Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is
immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar
phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of
art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason.
Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or
in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined
to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts
cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic
arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure
science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with
expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science
makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of
a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that
all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are
equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to
prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem
in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge
the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by
the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions,
as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to
his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and
science have their meeting-point in method.
And though Kant applies the word _genius_ (_ingenium_) strictly to the
cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science,
yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted
to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe
the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect,
because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far
intuitive or innate (_ingenium_) that, though study and practice perfect
it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into
order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and
dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who
possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must
possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a
philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the
talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a
philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there
is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less
perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives
some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of
the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of
a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as
science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the
mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while,
in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the
curves of grace.
And though, as I have said, Art enters into all works, whether addressed
to the reason or to the imagination, those addressed to the imagination
are works of Art _par emphasis_, for they require much more than the
elementary principles which Art has in common with Science. The two part
company with each other almost as soon as they meet on that ground of
Method which is common to both,—Science ever seeking, through all forms
of the ideal, to realise the Positive—Art, from all forms of the
Positive, ever seeking to extract the Ideal. The _beau ideal_ is not in
the reason—its only existence is in the imagination. To create in the
reader’s mind images which do not exist in the world, and leave them
there, imperishable as the memories of friends with whom he has lived,
and of scenes in which he has had his home, obviously necessitates a
much ampler and much subtler Art than that which is required to make a
positive fact clear to the comprehension. The highest quality of Art, as
applied to literature, is therefore called “the Creative.” Nor do I
attach any importance to the cavil of some over ingenious critics, who
have denied that genius in reality _creates_; inasmuch as the forms it
presents are only new combinations of ideas already existent. New
combinations are, to all plain intents and purposes, creations. It is
not in the power of man to create something out of nothing. And though
the Deity no doubt can do so now—as those who acknowledge that the
Divine Creator preceded all created things, must suppose that He did
before there was even a Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed to us to
trace Him through Nature, all that we see in created Nature is combined
out of what before existed. Art, therefore, may be said to create when
it combines existent details into new wholes. No man can say that the
watch which lies before me, or the table on which I write, were not
created (that is, made) by the watchmaker or cabinetmaker, because the
materials which compose a watch or a table have been on the earth, so
far as we know of it, since the earth was a world fit for men to dwell
in. Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that
that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form,
though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree,
a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases
in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the
Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature;
for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create
dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by
the animalcules that inhabit them. But the moment Art creates, it puts
into its creations life and intellect; and it is only in proportion as
the life thus bestowed endures beyond the life of man, and the intellect
thus expressed exceeds that which millions of men can embody in one
form, that we acknowledge a really great work of Art—that we say of the
Artist, centuries after he is dead, “He was indeed a Poet,” that is, a
creator: He has created a form of life which the world did not know
before, and breathed into that form a spirit which preserves it from the
decay to which all of man himself except his soul is subjected. Achilles
is killed by Paris; Homer re-creates Achilles—and the Achilles of Homer
is alive to-day.
By the common consent of all educated nations, the highest order of Art
in Literature is the Narrative, that is the Epic; and the next to it in
eminence is the Dramatic. We are, therefore, compelled to allow that the
objective faculty—which is the imperative essential of excellence in
either of these two summits of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains to a
sublimer reach of art than the subjective—that is, in order to make my
scholastic adjectives familiar to common apprehension, the artist who
reflects vividly and truthfully, in the impartial mirror of his mind,
other circumstances, other lives, other characters than his own, belongs
to a higher order than he who, subjecting all that he contemplates to
his own idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in his various images of
nature and mankind. We admit this when we come to examples. We admit
that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s
‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets;
‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective
poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.
But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great
artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a
mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an
admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him
who writes what is mediocre. There is no doubt that Horace is inferior
to Homer—so inferior that we cannot apportion the difference. The one is
epic, the other lyrical. But there is no doubt also that Horace is
incalculably superior to Tryphiodorus or Sir Richard Blackmore, though
they are epical and he is lyrical. In a word, it is perfectly obvious,
that in proportion to the height of the art attempted must be the powers
of the artist, so that there is the requisite harmony between his
subject and his genius; and that he who commands a signal success in one
of the less elevated spheres of art must be considered a greater artist
than he who obtains but indifferent success in the most arduous.
Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates so high a stretch of imagination,
and so wide a range of intellect, that it will always obtain, if
tolerably well told, a precedence of immediate popularity over the most
exquisite productions of an inferior order of the solid and staple
qualities of imagination—so much so that, even where the first has
resort to what may be called the brick and mortar of prose, as compared
with the ivory, marble, and cedar of verse, a really great work of
Narrative in prose will generally obtain a wider audience, even among
the most fastidious readers, than poems, however good, in which the
imagination is less creative, and the author rather describes or
moralises over what is, than invents and vivifies what never existed.
The advantage of the verse lies in its durability. Prose, when appealing
to the imagination, has not the same characteristics of enduring
longevity as verse;—first and chiefly, it is not so easily remembered.
