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?—
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?