of the Greeks, studying them with veneration, and imitating them with complacency, which has not lowered them in the eyes of posterity. The Eneid is an imitation of the Odyssey, and yet it has gratified the world for twenty centuries. Sophocles said in the last years of his life that if he had succeeded in writing anything beautiful in his life, it was through renouncing Æschylus' pompous style, and all those refinements of art to which he was too much inclined. These words ought to make any artist think, because they involve the profoundest teaching. When the legendary cycles of Greece had been unravelled, and presented in a marvellous way by the genius of Eschylus in the form of dramatic trilogies, they seemed unsurpassable; Sophocles, nevertheless, did succeed in improving on them. And he would not have achieved this if, led by self-esteem, he had tried to improve upon him by seeking better and brighter effects, and enforcing a style or language. But led solely by the love of the beautiful, and remaining true to its nature, he only tried to produce beautiful and perfect works, without caring to compete with the genius of his glorious predecessor; and through this modesty and moderation, he arrived at being one of the greatest dramatists the world has ever produced.

How different to the present system! Hardly does a young man know how to hold a paint-brush, pen, or chisel than he feels impelled to create something original, if not strange and unheard of; he would think himself humiliated in following the methods or another artist, be he ever so great. The chief business with him is not to work well, but to work in a different mode to others; originality is more to him than beauty. This idea which nowadays has such a strong hold on all heads, even the most empty, reminds us of that graceful epigram of Goethe's on originals. A certain person says, "I do not belong to any School, there exists no living master from whom I would take lessons, and as to the dead, I have never learnt anything from them," which, if I am not mistaken, means," I am a fool on my own account." What else is this extravagant desire for originality, but, as we have said, an exaggeration of individual energy, a want of equilibrium, the sin,

in fact, of pride? It is sad to confess it, but in the distorted ideal followed by the arts nowadays, the whole censure should not fall on those who cultivate them. The public also incurs a great share of the blame; the public, which instead of asking of them beautiful works, well thought out, and skilfully executed, only demands that they should be unlike others, and in this way it foments the eccentricity and bad taste which have given rise in these latter years to this crowd of extravagant and ridiculous works in which impotence goes arm in arm with vanity. The novel, being the predominant form of present literature, is the chief scene of this prevailing vice.

III

The novel is of a comprehensive genus, involving the nature of the epic, the drama, and sometimes also entering the realms of lyric poetry. Such scope gives the writer a delightful freedom, not accorded to those who cultivate other more strictly defined branches of art. Not only is it exempt from rhythmic language, but from those fetters which dogmatic rhetoric imposes on epic and lyric poets. The novel in its essence rejects every definition, it is what the novelist wants it to be. But the logical result of such independence is greater responsibility, for however much may be forgiven a novelist, his power of invention must never flag, esprit is the indispensable. The novelist is under the imperious necessity never to fatigue the reader, to keep his attention alert, and his spirit led along by invisible forces into the world of imagination. How little do we, who write novels, bear this first requisite of all romantic composition in mind. It seems most often that instead of interesting the reader, and recreating his mind, we try to exhaust his patience. Composition is the reef on which the majority of writers of novels are stranded. There are plenty capable of representing the beauty and interest offered by life and its contrasts, and they are gifted with great imagination, penetration and style. But in my opinion there are very few who really know how to compose a book. This is not because the talent for composing is

loftier or rarer than the others, but because authors do not give it the attention it requires. Newton was once asked, "How did you arrive at the discovery of the law of gravitation?" to which question he modestly replied, " By thinking about it." If novelists strove more to attain perfection in their works, and less to exhibit, at all costs, the gifts they think they possess, or to create a sensation, I believe they would be more beautiful and more enduring. The first thing they should recollect is that a novel is a work of art, therefore a work, in which harmony is essential. This harmony is naturally arrived at by the artist, who knows how to put bounds to his conceptions, and to concentrate the treasures of his imagination, exhibiting those required, and no more. Does such limitation detract from the richness of its substance, the bright portrayal of details, the feeling for colour, the delicate appreciation of the most subtle relations of life? I am far from thinking so. All this can perfectly subsist within definite outlines. Suffice it that the novelist feels the necessity of clearness and proportion.

