Chapter II: Part 2

The learned antiquarian has been nowhere more exposed to delusion than in this New World. Mr Wilson gives us an amusing account of the inscription on the Dighton Rock, which has received so many various interpretations. It stands in New England; and at a time when it was a favourite speculation of its theologians, that the Phœnicians had been the earliest colonists of America, and that the accursed race of Canaan had been banished there, this inscription was decided to be Punic. Dr Stiles, President of Yale College, when preaching in 1783 before the Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven, as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language, in proof that the Indians were of the cursed seed of Canaan, and were to be displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet! “The Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles, “charged the Dighton and other rocks in Narraganset Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large, as did Professor Sewell. He has lately transmitted a copy of this inscription to M. Gebelin of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, who, comparing them with the Punic palæography, judges them to be Punic, and has interpreted them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians once visited these distant regions.”

Various copies, all professing to be most carefully executed, of this inscription, were sent to antiquarian societies, to museums, to colleges, as well in Europe as in America. A learned Colonel Vallency, of the London Antiquarian Society, undertook to prove that the inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Then it became the fashion to look upon the Danes and the Northmen as the first discoverers of America, or its first colonists, and the _Punic_ was changed into a _Runic_ inscription. The names of Thorfinn and other Norse heroes were plainly read in this wild scrawl upon the Dighton Rock. Learned Danes themselves found no difficulty in deciphering the name at least of the chief hero who conducted the expedition of which this is a memorial, though they confess that the names of his associates are not quite so legible.

“Surely no inscription,” continues Mr Wilson, “ancient or modern, not
even the Behistun cuneatics or the trilingual Rosetta Stone, ever
received more faithful study. But the most curious matter relating to
this written rock is, that after being thus put to the question by
learned inquisitors for a hundred and fifty years, it did at length
yield a most surprising response. Mr Schoolcraft tested the origin and
significance of the Dighton Rock inscription, by submitting a copy of
it to Chingwauk, an intelligent Indian chief, familiar with the native
system of picture-writing. The result was an interpretation of the
whole as the record of an Indian triumph over some rival native tribe,
and the conviction on Mr Schoolcraft’s part that the graven rock is
simply an example of Indian rock-writing, attributable to the
Wabenakies of New England.... And such is the conviction reluctantly
formed in the mind of the most enthusiastic believer in the discovery
and colonisation of New England by the Northmen.”

We are in danger of losing our way entirely amongst the multitude of interesting subjects which Mr Wilson’s two thick volumes present to us—and present, it must be confessed, in a somewhat confused array. A rather pleasant effect is produced by the bringing together the knowledge of the European archæologist with the observations of the modern traveller; but this leads to a discursive style. In spite of the distinct titles of the several chapters, we never know precisely what we are discussing, and where to look for anything a second time which we may remember to have read. We are now engaged with the wild Indians, and are reminded of such human curiosities as the “Flatheads,” who glory in producing a deformed skull by a distressing pressure on the infant’s head, of which process we have a gilded picture strangely ornamenting our learned volumes. These Flatheads are plainly uninjured in their intellects by this distortion of the skull; so as there is room left for the development of the cerebrum, all seems right; and even when nature keeps the formation of the skull in her own hands, we apprehend this is all that is wanted. These Flatheads contrive to make slaves of the neighbouring round-headed Indians,—who, by the way, are not permitted to flatten the heads of _their_ children, this being jealously guarded as a sign of freedom and aristocratic privileges. They are said to look with contempt on the whites, as bearing in the shape of their heads the hereditary mark of slaves. After contemplating for a time these unprogressive natives, some railroad car comes whizzing past, or the posts of the electric telegraph remind the author of the go-ahead American who is gradually appropriating all the soil to himself. We have a highly characteristic trait mentioned of the new race. Not only does he cut down forests and break up the prairie, but he trades in _water-lots_—in land still covered with water; appropriates and sells half the soil of a lake which has yet to be reduced to the economical proportion he intends to allow it.

