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 melange 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 prima 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.