The best modern usage restricts the word literature to that which deals with the human heart and emotion, including intellectual emotion. That into which no feeling can enter is not literature. So a pure scientific treatise is not literature; neither is a simple historical record literature, as for example the news in a newspaper. Indeed, all histories, treatises, philosophical works, and textbooks and handbooks are literature only in such cases as an appeal is made to the universal heart or the emotions common to mankind.
A little psychology will help us to understand the matter better. The mind has three aspects: the intellectual, which gives us truth; the ethical, which gives us nobility; and the esthetic, which gives us beauty. It is really impossible to separate one of these things from the other entirely; but we may say that in science we have nothing but the intellectual, or truth; in religion nothing but the ethical, or nobility; and in art nothing but the esthetic, or beauty. But as a religion without truth or beauty would be a very poor affair, so art without truth or nobility would be almost inconceivable.
Literature is far more than art. Of course literature must be artistic: it must have the esthetic element of beauty; but it must also have both nobility and truth; and it must make its appeal through the emotions, that is, its appeal must be human. Possibly we must admit that all art is human, that its appeal is emotional; but this is not true of all beauty, for a mathematical hyperbola or parabola is perfectly beautiful, and it has its part in all drawing of artistic beauty; but the parabola or hyperbola does not become art except when executed by the human hand in making an appeal to human emotions.
Distinctions between truth, nobility, and beauty are merely for the sake of helping our thought. That which is noble must be true and it must be beautiful. That which is lacking in truth is lacking also in beauty. This, however, we are not always able to discover without analysing. Something may seem beautiful while we are thinking of beauty alone; but let us test its nobility or its truth, and if these are wanting we suddenly discover defects in the beauty we had not perceived before.
Who of us has not seen a woman who seemed at first to be perfectly beautiful, but whom we afterward found to be lacking in intellect or character. On re-examining the beauty we discover a weak mouth, inexpressive eyes, and other defects which may in time quite spoil the perfection of form we had admired so much at first, and we wonder how we could overlook these defects. The fact is, one supreme quality is likely to blind us to all defects until we cease to gaze upon that quality and hunt for others.
If we are literary critics, the first quality of literature that is likely to attract our attention is that of artistic beauty, which usually shows itself especially in the style. The musical flow of the words, the aptness and grace of the images, the refinement in the choice of words, make style, which, like charity, is a garment which covers a multitude of sins. If we are students, we look at the truth of the statements, their accuracy, their real significance, and talk about the poem’s or the story’s “depth” or lack of depth. But the common reader is more likely to judge the literary work by its nobility; in a novel such a reader wants characters he can admire and imitate, in a poem he wants thoughts that will inspire. Often to such a reader the lack of truth and of beauty are not even perceived. We see that which we look for, and fail to see that in which we have no interest.
But what part does amusement play in real literature? We hear that the “star of the public amuser is in the ascendant.” Is the novel any the less literature for being amusing? or may it amuse without being literature?
But let us see what amusement is. An alternative term is recreation, which means literally “being created anew.” Any escape from the routine of life into an atmosphere which is harmonious with our faculties for enjoyment is recreation. Amusement is the antithesis of work. A book the reading of which contains no suggestion of labour is a perfect recreation, since it allows our overworked faculties to rest and calls into play those faculties which otherwise would lie fallow and ultimately become stunted and dead. When we speak of a book as “amusing” we mean that it affords a complete relaxation to our faculties; but such complete relaxation is not altogether necessary to perfect recreation, for we may exercise one set of faculties while relaxing another. Literature is and should be relaxing to those faculties that are worn out by the dull routine of life; but any statement that a novel should be merely amusing, merely relaxing, is decidedly untrue to the facts in the case. The public does want recreation; we all want it; we all need it; it is one of the highest offices of literature to give it; but mere relaxation of wearied faculties will never create us anew. For true re-creation we must have that in literature which has been named creative,—something positive, vital, strong, and human. It is the duty of all great literature to be interesting. That which has ceased to be interesting is dead, and the quicker it is buried the better. The fact is, however, that no efforts at embalming or preservation on the part of critics will keep before the public that which the public chooses to bury.
