LESLIE FIEDLER
sentimental relationship is the loyalty of comrades in anns; but
by the eighteenth century the notion of a heroic poem without
romance had come to seem intolerable. The last pseudo-epics of
the baroque had been obsessed with the subject of love, and the
rococo had continued to elaborate that theme. Shakespeare him–
self appeared to the English Augustans too little concerned with
the "reigning passion" to be quite interesting without revision.
Why, after all, should Cordelia not survive to marry Edgar, they
demanded of themselves-and they rewrote
King Lear
to
prove
that she should.
The novel, however, was precisely the product of the senti–
mentalizing taste of the eighteenth century; and a continuing
tradition of prose fiction did not begin until the love affair of
Lovelace and Clarissa (a demythicized Don Juan and a secular–
ized goddess of Christian love) had been imagined. The subject
par excellence of the novel is love or, more precisely-in its
be–
ginnings at least-seduction and marriage; and in France, Italy,
Germany, and Russia, even in England, spiritually so close to
America, love in one form or another has remained the novel's
central theme, as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer
or revenge in the Renaissance drama. When the Romantic im–
pulse led in Germany to a technical recasting of the novel form,
even the wildest experimentalists did not desert this traditional
theme; Schiller's
Lucille
is a dialogue on freedom and restraint
in passion. But our great Romantic
Unroman,
our typical anti–
novel,
is
the womanless
Mob) Dick.
Where
is
our
Madame Bovar),
our
Anna Karenina,
our
Pride and Prejudice
or
Vanity Fair?
Among our classic novels,
at least those before Henry James, who stands so oddly between
our own traditions and the European ones we rejected or recast,
the best attempt at dealing with love is
The Scarlet Letter,
in
which the physical consummation of adultery has occurred and
all passion burned away before the novel proper begins. Our
