, prompted by ideas which
never culminated and were never realized; and it did not rise much above
the "stuffs" of life, as distinguished from the organic creations of the
mind. A many-limbed and shambling creature, which was not made a
spirit by the power of an idea, it fluttered amid all the culture of a
people,--amid the ideas and modes of the state, the church, the family,
the world of society,--like a bungler among paint-pots; but the paints
still remained paints on the canvas, instead of being blended and
transfigured into a thing of beauty. It was the organ of society, but
not of the essential truths which vitalize society, and its incidents
did not rise much above the significance of accidents.

What the novel was in knightly days, that it has continued to be. There
is a mysterious practical potency in precedent. All ideas and institutes
seem to grow in the direction of their first steps, as if from germs.
Thus, the doctrines of the Church fathers are still peculiarly
authoritative in theology, and the immemorial traditions of the common
law are still binding in civil life. Man seems to be an experimental
far more than a freely rational animal; for a fact in the past exerts
a greater influence in determining future action than any new idea. A
revolution must strike deep to eradicate the presumption in favor of
ages. Learned men are now trying to read the hieroglyphics of the East,
the records of an unknown history. Perhaps the result of their labors
will temper the next period in the course of the world more than all our
thinkers. Destiny seems to travel in the harness of precedents.

Thus, in obedience to the law of precedent, the mild gambols, the
_naive_ superficiality, the child-like irresponsibility for thinking,
which were the characteristics of the first European novels, have
generally distinguished the unnumbered and unclassified broods of them
which have abounded in subsequent literature. Designed chiefly to amuse,
to divert for a moment rather than to present an admirable work of art,
to interest rather than to instruct and elevate, the modern romance has
in general excused itself from thorough elaboration. Instead of being
a chastened and symmetrical product of the whole organic mind, it has
mainly been inspired by the imagination, which has been called the fool
in the family of the faculties, and wrought out by the assistance of
memory, which mechanically links the mad suggestions of its partner
wit