THE

NEW-YORK REVIEW.

NOVEMBER, 1825.

ART. XXXIV.-Lives of the Novelists. By Sir WALTER SCOTT. 2 vols. Philadelphia. H. C. Carey & I. Lea, &c. 1825.

SEVERAL Volumes of a publication, entitled Balantyne's Novelist's Library, have lately appeared at Edinburgh, and Sir Walter Scott has been employed to furnish a biography of each of the authors whose works are included in that collection, and a critical analysis of their writings. The book before us contains all that Sir Walter has written for the volumes which have already come out; and, although we cannot conceive why the reputed author of the Waverley novels should be, as some seem to suppose, the best possible compiler of the biographies of other novelists, any more than that a mathematical tailor should be the fittest man of his trade to make a coat for a professor of mathematics, yet we were prepared, from the first, to set no ordinary value on his criticisms. He who has written so much and so ably in the department of fictitious narrative, cannot but have reflected maturely upon its principles, and perused carefully the works of those who have distinguished themselves in this branch of literature.

The first thing which strikes us on looking over these volumes, is the entire absence of any thing like effort, pretension, or ambitious ornament in the style. If the meaning is only expressed, the author's purpose is answered; he does not seem to trouble himself in the least about the manner in which it is done. He writes like a quiet, sober, sensible sort of man, too rational to suffer himself to get in raptures about any thing, and too little of a coxcomb to affect a fervour that he does not feel. His negligence of manner does not, however, by any means sit ungracefully upon him, and it almost seems, while we are reading these volumes, as if we were admitted into the intimate and unreserved society of their celebrated author, and heard him expatiating carelessly, and at his ease, on the subject of those writings, with whose merits and whose faults he was alike so VOL. I.

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familiar. We could wish, indeed, that he had staid to prune his style of a few of its Scotticisms, and that he had studied a juster precision in the use of language; but we are quite willing to overlook his faults in these respects, if they are to be exchanged only for the mawkish and unhappy drollery to be found in the prefaces of some of the novels attributed to him, or for the stilted periods, and the almost mock-heroic swell of expression with which, in the narrative parts, the most common and trivial circumstances are often announced. The existence of the former of these qualities, few, we apprehend, will dispute; and if any body should doubt that of the latter, after it has been so often imitated, he may easily satisfy himself, by turning to the opening paragraphs of the Antiquary. If Sir Walter, in the work before us, having occasion to say that Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe were born, sent to school, came of age, and were married, had used a style like this, readers would only have laughed at his book. The present work is free from all such affectation, and this merit is perhaps the more grateful to us, for being somewhat unexpected. It is not unlikely, that a principal reason of its careless, unlaboured air, may be, that it was written less with a view to his increase of the author's reputation, to which its happiest execution could add nothing, than in fulfilment of a profitable engagement with the bookseller, who was desirous to recommend his publication to the world, by putting it under the auspices of a popular name. Accordingly, we find that the materials of those portions of the work which are merely biographical, are drawn from the most common and obvious sources, and thrown hastily together. The author has collected no new particulars; he has used no diligence to correct any errors of former biographers; he has rarely attempted to throw any new light upon personal character, but has, in general, contented himself with copying from those who have written before him. The life of Fielding, for instance, is abridged from that written by Arthur Murphy; the life of Smollet from those compiled by Dr. Moore and Dr. Anderson, with this difference, that in the latter case the obligation is acknowledged, and in the former it is not. Of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Cumberland, we could, of course, expect to be told nothing that we had not known before; and any one who had read the elegant biography of Richardson, from the pen of Mrs. Barbauld, could hardly hope a better even from that of Sir Walter Scott. The obscurer novelists, such as Clara Reeve and Charles Johnstone, whose lives were never written before, fare hardly in the hands of Sir Walter; and it is little that we know of their adventures, or their characters, when

we have finished the perusal of all that his researches have been able to glean concerning them. It was exceedingly fortunate for Robert Bage, that he had contracted an intimacy, in his lifetime, with the family of the late William Hutton, of Birmingham, from whose daughter the author received a well written sketch of his life; without which fortunate circumstance, we should probably have known as little of him as of the others. Nor is there any peculiar liveliness or power of exciting interest shown in his manner of relating facts so easily collected. All these circumstances indicate no mean proficiency in the ancient and respectable art of book-making, and were it not for the other portions of the work, it must have been considered as utterly unworthy of the writer; and we should have had no apology but his great reputation for obtruding these observations on the attention of the public. It is quite otherwise with his remarks upon the genius and writings of the authors who pass under his critical eye. These, it is

true, seem to have been thrown upon paper with the same haste which characterizes the other parts of the work; but there is an air of solidity, and most commonly a justness about them, that forbids us to believe them the suggestions of a moment; indeed, it is almost impossible, that his opinions respecting these subjects should not have been settled and matured by much previous examination and reflection. If, in his observations upon the works of Fielding, he shows that he has read the essay of Murphy; and if, in his strictures on the genius of other authors, he sometimes reminds us of what Hazlett says the English novelists, it may be observed in his favour, that nobody is obliged to keep his own opinions distinct from those of others; and it would be hard indeed, if no critic could be permitted to agree with his predecessors in such of their speculations as should seem to him just. Nobody is obliged to sacrifice truth to the affectation of originality.