The two races cannot plainly long reside on the same continent; but Mr Wilson brings before us a fact which will probably be new to most English readers. It is almost as much an absorption into the white race as a process of extinction that is now going on amongst the Red Indians. Wherever the whites, whether they are French, or English, or Scotch, have been long settled in the neighbourhood of Indian tribes, there has grown up a mixed race or half-breed. This half-breed, in some instances, remains in the settlement of the whites, but in others it still follows the mode of life of its Indian parent, and a race grows up that is neither European nor Indian. Whole tribes seem now to be constituted of this half-breed, and they are distinguished for their power of endurance and their greater faculty for social organisation. But in proportion as they approximate to the European, the less likelihood is there that they will long remain distinct and separated from the European by their mode of life.

“The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the absorption of the Indian into the
Anglo-American race will not, I am aware, meet with a ready
acceptance, even from those who dwell where its traces are most
perceptible; but fully to appreciate its extent, we must endeavour to
follow down the course of events by which the continent has been
transferred to the descendants of its European colonists. At every
fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering into the wild west, the work
has necessarily been accomplished by the hardy youths, or the hunters
and trappers of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with them
their wives or daughters; but where they found a home amongst
savage-haunted wilds, they took to themselves wives of the daughters
of the soil. To this mingling of blood, even in its least favourable
aspects, the prejudices of the Indian presented little obstacle.
Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux, says, ‘One of
the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to
Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.’
The fact is unquestionable that all along the widening outskirts of
the newer clearings, and wherever an outlying trading or hunting post
is established, we find a fringe of half-breed population, marking the
transitional border-land which is passing away from its aboriginal
claimants.... At all the white settlements near those of the Indians
the evidence of admixture is abundant, from the pure half-breed to the
slightly-marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable
only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the
eye, not unlike that of the English gypsy. There they are to be seen,
not only as fishers, trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal
terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place. In this
condition the population of all the frontier settlements exists; if,
as new settlers come in, the mixed element disappears, it does so
purely by absorption.

“Nor are such traces confined to the frontier settlements. I have
recognised the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a
Canadian Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of the
Legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and
mingling in the selectest social circles. And this is what has been
going on in every new American settlement for upwards of three
centuries, under every diversity of circumstance.”

This is a far more agreeable idea than that the Indians are being everywhere _starved_ out of existence by the encroachments of the European. But that portion of the mixed offspring which adhered to the Indian tribe, and became Indian in its habits, affords a still more interesting subject of speculation. On the Red River there is a settlement of half-breeds, numbering about six thousand. A marked difference, we are told, “is observable, according to their white paternity. The French half-breeds are more lively and frank in their bearing, but also less prone to settle down to drudgery of farming, or other routine duties of civilised life, than those chiefly of Scottish descent.” If in both cases the half-breed has been entirely educated by its Indian parent, this would be a good instance of the influence of _race_ as separable from the influence of education. These half-breeds are generally superior in physical as well as mental qualities, and have greater powers of endurance than any of the native tribes exhibit. Mr Wilson assures us “that the last traces of the Red blood will disappear, not by the extinction of the Indian tribes, but by the absorption of the half-breed minority into the new generations of the predominant race.”

Of the warlike tribes of native Indians some have been induced to settle down as agriculturists. Some are Roman Catholics, some Protestants. But we believe it may be stated that all signal amendments or progressive changes have been accompanied by a mixture of European blood. To this very day the full-blooded Indian despises the civilisation of the white man, or at least thinks it something that may be good for the white man, but by no means good for him. The fierce tribes that constituted the famous confederacy of the Iroquois, and who have settled in Canada, have been all more or less tamed, but they have all lost the purity of their race; and when we hear of the hunter of the prairies taking upon himself the mode of life of European colonists, we may be sure that this change has been facilitated by an intermixture of the two races. Some of these tribes have forgotten their own language, and speak only a French _patois_.

We do not imply by this observation that the native Indian would have been incapable of advancing by a slow and natural progression of their own on the road of civilisation: on the contrary, we believe that the civilisation of the Aztecs and the Peruvians may be seen in its earliest stage amongst the Iroquois. But when the European encounters the savage, there is a gap between them which the latter cannot suddenly traverse. The intermediate steps are not presented to him. The time is not given him by which slow-changing habits can be formed and transmitted. He is required to proceed at a faster pace than his savage nature can accomplish. Now, as every generation that has advanced upon its predecessors, transmits, together with its knowledge, some increasing aptitude for the acquisition of such knowledge, there is no difficulty in believing that the savage would be expedited in his career of civilisation as well by an intermixture of race as by a participation of knowledge.

