Yet between the vocal story and the story in literature there is an
immense difference, like that between talking and writing, between life
and art. The qualities which in the story-teller make even frivolity
weighty and dulness significant--the play of the eye, the lips, the
countenance, the voice, the whole sympathetic expression of the
person--are wanting to the novel; it has passed from the realm of life
to that of art; it loses the charm which personal relations give even
to trifles; it must have the charm which the mind can lend only to its
cherished offspring.

Considered as a thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of
such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse
in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,--now harlequin, now
gossip, now threnodist,--with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy,
uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,--now relating the story, with
childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart
ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting
the little story-cricket that creeps along from page to page with
immense loads of science, history, politics, ethics, religion,
criticism, and prophecy,--always regarded with kindness, always welcomed
in idleness, always presenting in a simple way some spectacle of
merriment or grief, as changeful as the seasons or the fashions,--with
all its odd characteristics, the novel is remarkably popular, and not
lightly to be esteemed as an element in our social and mental culture.

There is probably no other class of books, with literary pretensions,
that contain so little thinking, in proportion to their quantity of
matter, as novels. They can scarcely be called organic productions, for
they may be written and published in sections, like one of the lowest