died away.

HISTORICAL NOVELS

IN default of such an admirable piece of work as Dr. Weir Mitchell's
"Hugh Wynne," I like best those fictions which deal with kingdoms and
principalities that exist only in the mind's eye. One's knowledge of
actual events and real personages runs no serious risk of receiving
shocks in this no-man's-land. Everything that happens in an imaginary
realm--in the realm of Ruritania, for illustration--has an air of
possibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance. The atmosphere and local
color, having an authenticity of their own, are not to be challenged.
You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of the period in which his
narrative is laid, since the period is as vague as the geography.
He walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils that beset
the story-teller who ventures to stray beyond the bounds of the
make-believe. One peril he cannot escape--that of misrepresenting human
nature.

The anachronisms of the average historical novel, pretending to
reflect history, are among its minor defects. It is a thing altogether
wonderfully and fearfully made--the imbecile intrigue, the cast-iron
characters, the plumed and armored dialogue with its lance of gory
rhetoric forever at charge. The stage at its worst moments is not so
unreal. Here art has broken into smithereens the mirror which she is
supposed to hold up to nature.

In this romance-world somebody is always somebody's unsuspected father,
mother, or child, deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usually
the anonymous person is the hero, to whom it is mere recreation to hold
twenty swordsmen at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of them
before he escapes through a door that ever providentially opens directly
behind him. How tired one gets of that door! The "caitiff" in these
chronicles of when knighthood was in flower is invariably hanged from
"the highest battlement"--the second highest would not do at all; or
else he is thrown into "the deepest dungeon of the castle"--the second
deepest dungeon was never known to be used on these occasions. The hero
habitually "cleaves" his foeman "to the midriff," the "midriff"
being what the properly brought up hero always has in view. A certain
fictional historian of my acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim:
"My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff;" but that is an exceptionally
lofty flight of diction. My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and in
the course of long intervie