It need hardly be shown that the novel is not a drama, not a history, nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise. It may have sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they were the collected charms of literature, do not make a work of art. The styles are mixed,a certain sign, according to Lessing, of corruption of taste. Novels present the anomaly of being fiction, but not poetry,of being fruits of imagination, but of imagination improvising its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of ideas. Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for the future historian who, in searching the "Pickwick Papers" for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the undisciplined witches of Mr. Dickens's imagination.
If the novel be thus excluded from all the classical orders of literature, a trembling question is suggested, whether it may not be nevertheless a legitimate work of art. Though it be a mélange of styles, a story told, in literature what the story-teller is in society, yet why should it not have the honor among readers which the story-teller in all ages has had among listeners? Though by its escutcheon it assume a place among the amusing rather than the instructive class of books, why should not its nobility be recognized?
The answer is found in the essential nature of art, in the almost eternal distinction between life and thought, between actual and ideal realities. Unity amid diversity is the type of intellectual beauty and the law of the universe; to comprehend it is the goal of science, and to reproduce it in human works is the aim of art. Yet how hard it is to find the central and essential idea in a world of apparent accidents and delusions! to chase the real and divine thing as it plays among cheats and semblances! Hence the difficulty of thorough thought, of faithful intellectual performance, of artistic creation. To the thoughtless man life is merely the rough and monotonous exterior of the cameo-stone; but the artist sees through its strata, discerns its layers of many colors, and from its surface to its vital centre works them all together into varied beauty. To live is common; but art belongs only to the finest minds and the best moments. Life is a burden of present multitudinous phenomena; but art has the simple unity of perfect science, and is a goal and aspiration. Life comes by birth, art by thought, and the travail that produces art is ofttimes the severer. The fashions of life are bubbles on the surface, and pass away with the season; but the creations of art belong to the depths of the spiritual world, where they shine like stars and systems in the physical universe.
Story-telling is the most charming of occupations, and, whatever its relation to literary art, it is one of the graces of the art of life. Old as the race, it has always been in fashion on the earth, the delight of every clime from the Orient to the Occident, and of every age from childhood to second childhood. We live in such a concatenation of things,our hopes, fears, loves, hates, struggles, sympathies, defeats, and triumphs make such a medley, with a sort of divine fascination about it,that we are always interested to hear how anybody has borne himself through whatever varieties of fortune. At the basis of every other character which can be assumed by man lie the conceiver and the teller of stories; story-telling is the primá facie quality of an intelligent and sociable being leading a life full of events in a universe full of phenomena. The child believes the wonders of romance by a right instinct; narratives of love and peril and achievement come home to the spirit of the youth; and the mystical, wonder-expecting eye of childhood returns to old age. The humor, wit, piety, and pathos of every age abound in the written stories of its people and children.
Yet between the vocal story and the story in literature there is an immense difference, like that between talking and writing, between life and art. The qualities which in the story-teller make even frivolity weighty and dulness significantthe play of the eye, the lips, the countenance, the voice, the whole sympathetic expression of the personare wanting to the novel; it has passed from the realm of life to that of art; it loses the charm which personal relations give even to trifles; it must have the charm which the mind can lend only to its cherished offspring.
Considered as a thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting the little story-cricket that creeps along from page to page with immense loads of science, history, politics, ethics, religion, criticism, and prophecy,always regarded with kindness, always welcomed in idleness, always presenting in a simple way some spectacle of merriment or grief, as changeful as the seasons or the fashions,with all its odd characteristics, the novel is remarkably popular, and not lightly to be esteemed as an element in our social and mental culture.
There is probably no other class of books, with literary pretensions, that contain so little thinking, in proportion to their quantity of matter, as novels. They can scarcely be called organic productions, for they may be written and published in sections, like one of the lowest classes of animals, which have no organization, but live equally well in parts, and run off in opposite directions when cut in halves. Thoughts and books, like living creatures, have their grades, and it is only those which stand lowest in respect of intellectuality that admit of fractional existence. A finished work of the mind is so delicately adjusted and closely related, part to part, that a fracture would be fatal. Conceive of Phidias sending off from his studio at Athens his statue of Jupiter Olympius in monthly numbers,despatching now the feet, now the legs, now the trunk, in successive pieces, now the shoulders, and at last crowning the whole with a head!
