issoluble
way with Carlyle's individuality and his power as an artist. They are
not to be imitated, but he would be much less than he is without them,
and they act by their very strength and pungency as a preservative of
his work. That of all the political pamphlets which the new era of
reform occasioned, his, which were the least in sympathy with it and are
the furthest off the main stream of our political thinking now, alone
continue to be read, must be laid down not only to the prophetic fervour
and fire of their inspiration but to the dark and violent magic of their
style.

CHAPTER IX

THE NOVEL

(1)

The faculty for telling stories is the oldest artistic faculty in the
world, and the deepest implanted in the heart of man. Before the rudest
cave-pictures were scratched on the stone, the story-teller, it is not
unreasonable to suppose, was plying his trade. All early poetry is
simply story-telling in verse. Stories are the first literary interest
of the awakening mind of a child. As that is so, it is strange that the
novel, which of all literary ways of story-telling seems closest to the
unstudied tale-spinning of talk, should be the late discovery that it
is. Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the
stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama
dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the
lyric. The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740.
What is the reason it is so late in appearing?

The answer is simply that there seems no room for good drama and good
fiction at the same time in literature; drama and novels cannot exist
side by side, and the novel had to wait for the decadence of the drama
before it could appear and triumph. If one were to make a table of
succession for the various kinds of literature as they have been used
naturally and spontaneously (not academically), the order would be the
epic, the drama, the novel; and it would be obvious at once that the
order stood for something more than chronological succession, and that
literature in its function as a representation and criticism of life
passed from form to form in the search of greater freedom, greater
subtlety, and greater power. At present we seem to be at the climax of
the third stage in this development; there are signs that the fourth is
on the way, and that it will be a return to drama, not to the old,
formal, ordered kind, but, something new