THE LOGIC OF NOVEL-WRITING. "ARISTOTLE has divided the whole field of knowledge into three grand provinces; and the line of distinction which he has drawn as the general confine between that of the rational theoretic mind and those both of the practic and poetic, is this-that the first is productive of necessary and the other two of contingent Truth. Thus Truth is the staple produce, and Reason the common instrument of all. But he descends to a more particular and philosophical distinction of the three provinces, according to the different nature and direction which Truth assumes in each. In the theoretic province he represents it as originating with its subject, as standing independent, and terminating in itself. In the practic it originates in the mind of the agent, joins itself to correct desire, with which it mixes and co-operates, and keeps in prospect a moral end beyond itself. In the poetic, it originates more in the inventive mind of the artist, and through the instrumentality of different means, intends and accomplishes a still further end, which is properly termed effect."* In the Methodology of Bacon a similar division of knowledge is made. The three chief faculties of the human mind are Memory, Imagination, and Reason. The results of the operations of these powers are respectively named History, Poesy, and Philosophy. Poesy in this classification includes all the efforts of the creative Imagination. History informs, Science empowers, and Poetry delights. History deals with the actual, Philosophy with the possible, and Poesy with the probable. Experience lies at the root of each, and nourishes all three. "Poetry is the making of thought," and "a Poem unfettered by metre and rhythm takes the name of Romance." A novel is-or, at least, ought to be-a just and lively narrative of some imaginary event, or series of events, representing the changes of state, fortune, feeling, circumstances, passions, and humours of man, so related as to induce in the reader a sympathetic interest in the evolution of the plot, the forthgrowth of the incidents, the dispositions of the characters, the progressive convergence of act and circumstance towards some result, and the ultimate upshot of the whole of the co-operant elements, forces, energies, passions, occurrences, and accidents in some completed and terminal dénouement satisfactory to the judicial faculties excited. Yet this narrative should be so written as to show, lying along or intertwisted with the very course and progress of events, some constantly self-suggesting thought, or chain of thoughts, referring or referrible to the ordinary ongoings • Tatham's "Scale and Chart of Truth," vol. ii. pp. 220-222. 2 D VOL. III. of life, and thus through the ideal influencing the real. This undercurrent of thought, however, must neither be exhibited consciously, intrusively, or tutorially; it must be the transparent suggestion of the very incidents incorporated and detailed in the course of the story, and become "palpable to feeling," through the strictly representative harmony of the events related with the laws which regulate real history, and the accurate resemblancy given to their several details. So far as the aim and execution of the writer of fiction coincides with the Logic of Existence, his work will bear in its very inner vitality the lesson he desires to teach, and the capacity of exciting the special interest he desires to arouse or intensify. Not as an affixlike frontlet to the eyes, as phylacteries upon a garment's hem, or an amulet worn on the bosom, but as really and truly rising out of it, like the fine essence of a choice flower, will the lesson of a novel constructed with true art show itself. In History and in Nature wisdom is implicitly contained; it is not by express teaching, but by an intuitive or self-suggested interpretation, that their secret and innermost lesson is acquired; and didactic novels, whose purpose is ostentatiously paraded, must be defective because they do not in their form of teaching conform to and imitate, in this point, these divine models. Imagination is the essential faculty in every artistic pursuit or labour. Art is the manifested energy of the human imagination. In its widest signification imagination is a word used to denote that mental faculty which receives, retains, recalls, combines, modifies, and produces or reproduces ideas, and which, according to fixed laws, recomposes the objects of thought by a species of creative energy into new forms, capable of originating other conceptions, feelings, thoughts, and interests. To imagine, in this lofty, sublime, yet true sense, is to interpenetrate the forms of sensible nature with the life of thought, to realize the ideal, to bring the infinite and the invisible within the scope of temporal vision, and to animate intelligible truths with a transcendent vigour and vitality. "The human imagination," says Dr. Reid, “is an ample theatre upon which everything, good or bad, great or mean, laudable or base, is acted." Washington Irving declares that "it is the divine attribute of the imagination that it is irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and, with a necromantic power, can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions, to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of dungeons." Dugald Stewart says, "All the objects of knowledge supply materials for her forming hand; diversifying infinitely the works she produces, while the mode of her operation remains essentially uniform." The illimitable activity, the spiritual potentiality of imagination, is its most wondrous characteristic. Through the manifold variations of the similar and the dissimilar she moves with perfect ease and confidence, and chooses and combines, according to a voluntary and self-originated design, all that is fitting and appropriate for the effectuation of the task which reason, inclination, or taste imposes on her, or for the outworking of her own gratification-the very luxury of her activity. The imaginative organization of new actualities, the vital reproduction and realization of ideas which have been only, as yet, prefigured in the soul, is called Invention. 66 Invention is a productive energy of thought. In its widest sense it denotes the construction, eduction, or production of something which had, in the same form, for the same end, and of the same materials, no previous existence. In the signification now desired to be attached to it, it is intended to mean that prolific faculty of the mind which gives a kind of second creation to all the works of nature, which generalizes and enlarges their comprehension, heightens their beauty, and improves their charms." In a word, the excogitative energy of the mind, directed by the imagination towards the forth-figuring of some already pre-figured conceptionthe bodifying forth and actualizing of some original idea; "for everything that is great and worthy [low or contemptible] in human conduct must have been conceived in the imagination before it was brought into act," or representative being. Invention requires, for its proper activization, purpose, power, and opportunity. Purpose is the result of an operative-i. e., a sufficient-induce ment. Power is the result of the combined, constrained, and submissive co-exercised