The composition of novels must be reckoned, in design at least, one of the fine arts, but in fact they belong rather to periodical than to immortal literature. They do not submit to severity of treatment, abide by no critical laws, but are the gypsies and Bohemians of literature, bringing all the savagery of wild genius into the salons of taste. Though tolerated, admired, and found to be interesting, they do not belong to the system of things, play no substantial part in the serious business of life, but, as the world moves on, give place to their successors, not having developed any principle, presented any picture, or stated any fact, in a way to suggest ideas more than social phenomena. They are not permanent, therefore, because finally only ideas, and not facts, are generally remembered; the past is known to us more, and exclusively as it becomes remote, by the conceptions of poets and philosophic historians, the myriads of events which occupied a generation being forgotten, and all the pith and meaning of them being transmitted in a stanza or a chapter. Poetry never grows old, and whatsoever masterpieces of thought always win the admiration of the enlightened; but many a novel that has been the lion of a season passes at once away, never more to be heard of here. With few exceptions, the splendid popularity that greets the best novels fades away in time slowly or rapidly. A half-century is a fatal trial for the majority; few are revived, and almost none are read, after a century; will anybody but the most curious antiquary be interested in them after one or two thousand years? Without delaying to give the full rationale of exceptions which vex this like every other general remark, it may be added briefly that fairy stories are in their nature fantastic mythological poems, most proper to the heroic age of childhood, that historical romances may be in essence and dignity fantastic histories or epics, and that, from whatever point of view, Cervantes remains hardly less admirable than Ariosto, or the "Bride of Lammermoor" than the "Lay of the Last Minstrel."
In the mental as in the physical world, art, diamonds and gems come by long elaboration. A thoughtless man may write perennially, while the result of silent meditation 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. Eugène Sue and Béranger 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 "Mystères 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 sounding the universe. A novel is in its nature and as a matter of necessity an artistic failure; it pretends to nothing higher; but under the slack laws which govern its composition, multitudes of fine and suggestive characters, incidents, and sayings may be smuggled into it, contrary to all the usages and rules of civilized literature. Hence the secret of its popularity, that it is the organ of average as distinguished from highest thought. Science and art are the goals of destiny, but rarely is there a thinker or writer who has an eye single to them. It is an heroic, self-sacrificing, and small platoon which in every age brunts Fate, and, fighting on the shadowy frontier, makes conquests from the realm of darkness. Their ideas are passed back from hand to hand, and become known in fragments and potent as tendencies among the mass of the race, who live in the circle of the attained and travel in the routine of ages. The novelist is one of the number who half comprehend them, and borrows them from all quarters to introduce into the rich mélange of his work. To solve a social problem, to reproduce an historical age or character, or to develop the truth and poetry latent in any event, is difficult, and not many will either lead or follow a severe attempt; but the novelist will merrily chronicle his story and link with it in a thousand ways some salient reminiscences of life and thought.
What, then, is the highest excellence that the novel can attain? It is the carnival of literary art. It deals sympathetically and humorously, not philosophically and strictly, with the panorama and the principles of life. A transcript, but not a transfiguration of Nature, it assumes a thousand forms, surpassing all other books in the immense latitude left to the writer, in the wild variety of things which it may touch, but need not grasp. Its elements are the forests, the cities, and the seven ages of man,characters and fortunes how diversified! All species of thinkers and actors, of ideas and passions, all the labyrinthine complications and scenery of existence, may be illustrated in persons or introduced by-the-by; into whatever colors make up the phantasmagoria of collective humanity the novelist may dip his brush, in painting his moving picture. Yet problems need not be fully appreciated, nor characters or actions profoundly understood. It must be an engrossing story, but the theme and treatment are as lawless as the conversation of an evening party. The mind plays through all the realm of its knowledge and experience, and sheds sparks from all the torches of thought, as scenes and topics succeed each other. The pure forms of literature may be reminiscences present to the imagination, the germs of new truths and social arrangements may occupy the reason; but the novelist is neither practical, nor philosophical, nor artistic; he is simply in a dream; and pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediæval festival of the Church. Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night! Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together in the revelries of the novel. To state the degree of excellence possible to a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius free to introduce his creations just as they occur to him, and the author of talent free to range through all books and all time and reproduce brilliant sayings and odd characters,which, with no other connecting thread than a story, freaks like a spirit through every shade of feeling and region of thought, from the domestic hearth to the ultimate bounds of speculative inquiry,and which, by its daring and careless combinations of incongruous elements, exhibits a free embodiment in prose of the peculiar genius of the romantic.
And some philosophers have styled romance the special glory of Christianity. It is certainly the characteristic of critical as distinguished from organic periods,of the mind acting mystically in a savage and unknown universe, rather than of the mind that has reduced the heavens and earth to its arts and sciences. The novel, therefore, as the wildest organ of romance, is most appropriate to a time of great intellectual agitation, when intellectual men are but half-conscious of the tendencies that are setting about them, and consequently cease to propose to themselves final goals, do not attempt scrupulous art, but play jubilantly with current facts. Hence, perhaps, its popularity since the first conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, and especially since the great French Revolution, when amid new inventions and new ideas mankind has contemplatively looked for the coming events, the new historical eras, which were casting their shadows before.
When, some time, Christian art shall become classical, and Christian ideas be developed by superior men as fairly as the Hellenic conceptions were, the novel may either assume to itself some peculiar excellency, or may cease to hold the comparative rank in literature which it enjoys at present. Then the numberless prose romances which occupy the present generation of readers will, perhaps, be collected in some immense corpus, like the Byzantine historians, will be reckoned among the curiosities of literature, and will at least have the merit of making the study of antiquities easy and interesting. There is an old couplet,