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before
us, and that with the most noble seriousness and the most artistic skill,
a reality which lies deep in human nature and the period he represents.
The tragical complications and consequences resulting even from errors
which never took shape in evil deeds could not in the highest tragedy
be represented more purely and strikingly than here. The stain of
impurity rests upon the soul of him who thinks that he detects it, not in
the book itself. Ottilie is as pure and immortal a creation of genius as
Mignon.

As novel-literature has developed itself in Europe, an attempt has been
made to employ it as a mirror of the past, into which mankind shall
love to look, and thereby ascertain whether civilization has advanced or
retrograded with the lapse of time. This is a reaction against the
eighteenth century, and it appears under two forms--the
idealistic-sentimental and the strongly realistic-social. The earliest
instance in Germany of the romantic school, Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
is the apotheosis of the art and literature of the Middle Ages. The
writings of Walter Scott put an end to this sentimentalism, and this is
indeed their highest merit. Those of his works will continue to maintain
the most prominent place, standing forth as true and living
representations of character, which deal with the events of Scottish
history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Still more the work
of genius, however, and of deeper worth, Hope's Anastasius must be
admitted to be--that marvelous picture of life in the Levant, and in the
whole Turkish Empire, as far as Arabia, as it was about the end of the
last and the beginning of the present century. In this work truth and
fiction are most happily blended; the episodes, especially that of
Euphrosyne, may be placed, without disparagement, beside the novels
of Cervantes, and strike far deeper chords in the human heart than the
creations of Walter Scott. Kingsley's Hypatia, alone of modern works,
is worthy to be named along with it. That, indeed, is a marvelous and
daring composition, with a still higher aim and still deeper
soul-pictures. Both of them will live forever as examples of union of
the idealistic and the realistic schools, poetic evocations of a by-gone
reality, with all the truth and poetry of new creations. In reading either
of them we forget that the work is as instructive as it is imaginative.
The most vehement longing of our times, however, is manifestly after a
faithful mirror of the present; that is to say, after a life-picture of the
social relations and the struggles to which the evils of the present day
have given rise. We feel that great events are being enacted; that greater
still are in preparation; and we long for an epic, a world-moulding epic,
to imbody and depict them. The undertaking is a dangerous one--many
a lance is shivered in the first encounter. A mere tendency-novel is in
itself a monster. A picture of the age must be, in the highest acceptation
of the word, a poem. It must not represent real persons or places--it

must create such. It must not ingraft itself upon the passing and the
accidental, but be pervaded by a poetic intuition of the real. He that
attempts it must look with a poet's eye at the real and enduring
elements in the confusing contradictions of the time, and place the
result before us as an actual existence. It has been the high privilege of
the English realistic school, which we may call without hesitation the
school of Dickens, that it has been the first to strike the key-note with a
firm and skillful hand. Its excellence would stand out with undimmed
lustre had it not, as its gloomy background, the French school of Victor
Hugo and Balzac, that opposite of "the poetry of despair," as Goethe
calls it. Here again, in this new English school, has the genius of
Kingsley alighted. Most of his novels belong to it. And, besides himself
and Dickens, there stand forth as its most brilliant members the
distinguished authoress of Mary Barton, and the sorely-tried Charlotte
Brontë, the gifted writer of Jane Eyre--too soon, alas! removed from us.
This school has portrayed, in colors doubtless somewhat strong, the
sufferings and the virtues, the dangers and the hopes of the
working-classes, especially in towns and factories. But, instead of
enjoining hatred of the higher classes, and despair of all improvement
in the future for humanity, a healthy tone pervades their writings
throughout, and an unwavering and cheering hope of better things to
come shines through the gloomy clouds that surround the dreary
present. There are throes of anguish--but they tell of coming
deliverance; there are discords--but they resolve into harmony. The
spirit finds, pervading the entire composition, that satisfaction of the
desires