Who remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’? Who does not remember twenty
lines in the ‘Deserted Village’? Verse chains a closer and more minute
survey to all beauties of thought expressed by it than prose, however
elaborately completed, can do. And that survey is carried on and
perpetuated by successive generations. So that in a great prose fiction,
one hundred years after its date, there are innumerable beauties of
thought and fancy which lie wholly unobserved; and in a poem, also
surveyed one hundred years after its publication, there is probably not
a single beauty undetected. This holds even in the most popular and
imperishable prose fictions, read at a time of life when our memory is
most tenacious, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s
Travels’ or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We retain, indeed, a lively impression
of the pleasure derived from the perusal of those masterpieces; of the
salient incidents in story; the broad strokes of character, wit, or
fancy; but quotations of striking passages do not rise to our lips as do
the verses of poets immeasurably inferior, in the grand creative gifts
of Poetry, to those fictionists of prose. And hence the Verse Poet is a
more intimate companion throughout time than the Prose Poet can hope to
be. In our moments of aspiration or of despondency, his musical thoughts
well up from our remembrance. By a couple of lines he kindles the
ambition of our boyhood, or soothes into calm the melancholy
contemplations of our age.
_Cæteris paribus_, there can be no doubt of the advantage of verse over
prose in all works of the imagination. But an artist does not select his
own department of art with deliberate calculation of the best chances of
posthumous renown. His choice is determined partly by his own
organisation, and partly also by the circumstances of his time. For
these last may control and tyrannise over his own more special bias. For
instance, in our country, at present, it is scarcely an exaggeration to
say that there is no tragic drama—scarcely any living drama at all;
whether from the want of competent actors, or from some disposition on
the part of our public and our critics not to accord to a successful
drama the rank which it holds in other nations, and once held in this, I
do not care to examine; but the fact itself is so clear, that the Drama,
though in reality it is, in itself, the highest order of poem, next to
the Epic, seems to have wholly dropped out of our consideration as
belonging to any form of poetry whatsoever. If any Englishman were asked
by a foreigner to name even the minor poets of his country who have
achieved reputation since the death of Lord Byron, it would not occur to
him to name Sheridan Knowles—though perhaps no poet since Shakespeare
has written so many successful dramas; nay, if he were asked to quote
the principal poets whom England has produced, I doubt very much whether
Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway, would occur to his mind as
readily as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten, in short, somehow or
other, except in the single instance of Shakespeare, that dramas in
verse are poems, and that where we have a great dramatist, who can hold
the hearts of an audience spell-bound, we have a poet immeasurably
superior, in all the great qualities of poetry, to three-fourths of the
lyrical, and still more of the didactic versifiers who, lettered and
bound as British poets, occupy so showy a range on our shelves. It is
not thus anywhere except in our country. Ask a Frenchman who are the
greatest poets of France, he names her dramatists immediately—Corneille,
Racine, Molière. Ask a German, he names Goethe and Schiller; and if you
inquire which of the works of those great masters in all variety of song
he considers their greatest poems, he at once names their dramas. But to
return; with us, therefore, the circumstances of the time would divert
an author, whose natural bias might otherwise lead him towards dramatic
composition, from a career so discouraged; and as the largest emoluments
and the loudest reputation are at this time bestowed upon prose fiction,
so he who would otherwise have been a dramatist becomes a novelist. I
speak here, indeed, from some personal experience, for I can remember
well, that when Mr Macready undertook the management of one of those two
great national theatres, which are now lost to the national drama, many
literary men turned their thoughts towards writing for the stage, sure
that in Mr Macready they could find an actor to embody their
conceptions; a critic who could not only appreciate, but advise and
guide; and a gentleman with whom a man of letters could establish frank
and pleasant understanding. But when Mr Macready withdrew from an
experiment which probably required more capital than he deemed it
prudent to risk in the mere rental of a theatre, which in other
countries would be defrayed by the State, the literary flow towards the
drama again ebbed back, and many a play, felicitously begun, remains to
this day a fragment in the limbo of neglected pigeon-holes.
The circumstances of the time, therefore, though they do not arrest the
steps of genius, alter its direction. Those departments of art in which
the doors are the most liberally thrown open, will necessarily most
attract the throng of artists, and it is the more natural that there
should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who
can scribble at all, ever doubt that they can scribble a novel.
Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write
well, are the easiest to write ill. Where are the little children who
cannot write what they call poetry, or the big children who cannot write
what they call novels?—
“Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,”
says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies
in most force to that class of _poemata_, which pretends to narrate
the epic of life in the form of prose. For the _docti_ as well as
the _indocti_—men the most learned in all but the art of
novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and
often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with
a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is
for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and
Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and
speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to
the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with
which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy.
Certainly it is in the power of any one to write a book in three
volumes, divide it into chapters, and call it a novel; but those
processes no more make the work a novel, than they make it a History
of China. We thus see many clever books by very clever writers,
which, regarded as novels, are detestable. They are written without
the slightest study of the art of narrative, and without the
slightest natural gift to divine it. Those critics who, in modern
times, have the most thoughtfully analysed the laws of æsthetic
beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all
works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so
purely in the imagination, _that the artist never seeks to represent
the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth_. As HEGEL
well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something purely
individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially
destined to manifest the general.” A fiction, therefore, which is
designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination,
sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow
his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in
matters ecclesiastical, political, or moral, his work may or not be
an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.
