. Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the
brainstuff of fiction is internal history, and to suppose it dull is the
profoundest of errors; how deep, you will understand when I tell you that it is
the very football of the holiday-afternoon imps below. They kick it for pastime;
they are intelligences perverted. The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic,
they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity. But sharply comic,
adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the inter-winding with human
affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our Poet, between
whom and us yawn Time's most hollow jaws. Surely we owe a little to Time, to
cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our country. Dozens of writers
will be in at yonder yawning breach, if only perusers will rally to the
philosophic standard. They are sick of the woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on
a race-course to the roaring frivolous. Well, if not dozens, half-dozens;
gallant pens are alive; one can speak of them in the plural. I venture to say
that they would be satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement. They
would perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance
for an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold them fast.
But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected. The example might,
one hopes, create a taste. A great modern writer, of clearest eye and head, now
departed, capable in activity of presenting thoughtful women, thinking men,
groaned over his puppetry, that he dared not animate them, flesh though they
were, with the fires of positive brainstuff. He could have done it, and he is of
the departed! Had he dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the
Art in dignity on a level with History, to an interest surpassing the narrative
of public deeds as vividly as man's heart and brain in their union excel his
plain lines of action to eruption. The everlasting pantomime, suggested by Mrs.
Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not unrighteously, by
our graver seniors. They name this Art the pasture of idiots, a method for
idiotizing the entire population which has taken to reading; and which soon
discovers that it can write likewise, that sort of stuff at least. The forecast
may be hazarded, that if we do not speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the
Art is doomed to extinction, under
