were suggested by the popular creed. When Achilles in a pet retired with his myrmidons, it is probable enough that Diomed was roused to exert himself to the utmost in the common cause, and performed wonders in the first engagements after the secession of his great rival. On such an occasion it would not be unnatural for his brave companions, and still less for enraptured parasitical bards, to have expressed their admiration by saying, that they beheld him as if shining with a light from heaven in the battle; that Minerva was his friend and protector; that under her guidance he not only slew many

of the Trojan chiefs, but completely routed and made an incredible havock among the throng of the less noble combatants, who furiously assailed him, led on by the God of war in all his terrors;—in short, that Diomed was a match for Mars himself. But the heroes of the Trojan expedition were seen as visions by Homer and his cotemporaries: And, according to the representation in the fifth book of the Iliad, Minerva adorns the warrior with a real star-like flame beaming from the crest of his helmet; she obtains Jupiter’s permission to assist the Greeks; rouses Diomed’s courage who had been compelled to retreat; with her own divine hand, she pulls down the 7charioteer, mounts into his seat, and drives to where Mars was combating in propriâ personâ, but who is soon wounded by Diomed in the small guts, νείατον ἐς κενεῶνα, and sent roaring as loud as nine or ten thousand men to his father Jupiter on the top of Olympus. Thus the surprising events which were but moderately hyperbolized at the time, in the relation of the eyewitnesses, and ascribed to the

secret influences of the supernatural powers, rather than to the agency of their daylight apparitions, are wonderfully changed in the representation, at no great distance of time. The real hero slays his tens; the hero of the men-singers and women-singers slays his thousands and his tens of thousands: The real hero is large of bone and strong of muscle; the hero of the poet is a Hercules; and if not a giant, he is much more—like Tom Thumb he is the conqueror of giants: Those superior Beings, with whom the popular religion or superstition has peopled heaven and earth and hell, mingle openly in the fray: they are seen and recognized as distinctly as any others of the Dramatis Personæ, and act and converse very sensibly, sometimes very foolishly, not only with each other, but with their mortal associates. These superior Beings themselves, indeed, frequently owe their supernatural character, and in some cases, their very existence, to exaggeration. The heroes in process of time become demi-gods; and at last are invested with the full honours and emoluments of

Deities acknowledged and established by law;

The unknown causes which actuate the material world,—the passions which agitate the human breast,—and even several of those shadows of entity, the allegorical characters, have been distinctly personified, and many of them admitted to seats of greater or less dignity in the sacred college of Divinities.

But in general the most enormous exaggeration would disfigure those events which were the most ancient in the national traditions;—those events which bordered upon utter darkness and appeared to be coeval with the birth of Time. In a period of such dim antiquity, it appears that a certain Crown Prince of Crete, very enterprising and very unprincipled, rebelled successfully against his father, seemingly still more unprincipled than his son, and carried every thing before him. This worthy young gentleman, after being worshipped by the Cretans during his life, very much, we suppose, as other successful tyrants are worshipped, had the astonishing good fortune, in the course of a few centuries after his death, to be acknowledged as the King of Gods and men throughout all Greece, and afterwards 8through the whole extent of the Roman empire. The abortive insurrection of his kinsmen in Thessaly was in due time represented as the enterprise of stupendous giants, who heaped mountain upon mountain to attack the Thunderer in his Olympian Palace. And as

nobody could tell any thing about the parents of these great men, it was concluded, with a degree of probability amounting to what in the language of philosophers is with much propriety called moral certainty, that they had risen out of the ground like mushrooms. The events prior to his establishment on the throne, appear dimly in the back-ground of the sacred mythology—involved in all the awful obscurity of mysteries, not to be profaned by the scrutiny of impious mortals. We are told that there was a war in heaven of the Titans against Saturn the chief of the Gods, for not having devoured his son Jupiter. For it would appear that this good king, in whose reign, according to the poets, all the world, except the royal family, were virtuous and happy, had cajoled his elder brother Prince Titan out of his inheritance, under the express condition of destroying, or, according to the more elegant mystical account, of eating his male children as soon as they were born. The chief of the gods was at first defeated and imprisoned by the Titans, but was soon rescued and restored by

Jupiter, the hopeful Crown Prince, who afterwards expelled his father, and reigned in his stead.

