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 significant—­the play of the eye, the lips, the countenance, the voice, the whole sympathetic expression of the person—­are 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