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 melange 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.