The whole chapter of Mr Wilson on the Red Race is well worthy of perusal. The reader will find in it many interesting details, which, of course, our space will not permit us to allude to. We shall conclude our notice by some reference to a topic especially interesting when we speak of the progress of civilisation—namely, the mode of transmitting ideas, the art of writing, or letters. Our author, according to his favourite phraseology, entitles his chapter on this subject ‘The Intellectual Instinct: Letters.’

The origin of language may be open to discussion. Its gradual growth from the wants, the social passions, the organisation, the mimetic and reasoning powers of man, may to many persons seem an unsatisfactory account. But no one disputes that _writing_ is an invention of man. Even if the steps of this invention had not been traced, we should have been unable to frame any other hypothesis with regard to an art possessed by one people and not possessed by another. We may define writing to be the transmission of ideas by visible and permanent signs, instead of by momentary sounds and gestures. The art of writing, it must be remembered, is not complete till the characters upon the paper, or the parchment, or the plaster of the wall, or the graven rock, _interpret themselves_ to one who knows the conventional value of the several signs. So long as any picture-writing or symbolic figures act merely as aids to the memory, in retaining a history of events which is, in fact, transmitted by oral tradition, writing is not yet invented. The picture, however faithful, gives its meaning only to those who know many other facts which are not in the picture itself. When a system of signs has been invented, _by which alone_ the ideas of one person, or one generation, can be communicated to another person or another generation, then the art has been attained, whether those signs are hieroglyphics or alphabetical, whether they are signs of things or signs of words.

This is necessary to be borne in mind, because there is a certain use of pictorial and symbolic signs which is in danger of being confounded with the perfect hieroglyph; and we are inclined to think this confusion has been made with regard to some of the sculptured remains discovered in Central America. We doubt if these “hieroglyphics,” which scholars are invited to study and to interpret, are hieroglyphics as the word is understood by the Egyptologist. Granting that they always have a meaning, and are not introduced, in some cases, as mere ornaments (just as we introduce the heads of stags or the figures of little children on any vase we desire to ornament), still it may be a meaning of that kind which could be only intelligible to one who from other sources knew the history or the fable it was intended to bring to remembrance. A representation of this kind, half pictorial and half symbolic, would help to keep alive the memory of an event; but, the memory of it once extinct, it could not revive the knowledge of the event to us. We should waste our ingenuity in vain attempts to _read_ what was not, in fact, any kind of _writing_.

The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics, a kind of _memoria technica_. With certain knots in strings of different colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.” To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their _quipus_ would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the North American Indians had their _wampum_, their many-coloured belt, into which _they talked their treaty_, or any other matter it was desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude abbreviations, like the symbols either of Indian or Aztec picture-writing; but rather suggest the idea of a matured system of ideography in its last transitional stage, before becoming a word-alphabet like that of the Chinese at the present day.”

We should be open to the charge of great presumption, if, with nothing before us but a few engravings by which to guide our judgment, we ventured to offer an opinion opposed to that of Mr Wilson, or of others who have made the subject one of especial study. But opposite to the very page (p. 140, vol. ii.) from which we take this last sentence we have quoted, Mr Wilson gives us an engraving of what are denominated “hieroglyphics.” It appears to us as if the pillar here represented had been divided into compartments, and each compartment had been filled by the artist with some appropriate subject, generally some human figure whose action and attitude are unintelligible to us; but the whole conveys the idea, not of a series of hieroglyphics, but of individual representations, each of which has its own independent meaning. Other engravings, indeed, approximate more nearly to the hieroglyphic; the arbitrary sign is more conspicuous, and there is a more frequent repetition of the same subject; but when we consider the poverty of invention that even in later times afflicts the arts, and the tendency to repeat and to copy which is very noticeable in rude times, we are not surprised that the same subject is often found on the same monument, or that it has spread from Copan to Palenque. There is nothing in the engravings before us, or in the account given of them, which proves that a really hieroglyphic system had been invented; and we cannot but suspect that those who undertake the task of deciphering them will inevitably fail, not because the key cannot be found, but because no key ever existed.

