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.