e history of that pleasure, quite as much as the
history of the kind itself, that I wish to trace. In doing so it is
obviously superfluous to include inferiorities and failures, unless they
have some very special lesson or interest, or have been (as in the case
of the minorities on the bridge of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries) for the most part, and unduly, neglected, though they are
important as experiments and links.[1] We really do want here--what the
reprehensible hedonism of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and his submission to what
some one has called "the eternal enemy, Caprice," wanted in all
cases--"only the chief and principal things." I wish to give a full
history of how what is commonly called the French Novel came into being
and kept itself in being; but I do not wish to give an exhaustive,
though I hope to give a pretty full, account of its practitioners.

In another point, however, I have kept to my old ways, and that is the
way of beginning at the beginning. I disagree utterly with any Balbus
who would build an absolute wall between romance and novel, or a wall
hardly less absolute between verse- and prose-fiction. I think the
French have (what is not common in their language) an advantage over us
in possessing the general term _Roman_, and I have perhaps taken a
certain liberty with my own title in order to keep the noun-part of it
to a single word. I shall extend the meaning of "novel"--that of _roman_
would need no extension--to include, not only the prose books, old and
new, which are more generally called "romance," but the verse romances
of the earlier period.

The subject is one with which I can at least plead almost lifelong
familiarity. I became a subscriber to "Rolandi's," I think, during my
holidays as a senior schoolboy, and continued the subscriptions during
my vacations when I was at Oxford. In the very considerable leisure
which I enjoyed during the six years when I was Classical Master at
Elizabeth College, Guernsey, I read more French than any other
literature, and more novels than anything else in French. In the late
'seventies and early 'eighties, as well as more recently, I had to round
off and fill in my knowledge of the older matter, for an elaborate
account of French literature in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, for a
long series of articles on French novelists in the _Fortnightly Review_,
and for the _Primer_ and _Short History_ of the subject which I wrote
for the Clarendon Press;