and a long tortured soul may be expressed
in a minute. The work of the former is akin to conversation, one of the
fugitive pleasures of a day; that of the latter will, perchance, be a
star in the firmament of the mind. Eugene Sue and Beranger both wished
to communicate their reflections on society. The former dissipated his
energies in the _salons_, was wise and amusing over wine, exchanged
learning and jests, studied the drawing-room as if it were the
macrocosm, returned to his chamber, put on kid gloves, and from the odds
and ends of his dishevelled wits wrote at a gallop, without ever looking
back, his "Mysteres de Paris." The latter lived in an attic year after
year, contemplated with cheerful anxiety the volatile world of France
and the perplexed life of man, and elaborated word by word, with
innumerable revisions, his short songs, which are gems of poetry,
charming at once the ear and the heart. Novels are perhaps too easily
written to be of lasting value. An unpremeditated word, in which the
thoughts of years are exploded, may be one of the most admirable of
intellectual phenomena, but an unpremeditated volume can only be a
demonstration of human weakness.

The argument thus far has been in favor of the Muses. Hellenic taste and
the principles of high art ratify the condemnation passed on the novel
by the aesthetic goddesses. A wider view, however, will annul the
sentence, giving in its stead a warning and a lesson. If the prose
romance be not Hellenic, it is nevertheless humane, and has been in
honor almost universally throughout the Orient and the Occident. Its
absence from the classical literature was a marvel and exception, a
phenomenon of the clearest-minded and most active of races, who thought,
but did not contemplate,--whose ideal world consisted only of simple,
but stately legends of bright-limbed gods and heroes. A felicitous
production of high art, also, is among the rarest of exceptions, and
will be till the Millennium. Myriads of comparative failures follow in
the suite of a masterpiece. We have, therefore, judged the novel by an
impracticable standard, by a comparison with the highest aims rather
than the usual attainments of other branches of literary art. Human
weakness makes poetry, philosophy, and history imperfect in execution,
though they aspire to absolute beauty and truth; human weakness
suggested the novel, which is imperfect in design, written as an
amusement and relief, in despair of sou