of real fervour or force to make us forget the inherent defects of the art of which it is a poor specimen.  Wagner made the discovery, not a very wonderful one after all when we think, that an opera had much better be melody from end to end.  The realistic school following on Wagner’s footsteps discovered that a novel had much better be all narrative—­an uninterrupted flow of narrative.  Description is narrative, analysis of character is narrative, dialogue is narrative; the form is ceaselessly changing, but the melody of narration is never interrupted.

But the reading of “Lorna Doone” calls to my mind, and very vividly, an original artistic principle of which English romance writers are either strangely ignorant or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the dramatis personae and the deeds in which they are involved must correspond, and their relationship should remain unimpaired.  Turner’s “Carthage” is nature transposed and wonderfully modified.  Some of the passages of light and shade there—­those of the balustrade—­are fugues, and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination.  Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separately was black, but he painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere.  In the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra.  But the English novelist takes ’Arry and ’Arriet, and without question allows them to achieve deeds; nor does he hesitate to pass them into the realms of the supernatural.  Such violation of the first principles of narration is never to be met with in the elder writers.  Achilles stands as tall as Troy, Merlin is as old and as wise as the world.  Rhythm and poetical expression are essential attributes of dramatic genius, but the original sign of race and mission is an instinctive modulation of man with the deeds he attempts or achieves.  The man and the deed must be cognate and equal, and the melodic balance and blending are what first separate Homer and Hugo from the fabricators of singular adventures.  In Scott leather jerkins, swords, horses, mountains, and castles harmonise completely and fully with food, fighting, words, and vision of life; the chords are simple as Handel’s, but they are as perfect.  Lytton’s work, although as vulgar as Verdi’s is, in much the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal harmony; but all that follows is decadent,—­an admixture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo and the homeliness of Trollope; a litter of ancient elements in a state of decomposition.

The spiritual analysis of Balzac equals the triumphant imagination of Shakespeare, and by different roads they reach the same height of tragic awe, but when improbability, which in these days does duty for imagination, is mixed with the familiar aspects of life, the result is inchoate and rhythmless folly, I mean the regular and inevitable alternation and combination of pa and ma, and dear Annie who lives at Clapham, with the