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.