Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 34, August, 1860

Modern literature thus had its origin in romantic metrical pieces, which, in the next stage, were transformed into prose novels. Two circumstances contributed to this change,—a change which could not have been anticipated; for the Trouvère fabliaux and romans promised only epics, and the Troubadour chansons and tensons promised only lyrics and dramas. But the mind was now obliged to traverse the unbeaten paths of the Christian universe; it was overwhelmed by the extent of its range, the richness and delicacy of its materials; it could with difficulty poise itself amid the indefinite heights and depths which encompassed it, and with greater difficulty could wield the magician's rod which should sway the driving elements into artistic reconstruction. This mental inadequacy alone would not have created the novel, but would only have made lyrics and epics rare, the works of superior minds. The second and cooperating circumstance was the prevalence of the Christian and feudal habit of contemplation, which made constant literature a necessity. Nothing less than eternal new romances could save the lords, the ladies, and the dependents from ennui . But to supply these in a style of proper and antique dignity was beyond the power of the poets. In the wild forests of the mind they could rarely capture a mature idea, and they were as yet unpractised artists. Yet contemplative leisure called eagerly for constant titbits of romance to tickle the palate and furnish a diversion, while the genius of Christian poetry was yet in infantile weakness. The dilemma lasted but a moment, and was solved by an heroic effort of the poets to do, not what they would, but what they could. Yielding to practical necessities, they renounced the traditions of the classical past, which now seemed to belong to another hemisphere, abandoned the attempt to realize pure forms, postponed high art; melody gave way to prose, the romance degenerated into the novel, and prose fiction, which erst had flitted only between the tongue and ear, entered, a straggling and reeling constellation, into the firmament of literature. Hence the novel is the child of human impotency and despair. The race thereby, with merriment and jubilee, confessed its inability to fulfil at once its Christian destiny as completely as the Greeks had fulfilled their pagan possibilities. Purity of art was left to the future, to Providence, or to great geniuses, but the novel became popular.

Thus the modern novel had its genesis not merely in a contemplative mood, but in contemplation which was forced by the impetuous temper of the times to fail of ever reaching the dignity of thoughtfulness. It was the immature product of an immature mental state; and richly as sometimes it was endowed by every human faculty, by imagination, wit, taste, or even profound thought, it yet never reached the goal of thought, never solved a problem, and, in its highest examples, professed only to reveal, but not to guide, the reigning manners and customs. Rarely did its materials pass through the fiery furnace whence art issues; it was a work of unfaithful intellect, prompted by ideas which never culminated and were never realized; and it did not rise much above the "stuffs" of life, as distinguished from the organic creations of the mind. A many-limbed and shambling creature, which was not made a spirit by the power of an idea, it fluttered amid all the culture of a people,—amid the ideas and modes of the state, the church, the family, the world of society,—like a bungler among paint-pots; but the paints still remained paints on the canvas, instead of being blended and transfigured into a thing of beauty. It was the organ of society, but not of the essential truths which vitalize society, and its incidents did not rise much above the significance of accidents.

What the novel was in knightly days, that it has continued to be. There is a mysterious practical potency in precedent. All ideas and institutes seem to grow in the direction of their first steps, as if from germs. Thus, the doctrines of the Church fathers are still peculiarly authoritative in theology, and the immemorial traditions of the common law are still binding in civil life. Man seems to be an experimental far more than a freely rational animal; for a fact in the past exerts a greater influence in determining future action than any new idea. A revolution must strike deep to eradicate the presumption in favor of ages. Learned men are now trying to read the hieroglyphics of the East, the records of an unknown history. Perhaps the result of their labors will temper the next period in the course of the world more than all our thinkers. Destiny seems to travel in the harness of precedents.

Thus, in obedience to the law of precedent, the mild gambols, the naïve superficiality, the child-like irresponsibility for thinking, which were the characteristics of the first European novels, have generally distinguished the unnumbered and unclassified broods of them which have abounded in subsequent literature. Designed chiefly to amuse, to divert for a moment rather than to present an admirable work of art, to interest rather than to instruct and elevate, the modern romance has in general excused itself from thorough elaboration. Instead of being a chastened and symmetrical product of the whole organic mind, it has mainly been inspired by the imagination, which has been called the fool in the family of the faculties, and wrought out by the assistance of memory, which mechanically links the mad suggestions of its partner with temporal events. It is in literature something like what a feast presided over by the king's jester and steward would have been in mediaeval social life. Let any novel be finished, let all the resources of the mind be conscientiously expended on it, let it become a thorough intellectual creation, and, instead of remaining a novel, it would assume the dignity of an epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, or history. Its nebulae would be resolved into stars.

Has, then, the mild and favorite blossom, the fabula romanensis , which was so abundant in the Middle Ages, which has grown so luxuriantly and given so general delight in modern times,—has it no place in the natural history of literature? Shall it be mentioned only as an uncompleted something else,—as an abortive effort of thought,—as a crude mélange of elements that have not been purified and fused together in the focus of the mind? And were the Muses right in refusing to admit it into their sacred realm of art?

An affirmative answer can hardly be true; for an absurdity appears in the reduction that it would cause in the quantity of our veritable literature, and in the condemnation that it would pass on the tastes of many most intelligent writers and readers. Yet a comparison of the novel with the classical and pure forms of literature will show its unlikeness to them in design, dignity, and essential quality.

It was a favorite thesis of Fielding, often repeated by his successors, that the novel is a sort of comic epopee. Yet the romantic and the epic styles have nothing in common, except that both are narrative. The epic, the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation and a civilization; the novel, of a neighborhood and a generation. A thousand years culminate in the former; it sums up the burden and purpose of a long historical period; and its characters are prominent types in universal history and in highest thought. But the novel is the child of a day; it is the organ of manners and phases, not of principles and passions; it does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically significant in the mind.