table. This was a role the novel was suited to play, not only in America but in Europe as well. Elsewhere, Fiedler makes the point that old, institutional myths of religion and philosophy were, by the time of the Enlightenment, beginning to pale or to become increasingly inaccessible to the great mass of humanity. Higher culture, in one sense, was no longer accessible to the great mass, still less an expression of popular culture. It was instead something with a good deal of "otherness" to it. This is implied when Fiedler cites the extreme emotionalism of Romantic painting by David and Delacroix, and indeed of revolutionary political history. But it was during this time, too, that, as Fiedler says, "final horrors, as modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds" (Fiedler 38).
In a world torn between startling or idealized images generated by painting and sculpture, and emergent realities, there was still among most people a desire for an artistic connection, which could be experienced on a psychological as well as visceral level. The frank exploitation of grand design evident in the gothic cathedrals of the age of belief, and of universal Catholicism, was by the time of the Enlightenment, when the Reformation had been firmly entrenched into Western culture, bound not to be as meaningful or effective as it once had been. The novel, on this view, was an artistic form far better suited to providing such a connection. The grandeur of gothic architecture had lost its power to sway the masses.
Traditional literature in verse was certainly not attractive to them [bourgeois readers]. It was, quite simply, too difficult--not only in diction and metaphor, but also, perhaps especially, in its involvement with codes and conventions belonging to a life alien and incomprehensible to them. The concept of honor, for instance, and the adulterous codes of courtly love, were stra...