Religion and politics are not, indeed, banished from works of
imagination; but to be artistically treated, they must be of the most
general and the least sectarian description. In the record of the Fall
of Man, for instance, Milton takes the most general belief in which all
Christian nations concur,—nay, in which nations not Christian still
acknowledge a myth of reverential interest. Or again, to descend from
the highest rank of poetry to a third rank in novel-writing; when Mr
Ward, in his charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes his very plot consist
in the conversion of an infidel to a belief in the immortality of the
soul, he does not depart from the artistic principle of dealing, not
with particulars, but with generals. Had he exceeded the point at which
he very wisely and skilfully stops, and pushed his argument beyond the
doctrine on which all theologians concur, into questions on which they
dispute, he would have lost sight of art altogether. So in politics—the
general propositions from which politics start—the value of liberty,
order, civilisation, &c.—are not only within the competent range of
imaginative fiction, but form some of its loftiest subjects; but descend
lower into the practical questions that divide the passions of a day,
and you only waste all the complicated machinery of fiction, to do what
you could do much better in a party pamphlet. For, in fact, as the same
fine critic, whom I have previously quoted, says, with admirable
eloquence:—
“Man, enclosed on all sides in the limits of the finite, and aspiring
to get beyond them, turns his looks towards a superior sphere, more
pure and more true, where all the oppositions and contradictions of
the finite disappear—where his intellectual liberty, spreading its
wings, without obstacles and without limits, attains to its supreme
end. This region is that of art, and its reality is the ideal. The
necessity of the beau-ideal in art is derived from the imperfections
of the real. The mission of art is to represent, under sensible forms,
the free development of life, and especially of mind.”
What is herein said of Art more especially applies to the art of
narrative fiction, whether it take the form of verse or prose. For, when
we come to that realm of fiction which, whether in verse or prose, is
rendered most alluring to us, either by the fashion of our time or the
genius of the artist, it is with a desire to escape, for the moment, out
of this hard and narrow positive world in which we live; to forget, for
a brief holiday, disputes between High and Low Church, Tories and
Radicals—in fine, to lose sight of _particulars_ in the contemplation of
_general_ truths. We can have our real life, in all its harsh outlines,
whenever we please it; we do not want to see that real life, but its
ideal image, in the fable land of art. There is another error common
enough in second-rate novelists, and made still more common because it
is praised by ordinary critics—viz., an attempt at the exact imitation
of what is called Nature; one writer will thus draw a character in
fiction as minutely as he can, from some individual he has met in
life—another perplexes us with the precise _patois_ of provincial
mechanics—not as a mere relief to the substance of a dialogue, but as a
prevalent part of it. Now I hold all this to be thoroughly antagonistic
to art in fiction—it is the relinquishment of generals for the servile
copy of particulars.... It cannot be too often repeated that art is
_not_ the imitation of nature; it is only in the very lowest degree of
poetry—viz., the Descriptive, that the imitation of nature can be
considered an artistic end. Even there, the true poet brings forth from
nature more than nature says to the common ear or reveals to the common
eye. The strict imitation of nature has always in it a something trite
and mean—a man who mimics the cackle of the goose or the squeak of a
pig, so truthfully, that for the moment he deceives us—attains but a
praise that debases him. Nor this because there is something in the
cackle of the goose, and the squeak of pig, that in itself has a mean
association; for as Kant says truly, “Even a man’s exact imitation of
the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a
mimicry, and not the nightingale.” Art does not imitate nature, but it
founds itself on the study of nature—takes from nature the selections
which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that
which nature does not possess—viz., _the mind and the soul of man_.
Just as he is but a Chinese kind of painter, who seeks to give us, in
exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a tree, which, if we want to see
only a tree, we could see in a field much better than in a picture; so
he is but a prosaic and mechanical pretender to imagination who takes a
man out of real life, gives us his photograph, and says, “I have copied
nature.” If I want to see that kind of man I could see him better in
Oxford Street than in a novel. The great artist deals with large
generalities, broad types of life and character, and though he may take
flesh and blood for his model, he throws into the expression of the
figure a something which elevates the model into an idealised image. A
porter sate to Correggio for the representation of a saint; but
Correggio so painted the porter, that the porter, on the canvass, was
lost in the saint.
Some critics have contended that the delineation of character
artistically—viz., through the selection of broad generalities in the
complex nature of mankind, rather than in the observation of particulars
by the portraiture of an individual—fails of the verisimilitude and
reality—of the flesh-and-blood likeness to humanity—which all vivid
delineation of human character necessarily requires. But this objection
is sufficiently confuted by a reference to the most sovereign
masterpieces of imaginative literature. The principal characters in
Homer—viz., Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, Paris, Thersites, &c.—are
so remarkably the types of large and enduring generalities in human
character, that, in spite of all changes of time and manners, we still
classify and designate individuals under those antique representative
names. We call such or such a man the Ulysses, or Nestor, or Achilles,
or Thersites of his class or epoch. Virgil, on the contrary, has, in
Æneas, but a feeble shadow reflected from no bodily form with which we
are familiar, precisely because Æneas is not a type of any large and
lasting generality in human character, but a poetised and
half-allegorical _silhouette_ of Augustus. There is, indeed, an
antagonistic difference between fictitious character and biographical
character. In biography, truth must be sought in the preference of
particulars to generals; in imaginative creations truth is found in the
preference of generals to particulars. We recognise this distinction
more immediately with respect to the former. In biography, and indeed in
genuine history, character appears faithful and vivid in proportion as
it stands clear from all æsthetic purposes in the mind of the
delineator. The moment the biographer or historian seeks to drape his
personages in the poetic mantle, to subject their lives and actions to
the poetic or idealising process, we are immediately and rightly seized
with distrust of his accuracy. When he would dramatise his characters
into types, they are unfaithful as likenesses. In like manner, if we
carefully examine, we shall see that when the Poet takes on himself the
task of the Biographer, and seeks to give minute representations of
living individuals, his characters become conventional—only partially
accurate—the accuracy being sought by exaggerating trivial peculiarities
into salient attributes, rather than by the patient exposition of the
concrete qualities which constitute the interior nature of living men.
