ART. IV.- Undercurrents of Wall Street.

A Romance of

Business. By RICHARD B. KIMBALL, Author of "St. Leger," etc. New York: G. P. Putnam. 1862.

A VERY favorable decision has been pronounced on the literary merits of this book. But there are other questions which we propose to discuss. What is its moral character, its religious character? Has it any such character? or is it positively irreligious? One thing is certain. No thoughtful man can read the book without being impressed by it. It goes below the merely imaginative or the amusing. It makes us think, and enters into our thinking. Its representations of humanity affect us deeply, and that, too, all the more for their plainness, their want of striking originality, as some might say. We feel that they are true, because they go down to those deep things in which all men are original, which no man has borrowed from another, but all derive from the primitive stock of goodness or of evil, those more interior matters in which men agree, in distinction from the mere surface features in which they so greatly differ. They lead us, in short, to that department of anthropology with which the Apostle was so much better acquainted than the satirist. There has been a gross misnomer here. When we speak of human nature, or a knowledge of human nature, there are almost always had in mind these surface differences. The writers who depict them most vividly, whether as casuists, satirists, or outside reformers, these are called our shrewd men, our sharp men, our keen observers of the world and man. These, it is said, show such a deep knowledge of human nature. Keen it may be, sharp it may be, but what is there deep about it? A day's walk in the streets of London, with a good pair of eyes well employed, will give Dickens the materials of one of his longest novels; just as a walk in the woods will give a man who has an eye for the grotesque in crooked roots, and gnarled limbs, and odd, fantastic forms of every kind, the materials for a jumbled composite picture which the astonished admirer of such oddities calls most exquisitely true and natural. Such a "natural writer" need only note every outside difference that

he meets, every eccentricity of speech or action, real or affected, and he has produced, forsooth, a perfect picture of humanity. Let each man be dressed up in the odd costume of his individuality, only caricatured to the highest possible degree, or let him have some odd phrase which he repeats on all occasions, and we are immediately in raptures with its exceeding naturalness. How true to the life! We know the man every time he appears upon the scenes; we have seen something like him in our own experience, and the recognition gives us a higher idea of our own powers of observation. And so the picture may be infinitely varied. Another man may be represented as ever canting, as never opening his mouth without proclaiming himself a hypocrite, - doing this foolishly, unmeaningly, in season and out of season, as though he were afraid the world would not believe him hypocritical enough, or might fail to see the author's design in this his favorite creation, which is, of course, the honor of "pure and undefiled religion." Another man is made so unreasonably good, that one can hardly help detesting his shallow virtue, so absurdly overflowing, without any originating fountain, either in God's grace, or in any truth of humanity. Another is represented as so inexpressibly mean, and so ever exhibiting his meanness, that the sound-minded reader, if he has any natural pity for an ill-used subject, finds himself involuntarily on the side of the poor creature; the author has made him so very mean, so absurdly mean, that he becomes the object of compassion instead of hatred. This is because we cannot help feeling that the false virtue of the one and the monstrous moral deformity of the other are both alike, without any true ground in the human constitution, whether in its natural or regenerate state. Grace never made such goodness; nature never developed such crime. There is no more reason in the one than in the other; there is no reason in either of them; and hence the reader gets a sense of injustice, which is all very natural, though the sentimentalist may regard it as very perverse. The avowal may not seem creditable either to our artistic or our moral sense, and yet we must confess an aversion to such good people as Dickens's Brothers Cheeryble, their goodness is so surfeiting; while, in spite of ourselves, we get

on the side of wicked old Ralph Nickleby, his devilism is so pitiably motiveless and extravagant. So, too, we cannot avoid a touch of sympathy for the Quilps, and the Grides, and the Smallweeds, and that miserable, canting Uriah Heap. They are not only the author's creations, but his arbitrary creations; they look so very ugly simply because he chose to put upon them such hideous masks; we know not but that their "natural faces" might be as fair, or rather no more deformed, than those of the characterless good people whose outsides he has so painted in seeming contrast; we see, in short, no reason, either within or without, no reason in nature, education, discipline, grace, or circumstances, why the virtue should not have been on the one side as well as on the other. The end is aimless, the goodness has no root; the proceeding is wholly arbitrary, and our sense of justice revolts against it.