And this brings us to another question. What part has popularity in true literature? Some swear only by that which is very popular; and others curse the masses of the people, declaring that they like that which is bad for its very badness, wallowing in filth and the commonplace, loving sentimentality in preference to true sentiment, and seeking in fiction only excitement of their passions. Such a view is libellous. As Lincoln once said in regard to other matters, You can deceive all the people part of the time and part of the people all the time, but you cannot deceive all the people all the time. We must confess that the public is always wandering after a will-o’-the-wisp; but at all times the public as a whole, we must believe, is seeking the good. It does not love the bad merely because it is bad; but it swallows the bad because it wants the grain of good it can get in no other way. And with the element of time added, it is the public that makes “the verdict of posterity” which all reverence. We must not forget, however, the element in the equation called Time; for that Time may reduce the equation to zero and prove that our unknown quantity is nothing.
And now let us ask what relation any work of literary art ought to have to our lives of toil. If it merely gives us a picture of our actual lives it cannot be interesting or amusing, since we want to get away from ourselves and exercise new faculties and have new experiences. On the other hand, we understand only what we live, and if we get too far away from our own experiences we are equally at a loss. The fact is, a work of literature should give us ourselves idealized and in a dream, all we wished to be but could not be, all we hoped for but missed. True literature rounds out our lives, gives us consolation for our failures, rebuke for our vices, suggestions for our ambition, hope, and love, and appreciation. To do that it should have truth, nobility, and beauty in a high degree, and our first test of a work of literature should be to ask the three questions, Is it beautiful? Is it true? Is it noble?
We may consider literature under three heads—Pure Poetry, the Prose Essay, and Fiction.
Poetry is unquestionably the oldest form of literature. Matthew Arnold once queried whether a people ought not to be barbarous to be really poetic. Perhaps it originated in the chant of the priests as they offered sacrifices to their gods; but the chanted tale recounting the deeds of glorious war must have come very soon after.
Mechanically, poetry consists in words arranged in measured feet and lines, corresponding almost exactly to the time element in music. Rhyme is a modern invention and in no way essential to poetry. Originally anything that could be chanted or sung was regarded as poetry. Now the song element has largely disappeared, but the requirement of measured feet and lines remains, and we may almost say that no poetry can be fully appreciated till it is read aloud.
Poetry was invented to express lofty sentiments, sentiments of religion and the noble sentiments of patriotism and brave deeds, and finally the sentiments of passionate love. It is still the loftiest form of literature, and if we would seize at a grasp all the length and breadth of the highest literary art, we should begin with the study of poetry.
True literature should express equally Truth, Nobility, and Beauty, the intellectual, the ethical, and the esthetic. Of course one poem will be pre-eminent for its beauty, another for its nobility, a third for its truth. Let us examine various types, that we may see with our own eyes and feel with our own hearts what these words mean.
Read aloud this lullaby from Tennyson’s Princess:
The first thing we notice, besides the pleasing rhythm, is the musical quality of the words. There can be no melody, as melody is known in music, but in the repetition of sounds and their enchanting variations we find something that very strongly suggests musical melody.
Then we are attracted by the beauty of the images. The words come tripping like fairy forms, and we feel a picture growing out of the camera obscura of our minds.
The appeal is almost wholly to our feelings; for if we stop to analyse the words and interpret their strict sense, we seem to see nothing but nonsense. The poem exists for the soothing, enchanting, dreamy beauty that seems rather to breathe in the words than to be expressed by them as words express thoughts in prose.
If there is any truth or any nobility in this poem of Tennyson’s, it would be hard to say just what they are. There is nothing ignoble; there is nothing untrue. But it seems as if we had a perfect type of beauty pure and simple.
Now let us read this little thing from Shelley:
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY.
