audience from a lower to a
higher pitch of interest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore
be founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life, where duty and
inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I
call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy
specimens, all of our own day and language: Meredith's "Rhoda Fleming,"
that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,[21] and hunted for
at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's "Pair of Blue Eyes"; and two of
Charles Reade's, "Griffith Gaunt" and "The Double Marriage," originally
called "White Lies," and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to
my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In
this kind of novel the closed door of "The Author of Beltraffio" must be
broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last
word; passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution,
the protagonist and the _deus ex machina_ in one. The characters may
come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before
they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of
themselves by passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with
detail; to depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and
change in the furnace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the
sort; nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept
mere abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of
this class may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it
may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart
and the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the
second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue
has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind directed
to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the
novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre.
A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead
of a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be
plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in "Rhoda
Fleming," Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the reader; her motives
are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength
of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when
Balzac, after having begun the "Duchesse de L