The author of the "Undercurrents " exhibits, too, a knowledge of human nature, but it is of a different kind and from a different source. It is Biblical, we may say, although the book makes no show of Biblical authority, and is very far from being what is commonly, and most absurdly, called a religious novel. In other words, unlike the mere satires of Thackeray, or the caricatures of Dickens, it displays a knowledge of man grounded on the great truth that underlies the anthropology of Revelation. It is the Bible view of humanity, -severe, yet just; true, yet kindly; profound, while making no array of shrewdness or profundity. Had our satirists generally recognized the Scriptures, if only as presenting a picture of humanity, they would never have caricatured the race so horribly; they would never have employed one page to paint men as devils, worse than devils, more foolishly wicked than devils, and another to exhibit the writer's extreme aversion to that sober doctrine of human depravity which gave the noble Apostle "great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart," that compassionate doctrine of human depravity, which, in the sense it brings of the common ruin, is the only antidote to the satirist's morbid misanthropy,-that loving doctrine of human depravity, which finds below all superficialities, and all individualities, even in the deep original sin of the race, the true

ground of human brotherhood. A state of perfect individual blessedness, although not foreign to the thought of fraternity, does not primarily suggest it. Peace, harmony, sinlessness, they are consistent with it, they are strengthened by it, but they do not demand the social or kindred idea. We seldom think of the brotherhood of angels; there is but little of tenderness in the conception; it does not greatly move. But the human brotherhood! here is a new element; here is a thought of power. What makes it so deeply felt when felt at all? It is a community of sin, of suffering, of struggle. Higher than this, and stronger than this, it is the hope of a common salvation. The philanthropy that has not one or both of these elements is spurious; the satire that does not recognize them is the very spirit of Antichrist; the "knowledge of human nature" that ignores them is not the heavenly copía, but the "wisdom" of the serpent, "earthly, sensual, devilish." "Who can understand his errors?" What human intelligence can fathom the abyss of evil in humanity, that dark profound beyond the deepest profound in nature, that vast unknown within,

Upon whose dizzy verge we stand appalled,
And fear to cast our swimming eyes so low."

He alone who came from heaven to heal could know the desperateness of the disease. He alone could estimate the depth of the perdition, in the labor of the atonement, in the greatness of the redemptive work, or by what other name we may call that restoring process which was necessary for the outward judicial reinstatement, as well as the perfect inward cure, of our fallen humanity. No doctrine teaches charity like this. The worst man is only the developed representative of the evil that is in the best; the best man is only a proof of what the Divine grace or the Divine providence can do for the worst. And yet along with this deep view of the common evil we may hold what the mere casuist may regard as utterly inconsistent with it. The highest human virtue is sinful more or less; the deepest human wickedness is connected with some redeeming trait. This is simply holding that the best acts are not what they ought to be; the worst, not as bad as they might be. Our confusion has arisen from a wrong notion of

that old doctrine of "total depravity" which has, of late, been so much denounced, and so little understood. On both sides there has been misconception of the accurate language of the older theologians. Total is a term of extensity (we use the word for the sake of the parallel), but not of intensity, of width and breadth, but not of depth. We are bad enough, doubtless, but the degree of badness does not enter into the logical statement of the doctrine. The word is subjective; it measures the man rather than the amount of his sin. He has not all evil, but some evil everywhere. He has not all depravity, but he is all depraved, in thought, affections, will,- in body, soul, and spirit. Again, total is opposed to partial,— the partial in time and circumstance. It denies that man is partly good and partly bad, that he is part angel and part devil, or that he is either the one or the other. He is wholly fallen, but not out of sight of redemption. He is not one day holy and another day sinful, but always sinful, not evil in one respect, and innocent in another, but all wrong, wrong everywhere, wrong in everything, in "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart," - wrong always, or as the Hebrew expressively gives it, "all the day." In nothing is he free from sin. Evil he carries ever with him wherever he goes, and into whatever he may do. "Never, never," says St. Augustine, "was I innocent." Such is the doctrine. We are not now argumentatively defending it, but only stating it as it truly is. Man is not righteous, that is, he is unrighteous,

"In all his works and ways

Unholy and impure."

He is not "just before God; he is not clean before his Maker." Yet he is not a devil; there is not in him the utmost intensity of evil; he has not reached the irredeemable state; the worst man on earth, perhaps, has not arrived at that depth of depravity where he loves evil per se, or would say with Milton's Satan,

"Evil, be thou my good."

that yet

There is that in every man, even the worst man, moves the Divine compassion, yea, more, that has yet a hold upon the Divine love.