It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance,
this something which it is the function of that form of art
to create, this epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek
and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present
study. It is thus, I believe, that we shall see most clearly
the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his predecessors,
and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself
the task of realising, in the language of romance, much of
the involution of our complicated lives.
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood,
in every so-called novel. The great majority are not works
of art in anything but a very secondary signification. One
might almost number on one's fingers the works in which such
a supreme artistic intention has been in any way superior to
the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of
prose romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most
novels, paramount. At the present moment we can recall one
man only, for whose works it would have been equally possible
to accomplish our present design: and that man is Hawthorne.
There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about some
at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and
weaknesses of the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid
and single impression of his works.
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