Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

MODERN ROMANCE

AND

NOVEL.

H

MODERN ROMANCE AND NOVEL.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, in the commencement of his Essay on Romance, adverting to the division of fictitious narratives in prose into two classes, describes the romance as that in which the interest of the narrative turns chiefly on marvellous and uncommon incidents; and the novel, in which the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.

The rise of this last department of fictitious composition in England, takes place about the commencement of the eighteenth century; and its coincidence with the decline of the drama is remarkable. The novel aspired, in fact, to perform for a reading and refined age, what the drama had done for a ruder and more excitable period; to embody the spirit of the times in pictures at once amusing and accurate, and in the form best calculated to awaken attention and interest in those to whom they are addressed. In the earlier periods of a national literature, while the poetical and imaginative spirit of the time takes the direction of the long prose romance, the task of painting manners, and satirizing follies, and displaying the comic oddities of character, is most efficiently performed by the drama. Its strength, terseness, and brevity, with the aid of action and scenery

present the manners living as they rise, with abundance of force at least, and probably, for a time, with sufficient fidelity. But as society becomes more decorous, and peculiarities of manners less marked, the pictures exhibited by the stage are apt to become less true; for dramatic effect appears to demand something more stimulating than reality affords; and hence the drama, with a pardonable leaning to the principle of stage effect, often continues to reproduce the manners, vices, and humours of a preceding age, long after they have ceased to exist, merely because they are found better adapted to that broad and strongly-coloured delineation in which it chiefly deals. Thus, though the age of Vanburgh, Congreve, and Wycherley, was probably not a very moral age, and the tone even of its polite conversation, would probably appear somewhat questionable to modern ears, there seems to be no reason to believe that the universal profligacy of manners, and boundless licence of conversation which are exhibited in the comedies of these writers, really characterised the period at which they wrote. Their Wildairs, Sir John Brutes, Lady Touchwoods, and Mrs. Frails, are conventional reproductions of those wild gallants and demireps which figure in the licentious dramas of Dryden and Shadwell. They represented the manners and the morals of an age gone by; and the audiences who tolerated these indecencies for the sake of the wit by which they were occasionally redeemed, would have been revolted by their exaggeration and incorrectness, if they had looked upon them as exhibitions of society as it existed. The drama, then, had ceased to be the mirror in which the age could contemplate itself, and exhibited the license of a masque, or the extravagance of a caricature, much more than the

sobriety of actual life, or the fidelity of a portrait. Besides, there are many lesser traits of character, many sentiments and feelings, which are not at all dramatic, and which had therefore been overlooked by writers for the stage, yet in themselves highly interesting and curious, and capable, when judiciously employed, of exercising a strong influence on the feelings. These become more prominent, and stand out in brighter relief, as the restraints of civilization gradually throw into the background the wilder passions and more stormy impulses of our nature, until they acquire an importance which not only justifies, but renders their introduction into any fictitious narrative which represents the peculiarities of the time, necessary; and for this purpose, the calm and even march of the novel, and the detailed development both of sentiment and incident which it allows, is found to be admirably adapted. It is in the works of our novelists, therefore, rather than our dramatists, and in those passages in our essayists of Queen Anne's time, in which they treat of past fashions, manners, whims, and humours, that we must look for the changes which society has undergone, and from which we must try to realize to ourselves the features which it exhibited at any particular period.

The novel, then, affords a wider field for accurate and complete delineation of passions and feelings than the drama, and certainly one more in harmony with the dispositions of a modern public. In powerful effects no doubt it cannot compete with the stage. The whole range of novel or romance contains nothing, for instance, which in its tremendous impression, can be compared with the explosion of passion in the third act of Othello; but, on the other hand, it has greatly the advantage in the impression of verisimilitude which it leaves behind, produced by the accu

« VorigeDoorgaan »