ny of them were ready to his hand, this kind of
inventiveness denotes of itself no fine creative faculty. It is the
necessary equipment of the voluminous novelist. In this facility and
abundance Goldsmith could not have coped with James and Bulwer; and
yet the "Vicar of Wakefield" (not to go so high as "Tristram Shandy"
and "Don Quixote") is worth all their hundred volumes of tales put
together. What insight, what weight, and faithfulness, and refinement,
and breadth, and truth, and elevation of character and conception,
does the framework of incident support and display? That is the
aesthetic question. The novels of every day bristle with this material
inventiveness, this small, abounding, tangled underwood of event and
sensation, which yields no timber and wherein birds will not build.
The invention exhibited in the punishments and tortures and conditions
of the "Inferno" and "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso," is not admirable for
their mere exuberance and diversity,--for that might have come from a
comparatively prosaic mind, especially when fed, as all minds then
were, with the passionate mediaeval beliefs,--but for the heart there
is in them, throbbing deeply in some, and for the human sympathy, and
thence, in part, the photographic fidelity, and for the paramount gift
poetically to portray. A consequence of the choice of subject, and, as
regards the epic quality of Dante's poem, an important consequence, is
that there is in it no unity of interest. The sympathies of the reader
are not engrossed by one great group of characters, acting and
reacting on one another through the whole sweep of the invention.
Instead of this, we have a long series of unconnected pictures, each
one awakening a new interest. Hereby the mind is distracted, the
attention being transferred at every hundred lines to a fresh figure
or group. We pass through a gallery of pictures and portraits,
classed, to be sure, by subjects, but distinct one from the other, and
separated by the projection of as many different frames. We are on a
weird, adventurous journey, and make but brief stops, however
attractive the strangers or acquaintance we meet. We go from person to
person, from scene to scene; so that at the end of the journey,
although the perception has been richly crowded, one impression has
effaced the other. Not carrying the weight, not pulsating in its every
limb with the power of a broad, deep, involved story, architecturally
reared on one foundat