mere amusement, such reading is intolerably tedious, and even when accomplished, it gives a very faint representation of the actual scene as it appeared to those who sat or stood, day after day, in all the heat, and dust, and foul air of the court-house at Carlisle or Southwark, half understanding, and—as the main points at issue got gradually drowned in their own details-half attending to the proceedings on which the lives and deaths of their friends depended. A man really present on such an occasion, and personally interested, would probably bring away impressions which a life-time would not destroy. In a novel, such a scene is at once more and less interesting than it is in fact. There are more points of interest, more dramatic situations; the circumstances are more clearly defined, and more sharply brought out than they ever would be in real life; but at the same time, that from which such circumstances derive their interest is wanting: the necessity of thought and attention, the consciousness that what is passing is most real and serious business, which it is not open to the spectators to hurry over, or to lay down and take up again at pleasure. In one word, the reality. It is in order to supply the absence of this source of interest that recourse is had to the other.

If we imagine a novel written for a reader seeking, not amusement, but information, it would be not only insupportably dull, but would be more laborious reading than any other kind of literature. Suppose that in addition to the present novel of Waverley, we had the muster-roll of Captain Waverley's troop, with extracts from the Army List of that time as to Gardiner's dragoons ;—suppose we had full statements of the route of the Pretender's army, short-hand writers' notes of the proceedings of all his councils of war;-suppose the MSS. of the Jacobite divinity of Waverley's tutor, or at any rate, the plan of the work, with copious extracts, were actually printed, and all the proceedings against Fergus McIvor, and respecting the pardon of Waverley and the Baron incorporated in the book;—and suppose on the part of the reader sufficient interest and patience to go through all this mass of matter, no one can doubt that he would know much more about Waverley and his fortunes than ordinary readers do know. If, however, Waverley had been composed upon this principle, the conversations and descriptions, which give it all its charm, would have been greatly curtailed. A person who had toiled, notebook and atlas in hand, through all sorts of authorities, geographical, historical, antiquarian, and legal, about the Highland line, black-mail, and the heritable jurisdictions, would have little taste for the conversations between Waverley, Rose

Their Representations of Character.

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Bradwardine, Evan Dhu, and the Baron, upon the same subjects. They contemplate a frame of mind altogether different.*

The suppressio veri which occurs in novels may therefore be considered as an essential feature of that kind of literature, but it involves a suggestio falsi which is not so obvious, and has more tendency to mislead readers.

It requires but very little experience of life to be aware that the circumstances stated in a novel form a very small part of what must have actually occurred to the persons represented; but it requires more experience to see in what respects the fact that all dull matter is suppressed, falsifies the representation of what is actually described.

The most remarkable of all the modifications with which novels represent real life consists in the way in which such suppressions distort their representations of character.

These representations differ from the thing represented much as a portrait differs from a real face. A child would probably prefer the portrait to the face, because its colours are more definite, smoother, and less altered by the various disturbing causes which act upon the living body. This difference is a consequence of yielding to the temptation, under which novelists continually labour, of taking an entirely different view of character from those who seek not to represent, but to understand it.

The easiest way of representing character is to represent it as a set of qualities which belong to different men, as colour, weight, and form belong to different substances; to represent brave actions as resulting from a quality of courage in one man, or wise actions from a quality of wisdom in another, just as knives cut because they are sharp, or lead sinks because it is heavy. No one who takes his views of character from life

* It has indeed become a sort of commonplace, or what may perhaps be called a secondary commonplace (for which the authority of M. A. Thierry may be pleaded), to extol the representations of novelists and memoir writers over the more authorized mediums of obtaining historical and social knowledge. This surely is confounding facts and possibilities. It may be very true that more knowledge about the relations of the Saxons and Normans after the Conquest is gained from Ivanhoe than from Hume's History, but that is surely owing to the fact that, for one person who studies Hume and Hume's authorities with sufficient attention to place a clear picture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before his mind, thousands will read Ivanhoe. It is not because Mr. Macaulay's prefaces to his ballads contain more information than Niebuhr's History that they have informed a far greater number of people of the nature of the sources from whence we derive our knowledge of early Rome.

would accept this as a fair representation of it. Whatever ultimate differences not resolvable by any analysis there may be between one man and another, no one can seriously doubt that far the most important differences between men are differences of habit. What we call character is little else than a collection of habits, whether their formation is to be traced to original organic differences or to any other causes.

Almost everybody likes and dislikes the same things. Everybody likes praise, everybody likes knowledge, everybody likes distinction, everybody likes action; but everybody likes rest, and ease, and safety, and dislikes trouble, risk, and defeat. The difference between different people is that in some, for whatever reason, the passions which involve immediate selfdenial conquer those which involve immediate self-indulgence, whilst in others the opposite happens, and thus some habits are acquired with great ease and completeness, others at the expense of a good deal of effort and self-restraint, and therefore much less completely. A man may be a very brave man, and yet do very cowardly things, as he may be very prudent, and yet do very foolish things.