Once more we observe the rhythm and the music, though not so perfect or real as in Tennyson’s song; and we see the beauty of images, almost as beautiful as the images in Sweet and Low; but we observe that there is a new element: a thought is expressed. Beauty has come to the aid of truth; and while we are uncertain whether we care most for the beauty or for the truth, we cannot but perceive how they aid each other.
But we have not yet found the moral or ethical element. Neither Tennyson nor Shelley inspires in us nobler sentiments, or gives us courage to do and dare loftier deeds.
For the purely ethical type we might turn to the psalms of David, or that noble poem Job. But we find the same element in a simple and modern form in a poem of Longfellow’s.
A PSALM OF LIFE.
WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST.
Once more we observe how the musical flow of the language charms our ear, and how the poem makes us feel that which it would teach. We miss the vibrating melody of words which we found in Tennyson and even in Shelley; and the rarely beautiful images of both the preceding poems are almost entirely absent. There is another element, however, which we could not perceive at all in those verses, and that is the element of nobility, of moral inspiration. The poem does not teach us any moral truth with which we were before unfamiliar, as a treatise on philosophy might; but it makes us feel as nothing else ever has the reality of that which we know already. It actually breathes courage into us,—not the courage for heroic deeds in battle, but the heroism of living nobly the common life that is ours.
It is not fair to condemn this almost perfect poem, as some critics do, because it is lacking in the Beauty and fresh Truth that make the poems of other poets immortal; for in the whole range of poetic literature it will be difficult to find a more perfect example of nobility and heroic courage.
It will be interesting now to turn to Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra and find the philosophy, the Truth that corresponds to this Nobility.
VI.
VII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
The subject is almost precisely that of Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, but the object is not so much to give us courage as to confirm our courage by philosophy. The appeal is intellectual, not ethical.
Yet this is very different from a treatise by Kant or Hegel. Browning the poet makes us feel the truth. It is emotion that his philosophy, his Truth, arouses in us—an intellectual emotion, but none the less an emotion. We find the measured rhythm of poetry, but it is as far as possible from the songlike music of Tennyson’s lullaby. The mechanical limits and restrictions seem an excuse for unusual and almost strained images, but images that nevertheless carry conviction to our minds. There is, too, a beauty in the conception. This poetry is philosophy, but impassioned and inspired philosophy.
Let us now read a poem still more lofty, a poem in which rare beauty, lofty nobility, and profound philosophy are mingled in almost equal proportions. I refer to Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey:
The sweet melody of Tennyson’s lullaby has here given away to a deep, organ-like harmony, that swells and reverberates, while the words seem to be making the simplest and most direct of statements. Image and plain statement so mingle that we cannot distinguish them, Truth suddenly seems radiant with a rare and angelic Beauty, and the very atmosphere breathes the loftiness of Noble Purity. Unexpectedly almost we find ourselves in the presence of Divinity itself, and the humblest meets the loftiest on common ground.
Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including everything in language that is not poetry. In former times art in literature meant poetry,—or, at a stretch, it included in addition only oratory.
The beginning of art in the use of unmeasured language (if we may use that term to designate language that does not have the metrical form) was undoubtedly oratory,—the impassioned appeal of a speaker to his fellow men. The language was rhythmical, but not measured, that is, not susceptible of division into lines, corresponding to bars of music; and the element of beauty was distinctly subordinate to the elements of nobility and truth. In modern times poetry has come to be more and more the mere aggregation of images of beauty, without much reference to the intellectual, and still less to the ethical; and prose has been the recognized medium for the intellectual and the moral.
Of course, modern times have not given us any oratory superior to that of Demosthenes and Cicero; nor any plain statement of historical fact superior to that of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Tacitus. But art in conversational prose, reduced to writing and made literature, may fairly be said to date from the essayists of Queen Anne’s time—Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, and their fellows; and it was brought to perfection by Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, Irving, and others of their day.
