Masters of the English Novel | Page 2

stories have been told since man walked erect and long before
transmitted records. Fiction, a conveniently broad term to cover all
manner of story-telling, is a hoary thing and within historical limits we
can but get a glimpse of its activity. Because it is so diverse a thing, it
may be regarded in various ways: as a literary form, a social
manifestation, a comment upon life. Main emphasis in this book is
placed upon its recent development on English soil under the more
restrictive name of Novel; and it is the intention, in tracing the work of
representative novel writers, to show how the Novel has become in
some sort a special modern mode of expression and of opinion, truly
reflective of the Zeitgeist.
The social and human element in a literary phenomenon is what gives
general interest and includes it as part of the culturgeschichte of a
people. This interest is as far removed from that of the literary
specialist taken up with questions of morphology and method, as it is
from the unthinking rapture of the boarding-school Miss who finds a
current book "perfectly lovely," and skips intrepidly to the last page to
see how it is coming out. Thoughtful people are coming to feel that
fiction is only frivolous when the reader brings a frivolous mind or
makes a frivolous choice. While it will always be legitimate to turn to
fiction for innocent amusement, since the peculiar property of all art is
to give pleasure, the day has been reached when it is recognized as part
of our culture to read good fiction, to realize the value and importance
of the Novel in modern education; and conversely, to reprimand the
older, narrow notion that the habit means self-indulgence and a waste
of time. Nor can we close our eyes to the tyrannous domination of
fiction to-day, for good or bad. It has worn seven-league boots of
progress the past generation. So early as 1862, Sainte-Beuve declared
in conversation: "Everything is being gradually merged into the novel.
There is such a vast scope and the form lends itself to everything."
Prophetic words, more than fulfilled since they were spoken.
Of the three main ways of story-telling, by the epic poem, the drama

and prose fiction, the epic seems to be the oldest; poetry, indeed, being
the natural form of expression among primitive peoples.
The comparative study of literature shows that so far as written records
go, we may not surely ascribe precedence in time either to fiction or the
drama. The testimony varies in different nations. But if the name
fiction be allowed for a Biblical narrative like the Book of Ruth, which
in the sense of imaginative and literary handling of historical material it
certainly is, the great antiquity of the form may be conceded. Long
before the written or printed word, we may safely say, stories were
recited in Oriental deserts, yarns were spun as ships heaved over the
seas, and sagas spoken beside hearth fires far in the frozen north. Prose
narratives, epic in theme or of more local import, were handed down
from father to son, transmitted from family to family, through the
exercise of a faculty of memory that now, in a day when labor-saving
devices have almost atrophied its use, seems well nigh miraculous.
Prose story-telling, which allows of ample description, elbow room for
digression, indefinite extension and variation from the original kernel
of plot, lends itself admirably to the imaginative needs of humanity
early or late.
With the English race, fiction began to take con-structural shape and
definiteness of purpose in Elizabethan days. Up to the sixteenth century
the tales were either told in verse, in the epic form of Beowulf or in the
shrunken epic of a thirteenth century ballad like "King Horn"; in the
verse narratives of Chaucer or the poetic musings of Spenser. Or else
they were a portion of that prose romance of chivalry which was vastly
cultivated in the middle ages, especially in France and Spain, and of
which we have a doughty exemplar in the Morte D'Arthur, which dates
nearly a century before Shakspere's day. Loose construction and no
attempt to deal with the close eye of observation, characterize these
earlier romances, which were in the main conglomerates of story using
the double appeal of love and war.
But at a time when the drama was paramount in popularity, when the
young Shakspere was writing his early comedies, fiction, which was in
the fulness of time to conquer the play form as a popular vehicle of

story-telling, began to rear its head. The loosely constructed, rambling
prose romances of Lyly of euphuistic fame, the prose pastorals of
Lodge from which model Shakspere made his forest drama, "As You
Like It," the picaresque, harum-scarum story of adventure, "Jack