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 Trouvere 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,