Suppose a monument erected or a medal struck in honour of one of our own excellent missionaries; suppose it represented the missionary-standing with one foot on a broken image, or idol, and that by his side knelt some half-naked savage with a cross in his hands—this mixture of picture and of symbol would tell its tale very intelligibly to us, for we have heard before of the labours of the missionary. But suppose this and other pictures of the same kind were handed down to a remote posterity, who had no information except what the pictures themselves conveyed by which to understand them, what hopeless perplexities would they for ever remain! And the use of the repeated symbol might lead to the persuasion that they were composed on some hieroglyphic system. We might imagine learned men toiling for ever over such representation, and never coming to any satisfactory result.

What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ, at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,” without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a pictorial representation alone.

We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own conjectures. He says:—

“On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well
as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central
America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in
perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any
ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics
are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined,
representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are
no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of
sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which
picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American
civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity
which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the
hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque
sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an
infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the
characteristics of this form of writing.”

What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story of some good _padre_, who had assured him that a native Indian city, greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them, prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such _oscillations_, very likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.

The earliest stages of human progress are very slow, and much interrupted by wars of conquest and extermination. We find no difficulty, therefore, in assigning a great antiquity to some of these ruined cities, and a still greater antiquity to the curious mounds and earthworks in the valley of the Mississippi, without necessarily inferring that these are the remains of any civilisation superior to what history has made known to us. And before these mounds were constructed, there might have passed a long epoch in which man wandered wild by the rivers and in the forests of this continent. This last-mentioned epoch of mere savage existence, some of our speculative philosophers would extend to an enormous duration. We are not disposed, by any evidence yet submitted to us, to expand this period to what we must not call a _disproportionate_ length, because we have not the whole life of the human race before us; but which, arguing on those progressive tendencies which, notwithstanding the impediments and checks they receive, constitute the main characteristic of the species, seems an _improbable_ length. Let the geologist, however, to whom this part of the problem must be handed over, pursue his researches, and we need not say we shall be happy to receive whatever knowledge of the now forgotten past he can bring to light.

CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’

PART XVI.

NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.

Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason. Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions, as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and science have their meeting-point in method.

And though Kant applies the word _genius_ (_ingenium_) strictly to the cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science, yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect, because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far intuitive or innate (_ingenium_) that, though study and practice perfect it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while, in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the curves of grace.

And though, as I have said, Art enters into all works, whether addressed to the reason or to the imagination, those addressed to the imagination are works of Art _par emphasis_, for they require much more than the elementary principles which Art has in common with Science. The two part company with each other almost as soon as they meet on that ground of Method which is common to both,—Science ever seeking, through all forms of the ideal, to realise the Positive—Art, from all forms of the Positive, ever seeking to extract the Ideal. The _beau ideal_ is not in the reason—its only existence is in the imagination. To create in the reader’s mind images which do not exist in the world, and leave them there, imperishable as the memories of friends with whom he has lived, and of scenes in which he has had his home, obviously necessitates a much ampler and much subtler Art than that which is required to make a positive fact clear to the comprehension. The highest quality of Art, as applied to literature, is therefore called “the Creative.” Nor do I attach any importance to the cavil of some over ingenious critics, who have denied that genius in reality _creates_; inasmuch as the forms it presents are only new combinations of ideas already existent. New combinations are, to all plain intents and purposes, creations. It is not in the power of man to create something out of nothing. And though the Deity no doubt can do so now—as those who acknowledge that the Divine Creator preceded all created things, must suppose that He did before there was even a Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed to us to trace Him through Nature, all that we see in created Nature is combined out of what before existed. Art, therefore, may be said to create when it combines existent details into new wholes. No man can say that the watch which lies before me, or the table on which I write, were not created (that is, made) by the watchmaker or cabinetmaker, because the materials which compose a watch or a table have been on the earth, so far as we know of it, since the earth was a world fit for men to dwell in. Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form, though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree, a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature; for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by the animalcules that inhabit them. But the moment Art creates, it puts into its creations life and intellect; and it is only in proportion as the life thus bestowed endures beyond the life of man, and the intellect thus expressed exceeds that which millions of men can embody in one form, that we acknowledge a really great work of Art—that we say of the Artist, centuries after he is dead, “He was indeed a Poet,” that is, a creator: He has created a form of life which the world did not know before, and breathed into that form a spirit which preserves it from the decay to which all of man himself except his soul is subjected. Achilles is killed by Paris; Homer re-creates Achilles—and the Achilles of Homer is alive to-day.

