Margaret. A Tale of the Real and Ideal, of Blight and Bloom
By . Boston : Roberts Brothers.
THE sense of novelty and freshness which this beautiful old romance gives the reader is a most useful witness of the fact that, to be always modern and always new, it is only necessary to be of no fashion, — neither the fashion of one’s own day nor the fashion of a former day. This, to be sure is nearly as difficult as simplicity, of which perhaps it is a phase. Here and there, in all the history of the world, but few men have achieved so great an end in literature : the author of “ Margaret” is of these few.
We, who read the romance for the first time in this latest edition of it, must feel how vastly better it is, how much more recent it is, than the best new novel of our generation, and must peruse it with something of the contented wonder with which we should linger over “ Wilhelm Meister " or a play of Shakespeare if they were as strange to us. The comparison is of kind, not of degree ; but if “ Margaret ” were compared with any other romance of its own time, excepting the romances of Hawthorne, we should feel that there was no comparison for it save with the masterpieces. Like these it is epoch and fashion and method to itself. It is not nature, but the love of nature ; it is not reality, but truth. It is very far indeed from artistic perfection ; you may overfeast yourself m it, but you cannot famish.
Without more space than we can now give, any criticism of ours must fad to discover what the essence of such a book as “Margaret” is. It is easy enough to say that the scene is laid in a backwoods settlement of New England, in the time just alter the Revolution ; that the life and manners of the place and period are painted very effectively, with a strong dash of caricature, and that there is such sympathy with the inarticulate life of nature that the reader cannot help sharing the author’s rapture ; that Margaret and nearly all the other personages are fantastic ; that the fascination of the book is not in the plot. But all this is a dim and distorted reflex of the romance, and might be quite as true of a work done in a wholly different spirit and manner ; the very heart of the matter is left untouched, and is scarcely approached. It does not help much to add that the romance is largely religious, and that where the religious purpose prevails over the artistic feeling the work suffers ; or that the story seems always to run along the edge of a precipice, and you are liable to be dropped into limitless depths of airiness at any moment, though the author’s poise is kept, and the reader carried safely to the end, — it must be owned he is considerably dizzied towards the last.
It is curious to find in English a romance that confides so much in the reader’s sympathy : here we have long pauses for discussion and reflection as in German romances, yet the hook is not otherwise German, but singularly American, with inexhaustible sweetness, quaintness, and tenderness, and most American in its fantasticality. It is marvellously, almost matchlessly frank in dealing with the rude life in which Us scenes are laid, and no more moralizes that life or is ashamed of it than the sunshine would have been. It is with the reform of what civilization he finds that the author is concerned ; and this is not the only point on which he shows himself generous and wise, and one of the truest and foremost of his nation.