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 naive 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.