Has, then, the mild and favorite blossom, the fabula romanensis, which was so abundant in the Middle Ages, which has grown so luxuriantly and given so general delight in modern times,—­has it no place in the natural history of literature?  Shall it be mentioned only as an uncompleted something else,—­as an abortive effort of thought,—­as a crude melange of elements that have not been purified and fused together in the focus of the mind?  And were the Muses right in refusing to admit it into their sacred realm of art?

An affirmative answer can hardly be true; for an absurdity appears in the reduction that it would cause in the quantity of our veritable literature, and in the condemnation that it would pass on the tastes of many most intelligent writers and readers.  Yet a comparison of the novel with the classical and pure forms of literature will show its unlikeness to them in design, dignity, and essential quality.

It was a favorite thesis of Fielding, often repeated by his successors, that the novel is a sort of comic epopee.  Yet the romantic and the epic styles have nothing in common, except that both are narrative.  The epic, the rare and lofty cypress of literature, is the story of a nation and a civilization; the novel, of a neighborhood and a generation.  A thousand years culminate in the former; it sums up the burden and purpose of a long historical period; and its characters are prominent types in universal history and in highest thought.  But the novel is the child of a day; it is the organ of manners and phases, not of principles and passions; it does not see the phenomena of earth in heavenly or logical relations, does not transform life into art, and is a panorama, but not a picture.  So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities.  But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon’s way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically significant in the mind.

A contrast of any page of an epic with one of a romance will show their essential unlikeness.  Note, for instance, the beginning of the “Gerusalemme Liberata.”  The first stanza presents “the illustrious captain who warred for Heaven and saved the sepulchre of Christ,—­the many deeds which he wrought by arms and by wisdom,—­his great toil, and his glorious achievement.  Hell opposed him, the mingled populations of Asia and Africa leagued against him,—­but all in vain, for Heaven smiled, and guided the wandering bands beneath his sacred ensigns.”  Such are the splendid elements of the poem, outlining in a stanza the finest type, objects, and scenery of mediaeval heroism.  The second stanza invokes the Muse,—­“Not