Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/879

Rh important members, though two of them tower above all the others: the author of The Fox and the author of the Comédie Humaine. As to these two, indeed, so great are they in their own line that in importance they may be ranked with all but the very greatest members of the other and older tribe. Yet with the members of that other tribe, whom I have ventured, for comparison's sake, to call the tribe of Nature's children, the writers "sealed of the tribe of Ben" must not ever be confounded. Brilliantly and subtly as they depict human life, their "specimens" of humanity are excogitated; they are characters born of induction, whereas the other tribe—the tribe of Nature's children—know nothing of any characters of induction, know nothing of any characters save those of their own imagination's spontaneous projection. The characters constructed by the tribe of Ben say this and do that because by induction the dramatist, working on the best principles of German criticism, considers what they ought to say and do, and makes them speak and act accordingly. Hence it is not with Nature that the tribe of Ben live, but in fanciful chambers of their own—allegorical, transcendental chambers,

And this is why they see those "carvings" and nothing else, though the world is in truth full of figures that are not "made out of the carver's brain"—figures carved not quite so curiously as those of the tribe of Ben, but carved by Nature and revealed by her to poets of the other and nobler tribe. There is no need to exemplify the difference between the two kinds of figures, but if there were we should only, in tragedy, have to take the greatest character that was ever excogitated by Ben Jonson and set it beside Hamlet; we should only, in comedy, have to take the characters in The Silent Woman, or Every Man in His Humour, or The New Inn, and set them beside Shakespearian comic characters; nay, we should have only to set them beside Chaucer's figures in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Hamlet, of course, is in stature incomparable with any other tragic figure in imaginative literature. But take that miller of Chaucer's. Is he not as modern as the miller of Tennyson's idyl? And yet no subtle induction has gone to the making of him. By the side of that miller how old-fashioned and how dead seem Jonson's most vital characters! In inductive rightness, however, how perfect Jonson's figures are! how round and plump is every limb! In the carving of them there is scarcely a stroke too little or a stroke too much, for they are constructed on those very same methods of artistic induction which the German critics attribute to Shakespeare.

These transcendentalists forget that Nature, the most modest and unobtrusive of sculptors, pretends to no more inductive rightness than Shakespeare's projected characters display; and as to her logical power, they forget that she has always been shaky in her logic—so shaky, indeed, that innumerable theologies and mythologies have had to be invented in order to explain it. They forget that in her illogical and perhaps half-conscious way she, like Homer and Shakespeare and Chaucer, projects her characters, turns them out as entire organisms, and then leaves them to justify themselves. Here, indeed, is where Nature is so perennially delightful that she never dreams of justifying her work, and yet she is justified of all her children. Never entirely right and logical are her characters, as are Ben's characters, and as are the characters in the Comédie Humaine and in all the works of all the tribe of Ben; but they are alive—that is all the difference, these characters are alive. From head to foot we believe in them. The credence we give to them is different altogether from the credence we give to those curious figures moulded by the tribe of Ben. Hence their vitality is for all time. It is governed by no fashion, depends on no shifting web of circumstance, as does the vitality of the figures "made out of the carver's brain." And exactly as Nature works does that other great artist work—the great illogical artist Shakespeare, whom they persist in criticising as though he belonged to the tribe of Ben.

It seemed necessary to dwell at some length upon this classification of imag-