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This department of literature has been ably represented by the women of the United States, and their contributions form an important part of our national literature. Catharine M. Sedgwick has written the most pleasing and graphic tales of New England life. Lydia M. Child is the author of several fictions, as well as other prose works, which evince great vigor, beauty, and grace.
They are, for the most part, the mere conjectures or the fictions of subsequent ages; and even where at first they contained some resemblance of truth, they still vary with the imagination of those by whom they are transmitted, and in every generation receive a different form.
The only inconvenient and perplexing liars are those who sometimes speak truth by accident; and their fictions moreover are seldom extravagant enough to afford the amusement created by romancers of the former class; among whom I may reckon a beggar, who beset us on the quay of Chalons, maintaining in a strong French accent, that he was the son of a carman of Thames-street, in the parish of St.
The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out.
So soon as the constructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingenious fictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up the mythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting on one side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and on the other what dramatic imagination had added.
While the pantheistic systems of Tha'les, Heracli'tus, and other early philosophers admitted, in accordance with the fictions of the received mythology, that the universe is full of gods, the doctrine of Anaxagoras led to the belief of but one supreme mind or intelligence, distinct from the chaos to which it imparts motion, form, and order.
It will show, too, that a faithful historian is very largely concerned with the fictions as well as with the facts of the past. Legends which have no firm historical basis are often of the highest historical value as reflecting the moral sentiments of their time. Nor do they merely reflect them.
By the help of such easy fictions and vulgar topics, without acquaintance with life, and without knowledge of art or nature, a poem of any length, cold and lifeless like this, may be easily written on any subject. In his epilogues to Phaedra and to Lucius he is very happily facetious; but in the prologue before the queen the pedant has found his way with Minerva, Perseus, and Andromeda.
The ladies of the garrison come among the Highlanders, shaking them enthusiastically by the hand; and the children clasp the shaggy men round the neck, and to say truth, so do some of the mothers. But Jessie Dunbar and her "Dinna ye hear it?" in reference to the bagpipe music, are in the category of melodramatic fictions.
Voltaire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of his fictions from his lack of humor. “Micromégas” is a perfect tale, because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer’s wit and wisdom were all-sufficient for his purpose.
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