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Show Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 86 tative critics and literary figures as John Sylvester Gardiner, Wil lard Phillips, Frances Bowen, John Lathrop Motley, Lyman and Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sumner, Rufus Choate, Francis Parkman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfel low, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For the traditional moral terminology, members of this group substituted a critical vocabulary containing such terms as theme, style, characterization, mood, climax. Only when the con temporary moralistic criticism was being anathematized was there need for using the diction of moralistic convention. An example of the serious concern with which these men approached the problem of relating literature to a general life philosophy is found in the works of E. P. Whipple, who pub lished numerous critical articles in the N ott h American' Reoei w and the Atlantic Monthly. Although in the years following the Civil War Mr. Whipple tended to forsake criticism for moraliz ing, his definition of the novel suggests the critical insight and lucid style which characterized his earlier and better period. For Whipple the novel is if not most perfect forms of composition comprehensive mind can communicate itself to the world, exhibiting, as it may, through sentiment. incident, and character, a complete philosophy of life, and admitting a dramatic and narrative expression of the abstract principles of ethics, metaphysics. and theology. Its range is theoretically as wide and deep as man and nature.J" one the of most through which effective, a That the unconventional in Boston was often also the un popular was discovered by the Boston Miscellany. of Literature and Fashion, a belles-lettres magazine which espoused liberal lit erary doctrine throughout its thirteen issues before it ceased publi cation in February, 1843. Edited by Nathan Hale, Jr., with such illustrious contributors as A. H. Everett, N. P. Willis, Edgar Allan Poe, Evert A. Duyckinck, James Russell Lowell, and Wil liam Ellery Channing, this magazine attacked contemporary pru deries, and practices of using the novel as a moralizing message bearer. We hate misnomers. A book of devotion, a tract of controversial di vinity, a sermon, a moral essay, are all well in their proper place; but a book professing to be a novel, but which is, in fact, a sham novel. a mere cover name. is a of a falsehood, a totally contemptible piece of decep forgery, a work of another class. under its for the introduction tion.t? An article entitled "Religious Novels" further condemned the popular conceptions of morality and religion in literature, even while introducing the unorthodox concept that the more true liter ature is to life, the greater it is, and the more moral it becomes as well. |
