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tion; and so but yesterday, as it seems to us, did a greater than she already almost equally forgotten by the mob of galleryreaders-Miss Edgeworth. Before Sir Walter is entitled to argue as he has done, he must—at the least-show us, on the one hand, an author of Macbeth trying in vain to write an historical romance, or a fullgrown Molière failing in a novel; and on the other, an author of Waverley making a deliberate but fruitless inroad on the province of the drama. Had Don Quixote been an early production of Cervantes; had Le Sage written the Point d'Honneur, or even Turcaret after his Diable Boiteux: had Fielding written weak plays after Tom Jones; or Smollett dull ones after Humphry Clinker-the best perhaps, in every respect, of his works, at all events by much the most dramatic-there might have been something in such cases: but even they would, for reasons too obvious to need stating, have been insufficient.

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Upon the whole, Sir W. Scott seems to be of opinion that it is a more difficult matter to produce a good play, than a good novel (for we must dismiss the distinction between novel and romance as a generic one). The author,' he says, 'best qualified for a province in which all depends on the communication of his own ideas and feelings to the reader without any intervening medium, may fall short of the skill necessary to adapt his compositions to the medium of the stage.' This, we think, is the truth of the matter: the same creative powers, the same story, the same characters, that appear in a masterpiece of the one form of composition would, in every case, we have no doubt, be sufficient for a masterpiece in the other: but the dramatic form demands a prodigious degree of skill, of art, beyond the romantic. But though this view tends strongly to confirm the likelihood that he who writes a good novel may prove incapable of writing a good play, we confess that it appears to us to lend no assistance to the theory which Sir Walter maintains, to wit, that it must be a matter of even greater difficulty for the author of a good play to produce a good novel.

There can be no question that a man may produce a good novel without ever thinking, or having any business to think, of the stage but we have no light suspicion that he who produces a good play furnishes, by the very act of doing so, proof abundant that he could write a good novel if he pleased. A romance may be a very good one, although it has far less cohesion of plot than is requisite for a good play, but, to say the least of the matter, it can never be the worse for having a perfect dramatic plot. Now he who frames a good tragedy begins, we cannot but think, with neither more nor less than conceiving in his own mind a good ro

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mance. The play is a far more artificial representation of a given section of human life and conduct than the romance. It is the result of exquisite skill to be able to give anything like a true picture of a continued series of thoughts and deeds without departing from the form of dialogue. We all know that in every real love story, for example, much of the most interesting part, if we could come at it, remains entirely within solitary bosoms-and it is the same in every story where sentiment and passion are at work. The romancer can describe all this hidden part as he pleases the dramatist must contrive to hint it- he must have the art to make us guess from what the persons speak when they are together, what they have been thinking when alone; and how difficult this is, we may gather from the use of the prologue and of the chorus in the ancient theatre, and still more strongly from the use which all dramatists have made of the soliloquy—a method the employment of which nothing but absolute necessity could ever have reconciled us to and which, in plain words, the dramatist never (or almost never) has recourse to, without leaving his own department and trespassing on that of the romancer. But how many soliloquies must there have been in the first conception of a Macbeth, a Hamlet, a Timon, a Lear! And shall we believe that these soliloquies were the only invasions? Shall we believe that Shakspeare did not conceive in his own mind both the external nature which was to be represented as it might by scenery, and every action, gesture, look, pause, start, which were afterwards to be supplied or denied by the Quality'? And if he had all this in his head, where should have been the mighty difficulty of writing it down? Suppose some months ere Macbeth was to be produced he had been to tell some friend at the Mermaid what he was doing at home-suppose he had been to give Burbadge a notion of the embryo tragedy, what could he have done but speak a narrative abounding, as all interesting narratives do, in description, and broken here and there into patches of dialogue, the shadows more or less condensed of that which was to come;- and suppose there had been a Gurney in the antechamber, what could the result have been but Macbeth, an Historical Romance by the Author of Hamlet'?

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Goethe, in his Wilhelm Meister, has attempted to draw a line of absolute distinction between the materials of the romance and those of the drama; and, if he had succeeded in this, he must of course have solved at once the difficulties with which Sir Walter Scott has been embarrassed. The drama,' says he, has characters and deeds; the field of romance is incident, feelings, and manners.' But this, we fear, is a mere ideal line,' and, to say the least of it, if no more substantial division can be established

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between the sister kingdoms, there will always remain a large tract of debateable land. It is not easy to conceive of characters existing apart from feelings and manners; and though incidents may not always be deeds, we suspect a deed can never exist where an incident is not. But granting for a moment, that the dramatist might rest contented with the limits which Goethe has assigned to him, it is quite clear that the romancer never has done and never will do so. His most distinguishing excellence may lie elsewhere, but he cannot assuredly do without characters; and that characters may be developed in the drama, as well as in the romance, more by means of incidents and feelings than by what Goethe means when he speaks of deeds, we have one sufficient example in the Edipus Tyrannus, and another, still more complete and unanswerable, in Hamlet itself.

