ense of the relativity of national and
religious ideals has made us catholic of other systems than our own.
Consequently we have lost belief in a communal conflict so absolutely
just and necessary as to call to battle powers not only human but
divine. Also, since the French Revolution, we have grown to set the
one above the many, and to believe that, of right, society exists for
the sake of the individual rather than the individual for the sake of
society. Therefore the novel, which deals with individual personality
in and for itself, is more attuned to modern life than the epic, which
presents the individual mainly in relation to a communal cause which
he strives to advance or to retard.

The epic note, however, survives in certain momentous modern novels.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," for example, is less important merely as a novel
than as the epic of the great cause of abolition. Underlying many of
the works of Erckmann-Chatrian is an epic purpose to advance the cause
of universal peace by a depiction of the horrors of war. Balzac had in
mind the resumptive phase of epic composition when he planned his
"Human Comedy" (choosing his title in evident imitation of that of
Dante's poem), and started out to sum up all phases of human life in
a single monumental series of narratives. So also the late Frank
Norris had an epic idea in his imagination when he planned a trilogy
of novels (which unhappily he died before completing) to exhibit what
the great wheat industry means to the modern world.

In the broad and social sense, the epic is undeniably a greater type
of fiction than the novel, because it is more resumptive of life in
the large, and looks upon humanity with a vaster sweep of vision; but
in the deep and personal sense, the novel is the greater, because it
is more capable of an intimate study of individual emotion. And it is
possible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be at once epic
and novelistic in content and in mood,--epic in resuming all aspects
of a certain phase of life and in exhibiting a social struggle, and
novelistic in casting emphasis upon personal details of character and
in depicting intimate emotions. Probably no other author has succeeded
better than Emile Zola in combining the epic and the novelistic moods
of fiction; and the novels in the Rougon-Macquart series are at once
communal and personal in their significance.

=II. The Dramatic Mood.=--It is somewhat simpler to trace a
distinction b