CLAP-TRAP MORALITY.

WORKS of fiction and of poetry are the safety valves through which a vast volume of morbid passion and sentiment discharges itself, which can find no satisfactory outlet in real life. A man who has plenty of modes of indulging his ideas, or even his moody or visionary fancies, does not take refuge in composing novels. He has work to do in other ways ; and when this is done, he has no store of unsatisfied energy left unemployed to ferment within in his own bosom. Romance and poetry are a field occupied chiefly by those whose opportunities of action are not proportioned to the feverish activity of their inner selves ; and what they cannot perform in print, by the medium of fabulous heroes and impossible or improbable heroines. And there is another important fact that ought not to be forgotten. The imagination of authors is far more impressible and susceptible than the temper and disposition of society, which is governed by fixed habits and customs, and a rigid and traditional code. Every five or ten years, literary imagination undergoes a change, and enters on some new phase. What it busies itself with in 1860 is not what it busies itself with in 1865. Being generally in a state of fever of one description or another, it passes easily from one morbid condition to the next. Literature is often accordingly affected by a novel idea, borrowed perhaps from some one single writer of eminence, or imported, as is continually the case, from the literature of foreign countries. Thus sentimental ideas which have no hold anywhere upon the social habits of mankind may be propagated by a species of contagion from author to author, and run riot all over literary Europe, before they had effected any real and substantial lodgment among a single social class, except perhaps the class of literary recluses. It is not uncommon, in a similar way, to find the drama or romance of one nation impregnated with characteristics and peculiarities singularly unnational. A great deal of the misanthropy of French writing comes perhaps from the sentimental productions, not of France, but of Germany. The French are not naturally sentimental, but some of their literary men and women read " Werther," and thought that to imitate " Werther" was the sure road to truth and success. Nor are the French the only imitative nation. Second rate literature in England is quite at culpable of mimicry, and symptoms are not wanting of a disposition to transplant the Parisian flowers of M. Alex. Dumas the Younger to a London parterre. It it quite true that a change in the moral tone, of a nation's literature often leads to corresponding laxity in social manners; nor could it be otherwise, when we consider the wide circulation and increasing influence which modern ingenuity secures to works of fiction of every degree of merit. But the movement in literature and the movement in manners are not parallel, nor necessarily at all in proportion with each other. The Arcadian literature of the reign of Queen Elizabeth —to take an obvious illustration—was not a home-grown article, but an importation from the literature of Italy and Spain; and the fashionable fopperies that came into vogue at the time were not the cause of Sydney's " Arcadia," but its effect. Shakespeare, whose imagination is stronger and healthier, is free from them. His dramatic compositions are remarkably untinged with the shepherdess mania, and the conversation between Corin and Touchstone, in " As You Like It," is a characteristic passage in which the Arcadian theory of shepherds and shepherdesses is allusively discussed :—
" Corin.—And how like you this shepherd's life, Master Touchstone ?" "Touchstone.—Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now, in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well ; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humor well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach."
The plea that life ought to be painted as it is, is not, accordingly, a satisfactory answer on the part of erratic genius to the criticisms of "clap-trap morality." Novelists and poets in highly wrought descriptions seldom paint life as it is, though human life is so multiform, that no fictitious incident can be devised, which has not some counterpart in reality. But although they are careful to give every conception the color of probability, and although they have a right to say that things as strange as those they invent happened and do happen, their conceptions as a whole are a reflection, not of life, but of their own morbid and ill-regulated imagination. They attribute to society, and attribute to it unjustly, the corruption that really is inherent in their own intelligence and fancy. Moralists have a right to object to this unnecessary propagation of vicious or ugly thoughts. . . .
The end of literature is to create what is beautiful and good, not what is hideous and revolting; and the man who begets murderesses and villians wholesale in a three-volume novel is as complete a literary monster as the man who deliberately created a Frankenstein would be a social pest. Heavy fathers and prudish mothers—the class which we take to be typified under the title of clap-trap morality—have therefore something to say for themselves. For though literary immorality does not imply social immorality already pre-existing, it has a tendency to create it. There are times and places at which plain speaking and even plain narrative is necessary, and at which it becomes essential that wickedness should be photographed as it is. But poems and three volume novels stand apart. And accordingly, even if Britons continue to sand their sugar, and to ogle their maid-servants, they are not precluded by these weaknesses from adopting a very humdrum and a very clap-trap tone in dealing with the vagaries of the literature of the day.

 (From the Saturday Review.)Dec.1866,