e from the hands of all the more important
novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

_Christmas_, 1912.

CONTENTS

CHAP.

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

THE ENGLISH NOVEL

CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is to
say "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tell
a story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.

The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
original romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificent
poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
his way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropaedia_, shows
glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and it
is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
two novelists in the classical languages before about 40