Satire or eulogy obtrudes itself unconsciously to the artist; and mars
the catholic and enduring truthfulness which, in works of imagination,
belongs exclusively to the invention of original images for æsthetic
ends.
Goethe, treating of the drama, has said, that “to be theatrical a piece
must be symbolical; that is to say, every action must have an importance
of its own, and it must tend to one more important still.” It is still
more important, for dramatic effect, that the _dramatis personæ_ should
embody attributes of passion, humour, sentiment, character, with which
large miscellaneous audiences can establish sympathy; and sympathy can
be only established by such a recognition of a something familiar to our
own natures, or to our conception of our natures, as will allure us to
transport ourselves for the moment into the place of those who are
passing through events which are not familiar to our actual experience.
None of us have gone through the events which form the action of Othello
or Phèdre; but most of us recognise in our natures, or our conceptions
of our natures, sufficient elements for ardent love or agonising
jealousy, to establish a sympathy with the agencies by which, in Othello
and Phèdre, those passions are expressed. Thus, the more forcibly the
characters interest the generalities of mankind which compose an
audience, the more truthfully they must represent what such generalities
of mankind have in common—in short, the more they will be types, and the
less they will be portraits. Some critics have supposed that, in the
delineation of types, the artist would fall into the frigid error of
representing mere philosophical abstractions. This, however, is a
mistake which the poet who comprehends and acts upon the first principle
of his art—viz., the preference of generals to particulars—will be the
less likely to commit, in proportion as such generals are vivified into
types of humanity. For he is not seeking to personate allegorically a
passion; but to show the effects of the passion upon certain given forms
of character under certain given situations: And he secures the
individuality required, and avoids the lifeless pedantry of an
allegorised abstraction, by reconciling passion, character, and
situation with each other; so that it is always a living being in whom
we sympathise. And the rarer and more unfamiliar the situation of life
in which the poet places his imagined character, the more in that
character itself we must recognise relations akin to our own flesh and
blood, in order to feel interest in its fate. Thus, in the hands of
great masters of fiction, whether dramatists or novelists, we become
unconsciously reconciled, not only to unfamiliar, but to improbable,
nay, to impossible situations, by recognising some marvellous
truthfulness to human nature in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of
the character represented, granting that such a character _could_ be
placed in such a situation. The finest of Shakespeare’s imaginary
characters are essentially typical. No one could suppose that the poet
was copying from individuals of his acquaintance in the delineations of
Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Angelo, Romeo. They are as remote from
portraiture as are the conceptions of Caliban and Ariel. In fine, the
distinctive excellence of Shakespeare’s highest characters is that,
while they embody truths the most subtle, delicate, and refining in the
life and organisation of men, those truths are so assorted as to combine
with the elements which humanity has most in common. And it is obvious
to any reader of ordinary reflection, that this could not be effected if
the characters themselves, despite all that is peculiar to each, were
not, on the whole, typical of broad and popular divisions in the human
family.
Turning to prose fiction, if we look to the greatest novel which Europe
has yet produced (meaning by the word novel a representation of familiar
civilised life)—viz., ‘Gil Blas’—we find the characters therein are
vivid and substantial, capable of daily application to the life around
us, in proportion as they are types and not portraits—such as Ambrose
Lamela, Fabricio, the Archbishop of Toledo, &c.; and the characters that
really fail of truth and completion are those which were intended to be
portraits of individuals—such as Olivares, the Duke de Lerma, the Infant
of Spain, &c. And if it be true that, in Sangrado, Le Sage designed the
portrait of the physician Hecquet (the ingenious author of the “Système
de la Trituration),” and, in the poetical charlatan Triaquero, aimed at
a likeness of Voltaire, all we can say is, that no two portraits can be
more unfaithful to the originals; and whatever belongs to the characters
worthy the genius of the author is to be found in those strokes and
touches by which the free play of humour involuntarily destroys the
exactitude of portraiture. Again, with that masterpiece of prose romance
or fantasy ‘Don Quixote,’ the character of the hero, if it could be
regarded as that of an individual whom Cervantes found in life, would be
only an abnormal and morbid curiosity subjected to the caricature of a
satirist. But regarded as a type of certain qualities which are largely
diffused throughout human nature, the character is psychologically true,
and artistically completed; hence we borrow the word “Quixotic” whenever
we would convey the idea of that extravagant generosity of enthusiasm
for the redress of human wrongs, which, even in exciting ridicule,
compels admiration and conciliates love. The grandeur of the conception
of ‘Don Quixote’ is its fidelity to a certain nobleness of sentiment,
which, however latent or however modified, exists in every genuinely
noble nature. And hence, perhaps, of all works of broad humour, ‘Don
Quixote’ is that which most approximates the humorous to the side of the
sublime.
The reflective spirit of our age has strongly tended towards the
development of a purpose in fiction, symbolical in a much more literal
sense of the word than Goethe intended to convey in the extract I have
quoted on the symbolical nature of theatrical composition. Besides the
interest of plot and incident, another interest is implied, more or less
distinctly or more or less vaguely, which is that of the process and
working out of a symbolical purpose interwoven with the popular action.
