discussion of the materials and methods of fiction. It is a matter
of expression merely, and must be decided in each case by the
temperamental attitude of the author toward his subject-matter.

=Three Moods of Fiction.=--Eliminating, therefore, as unprofitable any
attempt at a critical distinction between fiction that is written in
verse and fiction that is written in prose, we may yet derive a
certain profit from a distinction along broad and general lines
between three leading moods of fiction,--the epic, the dramatic, and
what (lacking a more precise term) we may call the novelistic. Certain
materials of fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic,
as the case may be. Also, an author, according to his mental attitude
toward life and toward the subject-matter of his fictions, may cast
his stories either in the epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood.
In order to understand this distinction, we must examine the nature of
the epic and the drama, and then study the novel in comparison with
these two elder types of fiction.

=I. The Epic Mood.=--The great epics of the world, whether, as in the
case of the Norse sagas and possibly of the Homeric poems, they have
been a gradual and undeliberate aggregation of traditional ballads, or
else, as in the case of the "AEneid" and "Paradise Lost," they have
been the deliberate production of a single conscious artist, have
attained their chief significance from the fact that they have summed
up within themselves the entire contribution to human progress of a
certain race, a certain nation, a certain organized religion. The
glory that was Greece is epitomized and sung forever in the
"Iliad,"--the grandeur that was Rome, in the "AEneid." All that the
Middle Ages gave the world is gathered and expressed in the "Divine
Comedy" of Dante: all of medieval history, science, philosophy,
scholarship, poetry, religion may be reconstructed from a right
reading and entire understanding of this single monumental poem. If
you would know Portugal in her great age of discovery and conquest and
national expansion, read the "Lusiads" of Camoens. If you would know
Christianity militant against the embattled legions of the Saracens,
read the "Jerusalem Liberated" of Tasso. If you would know what the
Puritan religion once meant to the greatest minds of England, read the
"Paradise Lost" of Milton.

The great epics have attained this resumptive and historical
significance only by exhibi