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In beginning what, if it ever gets finished, must in all probability bethe last of some already perhaps too numerous studies of literaryhistory, I should like to point out that the plan of it is somewhatdifferent from that of most, if not all, of its predecessors. I haveusually gone on the principle (which I still think a sound one) that, instudying the literature of a country, or in dealing with such generalcharacteristics of parts of literature as prosody, or such coefficientsof all literature as criticism, minorities are, sometimes at least, ofas much importance as majorities, and that to omit them altogether is torisk, or rather to assure, an imperfect—and dangerouslyimperfect—product.
In the present instance, however, I am attempting something that I havenever, at such length, attempted before—the history of a Kind, and aKind which has distinguished itself, as few others have done, bycommunicating to readers the pleasure of literature. I might almostsay that it is the history of that pleasure, quite as much as thehistory of the kind itself, that I wish to trace. In doing so it isobviously superfluous to include inferiorities and failures, unless theyhave some very special lesson or interest, or have been (as in the caseof the minorities on the bridge of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies) for the most part, and unduly,[Pg vi] neglected, though they areimportant as experiments and links.[1] We really do want here—what thereprehensible hedonism of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and his submission to whatsome one has called "the eternal enemy, Caprice," wanted in allcases—"only the chief and principal things." I wish to give a fullhistory of how what is commonly called the French Novel came into beingand kept itself in being; but I do not wish to give an exhaustive,though I hope to give a pretty full, account of its practitioners.
In another point, however, I have kept to my old ways, and that is theway of beginning at the beginning. I disagree utterly with any Balbuswho would build an absolute wall between romance and novel, or a wallhardly less absolute between verse- and prose-fiction. I think theFrench have (what is not common in their language) an advantage over usin possessing the general term Roman, and I have perhaps taken acertain liberty with my own title in order to keep the noun-part of itto a single word. I shall extend the meaning of "novel"—that of romanwould need no extension—to include, not only the prose books, old andnew, which are more generally called "romance," but the verse romancesof the earlier period.
The subject is one with which I can at least plead almost lifelongfamiliarity. I became a subscriber to "Rolandi's," I think, during myholidays as a senior schoolboy, and continu