20. The novel, then, as being a work of art, must fail to teach the
lesson of life in its completeness: as an inferior work of art, it has
peculiar weaknesses of its own. However extensive the influence of the
literature of fiction may have been, its intensity has been in inverse
proportion. A great poem, once made our own, abides with us for ever.
"Amid the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,"[18]
the spirit, returning to it, may gain a fresh assurance of its _own_
birthright, and purify itself, as in a river of Lethe, for an ideal
transition to its proper home. The novel, itself the reflex of "the
fretful stir unprofitable," can exercise no such power. It can but make
us more at home in the region from which a great poem transports us. The
value of that experience of the world, which it is its object to impart,
is commonly overrated in our day. In the form in which it is imparted by
the novelist, we have perhaps had too much of it without his aid. Our
external environment is quite enough in our thoughts: we are not too
reluctant to admit that we are what we seem to be, dependent for good or
evil on circumstances which we do not make for ourselves. This
dependence is in itself, no doubt, a fact; but it ceases to be so for us
when we contemplate it in forgetfulness of that spring of potential
freedom which underlies it, and of the law of duty correlative to
freedom. To the exclusive consideration of it we owe those profitless
recipes for eliciting moral health from circumstances which are the
plague of modern literature, and which one of our ablest writers has
lately condescended to dispense, in an essay on "organisation in daily
life." This circumstantial view of life, if we may use the term, being
the only one that the novelist can convey, prudence is his highest
morality. But it may be doubted whether prudence is what any one has
great need to learn. The plain man, who fronting circumstances boldly on
the one hand, looks reverently to the stern face of duty on the other,
can dispense with its maxims. For the moral valetudinarian small benefit
is to be gained from a doctor who will
"Read each wound, each weakness clear,
Will strike his finger on the place
And say, 'Thou ailest here and here'."[19]
It is far better for him, instead of poring over a detail of the causes
and symptoms of the disease which he hugs, to be stimulated to an effort
in which, though it be but temporary, ecstatic, and for an end not
actually attainable, he may at least forget the disease altogether. Such
a stimulus a great poem may afford him; but in the whole expanse of
novel-literature he merely sees his own sickly experience modified in an
infinite variety of reflections, till he fancies that the "strange
disease of modern life" is the proper constitution of God's universe.