In most of this prose we find a new element—humour. The original, characteristic, typical essay is whimsical, sympathetic, kindly, amusing, suggestive, and close to reality. The impassioned appeal of oratory has been adapted to the requirements of reading prose by such writers as De Quincey and Macaulay; but the humorous essay has been by far the more popular.
And what is humour? It would be hard to say that it is either beauty, nobility, or truth. The fact is poetry, with its lofty atmosphere, rarefied, artificial, and emotional, is in danger of becoming morbid, unhealthy, and impractical. Humour is the sanitary sea salt that purifies and saves. No one with a sense of humour can get very far away from elemental and obvious facts. Humour is the corrective, the freshener, the health-giver. Its danger is the trivial, the commonplace, and the inconsequent.
The primary object of prose is to represent the truth, but in so far as prose is true literature, it must make its appeal to the emotions. The humorous essay must make us feel healthier and more sprightly, the impassioned oratorical picture must fire us with desires and inspire us with courage of a practical and specific kind. Mere logical demonstration, or argumentative appeal, are not in themselves literature because their appeal is not emotional, and so not a part of the vibrating electric fluid of humanity; and beauty plays the subordinate part of furnishing suggestive and illustrative images for the illumination of what is called “the style.”
Gradually prose has absorbed all the powers and useful qualities of poetry not inconsistent with its practical and unartificial character. So the characteristics of a good prose style are in many respects not unlike the characteristics of a good poetic style.
First, good prose should be rhythmical and musical, though never measured. As prose is never to be sung, the artificial characteristics of music should never be present in any degree; but as poetry in its more highly developed forms has lost its qualities of simple melody and attained characteristics of a more beautiful harmony, so prose, starting with mere absence of roughness and harshness of sound, gradually has attained to something very near akin to the musical harmony of the more refined poetry. Almost the only difference lies in the presence or absence of measure; but this forms a clear dividing line between poetry (reaching down from above) and prose (rising up from below).
Second, the more suggestive prose is, the better it is. It is true that images should not be used merely for their own sake, as they may be in poetry; but their possibilities in the way of illustration and illumination is infinite, and it is this office that they perform in the highest forms of poetry. To paraphrase Browning, it enables the genius to express “thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow” word. And so that whole side of life that cannot possibly be expressed in the definite formulæ of science finds its body and incarnation in literature.
Third, good prose will never be very far from easily perceived facts and realities of life. The saving salt of humour will prevent wandering very far; and this same humour will make reading easier, and will induce that relaxation of labour-strained faculties which alone permits the exercise and enjoyment of our higher powers. We shall never get into heaven if we are forever working, and humour causes us to cease work and lie free and open for the inspiration from above.
It would be hard to find either nobility, truth, or beauty as distinguishing characteristics in the following letter of Charles Lamb’s; but it is certain that it is admirable prose. If it does not give us that which we seek, it most certainly puts us into the mood in which we are most likely to find it in other and loftier writers:
“March 9, 1822.
“Dear Coleridge—It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well: they are interesting creatures at a certain age. What a pity that such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Œdipean avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of ripe pomegranate? Had you no complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire. Did you flesh maiden teeth in it?
“Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in his life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig after all was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teal, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese—your tame villatic things—Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled; your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child—when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I—not the old impostor—should take in eating her cake—the ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.
“But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.
“Yours (short of pig) to command in everything,
C. L.”
When we have finished reading this, we wonder if we have not mistaken our standards of life; if the senses are not as truly divine as our dreams, and certainly far more within the reach of our realization. We think, we feel happy, we are certainly no worse. Whatever strange thing this humour may have done to us, we are more truly men for having experienced it.
And it is this that prose can do that poetry, even of the best, can never accomplish.
From the beginning of literature the most interesting thing which a writer can write has been the life history of a MAN. We are like boats borne on the swift current of the rushing river of Time. Whether our boat sink or swim, or turn to the right or to the left, is the matter of intensest interest—indeed, our interest is usually so intense in this subject that we can think of nothing else with any zest. And as we study our own problem of navigation on the waters of life, we watch all our neighbours to see how they succeed or fail, and why. Their problem is our problem and ours is theirs. Hence it is that stories of human life have formed the substance of the world’s greatest literature since the days of Homer.
