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Untitled Article
thoughts of a spirit of the air , or a soul in purgatory . Hemce , too a there 19 little in hia writiogs of that elevated , generous , unworldly character , which has so often constituted the power and charm of romance . He could not enter thoroughly into such a character . He was no enthusiast . And his characters $ Jw 3 y 3 become unsubstantial and deficient in vitality , in proportion as they recede from the times in which authentic and abundant
information could be obtained . He failed , also , in all his dramatic attempts . The drama requires imagination in addition to conception . Its rapid developments , its selection of contrasted situations , its bounding over long intervals of the process to fix at once and exclusively on the more striking and startling points ; these were beyond the sphere of his peculiar faculty . The narrow space of five acts did not afford him room enough . His novels are better than his poems , for the same reason that his poems are better than his dramas . As he arrived at his idea of a character
by the combination of a multitude of particulars , fitting them together , and building them up into an harmonious entirety , so he required , for the conveyance of his idea to the reader ' s mind , full space for the converse process , scope for unfolding and exhibiting it by particulars as minute and multitudinous as those from which
it was concocted . His most congenial model for the drama would have been the German who produced a comedy in four volumes octavo . The preparatory writing in his novels is often rather lengthy . Had he written without regard to booksellers , hia narratives would have been interminable . There seems no good
reason ( except the shop ) why his people should not have carried on their sayings and doings in the same amusing way , through thirty volumes instead of three . Hence though his characters are *^ often very dramatic , his mode of developing and disposing of them i& usually most undramatic . He plays with them , and
exquisite fooling' it is , till the required quantity of letter-press is completed , and then he huddles up the catastrophe , and sends them about their business in a hurry . The school breaks up ; go honqe , boys 3 and be good ; and then he briefly tells us that they were , or shall be , very happy all their lives ever after . 6
Scott is said to have been so delighted yiith the Pleasures of Hope , ' that , the manuscript having been left : with him late one night , he was able , after twice reading it to repeat the whole poem next rooming , with pnly a few trifling omissions . We should have thought that the Pleasures of Memory fnot Rogers / s ) had been more to his taste . His genius was no Janus . The future
did not divide it& regards with the past : it looked ouly backward . He wfisi eminently the man of the past . In a literary sense , he thought little of the world to come ; his heart was in the bygpne world , tieforrn was a trouble to his mind ; he dwelt in the fading shadows of feudality , and wa § appalled at the growing glares qf democracy ; he knew not the people ; and as the people he Ipye ^ i
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of Sir Writer 8 co « , 7 * 7
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1832, page 727, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1824/page/7/
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