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About Hesperian student / (Lincoln [Neb.]) 1872-1885 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1879)
Mmfimtsn THE HIWSSMM gf WBME Vol. VIII. DECEMBER, 1870. No. 10. Qitcnmj. THE NOVEL. JMilE hiiiniui mind has ever sought to express the significance of mini's life, to know and understand the hiddun springs of notion, to interpret Hie play of passion mid to unravel the strange web of good and evil that envelops his exis tence. ICaoh generation seeks for u voice to ex press the workings and mysteries of its hi lar life, and this voice finds utterance through the nover-ohaiiging humanity be . ond which no human wisdom can reach. One age speaks to us in the divine lan guage of the poet, while another comes in the silent voice of a Raphael, or an Ange lo. The eighteenth century, with its pos ilivo tendencies, with the gradual and steady emergence into freedom and strength, must needs find expression in something that recognized the individual ity of mankind, that treated of man in the concrete; so wo find idealism giving way to realism, and the novel becomes the in. terpreter of this new phase of humanity. Its way had been kindly paved by gentle, genial Addison in his philanthropic de sire to bring philosophy from heaven to man; but notwithstanding the many for tuitous circuniMlauccs that marked its birth, it was doomed to be misrepresent ed and misunderstood, and, after the lapse of almost two centuries, there is still a reproach upon this exponent of man's life. Though the first novel was welcomed by moralists as a friend and ally to vir tue and religion, and so reccomeuded from the pulpit, yet time found the mor alists and the church bitterly opposing and denouncing what they considered as a corrupter of morals ami good taste. In some cases they were justified, for we know, with Tacitus, that the worst is the corruption of the best, and the novel suf fered shameful prostitution at one time, oven as the Elizabethan drama was do. graded in the time of Congrevo and Wichorly. But the good in the novel has been preset ved intact, and the vast proge ny of n Pamela, a Vicar of Wakefield, an Ivanhoe, has multiplied and filled the earth, until to-day in England alone there is a now novel for every day in the year. Among so many, the law of the survi val of the fittest must determine the most worthy, and it is at such a time, when thero is a peculiar bout of the national mind and an immense fruitfullncss in this direction, that a Hamlet is created, and. to-day the novel lias its Hamlet in a Daniel Deronda, RliJU SffiB