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 smile 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, allwhich, 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 essence of the novel, must be very sparingly introduced into dramatic composition, and scarce ever have a good effect upon the stage. Even 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 sidesaddle. 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 accessories of description and delineation, which are necessary to dilate it into a readable novel. It may thus easily be conceived, 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 property-man, 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 the 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 the 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.1

1

1 [“ This account of the matter, interesting and in many parts ingenious as it is, appears to us to be on the whole rather unsatisfactory. In the first place, Sir Walter accounts for the dramatic failures of his novelists, by suggesting that they had lost, in the habitual exercise of their talents for narrative, the 'particular turn' requisite for the attainment of excellence in the drama. But, unfortunately for this theory, the fact is, that Cervantes, Le Sage, Fielding, Smollett, began, one and all of them, with the drama, and, after failing in that, betook themselves to the efforts by which they have earned their immortality. No one instance is presented to us of a practised and successful dramatist trying his hand unsuccessfully at the novel; and yet it seems to be throughout assumed, that the frequent occurrence of such examples constitutes the principal difficulty to be solved. Another assumption, equally bold, and, as it seems to us, equally unfounded, is, that though a good acting play may be made by selecting a plot and characters from a novel, yet scarcely any effort of genius could render a play into a narrative romance. Now, in the first place, the former attempt (in the sense in which Sir Walter speaks of the matter) never has been made but once, by an author from whose talents any degree of success might have been à priori expected. Werner is in every point of view an anomaly, and we cannot consent to draw from it any general conclusion whatever. Such borrowing both of plot and character as we can trace in regard to almost every one of Shakspeare's plays, is nothing to the present purpose; for there infinitely more both of quantity and quality was added than taken. But who can suppose, that a man of genius in his senses ever will condescend to busy himself with transferring another man's complete extended plot, and all its full-length characters, from one form of composition to another either from drama to romance, or from romance to drama ?

Another circumstance may in the present day greatly interfere with the success of dramatic authors, and arises from the decay of that familiar acquaintance with the stage and its affairs, which prevailed during the more splendid days of the British theatre. It requires a frequent and close

Secondly, in point of fact, no good acting play has ever been produced in the way Sir Walter describes. We have no good acting play from Don Quixote, or Gil Blas, or Tom Jones, or Roderick Random, or Waverley. The popular novels of the day are often, indeed, dramatized, in a certain sense of the word, and the people flock to see them. But are any such performances entitled to be talked of as good acting plays? On the contrary, the best of them that we have seen (for example Rob Roy) must be admitted to amount to an arbitrary sequence of individual scenes, which would be unintelligible to any audience that wanted the means of filling up, every here and there, the most lamentable and hopeless hiatus, from previous and perfect knowledge of the not merely plundered, but maimed, mutilated, mangled romance; and accordingly, whenever the romance passes from its first stage of extreme popular favour, the good acting play is sure to follow it. Fielding and Smollett had their day of being, as the author of Waverley somewhere styles the process, Terryfied. Miss Burney shared for her hour the same distinction; and so but yesterday, as it seems to us, did a greater than she, already almost equally forgotten by the mob of gallery readers,-Miss Edgeworth. Before Sir Walter is entitled to argue as he has done, he must, at the least, show us, on the one hand, an author of Macbeth trying in vain to write an historical romance, or a full-grown Moliere failing in a novel; and, on the other, an author of Waverley making a deliberate but fruitless inroad on the province of the drama. Had Don Quixote been an early production of Cervantes; had Le Sage written the Point d'Honneur, or even Turcaret, after his Diable Boiteux : had Fielding written weak plays after Tom Jones; or Smollett dull ones after Humphry Clinker,-the best, perhaps, in every respect, of his works, at all events by much the most dramatic, there might have been something in such cases; but even they would, for reasons too obvious to need stating, have been insufficient."-Quarterly Review, Sept. 1826.]