ops. Music does not tend, as the world goes on, to be less formal, but more formal. The forms grow more complex and elaborate, but the trained ear is not confused by that. The pleasure of it grows, and becomes more and more delicate and intellectual. In music, one accepts the dicta of the experts, and one is content to believe in the excellence of the more complex music, even if one is not sufficiently trained to understand it. But the trained critic is not a man who invents the law, he only perceives it in its more subtle manifestations. Every

now and then some new genius sweeps past the accepted traditions, and illustrates the further secrets of the law. Then if the critic is a true critic, he says: "This is new and wonderful; it is an advance; it does not seem at first sight to be consonant with the old traditions, yet it is an extension of them." But on the other hand there may arise some brilliant and perverse writer who indulges in a shower of new effects. The true critic ought to be able to say, "This is not really an advance it leads nowhere; it has its brilliance, indeed, but it is a freak and a sport; it is not an extension of the law, but a violation of it."

Now exactly the same thing ought to be possible in literature. The French have carried the perception of the law of literary process far beyond ourselves. There is a tradition of criticism among them, and what is better still, there is a real, silent, critical apprehension of literary quality among readers in France, so that a writer finds favor according as he is in harmony with the law of literary progression. We in England, who are often only fervid amateurs in this respect, are impatient with that tradition, and think of it as something which hampers the liberty of the writer. Our unintelligent praise of what we call liberty in England has done our art much

harm. By liberty in art we mean nothing more than a coarse democratic equality of opinion. We say testily that there is no liberty in France, and that the majority dictate not only what the minority shall do, but what it shall think; when all the while what we are safeguarding is the ignorant and irresponsible frankness of the amateur. We are only glorifying muddle, and the frenzied impatience of the self-sufficient. We say that we love unconventionality, when we are really in love with lawlessness; and that is because we are a materialistic nation, and hold little sacred except property.

All art is by its nature intensely conventional; it is all based upon conventions. Rhyme, rhythm, form, arrangement, order-they are all entirely conventional things, rules established, agreed upon, accepted. The finest art is that which takes all these conventions for granted, uses them, abides by them, and yet contrives to give a natural and free effect to the whole.

Of course the artist need not be always conscious of his form; the better artist he is, the more instinctive is the process; but there must be something in his brain unconsciously directing and correcting the vagaries of imagination and construction. A book slowly elaborated by conventional rules would be a very lifeless thing.

But

we may depend upon it that the more that the law of form is in the writer's heart, the finer his work will be.

This, then, is my point, that the socalled conventions of art are nothing more than the natural laws of artistic development; and that if an artist disobeys them, though he may have what is called a success with readers who have no critical sense, he attains that success by qualities which have no artistic motive, by good-humor, or pictorial power, or pathos, or grotesqueness; and his art will have no permanence, as artistic appreciation grows. I do

not mean that all these qualities cannot be used by the artist-indeed, they are indispensable-but there must be the central, devising, controlling power behind it all. Otherwise the artist is like a statesman who has no policy, but is merely an opportunist. Such a statesman does not develop the State; he merely temporarily silences the forces which must ultimately be reconciled and mutually accommodated.

It is time for us in England to face the facts, if we are interested in artistic progress at all, if we do not merely mean to welter in vague emotion and dubious sentiment. We must believe, even if we do not wholly recognize, that there is a science of these things. We believe very much in what is technically called science, because we see the immense material conveniences which may result from really studying the laws and properties of matter. We see that there are perfectly inflexible laws behind every smallest particle about us. Let us recognize frankly that art is probably not a vague and irresponsible thing either, but perfectly and exactly scientific. Impatient religious amateurs used to say of medical science that if God Almighty had intended men to know about the insides of their bodies, He would not have covered them up so carefully. They did not reflect that there might be other reasons; but the spirit in which that protest was made was a spirit of pure anarchy. We have learnt now from science that the more we know, the more beautiful and wonderful it all becomes; and we ought to feel the same about art, which is a perfectly natural development of human minds and hearts.

Thus there is a principle which may be confidently laid down, that art is a vital thing, with a distinct life of its own, and the more that we study the law of its development, the purer and more beautiful our art will become.

Now the art of fiction, as it is to-day practised, may be broadly divided into two classes. The bounding line is hard to trace, and of course the two methods often overlap. But I think it is fair to say that the two opposite poles of fiction are Romance and Realism. There is always a difficulty in dealing with large words like these, because they are loosely used, and gather to themselves all kinds of secondary associations. But I will define the two words as I intend to use them. The Romancer is an artist who deliberately sets out with the intention of representing life as it is not-as he would like it to be, perhaps, and as on rare and heroic occasions it is, when the fire of humanity burns at its highest and hottest. He represents a world which is like our own, in a sense, but unlike it in the respect that it is infinitely more exciting, more vigorous, more interesting, more profound-more beautiful, in fact, with that beauty which the perceptive eye realizes in nature as art. The Romancer arrives at this effect by a deliberate selection of qualities and characteristics, by a deliberate heightening of certain values and depressing of othHe does not aim at the development of character, but at the presentation of sentiment, and his characters become, not inconsequent and inconsistent human beings, but types of qualities.

ers.