Before outlining the history of the literary form which the universal human story has taken, let us explain the meaning of “the dramatic.” Drama deals with the crises in individual lives. While our boats on the current of Time sail smoothly and straight on their way, there is no drama, nothing that can be called dramatic, and so no material for an interesting story; but the moment that any obstacle or force of any kind, exterior or interior, causes the steady onward course of the life to cease or turn aside, however little, that moment we have the dramatic. So for the elements of a drama we must have a collision of life forces, one of which forces is the onward movement of some individual human life. The other force may be circumstances, or “Fate,” as we call it; or it may be another human life. When but two forces meet, we have the simplest form of the drama, such as we may see in any short story or a one-act play. In a novel or a drama in acts we shall find a collision of several and various forces, usually different human lives meeting and influencing each other.
While the human story has been the same, and the principles of dramatic construction have been but little changed in several thousand years, the artistic form has changed with changing conditions, and the history of its development is intensely interesting.
The first form in which the story of life was told was the epic poem, as for example Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad was the tale of the “wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.” That force, coming straight athwart the current of the warlike lives of all the Greek and Trojan heroes, could not but be dramatic, for there was not one of them whose onward movement was not changed in some way, and of course the changes were interesting in proportion to the importance of the lives of the subjects—the greater the subject the greater the drama (if adequately executed) in the world’s literary history.
The next form which the human story took was that of the stage drama. Mechanical necessity required that the collision and life changes should be represented in the speeches of the characters, as in the epic poem they had been narrated in the song of the minstrel. We have our finest examples of the stage drama in Shakespeare, and we find that the poetic language uttered by the various characters on the stage is not very different from the language uttered by the single minstrel when he was the only performer. Moreover, we find a new element which the minstrel could not very easily represent, and that is humour. In the humorous portions the poetic drama begins to be prose.
The discovery of the printing press, which makes books that every man may read in his closet, has given birth to the third form of the great human story—the novel.
While there can be no doubt that the novel is the form above all others in which the world to-day chooses to receive the human story, the epic poem no longer being written and the poetic drama but rarely, still we should make a mistake if we suppose that the novel is the direct child and heir of the poetic stage drama even to the same extent that the drama was the direct child and heir of epic poetry.
Both the epic poem and the poetic drama have a dignity and loftiness that much more adequately represent the nobler and loftier characteristics of the human personality than the often trivial and even base and ignoble fictitious tale in the novel. The truth is, the modern novel is directly descended from the tavern tale, the amusing and entertaining narrative of the chance traveller coming unpretentiously and unexpectedly into the quiet country village. Such tavern tales we find in their purest form in the Arabian Nights and in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The stories of Sindbad the Sailor and the lovers of Boccaccio had unquestionably been told again and again by the wayfarer eager for the applause of his little audience, and had again and again been listened to by common folk whose only glimpse of the life of the outer world came through these same tavern yarns. Boccaccio collected his stories from the taverns of Italy, and wrote them out in the choicest Italian for the entertainment of his king and queen (A. D. 1348). The stories of the Arabian Nights were collected in Egypt at about the same time by some person or persons unknown, and reached the European world through the French version of Galland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the Arabian Nights we may find the origin of the modern romance, and in the Decameron the beginning of the modern love-story or novel.
The bond of union between the tavern tale and the story of modern fiction is not difficult to detect. The tavern tale is the confidential narrative of the unpretentious traveller to his handful of uncritical common people whose instincts are primitive and whose primary desire is for amusement: the story of modern fiction is the confidential narrative of the author to a single ordinary or average reader, who sits down in the privacy of his closet to be amused and instructed—chiefly amused. The style required in both cases is personal, familiar, and conversational. Formality is thrown aside, and unrestrained by any critical audience or the presence of a judge of mature mind and high appreciation, both tale-teller and story-writer speak freely of the privacy of life, and of its most sacred secrets as well as its most hidden vices. Such a medium is very far from the lofty dignity of poetry; yet it is perhaps the only truly democratic form of literary art.
