But what
is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy;
only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old
pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs,
opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things,
not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of
right reason, and with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put
us on our feet again, enable us to form an original judgment of our
duties, and suggest new thoughts for to-morrow.
"Lucrezia Floriani," "Le Peche de M. Antoine," "Jeanne," of George
Sand, are great steps from the novel of one termination, which we
all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from life and manners and
motives the novel still is! Life lies about us dumb; the day, as we
know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories are to the plots
of real life what the figures in "La Belle Assemblee," which
represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the novel
will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always be
the novel of costume merely. I do not think them inoperative now. So
much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched;
and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young
study noble behavior; and as the player in "Consuelo" insists that
he and his colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine
etiquette and strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with
so much effect in their villas and among their dependents, so I
often see traces of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy
and brilliancy of young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks.
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