-- -improving on his predecessors as much as Æschylus upon Phrynichus ; and if I venture to doubt whether he perfected that class of composition, it is not from the petty deficiencies of art to which I have alluded, but solely because his peculiar genius led him in prose, as in poetry, rather to melodrame than to tragedy. The ineffaceable distinction between Scott and Shakspeare is, that the former deals chiefly with externals, and the latter rarely. The antiquarian habits, the chivalric and somewhat gorgeous intellect of Scott, made him fond of painting the costume and the person a little to the exclusion of the mind. Shakspeare scarcely ever describes, except in broad comic, the dress or the persons of his characters, and we may suspect that where he does describe the latter, as in Hamlet,* or the two heroines of the Midsummer Night's Dream, it was solely in reference to the performers who were to act the parts. Few of us can picture to ourselves the exterior of his great creations, while we intimately know their hearts; but who of us cannot imagine forth the swart Templar and the stately Leicester ? Scott painted characters admirably, but the characters he selected are considerably beneath the intellectual order of Shakspeare's. The dark moral of the loftiest tragic,- the metaphysics of the soul, the subtle refinements of human thought, were not the sphere of Scott, and, if he be ever excelled in the dramatic fiction, it can be only by one who, equally a poet, shall be more of a philosopher. Scott would have drawn with no less spirit than Shakspeare the last combat of Macbeth, but he could not have written the harrowing soliloquies of the mighty murderer, nor conceived his awful struggles with his ghostly and supernatural destiny. When he speaks of Hamlet as fat, we must dissent from Goethe's refinements, and own that the description shocks a little our ideal, but if the man who played Hamlet was fat, what can we say more? The brilliant success of Scott has made, almost insensibly, the dramatic form of fiction not only the most popular, but also the sole criterion by which the critics are inclined to judge of fictitious compositions. They forget that there is another school of novel-writing equally excellent, to which all dramatic rules are inapplicable;—namely, the narrative. And if Gil Blas were published for the first time to-morrow, we should be told that it was deficient in plot and encumbered with episode, - doubtless; but such are not proofs of its failings, but the qualities of its class. - Indeed, with all the dazzling beauties of the dramatic fiction, —its delightful mystery, and its breathless progress, -we may doubt if it possess the same homely and accurate nature which distinguishes the master-pieces of the narrative romance, or if the very interest of its plot (when the plot, once unravelled, allures but feebly) does not deteriorate from the pleasure of a second and third perusal. I speak not of Scott himself, but I will take one of his disciples in the dramatic novel, Victor Hugo: any one would, I imagine, read "Notre Dame de Paris," for the first time, with a keener enjoyment than the "Pride and Prejudice" of Miss Austen, undoubtedly a writer of far less imaginative genius; but, for my own part, I can read the last repeatedly with renewed delight, and I recoil from the effort of returning to the first. Whenever the impression produced by a work has been intense enough to be painful, nothing but wonderful beauty in its descriptions, -a latent charm in its detached thoughts, -or that consummate skill in conduct which requires study to comprehend, will induce us voluntarily to renew the pain we have endured. Hence the most striking works are not often the most re-read; they live on the mem xvi BULWER'S NOVELS. ory, and the memory desires not to be refreshed by a recurrence to their terror or their pathos. Perhaps the most admired, and certainly the most truly tragic, of Scott's works, is the " Bride of Lammermuir," but I fancy it has been the least frequently re-perused. We had rather return to the jokes of Nicol Jarvie than the gloomy woes of Ravenswood. -- Unlike the dramatic, which is necessarily confined to narrow limits, the narrative form of fiction embraces many subdivisions, each very distinct from the other. The tale of life as it is, such as in the writings of Le Sage or Richardson, and in the lower but still exquisite school of Miss Austen or Miss Edgeworth, admits in itself the greatest varieties, something advantageously borrowing a little assistance, sometimes advantageously rejecting all relief, from the drama. What singular contrast in conception, plan, character, between the elaborate "Anastasius,” the homely "Peter Simple; "the chaste, the stately, the thorough-bred pictures of "De Vere," the quiet, the sober, the Country Gentleman sketches of" Pride and Prejudice !" To the narrative class belong, for the most part, the tribe of fashionable novels, maritime novels, religious novels, and sentimental novels, the sparkle of Mrs. Gore, the humor of Marryat, the elegance of Ward, the subdued, but irresistible truth of the author (whoever he be) of "The Admiral's Daughter."* So great a variety can scarcely be found in the dramatic romances, which are generally historical, as the narrative novel is usually a portraiture of the existing time. But, besides the multiform representation of real life, the narrative fiction takes two other shapes, equally dis* A work that seems to me of extraordinary depth and beauty, and one which any living writer might be proud to have written. tinguished from the dramatic, and, indeed, generally, yet less adapted to the stage. And these two shapes are of one species, both may be called the philosophical. The first appertains to the philosophy of wit, the second to that of poetry. I will call the first the satirical, the second the metaphysical, novel. Most satirists are thinkers, — satire is worthless without philosophy. Hence we find that all the great satirical novels have been written with philosophical aims, such as Candide, Gulliver, Jonathan Wild.* These can scarcely be said to paint real life, — they aim at exposing the interior of things, and not imitating the surface. You allow for a certain exaggeration and burlesque, nay, in this their very vitality, their sting, their faithfulness to nature, are made to consist. Nobody believes that there is a King of the Brobdignags, or an island in the air, but when Gulliver talks with the one, or visits the other, the grave burlesque brings out those truths of life that the author desires to inculcate, and confronts us, as in a looking-glass, with the absurdities of ambition and the vanities of philosophy. So, if it were in a novel, where no satire was intended, that Candide meets the six kings at table, one might gravely say, "Very improbable !" But there is a happiness in the satire far more true to nature than the closest probabilities of plot. In fact, this exaggeration belongs to satire; the reader accustoms his mind to it the moment he discovers the object of the work; he sees truth through peculiar glasses, and the only probability he regards as necessary, lies in the aptness and justice of the satire. The other class of philosophical novels, namely, the metaphysical, is as yet very rarely cultivated; it is scarcely * A great critic has suggested to me that, perhaps, also the Arabian Nights belong to this school, and that many of the tales in that charming work are satires in disguise. VOL I. B of a nature to be popular, and but few minds are inclined to adopt it. The greatest and most celebrated of such fictions is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. The French have made one or two attempts, which, like all their imitations from the German, appear to me singularly infelicitous. A German was one day discovered jumping over the chairs and tables in his room, "Good heavens! what are you about!" cried the intruder. "Trying to be lively," groaned the German! The French seem to be taking the same means, making the same clatter, and with the same success, in trying to make themselves profound! The metaphysical novel is, like the satiric, not to be regarded as a mere portraiture of outward society: like the satiric, it deals greatly with the latent, and often wanders from the exact probability of effects, in order to bring more strikingly before us the truth of causes. It often invests itself in a dim and shadowy allegory, which it deserts or resumes at will, making its action but the incarnations of some peculiar and abstract qualities, whose development it follows out. This is the case with Wilhelm Meister, which I do not believe to be wholly allegory or wholly matter of fact, - but both at times; the caprice of the author being always subservient to the end a similar design is to be traced in the remarkable tale of "Contarini Fleming," (not yet sufficiently appreciated by the age,) in which the brilliant genius of the author aims at developing the progress of the poetical character. Not of this precise school of metaphysical composition, but still of a metaphysical nature, are the dark tales of Godwin, and the far inferior compositions of Brown. Godwin's aims, in "Caleb Williams" and the magnificent "St. Leon," are, if I construe them rightly, those which satire is most commonly apt to embody, the first work - |