As we have seen, the modern novel was at first nothing more than an almost verbatim report of the tavern tale-teller’s narrative. Then, in Richardson and Fielding, we find the same kind of gossip invented by the author and set forth with a trifle more fancy and imagination, as it is done in letters. The powers of the prose essay invented by Addison and his fellows were soon added to the style of the novel, an early illustration of which we may find in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. Scott gave the novel the dignity and romantic interest of history—history made human and therefore turned into true literature. Dickens added the sentimental, poetic style of the ballad, and Thackeray the teaching of the familiar homily.[1] In the stories of Hawthorne we see what the ancient fable and allegory contributed to the modern fictitious phantasy.
In Balzac for the first time we discover any attempt to make fiction the vehicle for the broad national drama which Homer gave us in his epic poems. In Poe we find the beginnings of an application of dramatic principles to the construction of the short story, and in this very small field Maupassant brought the art of dramatic construction well nigh to perfection. We may imagine that a novel ought to be as complete and perfectly constructed a drama as one of Shakspere’s plays; but the fact that we find no such novels suggests that fiction as an art is yet incomplete and not fully matured.
The origin of fiction was very low; but it was an origin very near to the common people, and so to the simple and natural instincts of all of us. With this broad foundation the possibilities of development are enormous, and we may reasonably hope that some day the novel will take a place in literary art that is much above that of the epic poem or even the poetic drama. It is not hampered by the mechanical limitations of either of these, and the variety and literary opportunity which characterize it are the possession of fiction alone.
And now let us ask, What are the characteristics of a good novel? And, How may we judge a novel?
We may think of the novel in two ways—as the tavern tale and as poetry—as prose, with its characteristic humour and conversational style, and the imaginative and lofty dream of the human soul, otherwise expressible only in verse.
As a tavern tale we may test a novel by fancying that the author is sitting down in person with us in our dressing-gown before the fire. He talks to us and tells us a tale. If he were there in person, what characteristics should he have to make him attractive to us? Why, of course, he should be polite and engaging. Too great familiarity even in the privacy of home spoils friendship, and so does vulgarity. And yet with a certain reserve of manner he may enter upon almost any topic of human thought, and even discuss with us our own secret sins. The good conversationalist will make us think and talk ourselves, and so will a good novel-writer. Of course we cannot talk to the author; but we can find in our friends a good substitute for him.
Another quality we shall demand is sincerity. While we may like to listen for a time to the brilliant conversation of a witty talker whom we cannot trust, the sincere friend will hold our affections long after the brilliant talker is forgotten. The brilliant and insincere friend and the brilliant and insincere novelist or writer are alike left deserted in their old age, with not a friend in the world. (What better example of this could we have than Oscar Wilde? When the insincerity of his character was found out, how quickly the world dropped him!)
The novelist above all other writers stands to the reader in the attitude of a personal friend. At first we turn to such a friend merely because he is agreeable as a companion; but the time comes when we wish to consult him as to the solution of our personal difficulties, and ask him to share in our personal joys. In somewhat the same way a novel writer may become the friend and adviser of his reader. In the stories he tells he deals frankly and sincerely with just such problems of life and emotion as those which confront the reader; and through his characters he declares what he thinks the best thing to do. If you would test the greatness of any novelist, ask the question, Would you be willing to follow the advice which he gives his characters?
We have spoken of the author as the friend of the reader. This figure of speech has been chosen for the purpose of making apparent the intimate relations between the substance of the story and the personality of the reader. As a matter of fact, however, it is only the personality of the reader which is in any way alive and consciously perceived: the writer is so entirely impersonal (or should be) that he becomes completely merged in his characters. His spirit is felt in every line of description and every touch of character; but, as we might say, his own form should never be seen. With no suggestion of sacrilege we might even say that he is to the creations in the novel what God is to nature: the eye sees nature in all its beauty, but only the heart can perceive by a hidden vision of its own the presence of the divine. Such is the ideal part which an artist should play in his story.
