The novel, then, must be pure literature; as much so as the poem. But
poetry--now that the day of the broad Homeric epic is past, or temporarily
eclipsed--appeals to a taste too exclusive and abstracted for the demands
of modern readers. Its most accommodating metre fails to house our endless
variety of mood and movement; it exacts from the student an exaltation
above the customary level of thought and sentiment greater than he can
readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse his
every observation on life and nature; but to-day he reserves for it only
his most ideal and abstract conceptions. The merit of Cervantes is not so
much that he laughed Spain's chivalry away, as that he heralded the modern
novel of character and manners. It is the latest, most pliable, most
catholic solution of the old problem,--how to unfold man to himself. It
improves on the old methods, while missing little of their excellence. No
one can read a great novel without feeling that, from its outwardly
prosaic pages, strains of genuine poetry have ever and anon reached his
ears. It does not obtrude itself; it is not there for him who has not
skill to listen for it: but for him who has ears, it is like the music of
a bird, denning itself amidst the innumerable murmurs of the forest.

So, the ideal novel, conforming in every part to the behests of the
imagination, should produce, by means of literary art, the illusion of a
loftier reality. This excludes the photographic method of novel-writing.
"That is a false effort in art," says Goethe, towards the close of his
long and splendid career, "which, in giving reality to the appearance,
goes so far as to leave in it nothing but the common, every-day actual."
It is neither the actual, nor Chinese copies of the actual, that we demand
of art. Were art merely the purveyor of such things, she might yield her
crown to the camera and the stenographer; and divine imagination would
degenerate into vulgar inventiveness. Imagination is incompatible with
inventiveness, or imitation. Imitation is death, imagination is life.