Instead of appending to the fable a formal moral, a moral signification
runs throughout the whole fable, but so little obtrusively, that, even
at the close, it is to be divined by the reader, not explained by the
author. This has been a striking characteristic of the art of our
century. In the former century it was but very partially cultivated, and
probably grows out of that reaction from materialism which distinguishes
our age from the last. Thus—to quote the most familiar illustrations I
can think of—in Goethe’s novel of ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ besides the mere
interest of the incidents, there is an interest in the inward
signification of an artist’s apprenticeship in art, of a man’s
apprenticeship in life. In ‘Transformation,’ by Mr Hawthorne, the mere
story of outward incident can never be properly understood, unless the
reader’s mind goes along with the exquisite mysticism which is
symbolised by the characters. In that work, often very faulty in the
execution, exceedingly grand in the conception, are typified the
classical sensuous life, through Donato; the Jewish dispensation,
through Miriam; the Christian dispensation, through Hilda, who looks
over the ruins of Rome from her virgin chamber amidst the doves.
To our master novelists of a former age—to Defoe, Fielding, Richardson,
and Smollett—this double plot, if so I may call it, was wholly unknown.
Swift, indeed, apprehended it in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ which I consider
the greatest poem—that is, the greatest work of pure imagination and
original invention—of the age in which he lived; and Johnson divined it
in ‘Rasselas,’ which, but for the interior signification, would be the
faulty and untruthful novel which Lord Macaulay has, I venture to opine,
erroneously declared it to be. Lord Macaulay censures ‘Rasselas’ because
the Prince of Abyssinia does not talk like an Abyssinian. Now, it seems
to me that a colouring faithful to the manners of Abyssinia, is a detail
so trivial in reference to the object of the author of a philosophical
romance, that it is more artistic to omit than to observe it. Rasselas
starts at once, not from a positive but from an imagined world—he starts
from the Happy Valley to be conducted (in his progress through actual
life, to the great results of his search after a happiness more perfect
than that of the Happy Valley) to the Catacombs. This is the interior
poetical signification of the tale of ‘Rasselas’—the final result of all
departure from the happy land of contented ignorance is to be found at
the grave. There, alone, a knowledge happier than ignorance awaits the
seeker beyond the catacombs. For a moral so broad, intended for
civilised readers, any attempt to suit colouring and manners to
Abyssinian savages would have been, not an adherence to, but a violation
of, Art. The artist here wisely disdains the particulars—he is dealing
with generals.
Thus Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’ is no more a Babylonian than Johnson’s
‘Rasselas’ is an Abyssinian. Voltaire’s object of philosophical satire
would have been perfectly lost if he had given us an accurate and
antiquarian transcript of the life of the Chaldees; and, indeed, the
worst parts in ‘Zadig’ (speaking artistically), are those in which the
author does, now and then, assume a _quasi_ antique oriental air, sadly
at variance with meanings essentially modern, couched in irony
essentially French.
But the writer who takes this duality of purpose—who unites an interior
symbolical signification with an obvious popular interest in character
and incident—errs, firstly, in execution, if he render his symbolical
meaning so distinct and detailed as to become obviously
allegorical—unless, indeed, as in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ it is
avowedly an allegory; and, secondly, he errs in artistic execution of
his plan, whenever he admits a dialogue not closely bearing on one or
the other of his two purposes, and whenever he fails in merging the two
into an absolute unity at the end.
Now, the fault I find chiefly with novelists is their own contempt for
their craft. A clever and scholarlike man enters into it with a
dignified contempt. “I am not going to write,” he says, “a mere novel.”
What, then, is he going to write? What fish’s tail will he add to the
horse’s head? A tragic poet might as well say, “I am not going to write
a mere tragedy.” The first essential to success in the art you practise
is respect for the art itself. Who could ever become a good shoemaker if
he did not have a profound respect for the art of making shoes? There is
an ideal even in the humblest mechanical craft. A shoemaker destined to
excel his rivals will always have before his eye the vision of a perfect
shoe, which he is always striving to realise, and never can. It was well
said by Mr Hazlitt, “That the city prentice who did not think the Lord
Mayor in his gilded coach was the greatest of human beings would come to
be hanged.” Whatever our calling be, we can never rise in it unless we
exalt, even to an exaggerated dignity, the elevation of the calling
itself. We are noble peasants or noble kings just in proportion as we
form a lofty estimate of the nobility that belongs to peasants or the
nobility that belongs to kings.
We may despair of the novelist who does not look upon a novel as a
consummate work of art—who does not apply to it, as Fielding
theoretically, as Scott practically, did, the rules which belong to the
highest order of imagination. Of course he may fail of his standard, but
he will fail less in proportion as the height of his standard elevates
his eye and nerves his sinews.
The first object of a novelist is to interest his reader; the next
object is the quality of the interest. Interest in his story is
essential, or he will not be read; but if the quality of the interest be
not high, he will not be read a second time. And if he be not read a
second time by his own contemporaries, the chance is that he will not be
read once by posterity. The degree of interest is for the many—the
quality of interest for the few. But the many are proverbially fickle,
the few are constant. Steadfast minorities secure, at last, the success
of great measures, and confirm, at last, the fame of great writings.
I have said that many who, in a healthful condition of our stage, would
be dramatists, become novelists. But there are some material
distinctions between the dramatic art and the narrative—distinctions as
great as those between the oratorical style and the literary. Theatrical
effects displease in a novel. In a novel much more than in a drama must
be explained and accounted for. On the stage the actor himself
interprets the author; and a look, a gesture, saves pages of writing. In
a novel the author elevates his invention to a new and original story;
in a drama, I hold that the author does well to take at least the broad
outlines of a story already made. It is an immense advantage to him to
find the tale he is to dramatise previously told, whether in a history,
a legend, a romance, or in the play of another age or another land; and
the more the tale be popularly familiarised to the audience, the higher
will be the quality of the interest he excites. Thus, in the Greek
tragedy, the story and the characters were selected from the popular
myths. Thus Shakespeare takes his story either from chronicles or
novels. Thus Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire take, from scenes of
antiquity the most familiarly known, their fables and their characters.