of

The first of the lives in this collection is that of Fielding. This author, it seems, between the ages of twenty and twentynine, and previously to the publication of Joseph Andrews, wrote a good many rather indifferent comedies. These he generally composed in a furious hurry, finishing an act or two in a morning, and carrying them to the manager, scribbled on the paper in which he wrapped his tobacco. After this account of the matter, it seems to us, that no Edipus need be called in to explain why they were not first-rate productions. Murphy, however, and after him the author of these volumes, has laboured this point a good deal. The former author supposes, that many things may be exceedingly comic in the relation,

which cannot be made so in the representation. gives the following account of the matter:

Sir Walter

"It is the sole object of the novel-writer, to place before the reader as full and accurate a representation of the events which he relates, as can be done by the mere force of an excited imagination, without the assistance of material objects. His sole appeal is made to the world of fancy and of ideas, and in this consists his strength and his weakness, his poverty and his wealth. He cannot, like the painter, present a visible and tangible representation of his towns and his woods, his palaces and his castles; but, by awakening the imagination of a congenial reader, he places before his mind's eye landscapes fairer than those of Claude, and wilder than those of Salvator He cannot, like the dramatist, present before our living eyes the heroes of former days, or the beautiful creations of his own fancy, embodied in the grace and majesty of Kemble, or of Siddons; but he can teach his reader to conjure up forms even more dignified and beautiful than theirs. The same difference follows him through every branch of his art. The author of a novel, in short, has neither stage, nor scene painter, nor company of comedians, nor dresser, nor wardrobe: words, applied with the best of his skill, must supply all that these bring to the assistance of the dramatist. Action, and tone, and gesture, the simile of the lover, the frown of the tyrant, the grimace of the buffoon, all must be told, for nothing can be shown. Thus the very dialogue becomes mixed with the narration, for he must not only tell what the characters actually said, in which his task is the same as that of the dramatic author, but must also describe the tone, the look, the gesture, with which their speech was accompanied—telling, in short, all which in the drama it becomes the province of the actor to express. It must, therefore, frequently happen, that the author best qualified for a province in which all depends on the communication of his own ideas and feelings to the reader, without any intervening medium, may fall short of the skill necessary to adapt his compositions to the medium of the stage, where the very qualities most excellent in a novelist are out of place, and an impediment to success. Description and narration, which form the very essence of the novel, must be very sparingly introduced into dramatic composition, and scarce ever have a good effect upon the stage. Mr. Puff, in The Critic, has the good sense to leave out "all about gilding the eastern hemisphere ;" and the very first thing which the players struck out of his memorable tragedy, was the description of Queen Elizabeth, her palfrey, and her side-saddle. The drama.speaks to the eye and ear, and when it ceases to address these bodily organs, and would exact from a theatrical audience that exercise of the imagination which is necessary to follow forth and embody circumstances neither spoken nor exhibited, there is an immediate failure, though it may be the failure of a man of genius. Hence it follows, that though a good acting play may be made, by selecting a plot and characters from a novel. yet scarce any effort of genius could render a play into a narrative romance. In the former case, the author has only to contract the events within the space necessary for representation, to choose the most striking characters, and exhibit them in the most forcible contrast, discard from the dialogue whatever is redundant or tedious, and so dramatize the whole. But we know not any effort of genius which could successfully insert into a good play those accessaries of description and delineation which are necessary to dilate it into a readable novel. It may thus easily be con

ceived, that he whose chief talent lies in addressing the imagination only, and whose style, therefore, must be expanded and circumstantial, may fail in a kind of composition where so much must be left to the efforts of the actor, with his allies and assistants, the scene painter and propertyman, and where every attempt to interfere with their province, is an error unfavourable to the success of the piece. Besides, it must be farther remembered, that in fictitious narrative, an author carries on his manufacture alone, and upon his own account; whereas, in dramatic writing, he enters into partnership with the performers, and it is by their joint efforts that the piece is to succeed. Copartnery is called, by civilians, the mother of discord; and, how likely it is to prove so in the present instance, may be illustrated by reference to the admirable dialogue between the player and poet, in Joseph Andrews, book iii. chap. 10. The poet must either be contented to fail, or to make great condescensions to the experience, and pay much attention to the peculiar qualifications of those by whom his piece is to be represented. And he, who, in a novel, had only to fit sentiments, action, and character, to ideal beings, is now compelled to assume the much more difficult task of adapting all these to real existing persons, who, unless their parts are exactly suited to their own taste, and their peculiar capacities, have, each in his line, the means, and not unfrequently the inclination, to ruin the success of the play. Such are, amongst many others, the peculiar difficulties of the dramatic art, and they seem impediments which lie peculiarly in the way of the novelist who aspires to extend his sway over the stage."—Vol. I. pp. 7—11.

Sir Walter has, it is true, written an indifferent drama, called Halidon Hill, but we cannot subscribe to the justness of the conclusion drawn in this paragraph. The whole of his reasoning seems to amount to no more than this, that the novelist does all that falls within the province of the dramatic writer, and more; and that, therefore, he cannot succeed when he confines himself solely to the dramatic part of his labours. As to what is said about the necessity of adapting the characters in the play to the peculiar talents of certain actors, we answer, that this has nothing to do with the intrinsic merits of the piece; and that a failure in this respect proves no want of dramatic powers in the author, which might be more successfully exerted on another occasion. Besides, it is on record, that the farces of Fielding were eminently successful, and that several of his comedies were, in fact, received by the public with no inconsiderable favour. The doctrine, that what is written in haste is seldom well written, is not, we suppose, particularly palatable to an author who has astonished the world with the rapidity with which his voluminous productions have followed each other; but he should be reminded, for his consolation, that a play written in two or three days is much more likely to be a poor thing than a novel written in six months. Even if the mere composition of the latter be as rapid as that of the former, yet, as much more time is necessarily consumed in the