THE FAIR GOD.*
THERE is properly no history, only biography, says Emerson, adding, " All inquiry into antiquity—all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio circles, Mexico, Memphis—is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There-or-then, and introduce in its place the Here- and-now. It is to banish the Not-me, and supply the Me. It is to abolish difference and restore unity. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and Pyramids of Thebes till he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as himself, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself, in given circumstances, should also have worked, the problem is then solved ; his thought lives along the whole line of temples, and sphinxes, and catacombs,— passes through them all like a creative soul, with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are Now." This thought, whether supplied from outside or arising spontaneously in Mr. Wallace's mind, is, really the-basis upon which he has constructed the story before us. And in the enigmatical phrase of the writer quoted above, we may say he has discovered for us many things we knew long before. We doubt if his narrative supplies us with one fact with which the pages of Prescott, or those of the authorities to which he refers, had not already made us more or less familiar ; but he has taken bits of fact, as Professor Owen took the merry-thought of the Dodo, and constructed, not with such scientific accuracy, but yet with great skill, a consistent whole therefrom. He has made us at home with the actors in that great drama of the sixteenth century, so that the veriest schoolboy will turn from his tale to the pages of Prescott or of Melpa with fresh comprehension of the subject of which they treat, and as a necessary consequence will look with added interest to the lives of the men who made that age memorable. Mr. Wallace has studied attentively the more prominent figures on * The Fair God; or, the Last of the 'Trine. A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico. By L. Wallace. London: Trillmer & Co. Boston, U.S.: James Osgood, & Co. 1873.
the canvas,—Montezuma, Guatomazin, Cortes!, Alvarado, Doffa Marina, and with very subtle apprehension of the actual scene, has filled in many a shadowy outline, under the names of Hualpa the young warrior, Maalox the high priest of Quetzal', Io' the son and Tula and Nenetgn the daughters of Montezuma. Mr. Wallace has woven around names a history not wholly imaginary, but tinctured with romance not after the style of Scott, but after that of Bulwer in The Last Days of Pompeii.
The story commences with the year 1519, when the valley of Anahuac " was as yet untrodden by the gold-seeker, with cross- hilted sword at his aide, and on his lips a Catholic oath." In the earlier pages we gain an admirable introduction to a few of the principal characters from the gossips assembled in the house of Xoli, the Chat- eau, who combines in his own person the duties of rich citizen, broker, and hotel-keeper, and whose house serves the joint purposes of a modern club, and (save in the point of its special business) the ancient barber's shop ; indeed, we are more than once reminded of Nello's shop at the sign of "Apollo and the Razor " in the streets of Florence. But possibly one of the finest pictures in the early part of this book is that of Montezuma, brave, learned, sensible, yet sensuous and superstitious, disbelieving in his inmost soul the High Priest's theory that the strangers were gods, his disbelief strengthened by the skull his own eyes see in the kiosk in the 'Tzin's gardens ; trusting Guatamozin's loyalty to Anahuac abso- lutely, yet jealous of that very loyalty as it might possibly affect himself, and finally, under the fatal, almost magnetic influ- ence of Maalox, bowing his heart to the thought that Quetzal', the Fair God in whose return every Aztec more or leas believed, really led the invaders. We are brought face to face with this hero of many a well-written page, not as he stands before us simply in Spanish records or in historic criticism, but in the imaginary inner chambers of his life,—not expressing himself with all the conscious self-analysis born of a later civilisation, but no less truly troubled with ` a tortured double self,'—purpose in conflict with purpose, the instincts of the king with those of the much-dreading priest. The interior of the temple where Maalox delivers his prophecy is not described with the zest of the antiquarian, but is invested with more of human interest, as the reader is conducted through room after room, ball after hall, only noting, as it were by the way, the marble panels, the rich carvings, the white figures on the grey coral, as he follows with haste the steps of the King, eager with him to see what is the writing on the wall. And when all is over, and Montezuma has descended yet deeper into the caverns of the temple, and has heard the vision of the daughter of Maalox, we understand what his nobles could not,—how it is that their warrior-priest, the mighty monarch, is so overcome ; and what, also, is the after-effect of the weight of superstitious terror which crushes his spirit as no more tangible form of evil could :—
" Next evening a courier sped hotly over the causeway and up the street, stopping at the gate of the royal palace. He was taken before the king ; and, shortly after, it went flying over the city how Quetzal' had arrived, in canoes larger than temples, wafted by clouds, and full of thunder and lightning. Then sank the monarch's heart ; and though the Spaniard knew it not, his marvellous conquest was half completed before his iron shoe smote the shore at San Juan de Ulloa."
