ce, and he told the
tale in a series of exquisite lyrics; but the same story might have
been used by a different author as the basis for a novel in prose. The
subject of "Evangeline" was suggested to Longfellow by Hawthorne; and
if the great prose poet had written the story himself, it would not
have differed essentially in material or in structural method from the
narrative as we know it through the medium of the verse romancer. M.
Francois Coppee has composed admirable short-stories in verse as
well as in prose. "The Strike of the Iron-Workers" ("_La Greve des
Forgerons_"), which is written in rhymed Alexandrines, does not
differ markedly in narrative method from "The Substitute" ("_Le
Remplacant_"), which is written in prose. To be sure, the former is a
poem and the latter is not; but only a very narrow-minded critic would
call the latter a short-story without applying the same term also to
the former. Therefore, the question whether a certain fictitious
tale should be told in verse or in prose has no place in a general
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.

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.

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