If I may use a very homely illustration, I would quote the old rhyme of the man who said:

"Hush! I perceive a large bird in that bush!"

When they said "Is it small?"
He replied "Not at all!

It is three times as large as the bush."

By this simple allegory, I mean to express that the Romancer has a perfect right to his own scale of values. The only necessity is that he should maintain it, and not be deterred into con

curring with any conventional inquiries. If the bush is life, the living thing which the Romancer perceives in it may, if he so decide, set at defiance all ordinary laws of proportion and probability.

The Realist, on the other hand, aims at presenting life as it is, and character as it develops. He is not afraid, as the Romancer is, of depicting any emotion that might be misinterpreted in a well-bred person. He does not wish to emphasize the driving force of the world, but he wishes to show, in a panoramic kind of way, how lives as a matter of fact do work themselves out, how they triumph, how they collapse. Of couse, the Realist has to use selection too, because one cannot treat life in the mass; but his aim is not to represent either life at a high level, or life at a low level. He tries to give the true flavor of it, with its broken hopes, its successes that are often more hollow than its failures, its stolid complacencies, its meaningless sufferings, its baffling mystery. But the essence of the Realist's art is that he has no preconceived idea of what life ought to be or might be; his one aim is to present it as it is.

Let me say, first, that I do not propose to go back beyond the beginning of the nineteenth century. The genesis and evolution of the novel has been admirably traced, up to the time of Scott, by Sir Walter Raleigh; and Scott was the beginning of the romantic movement in fiction. But the difficulty of dealing with the subsequent period is very great, for the simple reason that there has been no artistic tradition of fiction in England at all. The art of fiction has been almost entirely art malgré lui. Most of the great writers of the century have not been aware what they were aiming at. It has all been a breathless sort of story-telling, an attempt to depict something of the vast panorama of life, arising, indeed,

t

from an intense interest in and pre-occupation with life. It was not that the great Romancers of the century did not so much know what they were about, as that they did not realize that there was anything to know. The result has been that there have been writers of overpowering vitality and volume, prodigal of humor and emotion, but with their plots and characters taking the bit in their teeth and bolting, not only unchecked but with the reins shaken out, down all sorts of byways and side-roads, and only recalled to the main journey when the delicious gallop was over. Some romantic writers have deliberately used the novel as a pamphlet to right some social abuse. I do not mean to say that this is to be wholly regretted. The practical reforms initiated and inspired, the crystallization of moral emotions effected by such books, are all valuable in the light of social progress. But I am here endeavoring to keep firmly in view the claim and end of art; and, from the artistic point of view, creation is vitiated the moment that a writer's aim becomes ethical and not artistic. If the end of art is to see life joyfully and ardently, to be conscious of its passions and greatness, to create living figures, to contrast them, to involve their affections and enmities, then little fault can be found with the work of the period; but I take it that this is not the aim. It must all be there, the glow and the passion of it; but the essence of art is self-control, the calculation of effect, the economy of material, the using of no more and no less than is required. But in the nineteenth century in England, neither critics nor novelists had any such conception; their force just weltered out in a broad and irregular stream.

The Romancer, then, in choice of subject and method of treatment, adopts certain definite conventions. To say that, is not to say that such art is

necessarily without life-likeness; life itself, our relation to each other, our behavior and demeanor, our very thoughts, are deeply based on conventions. Any men or women, who have any originality or vitality at all, know that their own interior life, the things that they really and secretly admire, love, hate, despise, are very different from the things which they allow it to be taken for granted that they admire, love, hate, despise. Our behavior to others is largely based, not on what we really feel about them, but upon what public opinion dictates; and public opinion is infinitely more cautious and more respectable than private opinion. The romantic writer and the melodramatic writer-for melodrama is only a coarser kind of romance—adopt at the outset certain conventions. Their characters, as I indicated before, are typical and not actual. They are called by names and designations, but they are much more like the personifications of virtues and vices in Mystery plays than real human beings. The Romancer does not begin by choosing, as a subject, a personality, but a quality. He does not consider how that personality develops by contact and admixture with other personalities, but simply how the personified quality makes clear to the reader what it is that it stands for. The qualities come on the stage like actors, they are well stagemanaged, they understand each other and know what is going on. One cannot think of them as having any real existence apart from the scene or outside of the book. They are just true to themselves all through. There is none of the sense of bewilderment, of inconsistency, of unexpectedness, which real life has.

