EVOLUTIONARY PEINCIPLES 51 



Renaissance there has been no pure and unmixed manifesta- 

 tion of national spirit in any art except Music. The problem 

 for the Evolutionist increases continually in complexity by 

 reason of crossings, blendings, and complicated heredity; 

 by reason of our common European culture being adapted to 

 divers national conditions ; by reason of the rapid inter- 

 change of widely separated and specific products. I have, 

 for instance, little doubt that the Novel could be analysed on 

 evolutionary principles. But the Novel is one of the most 

 * hybridisable genera ' known to us in literature. When we 

 reflect what Cervantes and Lesage taught English novelists, 

 how much Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, and 

 Scott contributed to France, what influence Werther exerted 

 for a time outside Germany, how the French producers of 

 romances since the days of Balzac and George Sand have 

 saturated the mind of Europe, what modifications we owe 

 to the practice of American writers, and how the Slavonic 

 peoples are now creating a new ideal for us of the realistic 

 story, it will be admitted that I am justified in proclaiming 

 the Novel to be no less certainly a ' hybridisable genus ' than 

 the Orchis. It would take too much time to demonstrate, 

 as I think it can be demonstrated, that when the arts have 

 entered into conditions of existence which are favourable to 

 hybridity, as in ancient Rome and modern Europe, they do 

 not exhibit that series of phenomena which I have above 

 described at one time under the metaphor of organic evolu- 

 tion, and at another under that of a parabolic curve. 

 Personal capacity, the liberty of individual genius, the caprice 

 of coteries, assert themselves with more apparent freedom 

 in these circumstances. The type does not expire, because 

 the type has become capable of infinite modification. It 

 is indeed no longer a type in the special sense I have put 

 upon that word, but a mongrel of many types. What art 

 loses in force and impressiveness, in monumental dignity and 

 power to embody the strong spirit of creative nations, it now 

 gains in elasticity and disengagement from the soil on which 

 it springs. 



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