the bounds of
the former. Now, although it may be urged that the vicissitudes of human
life have occasionally led an individual through as many scenes of
singular fortune as are represented in the most extravagant of these
fictions, still the causes and personages acting on these changes have
varied with the progress of the adventurer's fortune, and do not present
that combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist), in which all
the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their
appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe.
Here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune,
rests the improbability of the novel. The life of man rolls forth like a
stream from the fountain, or it spreads out into tranquillity like a
placid or stagnant lake. In the latter case, the individual grows old
among the characters with whom he was born, and is contemporary,--shares
precisely the sort of weal and woe to which his birth destined him,--
moves in the same circle,--and, allowing for the change of seasons, is
influenced by, and influences the same class of persons by which he was
originally surrounded. The man of mark and of adventure, on the
contrary, resembles, in the course of his life, the river whose
mid-current and discharge into the ocean are widely removed from each
other, as well as from the rocks and wild flowers which its fountains
first reflected; violent changes of time, of place, and of circumstances,
hurry him forward from one scene to another, and his adventures will
usually be found only connected with each other because they have
happened to the same individual. Such a history resembles an ingenious,
fictitious narrative, exactly in the degree in which an old dramatic
chronicle of the life and death of some distinguished character, where
all the various agents appear and disappear as in the page of history,
approaches a regular drama, in which every person introduced plays an
appropriate part, and every point of the action tends to one common
catastrophe.

We return to the second broad line of distinction between the novel, as
formerly composed, and real life,--the difference, namely, of the
sentiments. The novelist professed to give an imitation of nature, but
it was, as the French say, _la belle nature_. Human beings, indeed, were
presented, but in the most sentimental mood, and with minds purified by
a sensibility which often verged on extravagance.