16. The tragedian, then, idealises, because he starts from within. He
reaches, as it were, the central fire, in the heat of which every
separate faculty, every animal want, every fortuitous incident is
melted down and lost. We never could observe in actual experience
passion such as Lear's, or meditation such as Hamlet's, fusing
everything else into itself. Facts at every step would interfere to
prevent such a possibility. But let us place ourselves, by the poet's
help, within the soul of Lear or Hamlet, and we shall be able to follow
the process by which the spiritual power, taking the form of passion in
the one, and of thought in the other, and working outwards, draws
everything into its own unity, according to the same activity of which,
however impeded by the "imperfections of matter," we are conscious in
ourselves. The incidents of the tragedy are wholly subordinate, issuing
either from this spiritual energy of the actors on the one hand, or, on
the other, from destiny, to whose throne the poet penetrates. They thus
present an aspect entirely different from that of events which we
approach from without. The novel, on the contrary, starts from the
outside. Its main texture is a web of incidents through which the
motions of the spirit must be discerned, if discerned at all. These
incidents must be probable, must be such as are consistent with the
observed sequences of the world. The view of man, therefore, which we
attain through them, can only be that which is attainable by observation
of outward actions and events; or, in other words, according to the
distinction which we have attempted to establish, it is the natural
view, not the ideal. Its character corresponds to its origin.
Observation shows us man not as self-determined, but as the creature of
circumstances, as a phenomenon among other phenomena. As such, too, he
is presented to us in the novel. We do not see him, as in tragedy,
standing in the strength of his own spirit, remaking the world by its
power, determined by it for good or evil, dependent on it for all that
may be attractive or repellent about him. The hero of a novel attracts
in part by his physiognomy, his manner, or even his dress; his character
is qualified by circumstances and society; his impulses vary according
to the impressions of outward things; he is the sport of fortune,
dependent for weal or woe on the acquisition of some external blessing
which the development of the plot may or may not bestow on him. As
circumstances make his life what it is, so the particular combination of
circumstances, called happiness, constitutes its end. Instead of losing
his merely personal and particular self, as in the catastrophe of a
tragedy, he satisfies it with its appropriate pleasure. "He that loveth
wife or children more than me, is not worthy of me," are the words of
the Author of the Christian life. "Marry, enjoy domestic bliss, and thou
hast attained the end of virtue"--such is the ordinary moral of the
ordinary novel; nay, the only consistent moral of the consistent novel.
As the novelist sows, so must he reap; as his plot is, such must its
consummation be. In the body of the work he must, from the nature of the
case, represent men as they appear in fact, and he cannot fitly round it
off by representing them as they are only in idea. He cannot step at
pleasure from one sphere of art to another; by attempting to do so he
destroys the harmony without which there is no art at all, and leaves us
with a sense of dissatisfaction and unreality. The reader, who through
the whole three volumes till close upon the end has been travelling in
an atmosphere of ordinary morality and every-day aspiration, knows not
how in the last chapter to breathe the air of a higher life.