Familiar Studies of Men Books | Page 9

definite maturity;
many things have come to a point and been distinguished one from the
other; and it is only in the last romance of all, QUATRE VINGT
TREIZE, that this culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of
things. Men who are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be
compared more justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which
continues to advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone,
which is only the measure of what is past. The movement is not
arrested. That significant something by which the work of such a man
differs from that of his predecessors, goes on disengaging itself and
becoming more and more articulate and cognisable. The same principle
of growth that carried his first book beyond the books of previous
writers, carries his last book beyond his first. And just as the most
imbecile production of any literary age gives us sometimes the very
clue to comprehension we have sought long and vainly in
contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an
author's books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at
last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them - of that spinal
marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something
organic and rational. This is what has been done by QUATRE VINGT
TREIZE for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them,
for a whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate
continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far, its
explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so
slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce
them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in literary history;
and we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo's romances
if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines
of literary tendency.
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a
master in the art - I mean Henry Fielding - we shall be somewhat
puzzled, at the first moment, to state the difference that there is

between these two. Fielding has as much human science; has a far
firmer hold upon the tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character,
which he draws (and Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and
academical manner; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as
good- humoured as the great Scotchman. With all these points of
resemblance between the men, it is astonishing that their work should
be so different. The fact is, that the English novel was looking one way
and seeking one set of effects in the hands of Fielding; and in the hands
of Scott it was looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the
effects that by any possibility it could utilise. The difference between
these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic
movement, the movement of an extended curiosity and an enfranchised
imagination, has begun. This is a trite thing to say; but trite things are
often very indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as
far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose
romance, has never perhaps been explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based.
The purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so
much with the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure
by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort of
realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted
to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real
voices; what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what