h temporal events. It is in literature something like what a feast
presided over by the king's jester and steward would have been in
mediaeval social life. Let any novel be finished, let all the resources
of the mind be conscientiously expended on it, let it become a thorough
intellectual creation, and, instead of remaining a novel, it would
assume the dignity of an epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, or history. Its
nebulae would be resolved into stars.

Has, then, the mild and favorite blossom, the _fabula romanensis_, which
was so abundant in the Middle Ages, which has grown so luxuriantly
and given so general delight in modern times,--has it no place in
the natural history of literature? Shall it be mentioned only as an
uncompleted something else,--as an abortive effort of thought,--as
a crude _melange_ of elements that have not been purified and fused
together in the focus of the mind? And were the Muses right in refusing
to admit it into their sacred realm of art?

An affirmative answer can hardly be true; for an absurdity appears in
the reduction that it would cause in the quantity of our veritable
literature, and in the condemnation that it would pass on the tastes of
many most intelligent writers and readers. Yet a comparison of the novel
with the classical and pure forms of literature will show its unlikeness
to them in design, dignity, and essential quality.

It was a favorite thesis of Fielding, often repeated by his successors,
that the novel is a sort of comic epopee. Yet the romantic and the epic
styles have nothing in common, except that both are narrative. The epic,
the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation and a
civilization; the novel, of a neighborhood and a generation. A thousand
years culminate in the former; it sums up the burden and purpose of
a long historical period; and its characters are prominent types in
universal history and in highest thought. But the novel is the child
of a day; it is the organ of manners and phases, not of principles and
passions; it does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical
relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not
a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles,
Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic
expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck
of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as
Gibbon's