It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no completehandling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and importantthough that subject has been. Dunlop's History of Fiction, anexcellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased itsdealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliantdevelopment of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's EnglishNovel, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace ofstyle, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort ofanticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's English Novel andthe Principle of its Development is really nothing but a laudatorystudy of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, includingviolent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There arenumerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that Iknow even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to dealwith so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should"cultivate the garden" even if it is not a garden of many acres inextent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give"reviews" of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,handle very satisfactorily in his text.
I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of thisbook has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete surveyof the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more importantnovelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
Christmas, 1912.
I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
VI. THE SUCCESSORS—TO THACKERAY
VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY—CONCLUSION
INDEX
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts ofliterary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at anyrate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two greatclassical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be anaccident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prosefiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing inLatin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance ofApuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,that, from the foundation of Gree