But the scene which will captivate the imagination of the young most, and for the moment beat Ballantyne out of the field, is that in which the young warrior, Hualpa, at the risk of his own life, saves Montezuma from the tiger which has escaped from the royal menagerie. The subsequent conduct of Hualpa towards his foe, Iztil' the Tezencan, is not unparalleled in the annals of heathendom, but the record of it here is full of dramatic interest. The foes meet at the " King's banquet," and we wish we had space to insert the description of that banqueting-hall in its barbaric (?) splendour;
but for those twenty thousand human victims yearly sacrificed to the gods, but for the ghastly horror which surrounded at least one dish on the king's table, we might rather say the splendour of a civilisation which has passed away. Prescott has recorded that amidst the presents given by Cortes to his youthful bride was one of five emeralds cut by the Aztecs into the shape of flowers, and cups cut in gold and ornamented with pearls of exquisite work- manship. We know it was the overlading with much such treasure which caused one of the greatest difficulties of the Spaniards during the terrible Noche Triste. Nor need it be thought that the descriptiOn of the rich splendours of Montezuma's Court is exaggerated. For ages gold had been accumulating. So slight was the intercourse of the Mexicans with other nations, that they might have been in another planet, for all the gold that went out of the country. Then the great proportion of the people were really serfs, so that all the wealth of the land drifted to the comparatively small upper-class, and it is only with what we may call the tipper
ten of even that class that the story before us has to do. It is true, on one occasion we are told that when Montezuma vacillates and fails, the will of the people makes itself known, and that will is war. But the extremest Radical of the modern world finds moments when it is impossible to forget,—
" 'Tis not in multitudes of common minds A mighty cause can live, but in the Master-mind of one who sways them."
And so the will of the children of Anahuac meant loyalty to the person of Guatamozin. The manner in which the fortunes of Tula, the daughter of Montezuma, are interwoven with those of Guatamozin is well told, though her patriotism and devotion suffer somewhat from our remembrance of her subsequent history, as three times bride of the enemies of her husband and her country, but in the volume before us her story is not pursued beyond that terrible night so ineffaceably written on Spanish memory. Mr. Wallace has made one great mistake in the construction of his book, and it is one we should advise him to remedy in that second edition he is so sure soon to see. True to his theory that a personal experience, though ever so plainly told, is more attractive to listeners than fiction, he has endeavoured and has fairly suc- ceeded in giving his work the appearance of a narrative translated from one who knew all the facts as they occurred. This is quite fair, and to young inquirers into history compensates for slight misleading, by so fastening the interest upon the subject that an intelligent reader would at once seek further information at more authentic sources. But not content to let his story tell its own tale, Mr. Wallace has written an introduction, stating distinctly that his work is a translation from the works of Fer- nando De Alva (Iztlilzochitl), a noble Tezcucan, who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and whose works, we are all aware, are largely quoted by Prescott. Mr. Wallace pro- fesses to be translating MSS. now for the first time given to the world ; they were found, he says, among a heap of old despatches from the Viceroy Mendoza to the Emperor, and he concludes,—
In the translation certain liberties have been taken, for which, if wrong has been done, pardon is besought both from the public and the shade of the author. Thus, the Books in the original are unbroken narratives ; but with infinite care and trouble, they have all boon brought out of the confusion, and arranged into chapters. So, there were names, some of which have been altogether changed ; while othors, for the sake of euphony, have been abbreviated, though without sacrificing the identity of the heroes who wore them so proudly."
Now, had this statement been even in some degree true, we should, instead of a very cleverly written historical novel, have had here a most valuable record throwing light on the whole sub- ject of Mexican civilisation. A romance, it is true, but a romance from the pen of a Tezcucan, himself an actor in the tragedy he depicts, would have been a different thing from a novel, however clever, on the same subject, from the pen of an Englishman, or, as we presume in this case, an American. And so Mr. Wallace has concluded, and in a fit of compunction, lest his book should have undue weight, he has written a preface simply to state that the work is not really a translation at all. About the morality of this proceeding we have nothing to say. How far the right of introducing fiction into the introduction of a book may extend is a nice point we do not care to decide. But to make a statement in the introduction which materially affects the story, and then write a preface to deny that statement, is, to say the least, very inartistic, and destroys the force of more than one of the best passages in the book, by throwing the reader back on a critical inquiry into the truth of some statement he is bound to accept in good faith,—as, for instance, in a really magnificent sketch where Orteguilla the page is lost in the caverns of the Temple of Quetzal', and is suffering from hunger and thirst and the horror of darkness. The narrator describes with minutest detail the gradations of suffering and delirium in the hungry and thirst- stricken, adding,—" I have had personal experience of the anguish and delusions of which I speak. I have felt them, and I know."
The force of several pages is lost, and even Orteguilla for the moment forgotten, the mind instantly recurring to that unfortunate preface. The assertion, if true, lends force to the narrative. But is it true ? It is, of course, De Alva who speaks, but then we know that, as far as these pages are concerned, he is a fiction. We have said perhaps more than we at first intended upon this point, be- cause it is just the one blot on the book, and can so easily be removed. There is not the slightest occasion for the introduction, which is rendered absurd by the preface, and both might be left out with advantage. Mr. Wallace has used old material, and woven it into a story quite sufficiently brilliant to stand on its own merits. We heartily commend it to those who do not demand that a tale shall be so written that it can be finished at one reading, but more especially to young readers, particularly boys, who will find a fresh pleasure awaiting them.
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