Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/29

 the casual touch of a more powerful being sweeps away the web of the spider.

Many excellent romances have been composed in this view of human life, where the hero is conducted through a variety of detached scenes in which various agents appear and disappear, without, perhaps, having any permanent influence on the progress of the story. Such is the structure of Gil Blas, Roderick Random, and the lives and adventures of many other heroes, who are described as running through different stations of life, and encountering various adventures, which are only connected with each other by having happened to be witnessed by the same individual, whose identity unites them together, as the string of a necklace links the beads, which are otherwise detached.

But though such an unconnected course of adventures is what most frequently occurs in nature, yet, the province of the romance writer being artificial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of reality; just as we demand from the scientific gardener that he shall arrange, in curious knots and artificial parterres, the flowers which 'nature boon' distributes freely on hill and dale. Fielding, accordingly, in most of his novels, but especially in Tom Jones, his chef-doeuvre, has set the distinguished example of a story regularly built and consistent in all its parts, in which nothing occurs, and scarce a personage is introduced, that has not some share in tending to advance the catastrophe.

To demand equal correctness and felicity in those who may follow in the track of that illustrious novelist, would be to fetter too much the power of giving pleasure, by surrounding it with penal rules; since of this sort of light literature it may be especially said—tout genre est permis, hors le genre ennuyeux. Still, however, the more closely and happily the story is combined, and the more natural and felicitous the catastrophe, the nearer such a composition will approach the perfection of the novelist's art; nor can an author neglect this branch of his profession without incurring proportional censure.

For such censure the Monastery gave but too much occasion. The intrigue of the romance, neither very interesting in itself nor very happily detailed, is at length