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?
THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART.[[3]]
When the announcement first appeared that a biography of the late Sir Howard Douglas was in progress, the impression made upon our minds was anything but favourable to the enterprise. Of the good and gifted man himself, as he mixed in general society, our recollections were indeed of the most pleasurable kind. He stood before us with his kindly manner, his noble appearance, his high bearing, his generous nature, the perfect model of what an English officer and gentleman ought to be. And casting our eyes across the room to the shelf on which his ‘Naval Gunnery’ and ‘Military Bridges’ were ranged, we thought of him as a man of science more than ordinarily well read in his profession. But not all our desire to find in connection with him materials for a consecutive history, helped us to any other conclusion than this, that the story of his life, if told at length, must be a dull one. We acknowledge, less with shame than with satisfaction and some surprise, that we were quite mistaken. Sir Howard Douglas’s career had more of romance about it than that of many a man who has filled a much larger space in the world’s observation. It was successful as far as it carried him, because a sound judgment controlled good abilities, and directed them to a wise end. And, above all, it reads this lesson to coming generations, that he who honestly seeks the wellbeing of others rarely fails, sooner or later, to secure his own. Nor must we omit to render to Sir Howard’s biographer the commendation which he deserves. Mr Fullom has executed his task well; neither overlaying his narrative with details, which sometimes weary, nor keeping back anything which might conduce to its completeness, he has given us one of the pleasantest books which, for some time past, has come under our notice.
The house of Douglas has from the earliest times been renowned in Scottish story. Its alliance with the royal family began in the fourteenth century, when the Lord of Dalkeith took to wife Mary the fifth daughter of James I. On this same Lord of Dalkeith the earldom of Morton was not long afterwards conferred by his brother-in-law, James II. From father to son, or from uncle to nephew, the earldom passed through twelve generations, and narrowly escaped coming in the thirteenth to the father of Sir Howard. But Charles Douglas, if he missed a coronet, won for himself a baronetcy and great distinction as a British sailor. He it was who, when Arnold and Montgomery besieged Quebec, forced his squadron through the ice on the St Lawrence and relieved the place. He it was who first of all constructed a flotilla for himself, and then swept the Canadian lakes of the rebel gunboats; and by-and-by, on the 12th of April 1782, he caught, as if by inspiration, that idea, the application of which enabled Admiral Rodney to break the enemy’s line, and to save at a critical moment the honour of the British fleet.
Of this Sir Charles Douglas, Howard was the eldest son by a second marriage. Sir Charles’s first wife, a foreign lady, had brought him two sons and a daughter, so that Howard’s prospects, so far as title and fortune were concerned, could not have been in his infancy very bright: and they would have been entirely overcast by the early death of his mother, had not her place been well supplied by a maternal aunt. Under the roof of this lady, Mrs Bailey of Olive Bank, near Musselburgh, the little fellow grew and prospered, repaying all the tenderness with which he was reared by his affectionate and gentle disposition, as well as by his industry and success over his books.
Howard’s brothers both entered the navy. This was natural, and it was perhaps equally so that Howard should desire to follow their example; but Sir Charles considered that, if his three sons were all to embrace the same profession, the chances were that they would only stand in each other’s way. He gave directions, therefore, that Howard should be educated for a different walk in life, and the boy ascended in due time from the charge of the governess to the grammar-school. Yet the child’s tastes were entirely naval all the while. He built toy ships, and sailed them on a pond in the garden; he made friends of the fisher-lads and cabin-boys along the coast, and became so initiated into the mysteries of their craft that none among them could better manage than he a fishing-boat or a ship’s yawl. It thus became clear to Sir Charles Douglas, who visited his sister in 1789, previously to assuming the command on a foreign station, that nature had designed his youngest son for a career similar to his own, and he made up his mind to take Howard with him, and to rate him as a midshipman on board the flag-ship. But the coveted flag he was never destined to hoist. A sudden illness carried him off while the guest of his sister, and Howard’s lot was cast for him in the army.
The Royal Academy at Woolwich was more easily entered in those days than it is now. A pass examination was, however, required; and young Douglas, strange to say, in spite of his marked bias for practical mechanics, failed in the elements of geometry. But he had made so good a figure in other respects, and appeared so cast down by the circumstance, that the examiner, Dr Hutton, encouraged him to try again; and three weeks spent with a clever crammer sufficed to bring him up to the mark. He therefore presented himself a second time, passed, and was admitted.
There is one defect in Mr Fullom’s history which puts his readers to considerable inconvenience—he is not very accurate in his dates. We do not quite make out, for example, when young Douglas made his way into the Academy, or how long he continued a cadet; but we are told, what is extremely probable in itself, that he was much beloved by his contemporaries, and that he soon took the lead among them both in the playground and in the class-room. His passion for naval affairs continued as strong as ever, and he indulged it by frequent boat excursions on the Thames. He swam, also, like a duck, and paid many a furtive visit to Deptford dockyard, where he studied by fits and starts the art of shipbuilding. His vacations he spent in Scotland, passing to and from Leith in one of the smacks;—an intense delight to him, because he was instructed by the crews in the arts of knotting and splicing, of plaiting points and gaskets, of making gammets, and heaving the lead. It is not often that a youth displays such unmistakable aptitude for a career which he is not destined to follow; and it still more rarely happens that the amusements of the boy, whom circumstances in after life place in a groove apparently wide apart from them, turn out to have been by no means the least useful branches of his education, either to himself or to others.