Probably no one can look back upon his own history without recalling innumerable inconsistencies in his own conduct and in the conduct of those about him, with the principles which it has been their most earnest desire to recognise, and the habits which they have been forming for years. But though life is full of shortcomings and inconsistencies arising from this cause, novels are not. The difficulty of conceiving or representing differences which vary in every case would of course be very great, and the flow of the story would be interrupted by them. Character, in novels, therefore, is represented as far more homogeneous and consistent than it ever really is. Men are made cowards or brave, foolish or wise, affectionate or morose, just as they are represented as being tall or short, redhaired or black-haired, handsome or ugly.

It is to this origin that we are indebted for the mass of melodramatic or merely conventional characters, which form the staple of some novel writers, and which appear in greater or less numbers even in the most distinguished.

The heroes of the Waverley novels, one and all, belong to this class. They have certain characters assigned to them, and act accordingly throughout the whole story, never rising above or falling below a certain ill-defined, but well-understood, level of thought and conduct which is appropriated to such persons. There is no effort, no incompleteness, about these characters. Any one of them could be described by a certain number of

As composed of Definite Qualities.

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adjectives. All of them possess certain muscular and amatory qualifications for their office of hero, all of them are brave, most of them generous, some determined, and some irresolute, but none of them display the variety, the incompleteness, the inconsistency, which almost all men show in real life.

If we look either at history or at the very highest class of fiction, we shall find it impossible to exhaust a man's character by adjectives. Who could describe Cromwell, or William III., or Voltaire, or Falstaff, or Hamlet in this manner? It is only by reflection and comparison that we can tell what kind of persons Shakspeare's characters were intended to represent, just as it is only by studying and reflecting upon the different actions of their lives that we can become acquainted with any real personage whatever, historical or contemporary. great mass of characters in novels may be weighed and measured, and their qualities may be enumerated, with as much ease and precision as we could count the squares in a chessboard, and describe their colours.

The

A novelist always has some kind of scheme in his mind, according to which he draws his picture; and this scheme becomes sufficiently obvious to the reader long before he has finished the novel. In real life, on the contrary, we are obliged to take people as they come, and to form our opinions of their characters as time and opportunity happen to display

them to us.

Men whose opinion is worth anything upon such matters are very cautious indeed in describing characters by a few broad phrases; for no lesson is sooner learnt than that such general language requires to be modified in innumerable ways before it can, with any kind of correctness, be applied to any individual case. In life character is inferred from actions, in most novels actions are ascribed to particular people in order to illustrate the author's conceptions respecting their character. Language, therefore, is as inadequate, when applied to real persons, as it is adequate and exhaustive when applied to the common run of fictitious ones.

Even the most prominent figures in a novel are represented in a very imperfect manner. The object of a fictitious biography is to enlist the curiosity, which a real biography presupposes. It therefore seeks to lay before the reader rather a vivid picture than an historical account of a character. To exhibit a great man as he really is the novelist would have to be himself a greater man than the person represented, and the few cases in which this has really been done are universally recognised as the very highest efforts of genius. Hamlet, King

Lear, and Henry V., Satan in Paradise Lost,* and to some extent perhaps Prometheus, not only act as people capable of great things might act, but they absolutely do the great things themselves before us. It is, however, only in the very highest class of fiction that this is possible. In ordinary novels the labour necessary to effect such an object would be improvidently invested. If any one of the numerous biographies of popular clergymen which are so common in the present day were from beginning to end an entire fiction, it would be no doubt the most extraordinary feat of imagination ever performed. But few people, and those members of a very limited class, would care to read it. Novelists, therefore, are generally in the habit of representing people rather by their behaviour in the less than in the more important affairs of life. They say, A. B., being otherwise a remarkable man, acted thus or thus in relation to his marriage. We assume, for the purposes of the novel, that he was a remarkable man aliunde, and we consider the representation successful or not according as it corresponds or otherwise with this assumption.

There is always, however, a certain amount of risk that the reader will suppose that the author means to describe a man as he is, instead of giving a mere sketch, more or less perfect, of certain features in his manners. Hence they might come to draw a wider inference from the book than it was calculated to support, and to suppose that, because in this or that particular case, certain qualities were displayed by particular symptoms, there is, therefore, a necessary and universal connexion between the characters and the symptoms. Thus Byron suggests to many persons an association between misery and gloom on the one hand, and genius on the other, though, if we look at the books themselves, we have only Lord Byron's own word for the power or capacity of any kind, of Lara, and the Giaour, and the rest. No doubt he only exercised an author's prerogative in making such statements respecting them as matter of fact; but all that he shows of their characters is not in any way inconsistent with their having been as weak as they were bad. Byron's is an extreme case, but almost every writer who has obtained any considerable popularity has, more or less, misled his readers in this manner. To be able to do so is a proof, which few people can give, of the power of interesting and enlisting sympathy.

The most remarkable instance of this is afforded by Mr. Thackeray. As there is no writer who has shown greater

*Satan's rebellion is made the subject of a substantive description, which is not the case with the theft of Prometheus.

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