Nor is it only an advantage to the dramatist that the audience should
come to the scene somewhat prepared by previous association for the
nature of the interest invoked; it is also an advantage to the dramatist
that his invention—being thus relieved from the demand on its powers in
what, for the necessities of the dramatic art, is an unimportant if not
erroneous direction of art—is left more free to combine the desultory
materials of the borrowed story into the harmony of a progressive
plot—to reconcile the actions of characters, whose existence the
audience take for granted, with probable motives—and, in a word, to
place the originality there where alone it is essential to the
drama—viz., in the analysis of the heart, in the delineation of passion,
in the artistic development of the idea and purpose which the drama
illustrates through the effects of situation and the poetry of form.
But in the narrative of prose fiction an original story is not an
auxiliary or erroneous, but an essential, part of artistic invention;
and even where the author takes the germ of his subject and the sketch
of his more imposing characters from History, he will find that he will
be wanting in warmth of interest if the tale he tells be not distinct
from that of the history he presses into his service—more prominently
brought forward, more minutely wrought out—and the character of the age
represented, not only through the historical characters introduced, but
those other and more general types of life which he will be compelled to
imagine for himself. This truth is recognised at once when we call to
mind such masterpieces in historical fiction as ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Kenilworth,’
‘Quentin Durward,’ and ‘_I Promessi Sposi_.’
In the tragic drama, however, historical subjects appear to necessitate
a different treatment from that which most conduces to the interest of
romantic narrative. There is a dignity in historical characters which
scarcely permits them to be transferred to the stage without playing
before the audience the important parts which they played in life. When
they enter on the scene they excite a predominating interest, and we
should not willingly see them deposed into secondary agencies in the
conduct of the story. They ought not to be introduced at all, unless in
fitting correspondence with our notions of the station they occupied and
the influence they exercised in the actual world; and thus, whether they
are made fated victims through their sufferings, or fateful influences
through their power, still, in the drama, it is through them that the
story moves: them the incidents affect—them the catastrophe
involves—whether for their triumph or their fall.
The drama not necessitating an original fable nor imaginary characters,
that which it does necessitate in selecting a historical subject is, the
art of so arranging and concentrating events in history as to form a
single action, terminating in a single end, wrought through progressive
incidents clearly linked together. It will be seen that the dramatic
treatment is, in this respect, opposed to the purely historical
treatment; for in genuine history there are innumerable secondary causes
tending to each marked effect, which the dramatist must wholly eliminate
or set aside. He must, in short, aim at generals to the exclusion of
particulars.
And thus, as his domain is the passions, he must seek a plot which
admits of situations for passion, and characters in harmony with such
situations. Great historical events in themselves are rarely
dramatic—they are made so on the stage by the appeal to emotions with
which, in private life, the audience are accustomed to sympathise. The
preservation of the Republic of Venice from a conspiracy would have an
interest in history from causes appealing to political reasoning, that
would be wholly without interest on the stage. The dramatist, therefore,
places the preservation of Venice in the struggle of a woman’s heart
between the conflicting passions, with which, in private life, the
audience could most readily sympathise. According as Belvidera acts, as
between her husband and her father, Venice will be saved or lost. This
is dramatic treatment—it is not historical. All delineations of passion
involve the typical; because whoever paints a passion common to mankind
presents us with a human type of that passion, varied, indeed, through
the character of an individual and the situations in which he is placed;
but still, in the expression of the passion itself, sufficiently germane
to all in whom that passion exists, whether actively or latently, to
permit the spectator to transfer himself into the place and person of
him who represents it. Hence the passions of individuals, though
affecting only themselves, or a very confined range of persons connected
with them, command, in reality, a far wider scope in artistic treatment
than the political events affecting millions in historical fact. For
political events, accurately and dispassionately described, are special
to the time and agents—they are traced through the logic of the reason,
which only a comparative few exercise, and even the few exercise it in
the calm of their closets, they do not come into the crowd of a theatre
for its exercise. But the passions of love, ambition, jealousy—the
conflict between opposing emotions of affection and duty—expressed in
the breast of an individual, are not special,—they are universal. And
before a dramatic audience the safety of a state is merged or ignored in
the superior interest felt in the personation of some emotion more
ardent than any state interest, and only more ardent because universal
amongst mankind in all states and all times. If the domestic interest be
the strongest of which the drama is capable, it is because it is the
interest in which the largest number of human breasts can concur, and in
which the poet who creates it can most escape from particulars into
generals. In the emancipation of Switzerland from the Austrian yoke,
history can excite our interest in the question whether William Tell
ever existed—and in showing the large array of presumptive evidence
against the popular story of his shooting the apple placed on his son’s
head. But in the drama William Tell is the personator of the Swiss
liberties; and the story of the apple, in exciting the domestic interest
of the relationship between father and son, is that very portion of
history which the dramatic artist will the most religiously
conserve,—obtaining therein one incalculable advantage for his
effect—viz., that it is not his own invention, and therefore of
disputable probability; but, whether fable or truth in the eyes of the
historical critic, so popularly received and acknowledged as a truth,
that the audience are prepared to enter into the emotions of the father,
and the peril of the son.
