ABSTRACT
The novel is a portable drama, requiring no stage, no actors, no lights or scenery, and no fixed time of enactment. The very finest things of which the novel is now capable are rather calculated, in their delicate profundity, for private perusal than public recitation. The drama could alone compete successfully with the novel; but to do so it must undergo reforms more weighty than those which are needful to the perfection of the novel. The novel must go slowly forward; and the sentiments of the hero must, by some means or other, restrain the tendency of the whole to conclude. In reality, it applies to the novel as practiced by Goethe and Rousseau, rather than to the stature of the novel altered and strengthened by recent developments in its history. The novelist's prerogative of description, too, though unconscionably abused in general, is in many situations, if properly respected by him, a palpable advantage.
