and that it
succeeded to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne and by
the play in the days of Elizabeth.

And like the play and the essay in those earlier times, the novel now
attracts writers who have no great natural gift for the form. Just
as Peele and Greene wrote plays because play-writing was popular and
advantageous, in spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and
just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular and
advantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightness
which the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventured
themselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was a
born story-teller and whether she would not have been more successful
in some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel had
happened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo,
who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, who was
essentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that the
drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry
with prose-fiction; and novelists like Mr. Barrie and M. Hervieu have
relinquished the easier narrative for the more difficult and more
dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that the novel is soon
to lose its vogue. It has come to stay; and as the nineteenth century
left it to the twentieth so the twentieth will probably bequeath it to
the twenty-first unimpaired in prosperity.

Perhaps the best evidence of the solidity of its position is to be
found in the critical consideration which it is at last receiving.
Histories of fiction in all literatures and biographies of the
novelists in all languages are multiplying abundantly. We are
beginning to take our fiction seriously and to inquire into its
principles. Long ago Freytag's "Technic of the Drama" was followed by
Spielhagen's "Technic of the Novel," rather Teutonically philosophic,
both of them, and already a little out of date. Studies of
prose-fiction are getting themselves written, none of them more
illuminative than Professor Bliss Perry's. The novelists themselves
are writing about the art of fiction, as Sir Walter Besant did, and
they are asking what the novel is, as Mr. Marion Crawford has done.
They are beginning to resent the assertion of the loyal adherents of
the drama, that the novel is too loose a form to call forth the best
efforts of the artist, and that a play demands at least technical
ski