trument for applied
psychology, for the use of those delicate artists who are interested
rather in what character is than in what it may chance to do. In the
earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had been merely
a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violent attitudes, a
doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained, "answered the
desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual is merged in
the clan." And as the realistic writers perfected their art, the more
acute readers began to perceive that the hero who is a doer of deeds
can represent only the earlier stages of culture which we have long
outgrown. This hero came to be recognized as an anachronism, 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 were 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 idea