But, though the artist as a personality is or should be entirely unseen, he is only the more truly present; and the greater his soul and the nobler his life and the broader his imagination and the more poetic his fancy, the more truly does his book become a treasure to the reader.
All dramatic writers, whether epic poets, poetic dramatists, or novelists, are known by the characters they create. It is not important that those characters should ever have really existed in the world: what is demanded is that they be natural and possible and true to the principles of life. The creative writer will of course create characters never seen before. He will never be a mere copyist; or if he is he becomes a biographer, and ceases to be a dramatic artist. Of course, also, these characters must have their collisions with other characters or with the forces of fate. That is necessary to give dramatic interest, the interest of plot. And characters are known by what they do; so unless they really meet adequate dramatic situations they cannot be said to exist at all, even though the author has described them minutely and told us that they have an endless variety of noble and beautiful qualities: for us only those qualities exist which we see in action. So in brief we may say that a great novelist (or other dramatic writer) is known by the great deeds of his great characters.
From this point of view Shakspere is our greatest author. His Lear, Othello, Desdemona, Portia, Macbeth, Hamlet, Caesar, Brutus, Cleopatra, and the rest form a noble company of great men and women. Instinctively we compare these fictitious characters with the characters of history. Many of them are taken from history; but by art and imagination they are created anew in shapes that live before our eyes as the characters of history (often quite different personages) really lived before the eyes of their contemporaries, but could not live before our eyes.
No novelist gives us such a company of great men and women—very few give us even one great man. In some ways we may compare with Shakspere’s characters those of Balzac. The great French novelist set out to represent typical characters of all classes of the society he knew. He has as varied a company as Shakspere, and it is typical of society as Shakspere’s is not; but none of Balzac’s characters can for a moment be considered as great as Shakspere’s. Even the Country Doctor, perhaps Balzac’s noblest creation, has no such depth of interest as Hamlet, for example, though we might possibly compare him with Prospero; and what a creature is the Duchesse de Langeais beside Portia!
But a novelist who gives us no characters which we can take an interest in even if we do not love them or admire them is not much of a novelist. The name of Thackeray suggests Becky Sharpe and Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome. The fine substance of Thackeray’s men and women, both good and bad, their refinement and delicacy and intelligence and sensibility, mark them as personalities far above the ordinary in fiction; and so they give Thackeray a rank that the variety of his characters and the range of his sympathies would not otherwise entitle him to. Dickens is to us but a name for the little dream world in which we make the acquaintance of David Copperfield and Micawber and Peggotty and Agnes and Dora, of the father of the Marshalsea and Little Dorrit and their friends of the prison, of Little Nell and her friends, of Oliver Twist and his thievish but interesting companions. Dickens’s characters are not examples for admiration; but they are intensely interesting because so intensely human, coming so near to us ourselves as they often do even when we are least ready to admit it. And unquestionably their number is great. The number and variety of an author’s characters are always to be taken into account in estimating his greatness, or even his value to us individually.
Scott’s characters are very different from any of these. They seem made especially to wear picturesque historic costumes, and in their almost limitless multitude they form a pageantry which is splendid and entrancing in the extreme. The thing of value is that the pageantry is alive; and if Scott’s characters were created to wear costumes, they were created living all of them; and (as the reader of Sartor Resartus well knows) the wearing of costumes is, in its figurative sense, one of the most important duties of life, with many people becoming nearly a religion. In Scott we may find out to what extent this universal passion is legitimate and what great-souled love there may be in the heart beating beneath the costume.
Such are some of the principles by which we should test and judge all works of dramatic art, whether plays on the stage or novels. We need not, however, in all cases wholly condemn a book professing to be a novel which falls short by this criterion: it may be good as an essay or a history or a treatise, and its author may have mistaken its character in calling it a novel.