33. CHAPTER XXXIII.
WHICH MAY PASS FOR WHATEVER IT MAY PROVE TO BE WORTH.
But ere be given the rather grave story of Charlemont,
a reply must in civility be made to a certain voice
which methinks I hear, that, in view of past chapters,
and more particularly the last, where certain antics appear,
exclaims: How unreal all this is! Who did ever
dress or act like your cosmopolitan? And who, it
might be returned, did ever dress or act like harlequin?
Strange, that in a work of amusement, this severe
fidelity to real life should be exacted by any one, who,
by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is
not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to
something different. Yes, it is, indeed, strange that any
one should clamor for the thing he is weary of; that any
one, who, for any cause, finds real life dull, should yet
demand of him who is to divert his attention from it,
that he should be true to that dullness.
There is another class, and with this class we side,
who sit down to a work of amusement tolerantly as they
sit at a play, and with much the same expectations and
feelings. They look that fancy shall evoke scenes different
from those of the same old crowd round the customhouse;
counter, and same old dishes on the boardinghouse
house table, with characters unlike those of the same
old acquaintances they meet in the same old way every
day in the same old street. And as, in real life, the proprieties
will not allow people to act out themselves with
that unreserve permitted to the stage; so, in books of
fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but,
at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can
show. Thus, though they want novelty, they want
nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect
transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a
fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody
exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as
nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion:
it should present another world, and yet one to which
we feel the tie.
If, then, something is to be pardoned to well-meant
endeavor, surely a little is to be allowed to that writer
who, in all his scenes, does but seek to minister to what,
as he understands it, is the implied wish of the more
indulgent lovers of entertainment, before whom harlequin
can never appear in a coat too parti-colored, or cut
capers too fantastic.
One word more. Though every one knows how
bootless it is to be in all cases vindicating one's self, never
mind how convinced one may be that he is never in the
wrong; yet, so precious to man is the approbation of
his kind, that to rest, though but under an imaginary
censure applied to but a work of imagination, is no easy
thing. The mention of this weakness will explain why
all such readers as may think they perceive something
inharmonious between the boisterous hilarity of the
cosmopolitan with the bristling cynic, and his restrained
good-nature with the boon-companion, are now referred
to that chapter where some similar apparent inconsistency
in another character is, on general principles,
modestly endeavored to be apologized for.
