Criticism and Fiction | Page 8

his readers. This is not so bad in him as it would be in a
novelist of our day. It is simply primitive and inevitable, and he is not
to be judged by it.

IV
In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude
in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we
turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and
recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was
tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved
his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary;
that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them
talk as seldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely
descriptive; that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to
express a thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that
he trusted his readers' intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his
appeals to them. He was probably right: the generation which he wrote
for was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and in
maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of
to-day. All this is not saying Scott was not a great man; he was a great
man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who
went before him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought to be
instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaeval
ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy and
royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble,
patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of
God; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were
one of our contemporaries. Something of this is true of another master,

greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being more
German, namely, the great Goethe himself. He taught us, in novels
otherwise now antiquated, and always full of German clumsiness, that
it was false to good art--which is never anything but the reflection of
life--to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom he
often allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in
the actual world do. This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by
it can never be too grateful for; and it is equally a benefaction to
readers; but there is very little else in the conduct of the Goethean
novels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their sole
contribution to the science of fiction. They are very primitive in certain
characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep insight, an amusing
helplessness in dramatization. "Wilhelm retired to his room, and
indulged in the following reflections," is a mode of analysis which
would not be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness of
nomenclature in Wilhelm Meister is very drolly sentimental and feeble.
The adventures with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of
chivalry, and the tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor
on the author's part to escape from the unrealities which he must have
felt harassingly, German as he was. Mixed up with the shadows and
illusions are honest, wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of
wandering homelessly about among them, without definite direction;
and the mists are full of a luminosity which, in spite of them, we know
for common-sense and poetry. What is useful in any review of Goethe's
methods is the recognition of the fact, which it must bring, that the
greatest master cannot produce a masterpiece in a new kind. The novel
was too recently invented in Goethe's day not to be, even in his hands,
full of the faults of apprentice work.

V.
In fact, a great master may sin against the "modesty of nature" in many
ways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac's romance--it is
not worthy the name of novel--'Le Pere Goriot,' which is full of a
malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After that
exquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabby

boarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by the
exaggerated passions and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynic
reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villain
of melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization at
his command, and
"So dyed double red"
indeed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrified spectators
with his glare. A father fond of unworthy children, and leading a life of
self-denial for their sake, as may probably and pathetically