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But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious criticism while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time the novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often; by digression and divagation still oftener.
The best-known parody of Cobbett, that in Rejected Addresses, gives rather a poor idea of his style; exhibiting no doubt his intense egotism, his habit of half trivial divagation, and his use of strong language, but quite failing to give the immense force, the vivid clearness, and the sterling though not precisely scholarly English which characterise his good work.
Coleridge's temperament was not heroic, and his correspondence as well as his conduct justified, in regard to much more than his nonage, the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist that he must have been "a very beatable child." They are not very easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to divagation affects them.
If he did not move, Wonstead was capable of reporting him to the captain for strange behavior, and they were all too alert to a divagation which might mean trouble. He had no desire to end in confinement with Morris. "I'm coming," Raf said sullenly. But he remained sitting on the edge of the pad until Wonstead left the cabin, and he followed as slowly as he could.
Let us be set down at Queen's Crawley without further divagation, and see how Miss Rebecca Sharp speeds there. Private and Confidential Miss Rebecca Sharp to Miss Amelia Sedley, Russell Square, London. With what mingled joy and sorrow do I take up the pen to write to my dearest friend! Oh, what a change between to-day and yesterday!
Terje Figen will never be translated successfully into English, for it is written, with brilliant lightness and skill, in an adaptation of the Norwegian ballad-measure which it is impossible to reproduce with felicity in our language. Among Ibsen's writings Terje Vigen is unique as a piece of pure sentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony or pungency.
Imaginative creation has no mere vague sensory support; that is to say, it is not the unbridled divagation of the fancy among images of light, color, sounds and impressions; but it is a construction firmly allied to reality; and the more it holds fast to the forms of the external created world, the loftier will the value of its internal creations be.
And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness, his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really this.
Morgan Ruyler IV had overlooked his father-in-law's divagation from the orthodox standards of his own family because he had been a spectacular financial success; bringing home ropes of enormous pearls from India in addition to the fantastic sums paid him by enraptured native princes.
It was he who invented the modern dramatic method of seizing a situation at the point at which it can last be seized, and from there pushing it forward with imperturbable logic and not one divagation. As an artist Ibsen is to a considerable extent the master of Tchekov; but, as art is the last thing to which an English Intellectual pays attention, this fact has been overlooked.
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