By the common consent of all educated nations, the highest order of Art in Literature is the Narrative, that is the Epic; and the next to it in eminence is the Dramatic. We are, therefore, compelled to allow that the objective faculty—which is the imperative essential of excellence in either of these two summits of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains to a sublimer reach of art than the subjective—that is, in order to make my scholastic adjectives familiar to common apprehension, the artist who reflects vividly and truthfully, in the impartial mirror of his mind, other circumstances, other lives, other characters than his own, belongs to a higher order than he who, subjecting all that he contemplates to his own idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in his various images of nature and mankind. We admit this when we come to examples. We admit that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets; ‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.

But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him who writes what is mediocre. There is no doubt that Horace is inferior to Homer—so inferior that we cannot apportion the difference. The one is epic, the other lyrical. But there is no doubt also that Horace is incalculably superior to Tryphiodorus or Sir Richard Blackmore, though they are epical and he is lyrical. In a word, it is perfectly obvious, that in proportion to the height of the art attempted must be the powers of the artist, so that there is the requisite harmony between his subject and his genius; and that he who commands a signal success in one of the less elevated spheres of art must be considered a greater artist than he who obtains but indifferent success in the most arduous.

Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates so high a stretch of imagination, and so wide a range of intellect, that it will always obtain, if tolerably well told, a precedence of immediate popularity over the most exquisite productions of an inferior order of the solid and staple qualities of imagination—so much so that, even where the first has resort to what may be called the brick and mortar of prose, as compared with the ivory, marble, and cedar of verse, a really great work of Narrative in prose will generally obtain a wider audience, even among the most fastidious readers, than poems, however good, in which the imagination is less creative, and the author rather describes or moralises over what is, than invents and vivifies what never existed. The advantage of the verse lies in its durability. Prose, when appealing to the imagination, has not the same characteristics of enduring longevity as verse;—first and chiefly, it is not so easily remembered. Who remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’? Who does not remember twenty lines in the ‘Deserted Village’? Verse chains a closer and more minute survey to all beauties of thought expressed by it than prose, however elaborately completed, can do. And that survey is carried on and perpetuated by successive generations. So that in a great prose fiction, one hundred years after its date, there are innumerable beauties of thought and fancy which lie wholly unobserved; and in a poem, also surveyed one hundred years after its publication, there is probably not a single beauty undetected. This holds even in the most popular and imperishable prose fictions, read at a time of life when our memory is most tenacious, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We retain, indeed, a lively impression of the pleasure derived from the perusal of those masterpieces; of the salient incidents in story; the broad strokes of character, wit, or fancy; but quotations of striking passages do not rise to our lips as do the verses of poets immeasurably inferior, in the grand creative gifts of Poetry, to those fictionists of prose. And hence the Verse Poet is a more intimate companion throughout time than the Prose Poet can hope to be. In our moments of aspiration or of despondency, his musical thoughts well up from our remembrance. By a couple of lines he kindles the ambition of our boyhood, or soothes into calm the melancholy contemplations of our age.