It is, then, not in the invention of a story, nor in the creation of
imaginary characters, that a dramatist proves his originality as an
artist, but in the adaptation of a story, found elsewhere, to a dramatic
purpose; and in the fidelity, not to historical detail, but to
psychological and metaphysical truth with which he reconciles the
motives and conduct of the characters he selects from history, to the
situations in which they are placed, so as to elicit for them, under all
that is peculiar to their nature or their fates, the necessary degree of
sympathy from emotions of which the generality of mankind are
susceptible.
But to the narrator of fiction—to the story-teller—the invention of
fable and of imaginary character is obviously among the legitimate
conditions of his art; and a fable purely original has in him a merit
which it does not possess in the tragic or comic poet.
On the other hand, the skilful mechanism of plot, though not without
considerable value in the art of narrative, is much less requisite in
the Novelist than in the Dramatist. Many of the greatest prose fictions
are independent of plot altogether. It is only by straining the word to
a meaning foreign to the sense it generally conveys, that we can
recognise a plot in ‘Don Quixote,’ and scarcely any torture of the word
can make a plot out of ‘Gil Blas.’ It is for this reason that the novel
admits of what the drama never should admit—viz., the operation of
_accident_ in the conduct of the story: the villain, instead of coming
to a tragic close through the inevitable sequences of the fate he has
provoked, may be carried off, at the convenient time, by a stroke of
apoplexy, or be run over by a railway train. Nevertheless, in artistic
narrative, accident, where it affects a _dénouement_, should be very
sparingly employed. Readers, as well as critics, feel it to be a blot in
the story of ‘Rob Roy’ when the elder brothers of Rashleigh Osbaldistone
are killed off by natural causes unforeseen and unprepared for in the
previous train of events narrated, in order to throw Rashleigh into a
position which the author found convenient for his ultimate purpose.
A novel of high aim requires, of course, delineation of character, and
with more patient minuteness, than the drama; and some novels live,
indeed, solely through the delineation of character; whereas there are
some tragedies in which the characters, when stripped of theatrical
costume, are very trivial, but which, despite the poverty of character,
are immortal, partly from the skill of the plot, partly from the passion
which is wrought out of the situations, and principally, perhaps, from
the beauty of form—the strength and harmony of the verse. This may be
said of the French drama generally, and of Racine in especial. The
tragic drama imperatively requires passion—the comic drama humour or
wit; but a novel may be a very fine one without humour, passion, or
wit—it may be made great in its way (though that way is not the very
highest one) by delicacy of sentiment, interest of story, playfulness of
fancy, or even by the level tenor of everyday life, not coarsely
imitated, but pleasingly idealised. Still mystery is one of the most
popular and effective sources of interest in a prose narrative, and
sometimes the unravelling of it constitutes the entire plot. Every one
can remember the thrill with which he first sought to fathom the dark
secret in ‘Caleb Williams’ or ‘The Ghost-Seer.’ Even in the comic novel,
the great founder of that structure of art has obtained praise for
perfection of plot almost solely from the skill with which Tom Jones’s
parentage is kept concealed; the terror, towards the end, when the hero
seems to have become involved in one of the crimes from which the human
mind most revolts, and the pleased surprise with which that terror is
relieved by the final and unexpected discovery of his birth, with all
the sense of the many fine strokes of satire in the commencement of the
tale, which are not made clear to us till the close.
To prose fiction there must always be conceded an immense variety in the
modes of treatment—a bold licence of loose capricious adaptation of
infinite materials to some harmonious unity of interest, which even the
most liberal construction of dramatic licence cannot afford to the
drama. We need no lengthened examination of this fact; we perceive at
once that any story can be told, but comparatively very few stories can
be dramatised. And hence some of the best novels in the world cannot be
put upon the stage; while some, that have very little merit as novels,
have furnished subject-matter for the greatest plays in the modern
world. The interest in a drama must be consecutive, sustained,
progressive—it allows of no _longueurs_. But the interest of a novel may
be very gentle, very irregular—may interpose long conversations in the
very midst of action—always provided, however, as I have before said,
that they bear upon the ulterior idea for which the action is invented.
