It will not do to despise that which is so indestructible, and which everywhere exercises such powerful influence. Pedants may scorn fiction as beneath them, and waste their lives in composing dry treatises that will never be read; but the wise man, instead of deriding this tremendous engine, will endeavor to bend it to his purposes; and whether he seeks to shape the tale that is to be rehearsed on the dreamy banks of the Orontes, or to write the novel that will be read by thousands in England and America, will labor so to mix instruction with amusement, that his audience shall insensibly become moulded to his views. The moral teachers of both ancient and modern times have chosen the vehicle of fiction to inculcate truth; and even inspiration has not scorned to employ it in the service of religion. The most beautiful fictions ever written were the parables of the Savior. But it is also true that some of the most deleterious books we have are romances. This, however, is no reason why fiction should be abandoned to bad men, or proscribed as it is by many well-meaning moralists. Wesley said, with his strong Saxon sense, that he did not see why the devil should have all the good tunes.
Hence, in criticising a novel, it becomes important to examine the tendency of the work. We utterly repudiate the idea that a reviewer has nothing to do with the morality of a book. We reject the specious jargon to the contrary urged by the George Sand school. A novel should be something more than a mere piece of intellectual mechanism, because if not, it is injurious. There can be no medium. A fiction which does not do good does harm. There never was a romance written which had not its purpose, either open or concealed, from that of Waverley, which inculcated loyalty, to that of Oliver Twist, which teaches the brotherhood of man. Some novels are avowedly and insolently vicious; such are the Adventures of Faublas and the Memoirs of a Woman of Quality. Others, under the guise of philanthropy, sap every notion of right and duty: such are Martin the Foundling, Consuelo, _et id omne genus_. It is the novels of this last class which are the most deleterious; for, with much truth, they contain just enough poison to vitiate the whole mass. Chemists tell us that the smallest atom of putrid matter, if applied to the most gigantic body, will, in time, infect the whole: just so the grain of sophistry in Consuelo, admitting there is no more, in the end destroys all that the book contains of the beautiful and true. Said a lady in conversing on this subject: "I always find that people who read such books remember only what is bad in them." Her plain common sense hit the nail on the head, while transcendental folly hammered all around it in vain. We have spoken of Consuelo thus particularly because it is the best of its class: and of that enervating fiction we here record our deliberate opinion, that it will turn more than one foolish Miss into a strolling actress, under the insane and preposterous notion that it is her mission.