II
There is however a difference between a fixed form, such as the sonata has and the sonnet, and the more flexible formula, such as the arrangement within a framework which La Farge borrowed from the painters of the Italian Renascence. A pattern of this latter sort is less rigid; in fact, it is easily varied as successive artists modify it to suit themselves.
Consider the eighteenth century essay which Steele devised with the aid of hints he found in the ‘Epistles’ and even in the ‘Satires’ of Horace, and which was enriched and amplified by Addison. The pattern of the ‘Tatler’ and the ‘Spectator’ was taken over by a heterogeny of other essayists in the course of four-score years, notably by Johnson in the ‘Idler’ and the ‘Rambler’; and assuredly Johnson if left to himself could never have invented a formula so simple, so unpretending and so graceful. It was only a little departed from by Goldsmith, and only a little more by Irving in the ‘Sketch-Book,’ which is not so much a periodical (altho it was originally published in parts) as it is a portfolio of essays and of essay-like tales. From Irving, Thackeray borrowed more than the title of his ‘Paris Sketch-Book’ and ‘Irish Sketch-Book.’
Consider the earlier and in some measure stricter form of the essay as it had been developed by Montaigne,—the pattern that Montaigne worked out as he put more and more of himself into the successive editions of his essays. He had begun intending little more than a commonplace-book of anecdotes and quotations; and yet by incessant interpolation and elaboration his book became at last the intimate revelation of his own pungent individuality. This is the pattern that Bacon adopted and adapted to his purpose, less discursive and more monitory, but not less pregnant nor less significant. And it is Montaigne’s formula, not greatly transformed by Bacon, which Emerson found ready to his hand when he made his essays out of his lectures, scattering his pearls of wisdom with a lavish hand and not pausing to string them into a necklace. We cannot doubt that the pattern of Montaigne and Bacon and Emerson owed something also to their memory of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Shakspere was as fortunate as Bacon in the fact that he had not to waste time in vainly seeking new forms. He did not invent the sonnet and he did not invent the sonnet-sequence; but he made his profit out of them. Neither the stanza nor the structure of his two narrative poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’ was of his contriving; he found them already in use and he did not go in search of any overt novelty of form.
Scott, “beaten out of poetry by Byron,” as he himself phrased it, turned to prose-fiction; and almost by accident he created the pattern of the historical novel, with its romantic heroes and heroines and with its realistic humbler characters. His earliest heroes and heroines in prose were very like his still earlier heroes and heroines in verse; and his realistic characters were the result of his expressed desire to do for the Scottish peasant what Miss Edgeworth had done for the Irish peasant. The first eight of the Waverley novels dealt only with Scottish scenes; then in ‘Ivanhoe,’ and a little later in ‘Quentin Durward,’ Scott enlarged his formula for the presentation of an English and a French theme.
Since Scott’s day his pattern has approved itself to three generations of novelists; and it is not yet outworn. In France Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas accepted it, each of them altering it at will, feeling free to adjust it to their own differing necessities. In Italy it was employed by Manzoni, in Poland by Sinckiewitz; and in Germany by a horde of uninspired story-tellers. In the United States it was at once borrowed by Cooper for the ‘Spy,’ the first American historical novel. Then Cooper, having proved its value, took the pattern which Scott had created for the telling of a story the action of which took place on land, and in the ‘Pilot’ made it serve for a story the action of which took place mainly on the sea,—perhaps a more striking originality than his contemporaneous employment of it for a series of tales the action of which took place in the forest.
It is one of the most fortunate coincidences in the history of literature that Scott crossed the border and made a foray into English history at the very moment when Cooper was ready to write fiction about his own country; and it was almost equally unfortunate that Charles Brockden Brown was born too early to be able to avail himself of the pattern Scott and Cooper were to handle triumphantly. Brown died a score of years before the publication of ‘Ivanhoe.’ He left half-a-dozen novels of varying value, known only to devoted students of American fiction. He had great gifts; he had invention and imagination; he was a keen observer of human nature; he had a rich faculty of description. (In one of his books there is a portrayal of an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia which almost challenges comparison with De Foe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’.) But “the state of the art” of fiction supplied Brown with no model appropriate to his endowment; and therefore he had to do the best he could with the unworthy pattern of the Gothic Romance of Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe and of their belated followers, “Monk” Lewis and Godwin. If Brown had been a contemporary of Cooper, then the author of the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ might have had a worthy rival in his own country.
The state of the art in his own time was a detriment to a far greater story-teller than Brown or Cooper or Scott, to one of the greatest of all story-tellers, to Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ abides as the imperishable monument to his genius, to his wisdom, to his insight, to his humor, to his all-embracing sympathy. None the less is it sprawling in its construction and careless in its composition. There were only two models available for Cervantes when he wrote this masterpiece of fiction, the Romance of Chivalry and its antithesis, the Romance of Roguery—the picaresque tale. The Romance of Chivalry was generally chaotic and involute, with a plot at once complicated and repetitious. The Romance of Roguery, born of an inevitable reaction against the highflown and toplofty unreality of the interminable narratives of knight-errantry, was quite as straggling in its episodes; and it was also addicted to cruel and brutal practical joking. For Cervantes these were unworthy patterns; and he had no other. So it is that the method of ‘Don Quixote’ is sometimes unsatisfactory, even when the manner is always beyond all cavil. Moreover, it is evident that Cervantes builded better than he knew; he seems not to have suspected the transcendent quality of his own work; and therefore he did not take his task as seriously as he might. As it has been well said, Cervantes came too early to profit by Cervantes.
How much luckier are the novelists and short-story writers of to-day! The state of the art has advanced to a point unforeseen even a century ago. Whatever theme a writer of fiction may want to treat now, he is never at a loss for a pattern, which will preserve him from the misadventure which befell Cervantes. In its methods, if in nothing else, fiction is a finer art than it was once upon a time. Consider Rudyard Kipling, for example, who is almost infinitely various, and who is always inexpugnably original. Whatever his subject might be, there was always an appropriate pattern at his service; he had only to pick and choose that which best suited his immediate need. Consider Stevenson, again, and how he was able to play the sedulous ape at one time to Scott and Dumas, and at another to Hawthorne and Poe.