Our impression is that a careful examination of all that has been produced in either department, would terminate in perfect proof that there is no element of dramatic composition which may not be successfully employed in the romantic; but that the drama, being essentially a much more limited representation of life than the romance, many sources of interest are open to the latter from which the former is completely debarred. Indeed while it is easy to see that the drama takes in that only which may be embodied in the shape of action, and the dialogue of action, it seems to us to be altogether out of the question to limit in any Imanner whatever the dominion of the sister art. We may tell what has been done in it by the masters with whose works we are acquainted; but we have no belief that there is any element of interest in human life itself, which might not be brought into the service of the romance. And it is in this very width of range, this unrivalled and unlimited capacity, this perfect power of adaptation, that we recognize one main source of the modern superiority of the modern form over the antique. The older the world grows, we have no doubt the imagination of mankind will get more and more cold, or at least more and more fastidious; and as nature is the end of art as well as the beginning, we should not be surprized, if, the habits of reflection widening along with those of reading, and gaining necessarily new strength and refinement with every step of extension, the result should be hereafter a triumph of the romantic form infinitely more striking even than has as yet been exhibited. In a word, we think that, as to materials, the empire of romance includes that of the drama, and includes therein perhaps its finest province; but that as to art, the department which has the more limited range of material is immeasurably the more difficult of the two. To a certain extent, perhaps, their relative situation may be compared to that in which sculp

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ture and painting stand to each other. In one point of view, at least, painting includes the sister art-it includes all the dominion of form, although it cannot present form with the same bold and perfect projection of effect. In like manner, the romance includes action, and all the dialogue of action; and if it does not present these embodied in actual human organs, what it loses in that curtailment is more than made up for in the expanse of peculiar and unpartaken empire all around. The sculptor carves his group, and his art is at an end. The painter finishes his also, and if we cannot go round and round it, nor see it stand out from the canvass as if it were hewn from the rock, we have, to make us amends, tints and demi-tints, a fore-ground and a back-ground, and all the magic of the chiaroscuro. Such comparisons can never, of course, be satisfactory as to all points; but they may serve occasionally as partial illustrations.

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Thus regarding the literature of romance as fairly entitled to be ranked, in an intellectual point of view, with that of the drama, we cannot but express our dissent from the opinion which Sir Walter Scott appears to have formed as to its moral influence. Dr. Johnson said, men will not become highwaymen because Macheath is acquitted on the stage;' and our author says in the same strain,men will not become swindlers and thieves, because they sympathize with the fortunes of the Picaroon Gil Blas, or licentious debauchees because they read Tom Jones.'

The professed moral of a piece,' he proceeds, is usually what the reader is least interested in; it is like the mendicant who cripples after some splendid and gay procession, and in vain solicits the attention of those who have been gazing upon it. Excluding from consideration those infamous works which address themselves directly to awakening the grosser passions of our nature, we are inclined to think the worst evil to be apprehended from the perusal of novels is, that the habit is apt to generate an indisposition to real history and useful literature; and that the best which can be hoped is, that they may sometimes instruct the youthful mind by real pictures of life, and sometimes awaken their better feeling and sympathies by strains of generous sentiment, and tales of fictitious woe. Beyond this point, they are a mere elegance, a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half love of literature, which pervades all ranks in an advanced stage of society, and are read much more for amusement than with the least hope of deriving instruction from them. The vices and follies of Tom Jones are those which the world soon teaches to all who enter on the career of life, and to which society is unhappily but too indulgent; nor do we believe that in any one instance the perusal of Fielding's novel has added one libertine to the large list, who would not have been such had it never crossed the press. And it is with concern we add our sincere belief, that the fine picture of frankness and generosity, exhibited in that fictitious character, has had as few imitators as the career of his follies.

follies. Let it not be supposed that we are indifferent to morality, bes cause we treat with scorn that affectation, which, while in common life it connives at the open practice of libertinism, pretends to detest the memory of an author, who painted life as it was, with all its shades, and more than all the lights which it occasionally exhibits, to relieve them.'

With all deference we must take the liberty to believe that both Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott have judged as to these matters more from the vigour of their own masculine minds than from actual observation of the world at large as it was, and is. The Beggars' Opera did, we may admit, no harm in the boxes, but we suspect the galleries, if they could speak, might tell a very different tale. Schiller's Robbers did, all the world knows, seduce certain enthusiastic Burschen from the German universities to the highway; and the records of our police courts and of graver tribunals are ready to prove that while Tom and Jerry were crowding the streets with brawlers, the Memoirs of Messrs. Moffat and Haggart were leading or hurrying their victims to the gallows. In truth, to deny the influence of artificial representations of human life upon the manners of those who contemplate them, appears to us to be not very different from denying absolutely the effect of example. There are men and women, and there are boys and girls too, who may keep bad company with impunity; but such happy strength of mind and still happier purity of nature are, to say the least of the matter, by no means universal possessions. Our author, moreover, seems to speak rather inconsistently:- He admits that romances

may instruct the youthful mind by real pictures of life, and awaken our better feelings and sympathies by strains of generous sentiment.' But if they may be thus powerful for good, we fear it follows, as an unavoidable consequence, that they may be equally powerful for evil. And again, he tells us that

'the vices and follies of Tom Jones are those which the world soon teaches to all who enter on the career of life, and to which society is unhappily but too indulgent.'

But he has not told us that such novels as Tom Jones are read by many long before they enter the career of life, anticipating, and with fatal skill paving the way for its lessons of licentiousness; nor has he made any estimate of the extent to which the overindulgence of society in regard to certain classes of vice may be the effect of an immoral literature operating through a long course of years on the individual minds of which society is composed. And when he excludes from consideration those infamous works which address themselves directly to awakening the grosser passions,' we suspect he excludes a class of books by no means so

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