d wield the magician's
rod which should sway the driving elements into artistic reconstruction.
This mental inadequacy alone would not have created the novel, but would
only have made lyrics and epics rare, the works of superior minds. The
second and cooperating circumstance was the prevalence of the Christian
and feudal habit of contemplation, which made constant literature a
necessity. Nothing less than eternal new romances could save the lords,
the ladies, and the dependents from _ennui_. But to supply these in a
style of proper and antique dignity was beyond the power of the poets.
In the wild forests of the mind they could rarely capture a mature idea,
and they were as yet unpractised artists. Yet contemplative leisure
called eagerly for constant titbits of romance to tickle the palate and
furnish a diversion, while the genius of Christian poetry was yet in
infantile weakness. The dilemma lasted but a moment, and was solved by
an heroic effort of the poets to do, not what they would, but what they
could. Yielding to practical necessities, they renounced the traditions
of the classical past, which now seemed to belong to another hemisphere,
abandoned the attempt to realize pure forms, postponed high art; melody
gave way to prose, the romance degenerated into the novel, and prose
fiction, which erst had flitted only between the tongue and ear,
entered, a straggling and reeling constellation, into the firmament of
literature. Hence the novel is the child of human impotency and despair.
The race thereby, with merriment and jubilee, confessed its inability
to fulfil at once its Christian destiny as completely as the Greeks
had fulfilled their pagan possibilities. Purity of art was left to
the future, to Providence, or to great geniuses, but the novel became
popular.

Thus the modern novel had its genesis not merely in a contemplative
mood, but in contemplation which was forced by the impetuous temper of
the times to fail of ever reaching the dignity of thoughtfulness. It
was the immature product of an immature mental state; and richly as
sometimes it was endowed by every human faculty, by imagination, wit,
taste, or even profound thought, it yet never reached the goal of
thought, never solved a problem, and, in its highest examples, professed
only to reveal, but not to guide, the reigning manners and customs.
Rarely did its materials pass through the fiery furnace whence art
issues; it was a work of unfaithful intellect