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,