Thus we have in ‘Wilhelm Meister’ long conversations on art or
philosophy just where we want most to get on with the story—yet, without
those conversations, the story would not have been worth the telling;
and its object could not, indeed, be comprehended—its object being the
accomplishment of a human mind in the very subjects on which the
conversations turn. So, in many of the most animated tales of Sir Walter
Scott, the story pauses for the sake of some historical disquisition
necessary to make us understand the altered situations of the imagined
characters. I need not say that all such delays to the action would be
inadmissible in the drama. Hence an intelligent criticism must always
allow a latitude to artistic prose fiction which it does not accord to
the dramatic, nor indeed to any other department of imaginative
representation of life and character. I often see in our Reviews a
charge against some novel, that this or that is “a defect of art,” which
is, when examined, really a beauty in art—or a positive necessity which
that department of art could not avoid—simply because the Reviewer has
been applying to the novel rules drawn from the drama, and not only
inapplicable, but adverse, to the principles which regulate the freedom
of the novel. Now, in reality, where genius is present, art cannot be
absent. Unquestionably, genius may make many incidental mistakes in art,
but if it compose a work of genius, that work must be a work of art on
the whole. For just as virtue consists in a voluntary obedience to moral
law, so genius consists in a voluntary obedience to artistic law. And
the freedom of either is this, that the law is pleasing to it—has become
its second nature. Both human virtue and human genius must err from time
to time; but any prolonged disdain, or any violent rupture, of the law
by which it exists, would be death to either. There is this difference
to the advantage of virtue (for, happily, virtue is necessary to all
men, and genius is but the gift of few), that we can lay down rules by
the observance of which any one can become a virtuous man; but we can
lay down no rules by which any one can become a man of genius. No
technical rules can enable a student to become a great dramatist or a
great novelist; but there is in art an inherent distinction between
broad general principles and technical rules. In all genuine art there
is a sympathetic, affectionate, and often quite unconscious adherence to
certain general principles. The recognition of these principles is
obtained through the philosophy of criticism; first, by a wide and
patient observation of masterpieces of art, which are to criticism what
evidences of fact are to science; and next, by the metaphysical
deduction, from those facts, of the principles which their concurrence
serves to establish. By the putting forth of these principles we cannot
make bad writers good, nor mediocre writers great; but we may enable the
common reader to judge with more correctness of the real quality of
merit, or the real cause of defect, in the writers he peruses; and by
directing and elevating his taste, rectify and raise the general
standard of literature. We may do more than that—we may much facilitate
the self-tuition that all genius has to undergo before it attains to its
full development, in the harmony between its freedom and those elements
of truth and beauty which constitute its law. As to mere technical
rules, each great artist makes them for himself; he does not despise
technical rules, but he will not servilely borrow them from other
artists; he forms his own. They are the by-laws which his acquaintance
with his special powers lays down as best adapted to their exercise and
their sphere. Apelles is said to have made it a by-law to himself to use
only four colours in painting: probably Apelles found his advantage in
that restraint, or he would not have imposed it on his pallet. But if
Zeuxis found that he, Zeuxis, painted better by using a dozen colours
than by confining himself to four, he would have used a dozen, or he
would not have been Zeuxis.
On careful and thoughtful examination we shall find, that neither in
narrative nor dramatic fiction do great writers differ on the principles
of art in the works which posterity accepts from them as great—whereas
they all differ more or less in technical rules. There is no great
poetic artist, whether in narrative or the drama, who, in his best
works, ever represents a literal truth rather than the idealised image
of a truth—who ever condescends to servile imitations of nature—who ever
prefers the selection of particulars, in the delineation of character or
the conception of fable, to the expression of generals—who does not aim
at large types of mankind rather than the portraiture of
contemporaries—or, at least, wherever he may have been led to reject
these principles, it will be in performances that are allowed to be
beneath him. But merely technical rules are no sooner laid down by the
critics of one age, than they are scornfully violated by some triumphant
genius in the next. Technical rules have their value for the artist who
employs them, and who usually invents and does not borrow them. Those
that he imposes on himself he seldom communicates to others. They are
his secret—they spring from his peculiarities of taste; and it is the
adherence to those rules which constitutes what we sometimes call his
style, but more properly his manner. It is by such rules, imposed on
himself, that Pope forms his peculiar cæsura, and mostly closes his
sense at the end of a couplet. When this form of verse becomes trite and
hackneyed, up rises some other poet, who forms by-laws for himself,
perhaps quite the reverse. All that we should then ask of him is
success: if his by-laws enable him to make as good a verse as Pope’s in
another way, we should be satisfied; if not—not. One main use in
technical rules to an author, if imposed on himself, or freely assented
to by himself, is this—the interposition of some wholesome impediment to
the over-facility which otherwise every writer acquires by practice. And
as this over-facility is naturally more apt to be contracted in prose
than in verse, and in the looseness or length of the novel or romance,
than in any other more terse and systematic form of imaginative
fiction—so I think it a wise precaution in every prolific novelist to
seek rather to multiply, than emancipate himself from, the wholesome
restraints of rules; provided always that such rules are the natural
growth of his own mind, and confirmed by his own experience of their
good effect on his productions. For if Art be not the imitator of
Nature, it is still less the copyist of Art. Its base is in the study of
Nature—not to imitate, but first to select, and then to combine, from
Nature those materials into which the artist can breathe his own
vivifying idea; and as the base of Art is in the study of Nature, so its
polish and ornament must be sought by every artist in the study of those
images which the artists before him have already selected, combined, and
vivified; not, in such study, to reproduce a whole that represents
another man’s mind, and can no more be born again than can the man who
created it; but again to select, to separate, to recombine—to go through
the same process in the contemplation of Art which he employed in the
contemplation of Nature; profiting by all details, but grouping them
anew by his own mode of generalisation, and only availing himself of the
minds of others for the purpose of rendering more full and complete the
realisation of that idea of truth or beauty which has its conception in
his own mind. For that can be neither a work of art (in the æsthetic
sense of the word) nor a work of genius in any sense of the word, which
does not do a something that, as a whole, has never been done before;
which no other living man could have done; and which never, to the end
of time, can be done again—no matter how immeasurably better may be the
_other_ things which _other_ men may do. ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Childe Harold’
were produced but the other day; yet already it has become as impossible
to reproduce an ‘Ivanhoe’ or a ‘Childe Harold’ as to reproduce an
‘Iliad.’ A better historical romance than ‘Ivanhoe,’ or a better
contemplative poem than ‘Childe Harold,’ may be written some day or
other; but, in order to be better, it must be totally different. The
more a writer is imitated the less he can be reproduced. No one of our
poets has been so imitated as Pope, not because he is our greatest or
our most fascinating poet, but because he is the one most easily
imitated by a good versifier. But is there a second Pope, or will there
be a second Pope, if our language last ten thousand years longer?