onism, out of place in a more modern social
organization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He was
too much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demands
of those who looked to literature as the mirror of life itself and who
had taught themselves to relish what Lowell terms the "punctilious
veracity which gives to a portrait its whole worth."

Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after
Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, and
Hawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was in
the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it
was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetiere in
the preface to his "Roman Bourgeois." Furetiere lacked the skill and
the insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard he
set up--indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power of
most novelists even now. But Furetiere's declaration of the principles
which he proposed to follow is as significant now as it was in 1666,
when neither the writer himself nor the reader to whom he had to
appeal was ripe for the advance which he insisted upon. "I shall tell
you," said Furetiere, "sincerely and faithfully, several stories or
adventures which happened to persons who are neither heroes nor
heroines, who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms, but who
will be honest folk of mediocre condition, and who will quietly make
their way. Some of them will be good-looking and others ugly. Some of
them will be wise and others foolish; and these last, in fact, seem
likely to prove the larger number."

II

The novel had a long road to travel before it became possible for
novelists to approach the ideal that Furetiere proclaimed and before
they had acquired the skill needed to make their readers accept it.
And there had also to be a slow development of our own ideas
concerning the relation of art to life. For one thing, art had
been expected to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand on the
drama to be overtly didactic. Less than a score of years after
Furetiere's preface there was published an English translation of the
Abbe d'Aubignac's "Pratique du Theatre" which was entitled the
"Whole Art of the Stage" and in which the theory of "poetic justice"
was set forth formally. "One of the chiefest, and indeed the most
indispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in them Virtues alway