I can make this clearer, perhaps, by illustrating it from the work of the great romancer, Dickens. It is true that the definition does not hold good of all his books; in David Copperfield,

LIVING AGE. VOL. LIV. 2814

for instance, there is more attempt at realism. But take a book like Martin Chuzzlewit, which is a pure and simple romance. The characters of Martin Chuzzlewit are mere personifications of virtues and vices. There is young Martin, the impulsive egotist; Pecksniff, the scheming humbug; Tom Pinch, the mild, disinterested saint; Mark Tapley, the embodiment of human kindliness, and so forth. There is no attempt to develop or analyze character. It is merely a clash of forces. It is life-like, indeed; it has a prodigal vigor and vitality; but it is not in the least like life. A few characters are chastened out of superficial faults, whereas in real life most people only learn to minimize inconvenient failings; but everything happens exactly as it ought to happen, and when it ought to happen; and part of the comfort of the book is the sense that one can depend upon the programme being precisely carried out, without any of the false stitches or loose ends that disfigure most of our lives.

What deceives some people into thinking that Dickens was a realist, and what must not be coolly and critically passed over in his writings, is the immense perception of it all; the zest, the excitement about the minutest details-in Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance the luncheons packed in neat baskets, the pews so convenient for eavesdropping, the splendid insolence of footmen, the juicy expectorations of Americans, the glorification of all things heard and seen and smelt. But this is not realism, it is the purest romance. The crusted roll, the limp shirt-collar, the muffin on Mr. Pecksuiff's knee, the clenched fist of Mr. Spottletoe held out under Mr. Pecksniff's nose as if it were a natural curiosity from the inspection of which he might derive the highest gratificationall this is the expression of the romance in mortal things. Everything

presented to us is at the top of its quality. Nothing is insignificant or commonplace; the very dreariness of the weltering river-swamp is intense and active. There is no negative existence; all is furiously alive.

The choice, then, of the Romancer's subject is at the root an ethical one. The victory of sentiment is his aim. He has seen, or he has heard of, situations, in which human nature, at its highest and best is heroic-there is so much likeness to life and no morethat is the beauty of which he is enamored, a moral beauty, an emotional beauty. Now in order to develop that beauty, there must be obstacles-fences to jump, rivers to swim-so that one may see one's hero in action, rejoicing in his strength. Thereupon the other forces of the world, the contrary forces of meanness, spite, avarice, vulgarity, chicanery, selfishness, must be arrayed like stage-demons, to be defied and trampled upon. Each of these demons must be habited and presented like a man or a woman, must pay rates and have a postal address. The thing is to name them, to dress them, to make them speak, so that there shall never be any real doubt as to what they are up to.

The villains must never be allowed to fall into any unconscious nobility of action, they must never know repentance, but only despair. Their only dread is the dread of being found out. The whole of that mysterious dualism of nature, of which most of us are conscious, that dualism which makes us do and say things which we know to be false and mean, has no existence for the Romancer at all. That is one of his conventions; and the reason why Romance appeals so strongly to most minds is that there is no intellectual or critical judgment required. It sweeps away bewilderment and uncertainty; it confirms us in the optimism which is so stubbornly contradicted by life and life's events. It ad

justs life to a divine standard with a sort of vigorous Calvinism. It gives us not dim hope, but radiant certainty. That is the enormous power of the Romancer, and that is his temptation as well.

Then there comes in the method of the Romancer; this is all modified by the same idea, and the method follows naturally from the outlook, from the attempt to idealize, to emphasize. There is no attempt at psychological method, no desire to render the strange chemistry which human beings exert upon one another. The essence of the situation is not that character should be studied, and still less that it should be developed; there must be no deflections from what is typical. It may be noted that in romance generally, the hero and the heroine are the most colorless figures in the whole story. The reason of this is that they stand, as a rule, for the simplest and largest of qualities-affection, loyalty, high principle, disinterestedness; and these are not the things that lend color to life. Indeed, it is rather the other way, because the human beings who live on these large lines are generally to be recognized by the fact that they have neither prejudices nor mannerisms. They have no egotism, no scheme of life, no particular ambitions. They are absorbed, as a rule, in other lives, in service, in tendance, in encouragement, in sympathy; and these are the hardest of all characters to depict, because they are often lacking in salient qualities, in humor, in definiteness, in angularity. It is hard to make goodness and guilelessness interesting, and the attempt to represent a flawless character generally ends in a collapse into priggishness, or feebleness, or silliness. Just as Satan inevitably becomes the hero of Paradise Lost, and leaves the Eternal Father quite in the cold, so romances which centre about virtuous people shift the interest of