In some such manner real events are represented by the bards of future generations; with a strange fantastic jumble of hyperbole and allegory, converted partly or entirely from a figurative to a literal meaning, the marvels of superstition, childish fancies, and the brilliant conceptions of poetical genius; while during the whole time there is but little invention of incident, and far less of any thing like that artificial fabrication of a continued fiction, which critics like Bossu have ascribed to Homer so gratuitously, and indeed in such contradiction to all that is known from experience concerning the progress of the human mind in any of the arts.

Fictitious incidents would generally be at first introduced by a much easier method than invention into the narratives of the bards. The gentlemen of this ancient, itinerant corporation would naturally, in the course of their peregrinations, become acquainted with many tales, both foreign and domestic, not generally known to the rest of their countrymen; and would be tempted to steal the most striking of the incidents, whether true or false, and transfer them to the characters in their own histories. Various instances of such pilfering are every day detected in the story-tellers of society, as well as in authors both ancient and modern; and hence it sometimes happens that the same transaction appears in several different associations. Thus, much use 9has been made, in various books, of the transaction so well known to the readers of plays and romances,—the conspiracy for ruining a lady’s reputation by carrying her friends to a hiding-place from whence they could spy the improper behaviour of a person who was dressed so as

to resemble her. This clumsy contrivance seems to have been stolen by Bandello from Ariosto,—and has been employed both by Shakespeare and Spenser. And when authors endowed with so fertile inventions condescend to borrow incidents so ill-contrived, (and indeed they sometimes stoop to still poorer thefts), we cannot doubt that similar plagiarisms must have been frequent among the inferior practitioners in the trade of story-making.

In fact, the piracy of incidents may be traced from the most remote antiquity down to modern times, in the histories both of supernatural agents and of mortal men. There are strong presumptions that the Grecian archives of Hercules, and of Jupiter himself, have been enlarged by plunder both from Egypt and Asia. The Jewish visionaries superadded to the truths of the sacred Scriptures many curious anecdotes relating to the celestial principalities,—which they learned from the authentic records of their Chaldean conquerors. The Romances of chivalry have been enriched by contributions from various quarters; from the songs of the Scalds, the bards of the Northern tribes that overran so many provinces of the Roman empire; from the tales of Arabia, Persia, and other eastern nations; and also from the fables transmitted by the classics of Greece and Rome. Mr. Dunlop very properly rejects any theory which would ascribe the beauties of romantic fiction to any one of these sources exclusively, and we shall quote his general account of the subject, as a fair specimen of his style and sagacity.

‘From a view of the character of Arabian and Gothic fiction, it appears that neither is exclusively entitled to the credit of having given birth to the wonders of romance. The early framers of the tales of chivalry may be indebted to the northern bards for those wild and terrible images congenial to a frozen region, and owe to Arabian invention that magnificence and splendour, those glowing descriptions and luxuriant ornaments, suggested by the enchanting scenery of an eastern climate,

‘It cannot be denied, and indeed has been acknowledged by Mr. Warton, that the fictions of the Arabians and Scalds are totally different. The fables and superstitions of the Northern bards are of a darker shade and more savage complexion than those of the 10Arabians. There is something in their fictions that chills the imagination. The formidable objects of nature with which they were familiarized in their northern solitudes, their precipices and frozen mountains and gloomy forests, acted on their fancy, and gave a tincture of horror to their imagery. Spirits who send storms over the deep, who rejoice in the shriek of the drowning mariner, or diffuse irresistible pestilence; spells which preserve from poison, blunt the weapons of an enemy, or call up the dead from their tombs—these are the ornaments of northern poetry. The Arabian fictions are of a more splendid nature; they are less terrible indeed, but possess more variety and magnificence; they lead us through delightful forests, and raise up palaces glittering with gold and diamonds.

