Excepting in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent
knew how to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the
novels of costume are all one, and there is but one standard English
novel, like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is
repeated every Sunday from so many pulpits.
But the other novel, of which Wilhelm Meister is the best
specimen, the novel _of character_, treats the reader with more
respect; a castle and a wife are not the indispensable conclusion,
but the development of character being the problem, the reader is
made a partaker of the whole prosperity. Every thing good in such a
story remains with the reader, when the book is closed.
A noble book was Wilhelm Meister. It gave the hint of a
cultivated society which we found nowhere else. It was founded on
power to do what was necessary, each person finding it an
indispensable qualification of membership, that he could do something
useful, as in mechanics or agriculture or other indispensable art;
then a probity, a justice, was to be its element, symbolized by the
insisting that each property should be cleared of privilege, and
should pay its full tax to the State.
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