Man is a limited being, and by the token, all that emanates from him must also be limited. Because the ground of the work of art, which is Ideal beauty, has no limits, it must not be thought that its plastic or conceptive expression can dispense with them. Beauty expresses itself eternally in nature, in a definite, clear, concrete form; in art it ought to be the same. There are many artists who ignore this great truth, they imagine that in leaving the outlines of their work uncertain, they emancipate themselves from the limitations, constituted by their Being, and approximate more to the sublimity and grandeur of the Ideal. It is an optical delusion with which they deceive themselves and deceive others. So when there appears one of these ostentatious, enormous, wearisome works, enveloped in vagueness and mystery, full of symbolical and mystical aspirations, like many of the Romantic School of the past, and nearly all of the modern naturalists, symbolists and decadents, the public is delighted, it thinks that there is an ineffable mystery behind those clouds, that it will finally discover and contemplate the eternal secret, and so it runs eagerly to see

the miracle, but it soon turns away sad and disillusioned, because behind so much show there is absolutely nothing. The portentous work soon lapses into obscurity, whilst a well-defined, clear and harmonious one, like the Odyssey, The Syracusans by Theocritus, Hermann und Dorothea by Goethe, continue from century to century, each fresh as a rose, reflecting the immortal beauty of the universe. I sometimes think that this necessary harmony in the composition of the novel is equivalent to simplicity. The novel participates, as I have said, in the nature of the drama, and in that of the epic, but more, in my opinion, in that of the latter. It is not then essential for the action to advance rapidly until the end without any lapse, like that of the drama, but it can go slowly, stopping every minute to relate episodes, or to describe countries and customs, like epic poems, because, as Schiller remarks so wisely, the action with the dramatic poet is the true aim, whereas with the epic writer (let us say novelist in this case) it is only a medium to bring forward an absolute and æsthetic object. Now what is this absolute æsthetic object which the epic poet and the novelist pursue? Schiller again describes it with admirable clearness in another of his letters. The mission of the epic poet is to reveal entirely the innermost truth of the event; he only describes the existence of things, and the effect that they naturally produce; that is why, instead of hastening to the end of the narration, we are pleased to be arrested at every moment in its course. The novelist is therefore permitted to stop where he thinks fit, like the epic poet. If he like clearness and moderation, his work will be clear and harmonious, although it may frequently be discursive. Nobody will dare deny these qualities to the Odyssey, the Eneid, or Don Quixote, and Gil Blas de Santillana, in spite of their numerous episodes. We must guard against confounding harmony either with simplicity of plot or with regularity of design. It is something profounder and more spiritual, arising spontaneously from the beauty of the subject and the equilibrium of the artist's faculties.

There is no need to remind the novelist that this liberty must be subordinated to the inevitable exigency of every work of art to

interest. So the episodes of the novel must have, like those of an epic poem, an absolute and independent value, or, what comes to the same thing, they must exercise on the mind the fascination which beauty produces. If they give no pleasure, they should be suppressed. The empirical rule of composition (and as it seems impertinent of me to dogmatise on this point, I will add, in my opinion) is that the episodes ought to be as little detached as possible from the principal plot, and even if not apparent a secret relation should be maintained between them and it. The most plausible episodes are those which give a relative value to the beauty of the main plot, throwing into relief the principal character of the work, or giving what is now called local colouring; this is the revelation of the mysterious bond which unites man with the nature, characters, and situations in which his mental activity is exercised. Almost all those of Don Quixote conform admirably with this requirement. But those of other Spanish novelists, like Mateo Aleman, Vicente Espinel, Vilez de Guevara, Cespedes, etc., weary us with their prolixity, if not by their insipidity. And, in spite of their excellence, it is the same thing with some foreign writers, like Richardson, Fielding, Dickens, Jean Paul Richter, etc.

I will remark that this tendency to diverge has much decreased at the present time. Actual novelists have more pleasure in seizing a plot and pursuing it without any divagations or break, than in taking up secondary narrations, more or less removed from the chief, as did those of the last century, and of the first half of this. Nevertheless, in this point the writers of the Latin race are more distinguished for their love of unity than are the Germans and Slavs always inclined to a predilection for variety. The works of these latter are characterised by a great richness of ideas and sentiments; in those of some of them there is much delicacy of perception in seizing the most subtle relations of the Ideal world which evades us; but they are not generally so well composed as those of the Latins. I will illustrate my meaning from two modern writers who have passed away-Dostoievsky, a Russian writer, and Silvio Pellico, an Italian, who both narrated the