at is yet studying the enigmas of Goethe's "Faust." Prose Romance has
immemorially asserted, no less than the Epic or the Drama, its heritage
in the Realm of the Marvellous. The interest which attaches to the
supernatural is sought in the earliest Prose Romance which modern times
take from the ancient, and which, perhaps, had its origin in the lost
Novels of Miletus; (4) and the right to invoke such interest has, ever
since, been maintained by Romance through all varieties of form
and fancy,--from the majestic epopee of "Telemaque" to the graceful
fantasies of "Undine," or the mighty mockeries of "Gulliver's Travels"
down to such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet
preserve from oblivion "The Castle of Otranto" and "The Old English
Baron."

Now, to my mind, the true reason why a supernatural agency is
indispensable to the conception of the Epic, is that the Epic is the
highest and the completest form in which Art can express either Man or
Nature, and that without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not man
nor Nature, nature.

It is said, by a writer to whom an eminent philosophical critic justly
applies the epithets of "pious and profound:" (5)

"Is it unreasonable to confess that we believe in God, not by reason
of the Nature which conceals Him, but by reason of the Supernatural
in Man which alone reveals and proves Him to exist?... Man reveals
God: for Man, by his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue
of this intelligence is conscious of himself as a power not only
independent of, but opposed to, Nature, and capable of resisting,
conquering, and controlling her."(6)

If the meaning involved in the argument, of which I have here made but
scanty extracts, be carefully studied, I think that we shall find
deeper reasons than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the last
century discovered,--why the supernatural is indispensable to the Epic,
and why it is allowable to all works of imagination, in which Art looks
on Nature with Man's inner sense of a something beyond and above her.

But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose, would avail himself of
such sources of pity or terror as flow from the Marvellous, can only
attain his object in proportion as the wonders he narrates are of a kind
to excite the curiosity of the age he addresses.

In the brains of our time, the faculty of Causation is very markedly
developed. People nowadays do not delight in