energy of all the faculties requisite for the performance or effectuation of any given work. Opportunity is the result of the possession of ample time, ready material, speedy execution, open field, scope for effort, due encourage. ment, fair competition, and honest appreciation. Purpose implies an object or aim. Intention precedes invention. Aims may vary in different individuals and at different times; and as they superintend Invention, the nature and qualities of the produce of that energy will also differ in individuals and with times. We have here, however, only to deal with literary aims, efforts, and intents; and even of these we can now concern ourselves with those only which originate in or call for the exercise of the creative imagination. Nor have we to expatiate upon the whole wide field of those literary efforts in which the creative imagination is employed, or bears sway; our attention must be confined to a minuter department of inventive exertion. Epic, descriptive, didactic, and dramatic poetry, must be placed aside. Fables, parables, and allegories, must be passed unnoticed. Arcadias, Utopias, Clovernooks, and Dialogues innumerable, must be withdrawn from our present investigation, and we must, perforce, confine our present prelection to that special class of fictitious narratives which has received the accidental, yet now sufficiently differentiating, title of Novels. The Novel is the modern form of the olden Epic. It is in itself an epitomized literature; a history pulsing with the life-blood of humanity; a drama of vivid movement, change, variety, and character; an epic of refined and intense grandeur; a fable with a pure and purifying moral; a philosophy which lightens and adorns life with the grandeur of wisdom and the splendour of beauty; and a theology which demonstrates emphatically that, wheresoever and howsoever we walk, "There's a Divinity doth shape our ends." A novel should be eventful; it ought to represent a single circle of action and existence, -possessed of a unity of interest and a unity of plot,-which, though it must have a centre and a circumference of its own, need not be so entirely and distinctly disconnected from other circles as to prevent intersection, or even circumscription. It ought indeed to be a rounded off and completed view of some course of life, in which, while there is a strict and perfect probability maintained, and a visible inter-dependence of character, circumstance, and end, observable, there need not be wanting the more complete intersections of those causative influences which are intertextured with nature, history, and time, whatever be the surroundings or environments of man's life or fate. An organic oneness and growth ought to be perceptible in the characters and the incidents; and, therefore, such events should be chosen as usually may or do happen among men living and acting in the chosen sphere, conformable to the age, the scope of the activities, and the qualities, in kind and degree, of the persons who are to be represented. If it fulfil the primary condition of eventfulness it will be a story; a coil of the phenomena of life; a concrete whole, pervaded with vitality, and full of the fresh and glowing energy of progressive and consistent development; a unitive complexity of being and action, mutually modifying and modified in a natural and probable manner. It ought to give us a sense of livingness, and show the impulses and successions, the whirling and roaring, the changing and shifting, the actuation and restraint of feeling, emotion, passion, and thought; of wants, desires, hopes, beliefs, and duties. This is the groundwork the Imagination has to do that it may engage our sympathies and excite our interest. "True genius is the ray that flings A story is a representative or a descriptive sketch of some specific imaginative manifestation of human life and its realities, in which the diverse phenomena of being and action, circumstance, causation, and character, are harmonized into a unique and concrete whole by the pervasive and constructive power of living thought and definite intention. It may employ itself in recording a simple set of coexistent and co-operant phenomena, tending towards and at last resulting in some ultimate issue; or it may deploy before the reader's eye a crowded and intermixed group of co-existent and successive phenomena, weaving and interweaving their complex energies from the centre to the outermost edge of the web of fiction; but it must be a shadowing forth or presentation of life in operation under laws. A story requires a plot, a time, scenery, characters; and a consistent associativeness in and all of these. The plot must be interesting, perspicuous, probable, consistent, and skilfully harmonized with the general laws of causation which operate in the ordinary course and process of events; yet it must be possessed of unity, continuity, simplicity, and progressiveness, and have the writer's predetermined aim as the axle and central point of the whole, and that whence and in accordance with which all tends to its proper and peculiar issue. The supreme canon relating to the construction of a plot is that it be probable, i.c., it must be in conformity with observation, knowledge, experience, or trustworthy testimony. Mere likelihood will, however, not satisfy or gratify the mind, and it is advisable to adopt such series and concatenations of events as may be fairly regarded as morally certain. True, "the improbabilities of experience are many, and the impossibilities few," but the liveliest power of the magic spell which enchants man in the novel is rarely felt when the thoughts are far strained beyond their ordinary bent, or much twisted out of their common course. Mysteries, hairbreadth chances, lucky occurrences, marvels, myths, magics, and monstrous mechanisms, are drawbacks to enjoyment, because hindrances to our faith. Within the circle of real life there is scope and sweep sufficient for the imagination. The reach of the probable is wide, but it does not enable the thinker to fathom the possible. Did it do so, it would no longer be true that "Truth is strange, stranger than fiction." In all points, and we utter our thoughts not in the spirit of paradox,—a work of fiction ought to aim at realizing in the fullest manner the idea of truthfulness; and hence it must be probable,-be within the limits of a becoming likelihood. Fiction is not falsehood -it is Life imagined and written, conceived in, and tested by, thought. That the plot may be interesting there is, in general, required both a complication and an unravelment; something that both excites and justifies curiosity; that evokes sympathy and elicits thought. The events related must have a continuity and movement, a coherent and plausible vraisemblance and wholeness; the several states and stages of circumstance, however they knot and twist themselves, must be carefully and causatively connected; all the tendencies and workings of the various actors must naturally and simply conduce to the production of the catastrophe or terminal éclaircissement; and great tact, dexterity, and sagacity is requisite to cause the full excitement to converge towards, and culminate at and in, the allision—the goal, or point of discovery. For this purpose, |