Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 34, August, 1860 | Page 9

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 part in the serious business of life, but, as the world moves on, give place to their successors, not having developed any principle, presented any picture, or stated any fact, in a way to suggest ideas more than social phenomena. They are not permanent, therefore, because finally only ideas, and not facts, are generally remembered; the past is known to us more, and exclusively as it becomes remote, by the conceptions of poets and philosophic historians, the myriads of events which occupied a generation being forgotten, and all the pith and meaning of them being transmitted in a stanza or a chapter. Poetry never grows old, and whatsoever masterpieces of thought always win the admiration of the enlightened; but many a novel that has been the lion of a season passes at once away, never more to be heard of here. With few exceptions, the splendid popularity that greets the best novels fades away in time slowly or rapidly. A half-century is a fatal trial for the majority; few are revived, and almost none are read, after a century; will anybody but the most curious antiquary be interested in them after one or two thousand years? Without delaying to give the full rationale of exceptions which vex this like every other general remark, it may be added briefly that fairy stories are in their nature fantastic mythological poems, most proper to the heroic age of childhood, that historical romances may be in essence and dignity fantastic histories or epics, and that, from whatever point of view, Cervantes remains hardly less admirable than Ariosto, or the "Bride of Lammermoor" than the "Lay of the Last Minstrel."
In the mental as in the physical world, art, diamonds and gems come by long elaboration. A thoughtless man may write perennially, while the result of silent meditation and a long tortured soul may be expressed in a minute. The work of the former is akin to conversation, one of the fugitive pleasures of a day; that of the latter will, perchance, be a star in the firmament of the mind. Eug��ne Sue and B��ranger both wished to communicate their reflections on society. The former dissipated his energies in the _salons_, was wise and amusing over wine, exchanged learning and jests, studied the drawing-room as if it were the macrocosm, returned to his chamber, put on kid gloves, and from the odds and ends of his dishevelled wits wrote at a gallop, without ever looking back, his "Myst��res de Paris." The latter lived in an attic year after year, contemplated with cheerful anxiety the volatile world of France and the perplexed life of man, and elaborated word by word, with innumerable revisions, his short songs, which are gems of poetry, charming at once the ear and the heart. Novels are perhaps too easily written to be of lasting value. An unpremeditated word, in which the thoughts of years are exploded, may be one of the most admirable of intellectual phenomena, but an unpremeditated volume can only be a demonstration of human weakness.
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