_Cæteris paribus_, there can be no doubt of the advantage of verse over prose in all works of the imagination. But an artist does not select his own department of art with deliberate calculation of the best chances of posthumous renown. His choice is determined partly by his own organisation, and partly also by the circumstances of his time. For these last may control and tyrannise over his own more special bias. For instance, in our country, at present, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that there is no tragic drama—scarcely any living drama at all; whether from the want of competent actors, or from some disposition on the part of our public and our critics not to accord to a successful drama the rank which it holds in other nations, and once held in this, I do not care to examine; but the fact itself is so clear, that the Drama, though in reality it is, in itself, the highest order of poem, next to the Epic, seems to have wholly dropped out of our consideration as belonging to any form of poetry whatsoever. If any Englishman were asked by a foreigner to name even the minor poets of his country who have achieved reputation since the death of Lord Byron, it would not occur to him to name Sheridan Knowles—though perhaps no poet since Shakespeare has written so many successful dramas; nay, if he were asked to quote the principal poets whom England has produced, I doubt very much whether Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway, would occur to his mind as readily as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten, in short, somehow or other, except in the single instance of Shakespeare, that dramas in verse are poems, and that where we have a great dramatist, who can hold the hearts of an audience spell-bound, we have a poet immeasurably superior, in all the great qualities of poetry, to three-fourths of the lyrical, and still more of the didactic versifiers who, lettered and bound as British poets, occupy so showy a range on our shelves. It is not thus anywhere except in our country. Ask a Frenchman who are the greatest poets of France, he names her dramatists immediately—Corneille, Racine, Molière. Ask a German, he names Goethe and Schiller; and if you inquire which of the works of those great masters in all variety of song he considers their greatest poems, he at once names their dramas. But to return; with us, therefore, the circumstances of the time would divert an author, whose natural bias might otherwise lead him towards dramatic composition, from a career so discouraged; and as the largest emoluments and the loudest reputation are at this time bestowed upon prose fiction, so he who would otherwise have been a dramatist becomes a novelist. I speak here, indeed, from some personal experience, for I can remember well, that when Mr Macready undertook the management of one of those two great national theatres, which are now lost to the national drama, many literary men turned their thoughts towards writing for the stage, sure that in Mr Macready they could find an actor to embody their conceptions; a critic who could not only appreciate, but advise and guide; and a gentleman with whom a man of letters could establish frank and pleasant understanding. But when Mr Macready withdrew from an experiment which probably required more capital than he deemed it prudent to risk in the mere rental of a theatre, which in other countries would be defrayed by the State, the literary flow towards the drama again ebbed back, and many a play, felicitously begun, remains to this day a fragment in the limbo of neglected pigeon-holes.

The circumstances of the time, therefore, though they do not arrest the steps of genius, alter its direction. Those departments of art in which the doors are the most liberally thrown open, will necessarily most attract the throng of artists, and it is the more natural that there should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who can scribble at all, ever doubt that they can scribble a novel. Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write well, are the easiest to write ill. Where are the little children who cannot write what they call poetry, or the big children who cannot write what they call novels?—

“Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,”

says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies in most force to that class of _poemata_, which pretends to narrate the epic of life in the form of prose. For the _docti_ as well as the _indocti_—men the most learned in all but the art of novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy. Certainly it is in the power of any one to write a book in three volumes, divide it into chapters, and call it a novel; but those processes no more make the work a novel, than they make it a History of China. We thus see many clever books by very clever writers, which, regarded as novels, are detestable. They are written without the slightest study of the art of narrative, and without the slightest natural gift to divine it. Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analysed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so purely in the imagination, _that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth_. As HEGEL well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.” A fiction, therefore, which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination, sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political, or moral, his work may or not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.

Religion and politics are not, indeed, banished from works of imagination; but to be artistically treated, they must be of the most general and the least sectarian description. In the record of the Fall of Man, for instance, Milton takes the most general belief in which all Christian nations concur,—nay, in which nations not Christian still acknowledge a myth of reverential interest. Or again, to descend from the highest rank of poetry to a third rank in novel-writing; when Mr Ward, in his charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes his very plot consist in the conversion of an infidel to a belief in the immortality of the soul, he does not depart from the artistic principle of dealing, not with particulars, but with generals. Had he exceeded the point at which he very wisely and skilfully stops, and pushed his argument beyond the doctrine on which all theologians concur, into questions on which they dispute, he would have lost sight of art altogether. So in politics—the general propositions from which politics start—the value of liberty, order, civilisation, &c.—are not only within the competent range of imaginative fiction, but form some of its loftiest subjects; but descend lower into the practical questions that divide the passions of a day, and you only waste all the complicated machinery of fiction, to do what you could do much better in a party pamphlet. For, in fact, as the same fine critic, whom I have previously quoted, says, with admirable eloquence:—

“Man, enclosed on all sides in the limits of the finite, and aspiring
to get beyond them, turns his looks towards a superior sphere, more
pure and more true, where all the oppositions and contradictions of
the finite disappear—where his intellectual liberty, spreading its
wings, without obstacles and without limits, attains to its supreme
end. This region is that of art, and its reality is the ideal. The
necessity of the beau-ideal in art is derived from the imperfections
of the real. The mission of art is to represent, under sensible forms,
the free development of life, and especially of mind.”

