Therefore I think that, apart altogether from the literary excellence of the presentation, Bret Harte’s pictures of the Anglo-Saxon in these conditions will, even as documents, pass into literature. And again, year by year, as nature is being more and more studied, are what I may call the open-air qualities of literature being more sought after. This accounts in a large measure for the growing interest in a writer once strangely neglected, George Borrow; and if there should be any diminution in the great and deserved vogue of Dickens, it will be because he is not strong in open-air qualities.
Bret Harte’s stories give the reader a sense of the open air second only to Borrow’s own pictures. And if I am right in thinking that the love of nature and the love of open-air life are growing, this also will secure a place in the future for Bret Harte.
And now what about his power of creating new characters—not characters of the soil merely, but dramatic characters? Well, here one cannot speak with quite so much confidence on behalf of Bret Harte; and here he showed his great inferiority to Dickens. Dickens, of course, used a larger canvas—gave himself more room to depict his subjects.
If Bret Harte’s scenes and characters seem somewhat artificial, may it not be often accounted for by the fact that he wrote short stories and not long novels? For it is very difficult in a short story to secure the freedom and flexibility of movement which belong to nature—the last perfection of imaginative art.
All artistic imitations of nature, of course, consist of selection. In actual life we form our own picture of a character not by having the traits selected for us and presented to us in a salient way, as in art, but by selecting in a semi-conscious way for ourselves from the great mass of characteristics presented to us by nature. The shorter the story, the more economic must be its methods, and hence the more rigid must its selection of characteristics be; and this, of course, is apt to give an air of artificiality to a short story from which a long novel may be free.”
[Picture: Ogwen and the Glyders from Carnedd Dafydd]
IT is impossible within the space at my command to follow Mr. Watts-Dunton into Wales, or through those Continental journeys described by Dr. Hake in ‘The New Day.’ I can best show the impression that Alpine scenery made upon him by quoting further on the end of ‘The Coming of Love.’ But with regard to Wales, it seems necessary that a word or two should be said, for it is a fact that the Welsh nation has accepted ‘Aylwin’ as the representative Welsh novel. And this is not surprising, because, as many Welsh writers have averred, Mr. Watts-Dunton’s passionate sympathy for Wales is as sincere as though he had been born upon her soil. The ‘Arvon’ edition is thus dedicated:—