it is the natural
view, not the ideal. Its character corresponds to its origin.
Observation shows us man not as self-determined, but as the creature of
circumstances, as a phenomenon among other phenomena. As such, too, he
is presented to us in the novel. We do not see him, as in tragedy,
standing in the strength of his own spirit, remaking the world by its
power, determined by it for good or evil, dependent on it for all that
may be attractive or repellent about him. The hero of a novel attracts
in part by his physiognomy, his manner, or even his dress; his character
is qualified by circumstances and society; his impulses vary according
to the impressions of outward things; he is the sport of fortune,
dependent for weal or woe on the acquisition of some external blessing
which the development of the plot may or may not bestow on him. As
circumstances make his life what it is, so the particular combination of
circumstances, called happiness, constitutes its end. Instead of losing
his merely personal and particular self, as in the catastrophe of a
tragedy, he satisfies it with its appropriate pleasure. "He that loveth
wife or children more than me, is not worthy of me," are the words of
the Author of the Christian life. "Marry, enjoy domestic bliss, and thou
hast attained the end of virtue"--such is the ordinary moral of the
ordinary novel; nay, the only consistent moral of the consistent novel.
As the novelist sows, so must he reap; as his plot is, such must its
consummation be. In the body of the work he must, from the nature of the
case, represent men as they appear in fact, and he cannot fitly round it
off by representing them as they are only in idea. He cannot step at
pleasure from one sphere of art to another; by attempting to do so he
destroys the harmony without which there is no art at all, and leaves us
with a sense of dissatisfaction and unreality. The reader, who through
the whole three volumes till close upon the end has been travelling in
an atmosphere of ordinary morality and every-day aspiration, knows not
how in the last chapter to breathe the air of a higher life.

F. THE EPIC AND THE NOVEL

17. It may be objected to this limitation of the capabilities of the
novel, that it must stand on the same footing with the epic poem, which
is no less made up of a texture of incident, and which, therefore,
according to the present argument, can only reach the springs of man's
actions from without. Such a