What is herein said of Art more especially applies to the art of narrative fiction, whether it take the form of verse or prose. For, when we come to that realm of fiction which, whether in verse or prose, is rendered most alluring to us, either by the fashion of our time or the genius of the artist, it is with a desire to escape, for the moment, out of this hard and narrow positive world in which we live; to forget, for a brief holiday, disputes between High and Low Church, Tories and Radicals—in fine, to lose sight of _particulars_ in the contemplation of _general_ truths. We can have our real life, in all its harsh outlines, whenever we please it; we do not want to see that real life, but its ideal image, in the fable land of art. There is another error common enough in second-rate novelists, and made still more common because it is praised by ordinary critics—viz., an attempt at the exact imitation of what is called Nature; one writer will thus draw a character in fiction as minutely as he can, from some individual he has met in life—another perplexes us with the precise _patois_ of provincial mechanics—not as a mere relief to the substance of a dialogue, but as a prevalent part of it. Now I hold all this to be thoroughly antagonistic to art in fiction—it is the relinquishment of generals for the servile copy of particulars.... It cannot be too often repeated that art is _not_ the imitation of nature; it is only in the very lowest degree of poetry—viz., the Descriptive, that the imitation of nature can be considered an artistic end. Even there, the true poet brings forth from nature more than nature says to the common ear or reveals to the common eye. The strict imitation of nature has always in it a something trite and mean—a man who mimics the cackle of the goose or the squeak of a pig, so truthfully, that for the moment he deceives us—attains but a praise that debases him. Nor this because there is something in the cackle of the goose, and the squeak of pig, that in itself has a mean association; for as Kant says truly, “Even a man’s exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.” Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature—takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess—viz., _the mind and the soul of man_.

Just as he is but a Chinese kind of painter, who seeks to give us, in exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a tree, which, if we want to see only a tree, we could see in a field much better than in a picture; so he is but a prosaic and mechanical pretender to imagination who takes a man out of real life, gives us his photograph, and says, “I have copied nature.” If I want to see that kind of man I could see him better in Oxford Street than in a novel. The great artist deals with large generalities, broad types of life and character, and though he may take flesh and blood for his model, he throws into the expression of the figure a something which elevates the model into an idealised image. A porter sate to Correggio for the representation of a saint; but Correggio so painted the porter, that the porter, on the canvass, was lost in the saint.

Some critics have contended that the delineation of character artistically—viz., through the selection of broad generalities in the complex nature of mankind, rather than in the observation of particulars by the portraiture of an individual—fails of the verisimilitude and reality—of the flesh-and-blood likeness to humanity—which all vivid delineation of human character necessarily requires. But this objection is sufficiently confuted by a reference to the most sovereign masterpieces of imaginative literature. The principal characters in Homer—viz., Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, Paris, Thersites, &c.—are so remarkably the types of large and enduring generalities in human character, that, in spite of all changes of time and manners, we still classify and designate individuals under those antique representative names. We call such or such a man the Ulysses, or Nestor, or Achilles, or Thersites of his class or epoch. Virgil, on the contrary, has, in Æneas, but a feeble shadow reflected from no bodily form with which we are familiar, precisely because Æneas is not a type of any large and lasting generality in human character, but a poetised and half-allegorical _silhouette_ of Augustus. There is, indeed, an antagonistic difference between fictitious character and biographical character. In biography, truth must be sought in the preference of particulars to generals; in imaginative creations truth is found in the preference of generals to particulars. We recognise this distinction more immediately with respect to the former. In biography, and indeed in genuine history, character appears faithful and vivid in proportion as it stands clear from all æsthetic purposes in the mind of the delineator. The moment the biographer or historian seeks to drape his personages in the poetic mantle, to subject their lives and actions to the poetic or idealising process, we are immediately and rightly seized with distrust of his accuracy. When he would dramatise his characters into types, they are unfaithful as likenesses. In like manner, if we carefully examine, we shall see that when the Poet takes on himself the task of the Biographer, and seeks to give minute representations of living individuals, his characters become conventional—only partially accurate—the accuracy being sought by exaggerating trivial peculiarities into salient attributes, rather than by the patient exposition of the concrete qualities which constitute the interior nature of living men. Satire or eulogy obtrudes itself unconsciously to the artist; and mars the catholic and enduring truthfulness which, in works of imagination, belongs exclusively to the invention of original images for æsthetic ends.