‘It may also be observed, that, allowing the early Scaldic odes to be genuine, we find in them no dragons, giants, magic rings, or enchanted castles. These are only to be met with in the compositions of the bards who flourished after the native vein of Runic fabling had been enriched by the tales of the Arabians. But if we look in vain to the early Gothic poetry for many of those fables which adorn the works of the romancers, we shall easily find them in the ample field of oriental fiction. Thus the Asiatic romances and chemical works of the Arabians are full of enchantments similar to those described in the Spanish, and even in the French, tales of chivalry. Magical rings were an important part of the eastern philosophy, and seem to have given rise to those which are of so much service to the Italian poets. In the Eastern peris, we may trace the origin of the European fairies in their qualities, and perhaps in their name. The griffin or hippogriff of the Italian writers, seems to be the famous Simurgh of the Persians, which makes such a figure in the epic poems of Sadii

and Ferdusii.

‘A great number of these romantic wonders were collected in the East by that idle and lying horde of pilgrims and palmers who visited the Holy Land through curiosity, restlessness, or devotion, and who, returning from so great a distance, imposed every fiction on a believing audience. They were subsequently introduced into Europe by the Fablers of France, who took up arms and followed their barons to the conquest of Jerusalem. At their return, they imported into Europe the wonders they had heard, and enriched romance with an infinite variety of Oriental fictions.

‘A fourth hypothesis has been suggested, which represents the machinery and colouring of fiction, the stories of enchanted gardens, monsters, and winged steeds, which have been introduced into romance, as derived from the classical and mythological authors; and 11as being merely the ancient stories of Greece, grafted on modern manners, and modified by the customs of the age. The classical authors, it is true, were in the middle ages scarcely known; but the superstitions they inculcated had been prevalent for too long a period, and had taken too firm a hold on the mind, to be easily obliterated. The mythological ideas which still lingered behind were diffused in a multitude of popular works. In the travels of Sir John Mandeville, there are many allusions to ancient fable; and, as Middleton has shown that a great number of the Popish rites were derived from Pagan ceremonies, it is scarcely to be doubted, that many classical were converted into romantic fictions. This at least is certain, that the classical system presents the most numerous and least exceptionable

prototypes of the fables of romance.

‘In many of the tales of chivalry, there is a knight detained from his guest, by the enticements of a sorceress; and who is nothing more than the Calypso or Circe of Homer. The story of Andromeda might give rise to the fable of damsels being rescued by their favourite knight, when on the point of being devoured by a sea monster. The heroes of the Iliad and Æneid were both furnished with enchanted armour; and in the story of Polyphemus, a giant and his cave are exhibited. Herodotus, in his history, speaks of a race of Cyclops who inhabited the North, and waged perpetual war with the tribe of Griffons, which was in possession of mines of gold. The expedition of Jason in search of the golden fleece; the apples of the Hesperides, watched by a dragon; the king’s daughter who is an enchantress, who falls in love with and saves the knight,—are akin to the marvels of romantic fiction—especially of that sort supposed to have been introduced by the Arabians. Some of the less familiar fables of classical mythology, as the image in the Theogony of Hesiod, of the

murky prisons in which the Titans were pent up by Jupiter, under the custody of strong armed giants, bear a striking resemblance to the more wild sublimity of the Gothic fictions.’ (Vol. 1. p. 135.)

Thus Bayes is not the only poet whose invention is indebted to his memory or common-place book; and the art of fictitious narrative, like every other art, seems to have arisen gradually from very humble beginnings; and to have consisted, at first, not in the invention of incidents, but in the exaggeration, natural even to eyewitnesses, in relating any interesting or surprising event; and afterwards, in borrowing incidents, true or false, from every quarter, whenever such a license had the chance of escaping detection, or of being favourably received.

But the licence, whether of exaggerating, of borrowing, or of inventing incidents, would be more freely assumed by the bard, and 12more indulgently admitted by his audience; and indeed the reports of travellers, who have always enjoyed a peculiar privilege, would provide the materials of fiction in greater variety, and of a more wonderful kind, when the scene of the hero’s adventures happened to be in distant and unknown regions, inhabited by other races of men, enclosed by other mountains and other seas, subject to the influence of other skies, and governed by other gods and another order of Nature.—The Odyssey is a curious example.—If we except the usual interposition of the usual deities, the history of what passes in Ithaca and Greece seems to contain little which may not be more easily conceived to have actually happened, than to have been invented by the poet. But when we accompany Ulysses to Italy, Sicily and Ogygia, countries so little known in those early times to the inhabitants of Ionia or Greece, we find ourselves in another world. We