econd-hand.

* * * * *

To collect the results of this long chapter, we may observe that in
these three departments--Pastoral, Heroic, and Fairy--various important
elements of _general_ novel material and construction are provided in a
manner not yet noticed. The Pastoral may seem to be the most obsolete,
the most of a mere curiosity. But the singular persistence and, in a
way, universality of this apparently fossil convention has been already
pointed out; and it is perhaps only necessary to shift the pointer to
the fact that the novels with which one of the most modern, in perhaps
the truest sense of that word, of modern novelists, though one of the
eldest, Mr. Thomas Hardy, began to make his mark--_Under the Greenwood
Tree_ and _Far from the Madding Crowd_--may be claimed by the pastoral
with some reason. And it has another and a wider claim--that it keeps
up, in its own way, the element of the imaginative, of the fanciful--let
us say even of the unreal--without which romance cannot live, without
which novel is almost repulsive, and which the increasing advances of
realism itself were to render more than ever indispensable. As for the
Heroic, we have already shown how much, with all its faults, it did for
the novel generally in construction and in other ways. It has been shown
likewise, it is hoped, how the Fairy story, besides that additional
provision of imagination, fancy, and dream which has just been said to
be so important--mingled with this a kind of realism which was totally
lacking in the others, and which showed itself especially in one
immensely important department wherein they had been so much to seek.
Fairies may be (they are not to my mind) things that "do not happen";
but the best of these fairies are fifty times more natural, not merely
than the characters of Scudery and Gomberville, but than those (I hold
to my old blasphemy) of Racine. Animals may not talk; but the animals
of Perrault and even of Madame d'Aulnoy talk divinely well, and, what is
more, in a way most humanly probable and interesting. Never was there
such a triumph of the famous impossible-probable as a good fairy story.
Except to the mere scientist and to (of course, quite a different
person) the unmitigated fool, these stories, at least the best of them,
fully deserve the delightful phrase which Southey attributes to a friend
of his. They are "necessary and voluptuous and right." They were, to the
Frenc